Robby Bednar, Joey Notte, Samantha Smith

Professor Renea Nichols

Comm 100.202

18 July 2019

The Magazine Industry

Read a magazine. They have been around for hundreds of years, and yet they haven’t changed too much. Our generation is one that belongs to technology, therefore if we read magazines they’re mostly going to be on our smartphones or our laptops. However, they do still appear in grocery stores and bookstores and are made of the same material as the very first one. Now despite being physically the same, they have made many transformations. Some good, some bad. Why should you read one? Simply because they are a central part of our media culture and yet they don’t reflect our views. For the past 50 years, women and men have been unrealistically portrayed by these magazine companies. This ultimately leads to a person feeling uncertain of their looks, personality, and bodies after reading. More people need to be aware if this and magazines need to start representing their audiences instead of targeting them. 

Magazines have existed since the 1700s and throughout the years have evolved into the colorful pages we see today. The Textbook defines them as “collections of materials (stories, ads, poems, and other items) that their editors believe will interest their audiences” (Turow 247). While today, magazines are printed in large amounts by automated printers, and are widely available online, in the beginning they were printed using large manually operated printing presses. These printing presses were limited to the number of magazines they could print a day and only printed in black and white. Early magazines had many white blank areas and were sometimes even handwritten. They also featured ads like today, only these were small squares typically printed at the end of the booklet. These squares were also hand written and hand drawn ads. Magazine sales began in England and shortly followed in the US in the early 1700s. By 1810 there were about 100 US magazines in existence and by 1825 they were comericalized. The late 1800s featured big selling magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Godey’s Lady’s Book each selling more than 100,000 copies. These were followed by The New Yorker and Businessweek in the early 1900s and shortly after that modern magazines began to form. By the Early 60s modern favorites like Time magazine and Life became popular. By this time Audiences had already began to be sought out by big commercialized magazine businesses. Now in the 2000s we have an abundance of online magazines made popular by social media and Apple’s Newsstand application. Magazines have come a long way in the past 250 years, and yet we still see things that need to change. 

The magazine industry affects all women and their self-esteem greatly. When you examine a photo from a magazine whether it be Vogue, Cosmopolitan, or People Magazine, each company has always maintained a certain look through their models. Recent trends have begun to break this stereotype of the “perfect body,” like when Ashley Graham was featured on the cover of Vogue. However, as seen on the issue she is only pictured from the neck up where she is not visibly a “plus-size model.” The media industry is stuck in this mindset that to be pretty and to be a model you must be skinny. We need to break this trend. Did you know that the average American woman averages a height of 5’4 and a weight of one hundred forty pounds and that the average American model weighs around one hundred seventeen pounds and is 5’11 (Chojnacki et al. 1)? This statistic is shocking to many and sets unrealistic standards for women. Negative body image and self-esteem issues will often lead to depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. It is a sad truth that many women across the United States are struggling with mental health and self-esteem issues.

A recent statistic from Teen-Beauty-Tips shows that 80% of women admit to feeling insecure when viewing images of women in magazines and a shocking 81% of ten-year-old girls fear that they will be fat when they grow up (“How Magazines”). Do we really want young girls living in fear of being fat? The images young, impressionable girls are viewing in magazines immediately affect their self-esteem on an extreme level. Another research project conducted by Girl Scouts in 2010 consisted of 1000 girls ages 13-17. The online experiment found that nine out of ten girls feel pressured to be skinny from fashion and media industries (Gallivan). The only standards young girls should be held to are what makes a good friend or what makes a respectful student. Not what makes a person pretty. The impressions magazines make on young girls are powerful and are more than likely very dangerous to their future mental health. It is important to note however, that although magazines have been known to affect women’s health, in recent research, scientists have discovered new statistics that discuss effects that men’s magazines have on the male gender.

Body image is universal, and people are fooled into thinking that what affects one gender isn’t the same for both, even though the effects may manifest themselves in different ways. Magazines targeted at women want them to “lose” or “trim” or “tighten,” whereas for the men’s magazines it’s about “bulking” or “building.” The body image men have is different than the body image women have. You don’t really hear about the effect that male body image has on men, but it is most certainly there. Body image not only affects how we see ourselves, but it also affects our physical and mental health. It affects the way we interact with others and how we behave around people. While men may tend to see themselves as not muscular enough, as opposed to too fat, they are still prone to taking unhealthy approaches to change their bodies including, eating disorders or unhealthy lifestyles. Men that are regularly exposed to unrealistic images in the media can also experience a poor body image. Under the right circumstances, men develop realistic body images. They understand what a healthy body looks like and have realistic expectations about what they should weigh. But that isn’t always the case.

The development of eating disorders is a serious concern for men with body image issues. Certainly, not all men with poor body image issues develop eating disorders, but some do. The Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness reports that between 2.4 and 3.6 million men suffer from eating disorders today. Up to 20 percent of people with Anorexia Nervosa die from the condition. We must address the negative body image issues men have to prevent conditions like anorexia and bulimia. Of course, negative body image is not the only thing that causes such conditions but it can be a contributing factor for most men. A counselor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering reports that “over the past decade, men that regularly read fitness magazines express greater dissatisfaction than those that don’t read such magazines.” This supports the claim that male body image suffers when men are exposed to unrealistic images. 

Men’s fitness magazines present an image of very low body fat and well-defined muscles. Men embody such images as a representation of what masculinity is and what women look for in partners. This unhealthy because an immense amount of men are becoming very dissatisfied with their bodies. Furthermore, according to Bradley University, “a staggering 95 percent of college-aged men reported some level of dissatisfaction with their bodies.” This was very surprising to our group as this is a large number for such a negative statistic. Men are becoming more dissatisfied with their appearance as a whole, instead of just dealing with issues of their weight. In a study at Bradley University, “Men show escalating dissatisfaction with their abdomens (63%), weight (52%), muscle tone (45%), overall appearance (43%).” Magazines are setting terrible standards of what men should look like and it is seriously beginning to have negative effects on the male race as a whole. 

The magazine industry affects all generations and genders in similar ways. As a group, we were shocked by the statistics and information we found while researching different topics. This student lecture topic opened our eyes to what needs to seriously change in our society. Advertising unrealistic models are wrong and we don’t believe that these images will be popular forever. In fact, we think that magazines will bring in more revenue by publishing more realistic and regular people. This experience has been beneficial to both ourselves and our class as a whole because we were able to examine and take note of the kinds of images that are placed into magazines and on other forms of social media daily.

 

Works Cited

Chojnacki, Mary-Signe, et al. Depleting Body Image. Research report no. 7809, Social Science 

Computing Cooperative, www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/body-image.htm. Accessed 14 July 2019. The effects of female magazine models on the self-esteem and body image of college-age women.

Find Your True Beauty. Apr. 2014, findyourtruebeauty.weebly.com/beauty-through-photos.html. 

Accessed 14 July 2019.

Gallivan, Heather R., PsyD. Teens, Social Media and Body Image. Minnesota Association for 

Children’s Mental Health. Park Nicollet Melrose Center, www.macmh.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/18_Gallivan_Teens-social-media-body-image-presentation-H-Gallivan-Spring-2014.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2019.

“How Magazines Affect Your Body Image Perception.” Style Sprinter, 2019, 

stylesprinter.com/how-magazines-affect-your-body-image-perception/. Accessed 14 July 2019.

“Male vs. Female Body Image.” Bradley University, 2019, 

www.bradley.edu/sites/bodyproject/male-body-image-m-vs-f/.

Turow, Joseph. Media Today : Mass Communication in a Converging World. 1999. edited by     

Sharon Tripp, 6th ed., London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–445.