Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Cosmo vs Playboy


Cosmopolitan Magazine is a singles girl magazine. Helen Gurley Brown was editor-in-cheif of the magazine and, "gave advice to women as a cultural discourse that managed some of the social and economic tensions of the 1960s and early 1970s, while also offering certain women the symbolic material to enable them to think about themselves as historical subjects in new ways."

This reading takes Cosmopolitan Magazine as an example to show educated women to go out in the workforce. Cosmopolitan also talks about women's sexual fantasies, and better sex that these women probably do not get anyway. Brown used the "Cosmo Girl" as a sexualized symbol of pink-collar femininity. The article also says that women are now wearing more skimpy clothing in the workplace because Cosmopolitan basically is promoting it.

On the other hand, Playboy magazine is basically taking the stereotypical attractive girl and degrading their status in society. This reading says that Playboy shows "wives and single women were depicted as shrews and 'gold-diggers,' while bachelors were advised to pursue sex on a casual basis to avoid getting snared in a 'long term contract.'" This basically is saying that men are still use women as sexualized objects before work companions. Magazines like Playboy, will take attractive women and show then in pornographic photo shoots, which basically sends a message to women that they are second tier.

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