Magazines. They have always been a guilty pleasure. Normally I save them for when I am traveling on airplanes. Since I was a little girl, I have been doing a lot of traveling and part of travel has always included a bag full of magazines. I like reading trashy magazines when travel is because I find them entertaining. But I know that they are trashy, so I only read them when I travel. That’s how I justify it.

I have been reading magazines since I was about 8 or so. When I was younger, I would have much rather been reading a magazine than a book. My long ti
me favorite magazine is Cosmopolitan. [I wasn’t reading Cosmo at 8!] Before Cosmo, I liked reading the celebrity gossip magazines and Seventeen. I would also read GL and other teen beauty and fashion magazines. I read many more magazines when I was younger than I do today.

Currently I read the Economist every week  [a news magazine] and I’ll also read Cosmo every now and then. But it has been over six months since I have even opened an issue [I get it on my tablet every month]. As I said in my last post, I don’t really have the time to do a lot of reading for pleasure. All the reading I do is either daily news or assigned school work. Between the two, I don’t have time to read much of.

Magazines have a huge impact on popular culture. The materials that we went over this week did nothing but enforce that. I ended up watch two of the three documentaries that were options this week. I was having trouble picking between two, so I watched both. I chose to watch the HBO documentary on Vogue and the PBS Frontline documentary on porn. I wasn’t surprised on the overlap of the two videos had.

I really liked looking at the past covers of Cosmo. It was really interesting to see how much
the covers and the magazine have changed throughout the years. The article was written in honor of former Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown. The article stated that Brown is, “not only credited with helping to jumpstart the sexual revolution—making it acceptable for young women to have sex and enjoy it without guilt—but also for transforming the previously bland Cosmopolitan into a racy, controversial, and wildly successful magazine empire.”  I think it’s really cool how the magazine encourages women to talk about sex and that it is okay for women to enjoy sex.

Today Cosmopolitan is known for sex. The sex story of the month is always the biggest [in font size] headline on the cover. Even though the magazine offers a variety of articles, they are often not the main focus. I personally really like the variety of articles the magazine offers. Yes, I read the sex articles. But I also read the beauty, fitness, lifestyle, and fashion articles as well. It’s not like the whole magazine cover to cover is just advertisements and sex articles.

The short video called “The Perfect Life” that we watched this week reminded me of this speed up video of someone using Photoshop to retouch a model. It’s only about a minute long and I suggest y’all check it out. I used it as a visual aid in a speech for an example on what the ‘standards’ of beauty are. They take this already beautiful women and photoshop her to make her “magazine ready”. It’s gross to see everything that is done to achieve this perfect woman.

 

 

The Perfect life video points out that there is this “impossible image of beauty”. They point out that the “majority of teenage girls have no idea that every photo they see is manipulated.” People look at the way these celebrities and models look in magazines and on television, and don’t realize that they have been photoshopped to look that way. The video keeps enforcing the statement that there is “no perfect women” and that it is a completely unrealistic standard of beauty. Photoshop allows for each flaw to be fixed by a click of the mouse. I found it really interesting when Dr. Nicole Hawkins said that the goal of magazines “is to make us feel a little insecure so we buy to make us feel better about ourselves.

The video didn’t really talk about the Photoshop that happens on men. And its done to them too. Here is a picture of Justin Bieber where we can see where he was photo shopped for the ad.

I found the porn documentary to be very interesting. It is no secret that the porn industry is HUGE and makes billions of dollars. Porn can be another way that the media sets unrealistic standards for women and men, and how sex should be. There are definitely some issues with this just like we saw in the other sources during this section. By setting these unrealistic standards it can lead to the misrepresentation of sex and can cause issues in relationships. It also changes the way men and women think of their bodies and what they need to look like to be ‘doing it right’. The documentary stated that “Millions and millions of people want porn and will pay millions for it.” Not saying that porn affects everyone this way, but neither does Cosmo or Vogue.  

Larry Flynt who is known as the ‘king of porn’ is the CEO of HUSTLER. He owns the magazine, and the store chain. When the documentary was published they were building their fourth store, now they have twenty stores nationwide. Not all of them have the place to buy smoothies and cookies like the Sunset location [They are really good by the way!] but they have all been a huge success. The Hustler Hollywood store on Sunset Ave in LA sells about 10,000 videos each month.  Flynt said, “You can now see on television material just as explicit as we were publishing in Hustler in 1974.” Obviously the porn industry has had to change with the television industry, continuity pushing limits and breaking boundaries. The video states that “The mainstreaming of sexual content that is on cable is forcing some pornographers to go further.” Technology has really transformed the porn industry. When pornographic images are put into the mainstream media, it makes it more ‘acceptable’ or ‘okay’.

One thing I found really disturbing in the film was the female director who was creating a rape fantasy film. She was talking about how the actress, who was also her friend, had no idea the film that they were going to be shooting. She was just told to ‘go with the flow’. Even though it seemed like everything was consensual, the producers of Frontline left because they didn’t want to chance it. That says something. It also made me very uncomfortable when I was watching it.  The director tried to justify it being okay because she was a woman, and that it is only okay for a woman to ask their friend to do this without knowing any details. I thought this was bullshit. It does not matter what sex you are, if you are going to ask someone to be in a movie like this, they should know completely what they are getting themselves into.

The Vogue documentary was also very good. I have never been a huge fan of Vogue. The film was released to celebrate 120 years of Vogue and looked at the 8 of the fashion editors during the past 120 years showing how “fashion has changed dramatically” over the years.  I really enjoyed watching it. I found the responses from the fashion editors about what they do was really funny. None of them could answer the question and it was their job. I was cracking up the whole time. I loved seeing how these editors would do anything to make the shoot work. Even if it meant tying a thread to a scarf and running after a model upstairs to get the perfect shot. I found it really interesting when the fashion editors were talking about other editors fashion choices.  For example when Babs Simpson was disgusted by Lady Gaga’s cover. Simpson thought Gaga was a man and thought the cover was very ugly. The choices that these editors make real impacts on the fashion world.

 

As the article “All Good Print Magazines Go to Digital Heaven…Or Do They?” by Samir Husni, pointed out, not all magazines work in both the digital and print form. It also points out that there is no way to completely tell if a magazine will succeed or not. As times change, so do magazines. Husni states, “At the end of the day if we don’t we create a community where we make our customers feel like members instead of just numbers after a dollar sign, we won’t have anything to publish in print or digital—no long-lasting relationship, anyway, merely a one-night stand.” It is up to the magazine to keep the reader’s attention, weather in print or digital from. Without readers, the magazines will go to ‘magazine Heaven’.

So in the end I thought this was a really interesting section. I also learned that the fashion and the porn industry have a lot in common. They both create unrealistic standards that average people try and live up to.

That’s all for now, talk to you later.

-Kristine