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There Is Now A Hegemonic Effort Extended Across The Social Field To Win The ...

There is now a hegemonic effort extended across the social field to win the consent of young women' (2001: 201). Catering to the desires of these young women, then, means displaying covers that they want to see. The point for them is, after all, to selland they sell by doing what works.
What works is staying in businessbut to stay in business, magazines rely on their advertisers. Because the advertisers are the ones who foot the bill, they have considerable power when it comes to dictating the content of the articles that appear alongside their ads. As French explains it, ‘makers of products for women require women's magazines () to print recipes and articles on beauty and fashion to highlight their ads, and further, to promote a certain kind of beauty, food, and fashionthe accoutrements of woman-as-commodity' (1992: 171). Advertisers are also concerned that when their products appear in women's magazines, they will decrease in value. The association of the product with women is thought to somehow debase it: ‘Many advertisers avoid women's magazines entirely, fearing that a product that becomes associated with women will be devalued for men. . . .To be assured of advertising revenue, women's magazines must be vapid, contentless' (French, 1992: 172).
C. Playing Both Sides
In addition, advertisers seem to want it both waysthey want to sell products to women, and they want to be perceived as supportive of women. Often, these two desires art at odds with each other. On a superficial level, most magazines do a good job of including titles and headlines that, on a cursory reading, appear to do both at the same time. And, as we have seen, ‘real' women on the cover don't sell consistently high numbers of magazines for the major publications. As sophisticated as young women may be today, they are still imprisoned in societal expectations. McRobbie asserts that ‘the now normative irony (as knowingness) which pervades the contemporary popular culture and mass media in which young women find themselves accommodated to as post-feminist high achievers, actively disallows such inclinations' [to be themselves] (2004: 508509). She also explains that because of their success, these young women are removed from having to face some of the more unpleasant issues that are faced daily by less fortunate female counterparts. What feels like a luxury to themthe avoidance of unpleasant realitiesactually strips them of power, unbeknownst to them. ‘Daily discouraged from the requirement to think or act with courage (as a privilege of the good fortune of living in the affluent liberal west)' she writes ‘is of course an effective means of disempowerment' (2004: 509).


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