A very high majority of adolescent personnel regularly read and seek guidance and advice from magazines; these could be on matters such as; latest clothing trends and new make-up phenomenon’s, all in order to ensure they can look “beautiful”, in fact many magazines have specific columns dedicated to fashion and make-up, persuading and brain washing these pubescent kids into what they want and ought to have, moreover usually there are also dedicated columns on the latest and craziest diets, to aid young girls gain that very much sought after “perfect figure”, subsequently for the male audience, there most effective pills and gadgets for guys promising to give them bigger muscles no matter what their physical appearance and gain “rock solid abs” in no time.
“Mass Media” is the term given to all the technologies and methods that advertise or attract a significant amount of audience towards it, examples of which are; television, internet, radio, newspapers and of course magazines, all the stated above come under the shiny umbrella that is “Mass Media”.
Media has an immense effect on the portrayed images of men and women, it creates a spectacle in which the men and women appear flawless and perfect, yet this in reality does not hold any truth, images and photographs of these so called “flawless beings” have comprehensively being edited to emit this false sense of perfection, giving these young naïve and inexperienced members of the public hope that maybe with the aid of the “advertised” and “featured” products they may also be able to achieve this false sense of perfection, additionally some even go to extreme measures in which they actually starve themselves in order to attain that “size 0” figure advertised by the “perfect” model on the latest cover of “vogue”, thus falling into a continuous trap of consistent low-confidence and low self esteem with a delusional sense of reality, while in the meanwhile being addicted to these magazines in order for it to dictate their life!
Gender is the classification of the two different sexuality’s present in our society, one being male and the other female.
Stereotypes are assumptions made by people regarding a certain group or type of personnel based merely on their characteristics. Understandably both men and women are very stereotypical of each other. Any sane man would instantly pigeonhole women as; sensitive, weak and emotionally unstable, fit to raise children and serve her man, right guys? Conversely, pose the same situation to a woman and she’d instantaneously label all men as; aggressive, unemotional and physically powerful, built for donkey-work, you know the bread winner, am I right ladies?
Furthermore our society is also rather stereotypical of gender; men on average are paid more than woman on majority of the given jobs, just due to the fact that their male and posses a phallus! Equally both Men and women are stereotyped by society into only certain type of jobs that are deemed as acceptable and appropriate, and although the taboo of many one-sex jobs have being broken, the sense of masculinity and femininity still comes attached with certain jobs, For example jobs such as; teacher, hairdresser, nurse, cleaner are mostly deemed feminine hence females are unsurprisingly directed to follow these career paths, subsequently jobs such as; lawyer, doctor, builder and engineer are all mainly considered as masculine, thus naturally males are instructed to follow them as career paths!
In this investigation, my primary source will be a magazine dedicated to the female audience; I shall be conducting this investigation to determine whether my initial hypothesis was correct.
