preview

Sociological Perspective

Good Essays

A Sociological Perspective of Magazine’s Influence Looking through popular magazines has long been a source of reading entertainment for many people. Throughout the years magazines slowly but surely also began influencing their reader’s lives. Readers of all ages, nationally and gender were now looking though magazines for answer on life, fashion, love and even sex. Advertising companies soon began to notice the phenomenon that was happening and began incorporating their ads into magazines. Today, magazines are full of ads. The scary part of all this is that advertising companies are willing to corrupt your mind to convince you to buy their product. The level of influence is unmeasurable since it can come in many forms. Because of this, I’ve …show more content…

In my Cosmopolitan, the women were very thin, wore excusive make-up, they were also often engaging in an activity perceived to be for women such as cooking or gardening. There was also a lack of diversity amongst the models, most of them were Caucasian. In each ad the women wore tight sexy clothing or barley any clothes at all. For the men I noticed that the men were never smiling. The message that I took from that was that men are supposed to be tough, and tough men don’t smile or show emotions. Men were depicted as an object for sex as well. Cosmopolitan on the other hand embraces and encourages women to express their sexual desires without judgement. In all four of the magazines I realized that if there was an ad featuring a male and female, it would sexual in nature it didn’t matter what the ad was actually trying to sell. What readers many times fail to understand it that the ideal culture as represented in these magazines is not the same as real culture. However, these ads and the stories in these magazines still have a large contribution in influencing our …show more content…

In order to know how influential magazines are, we must first ask why people read magazines. Many people purchase magazines to learn something or they enjoy keeping up with current products, events and celebrities. So basically it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for fitness tips or beauty tricks, the readers will in one way or another be influenced by the advertisements and messages in the magazines. The type of influence may vary from positive to negative. Advertising, particularly for fashion and cosmetics, has a powerful effect on how the reader’s views themselves. Often when you ask someone what is the definition of beauty they will show you a picture of a model or celebrity. These magazines gives the reader often very unrealistic ideation. Often the models used for ads are extremely thin and dramatically photoshopped to look as flawless as possible. Young women rely heavily on them for information on beauty, love and fashion, valuing their advice nearly as highly as that of their peers. This leads to an unrealistic ideation for many readers to follow. Men’s magazine in my opinion doesn’t have enough character. The magazines consisted of fitness tips, samples of cologne and clothing. Nowhere did I observe dialog for self-expression. This leads to my main issue with magazines which is own as gender socialization. Magazine’s

Get Access