Like it or not, popular culture is an undeniable influence on how society perceives itself. When examining mass culture, one must keep in mind the equilibrium between how much we, as a society, affect the way popular culture is constructed and to what extent popular culture influences the way we view ourselves and shapes our ideologies. An aspect of popular culture that may serve to greatly exemplify this theory of society as both the affecter and the affected is the genre of magazines targeted at young women. Though these publications are targeted as the representation of our society's adolescent females, they actually have a great influence over the ways in which teens view and construct certain social ideologies. This essay will shed light on the influences these publications have in shaping, regulating, and defining young women's perceptions of femininity, sexuality, and romance. Consequently, it will also reveal an irony in the fact that "women's magazines", written for (and mostly by) women actually mold their beliefs and actions into those that reinforce female subordination through the traditional standards of a patriarchal society.
English: Barnstar for WikiProject Popular Culture
The Journal of Popular Culture
Early Popular Visual CultureFor the purpose of analysis, I will focus on three publications for women, each with a slightly different audience according to the age and class brackets targeted and the subjects offered. In her analysis of one of Britain's women's magazines called Jackie, McRobbie identifies four codes that form the content of these publications: those of fashion and beauty, romance, personal and domestic life, and pop music (Christian-Smith,8). The magazines I will examine all exemplify the four factors of McRobbie's codes.
The first publication is a magazine called Twist. From the content, one may infer that the main target of this magazine is a high school age bracket. The cover stories include "Make-him-Melt Prom Hair and Makeup", "Is it...