Saturday night girls and other dream images : how readers of women's magazines are deceived by the portrayal of women

Abstract

The effects of women's magazines on their readers and their importance in affecting the opinions women have on themselves and the image of women in general were looked at in this study. If one browses through any women's magazine, one is faced with beautiful (what our culture considers as beautiful) images of women, and with many articles and advertisements which promise that the same looks can be achieved by following the advice and instructions in the magazine. Everyone knows, though, that reality is much different from what the magazines present to us. So why is it that women adapt the beauty thinking (only beauty brings happiness and success in life)? Why is it that women imagine of looking like the models and are not happy with how they look (they buy more magazines and more products)? Why is it that women and men look at women and judge them according to the beauty thinking? What is the role of women's magazines in portraying women in a certain way and why? These were the questions to which I wanted to find an answer through this study. Previous studies on women's magazines (White, 1970; Friedan,1963; Ferguson, 1983) have shown that women's magazines effect their readers by distributing certain values, attitudes and ideas about femininity. Women are encouraged to share the offered symbolic environment. In this study nine Maltese teenage girls were interviewed in order to find out what they experience when they read British young women's magazines. The girls were asked to describe how the magazines affect them.