The Portrayal of Femininity in Women’s Magazines, A Contrastive Perception Analysis of Males and Females
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Date
2009-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study was designed to figure out how members of the sexes make sense of the images of women portrayed in women’s magazines published in Addis Ababa.
A qualitative research methodology was adopted wherein textual analysis of the images, focus group interviews as well as individual in-depth interviews were conducted to unearth the necessary data. Kalkidan, which was found to be the only women’s magazine published in the metropolitan, was used in all cases of the data gathering stages. In textual analysis a description of the portrayal of the images of femininity was provided. This was done to give the reader a glimpse of how the images of women are presented in the genre under consideration. More importantly, however, the images were used to elicit perceptive accounts from the participants of both group and individual interviews.
In the final analysis, the results of the textual analysis revealed that women are portrayed in a sexually titillating ways. The findings of the group and individual interviews were considered in terms of how the participants of the research perceived the images against culture, perception of the impacts the images might have, especially on women, perception of sexual objectification and the need for audience segmentation.
Both males and females had unanimously deemed the images of women in the magazine as transgressing Ethiopian cultural standards. In terms of sexually objectifying portrayal, besides gender, age was found to be a major determinant. Young men showed sharper tendency to point out sexually objectifying representations. In the case of women old ones more readily noticed it than the young ones. This and all other differences appear to be explainable in terms of standpoint theory and the notion of co-cultures in human communication.
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Femininity in Women’s Magazines