Sunday, June 12, 2011

Talking points #5-"Mastering Your Johnson"

Hyperlinks: "Mastering Your Johnson"by Krassas, Blauwkamp and Wesselink, is about photographic analysis in Maxim and Stuff magazine. Many magazines including this one, uses sexuality to grab their audience and readers. In many ways they portray women as being sex symbols. When I went to check out the magazines website, the cover page is all about women. There's a column for "today's girls", "Hottest Wags", and "sexy seat cushions". In almost all of the photos the models are wearing either a swim suit, intimate wear , or barely any thing at all.
I found an article on something similar to this article that is comparing Cosmo and Maxim magazine ads. The authors question was whether there is a difference in the way women are portrayed in these magazines? Even though in women's magazines such as Cosmo the women on the covers are fully dressed, the authors of this magazine claim that the content of the magazine teach women that they need a man to take care of them and protect them when they show ads with men embracing or hovering over the women. What caught my attention the most is when they brought up the ads in Maxim magazine and how most of their ads were of women wearing almost nothing and being seductive. This is also similar to "Mastering Your Johnson","Goffman (1979, pp. 29-31) found that women were more likely than men to be touching themselves (perhaps in a sexually suggestive manner), or gently touching an object rather than putting an object to use" (pg 106).
Lastly, in the reading and in some of the research that I did, race in this magazine seems to be a problem. I found a blog online from someone referring to the lack of multiracial models in this magazine. This blog was also relevant to this article and the statistics that were found. "Finally, our measure of the race of the models indicates that more than 80% of all the pictures of men and women depicted individuals who appeared white to the coders. Less than 10% appeared black, less than 2% Asian and about 6% were non-white of a race indeterminate to the coders" (p.111).

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