The Practical Habit

Although men’s magazines of the time appear to focus on a single subject, many, include articles on a range of subjects. One of the earliest, Hobbies, includes pieces on football, stamp collecting or gardening alongside those on making picture frames or pipe racks. Later magazines had a sharper focus, as revealed in titles such as Practical Motorist, Practical and Amateur Wireless and Popular Flying. Many described tasks of maintenance and construction with complex diagrams, yet still gave instructions in continuous prose, not simple lists. In this, they lagged behind women’s magazines. Like them, though, they carried pages of readers’ tips, suggesting the importance of being part of a group. They also focus on activities done in or around the home, again resembling magazines for women. Other magazines contained first-hand war recollections, often with maps and drawings by the authors, as important ways of sharing events familiar to many.

Metasemiotic Projects and Lifestyle Media: Formulating Commodities as Resources for Identity Enactment

There has recently been a notable increase in the amount and perceived significance of new lifestyle media. Besides the instructive and entertaining function, these media arguably play a more fundamental sociocultural role of constructing identities. In consumer societies, these identities are to a great extent enacted through the acquisition of commodities and engagement in commodified practices, which thereby become semiotic resources of identity stylization. The purpose of this article is to explore the discursive mechanisms underpinning the process of formulating commodities and practices as such semiotic resources. To this end, several discourses from new online men’s magazines have been analyzed drawing on a model of discourse analysis that sees discourse as one of the “moments” of the social practice it is embedded in. The results indicate that the mechanism behind the processes in question can be described as a metasemiotic project. As such a project unfolds in discourse, various commodities and practices are being typified by a metasemiotic term. One of the most frequent prototypical metasemiotic terms in these resources is stylish man . The term is instantiated in texts by several lexemes, including the lexeme style and its derivatives, as well as lexemes naming various “masculine personas” such as man , guy, kid, gentleman, bad ass. It has been shown that an increasing number of commodities and practices are being “theorized” by the discourse of new online men’s magazines and typified by this term. One important feature behind the workings of the metasemiotic project is intertextuality. Specific texts are always dialogically linked to other texts of lifestyle discourse, while object-signs are reformulated and imbued with different social values. These results contribute to the exploration of contemporary lifestyle media and discursive mechanisms of identity construction used by them, and, in a more general sense, to recent discussions of operationalizing wider sociocultural context in textually oriented discourse analysis.

Sequential Titillation: Comics Stripped at the Museum of Sex, New York

This chapter includes a 2018 commentary about Comics Stripped (2011) at the Museum of Sex in New York curated by publisher/collector Craig Yoe and Sarah Forbes. Covering the decades between the Great Depression to the present, the exhibit featured art by Joe Shuster, R. Crumb, Wally Wood, Jack Cole, Tom Finland, and many others. Topics included Tijuana Bibles (“The People’s Pornography”), 1950’s men’s magazines, censorship crusades, the underground comix revolution, fetish art by Joe Shuster (as featured in Yoe’s book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster) and Eric Stanton, cartoon porn, same sex comics, and international comics. This chapter includes commentary by curator, collector, and publisher Craig Yoe about how this extensive examination of sexual taboos and other naughty bits came about, as well as his thoughts about sharing his collection and the public response to the show. Images: two exhibition photos

Media Representations as a Form of Stacking: Male and Female Athletes Featured on Men’s Magazine Covers, 1980–2019

This study analyzed 264 athlete images featured on the covers of nine men’s magazines across a 40-year period, 1980–2019. Among males, who accounted for 227 (81%) of the 264 athletes, African Americans and Latinos each represented 6 sports, most of which involved team competition, while White males represented 21 sports, many of which were individual. Analyses of position stacking in football showed White players in positions considered “central” to contest outcomes and Black athletes assigned to more “peripheral” roles. Among females, nearly all of whom were White, more than one in three participated in professional wrestling or sports entertainment. Other female athletes represented individual sports such as tennis and swimming. Overall, the study concludes that men’s magazines reproduced stacking patterns observed in earlier research.

ВІЗУАЛІЗАЦІЯ ОБРАЗУ ЖІНКИ НА ШПАЛЬТАХ ЖУРНАЛЬНИХ МЕДІА ДЛЯ ЧОЛОВІКІВ

<div><p><em>The article describes the main media visualization tools and describes typical gender images that are portrayed in the media. The influence of media on the creation, change and dissemination of stereotypes is outlined. The process and consequences of the transformation of gender roles, depending on the socio-historical context and the features of their contemporary identification in the magazine media for men, are examined. Monitoring of periodicals illustrated, on the one hand, the existing system of imagery (illustrations, dies, lines, footnotes, cuts, color, free space, various decorative elements) and components of illumination of a certain media image – on the other. Emphasis is placed on the ratio of visual and textual content in this plane.</em></p></div><p><em>It has been found that in the counters of modern men’s magazines there is a considerable number of photographs depicting women, mostly thought leaders in their fields. As a rule, in most of the photos the woman is shown in a certain role: «Barbie-woman», «Cinderella», «glamor maiden», «bitch-woman», «superwoman», «cosmo-woman», «feminist», «caregiver», «a militaristic woman»</em><em>.</em><em> </em><em>Among the most common female media images portrayed in the mass media GQ, Esquire and Men’s Health is named «cosmo-woman», «glamor maiden» and «Cinderella», which allowed to state: modern magazines for the general public, in particular for men, aimed at depicting women in the popular nowadays.</em></p><p><em>As a result of a practical study of magazines, stereotypes that are no longer indicative of the current information world have been identified, as well as factors that influence the emergence or, on the contrary, the disappearance of gender roles in the media environment.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> visualization, gender, image, media, stereotype, mass culture.</em></p>

EDITOR’S LETTER IN MODERN WOMEN’S AND MEN’S MAGAZINES: GENDER APPROACH

This paper presents a gender approach to the study of the editor’s letter, the genre endemic in modern press. In particular, it focuses on popular women’s and men’s magazines which are considered to be powerful instruments in maintaining and promoting certain gender stereotypes in modern society. The paper gives a short insight into the definition of the term “gender” in modern linguistics. The study is theoretically framed by R. Lakoff’s findings – the differences of men’s and women’s speech. More specifically, applying functional approach to language, the paper examines the use of key words, emotional adjectives and words of feelings, intensifiers, words and constructions expressing probability, phrasal verbs, idioms, polite words and expressions, and slang. The results of the analysis demonstrate an emphasis on certainty and confidence, politeness and loyalty in the editor’s letters written by both women and men. Also, they indicate that apart from traditional topics a motif of family and relationship is important for the male editors. Finally, the findings show a tendency to neutral words and phrases which substitute sexist language in the analyzed male and female editor’s letters. The paper argues that although editor’s letters reflect the basic features of women’s and men’s speech, generic conventions play a crucial role in presenting information. The linguistic peculiarities of editor’s letters help to construct a certain image of modern man and woman promoted by these popular media nowadays.