When choosing which "postive women image" magazine I wanted to read, I immediately was attracted to bitch. Yes, to be honest it probably was because of the title but lets talk about my journey to the bookstore trying to find this magazine. Here I am standing in front of the wall of 100s of magazines, blinded by all the different sizes, colors and titles. Caterogorized by topic, I finally found the section labeled women's magazines. The first magazines I found were the typical women's mags like Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Glamour. Now as I started to narrow down my search, I was bombarded by all these fashion mags, ones about prom fashion and about 3-4 specifically regarding weddings. There was even one titled Mens Guide to Wedding Fashion! Keep in mind that I had never seen the cover of bitch and I had no idea of what kind of magazine I was looking for. Finally after a good 10 min of searching, I found bitch. Before this journey, I had decided to compare and contrast bitch with the Cosmo magazine that I had a subscription to. I am going to be comparing and contrasting these two mags in the same structure that Jennielee and Moani have in their blogs as well: cover, content and advertisment.
Cover
Here are the covers of both magazines:
Instantly I saw that the covers were extremely different. Moani talked about the idea of judging a book by its cover in her blog and to be honest, this is exactly what I did. Why is there a picture of ladybugs on a flower and why is this the cover to a magazine that I thought would be more I guess you can say "loud"? I thought it was interesting how the title was all lowercase: bitch. I was expecting to see it as BITCH and have all these bright colors and illustrations. On the contrary, it gave off a calm and relaxed vibe. Now when looking at the Cosmo cover, I had an idea of what I expected to see: the new Cosmo cover girl for that month and mini excerpts of what was going to be talked about in the mag that usually consisted of a title like "50 Ways to Seduce a Man". Usually Cosmo covers intentionally include excerpts like these that highlight topics involving a certain number of things, by this I mean titles like "10 Ways to Reduce Belly Fat" and like on this cover "6 Choices that Will Make you Happier". Overall, there are noticeable differences in the presentation of the covers for both magazines. Take a look at these closely... would you judge these magazines by their cover?
Content
One very noticeable thing that I caught right away while skimming through bitch, was how the entire magazine was primarily 2 colors except for the pages dedicated to advertisments. Another thing was the structure and types of articles that were included. After reading through some of the topics, I found two that were very interesting: one titled "From the Dept. of Gendered Science: Your Genes are Making You Slutty" and the other "Swift Judgement: Who made Taylor Swift the sex police?" The first one came off very informative and took the relaxed form of a psychology/science article. I thought it was very interesting. The second excerpt took more of an opinionated attitude towards the pop idol, Taylor Swift who most commonly is seen as a innocent, docile teenager who's inspiring lyrics have been powerful for the younger population of today's society. The different focus of these two articles were interesting to read and opened my mind to what this magazine was about.
In the Cosmo magazine, I was not surprised that most of everything involved sex, fashion, and the status of celebrities. One of my favorite sections titled Sexy vs. Skanky, takes a more humorous perspective to celebrities and their fashion oops. I don't think that purpose of the authors for this section necessarily is to send out any kind of message to their readers, but include it more for pure entertainment. This I think differs dramatically from bitch because I feel that everything written in the magazine has a purpose of educating their readers.
Advertisment
Not only does the type of advertisment differ dramatically between both magazines, but the number of advertisements is quite remarkable. When I first opened bitch, the first page included 4 advertisemnts: 2 on certain websites and the other 2 promoting the Adam and Eve website of adult products and the other promoting a new kind of pad called Lunapads. After this page, a table of contents was provided. Through out the rest of the magazine, I only encountered about 2 or 3 more pages of advertisment, all promoting female sex toys and helpful websites for women regarding many different topics.
On the contrary, in Cosmo, there were 5 pages of advertisment before the table of contents. These 5 pages all were about makeup, hair products, and perfume. After the table of contents, there was a remarkable 17 pages of advertisment before I got to the first article that was mentioned on the cover! Cosmo is FULL let me repeat FULL of advertisements and they are not subtle. Here are just a few that I chose:
Cmon really a spray to help women lose weight?!
Overall it was a learning expereince to really look at these two types of magazines and compare the differences and see if there were any similarites. The differences are so dramatic. In general, I somewhat enjoyed bitch but I did find it difficult to understand alot of the content. I really enjoyed the book, screen, and music reviews towards the end of the magazine because it provided a new point of view on media. I would reccomend reading bitch, but just let it be known that it is hard to follow if you have not read any other magazines with a similar structure and or content.
ALSO, dont forget to take a look at the other two magazines that Jennielee and Moani read and blogged about! They are also very interesting!
~Erica
No comments:
Post a Comment