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Men's Magazines and Masculinity

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Advertisements & Who They Target

In 2012, researcher Cele Otnes and the Investors in Business Education Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois found that many men react negatively to the stereotypical male images they see in advertisements because they do not feel it is a positive or realistic representation of them. According to Otnes, "People build up certain offensive and defensive strategies when they look at ads," Otnes said. "So if a man is turned off by how males are portrayed in an advertisement, he'll say, 'I don’t want to be that guy' – and that’s the end of his relationship with that brand. So teasing out what’s offensive from a sociological or cultural perspective is important."

Furthermore, "A lot of ads directed at males are still dominated by 'The Player,' 'The Beer Drinker' or 'The Buddy,'" Otnes said. "But those stereotypes don’t actually fit the vast majority of males. Advertisers and marketers need to broaden the spectrum, and create campaigns centered on more of the actual roles that men play – 'The Dad,' 'The Husband' and 'The Handyman.' Those types of ads weren’t easy to find at the time we were doing our research."

While advertisers and marketers should create campaigns based on some of the roles mentioned above, it is important that we expand beyond those stereotypes too, because while 'The Dad,' 'The Husband,' and 'THe Handyman,' are a much needed deviation from 'The Player,' they are still traditional masculine roles that dominate society and leave little room for variation. There absolutely needs to be a shift to broader spectrum, but it's problematic to think that adding dads, handymen, and husbands would broaden that spectrum significantly. Not all dads are husbands, not all husbands are dads, not all handymen are men, and so on.

In 2013, an even bigger conversation about the way men's magazines advertise to men and why it is problematic began. It was found that magazines with the most hyper-masculine ads were geared toward younger, less affluent and less educated men. Consequently, the ads have a huge impact on the attitude development in these men in regard to how they perceive women, particularly because the targeted men are at an age where they are still developing their views of society. Researchers say the ads reinforce negative attitudes that have already been established. While men can try to resist these attitudes if they recognize them, many of them are not aware of the consequences these advertisements have for them or for humanity at large.

Psychologists at the University of Manitoba analyzed advertisements in a slew of men's magazines. They tallied up which ads depicted hyper masculinity (toxic masculinity) by showing men as "violent, calloused, tough, dangerous, and sexually aggressive." Not only are hyper masculine images are more likely to be targeted at younger audiences, they are also targeting working-class men, who are “embedded in enduring social and economic structures in which they experience powerlessness and lack of access to resources” like political power, social respect, and wealth, and so turn to more widely accessible measures of masculine worth—like “physical strength and aggression.”

The magazines which push this ideal most aggressively are Playboy and Game Informer. Their ads play on hyper masculine tropes 95% of the time, compared magazines like Golfer's Digest which relied on those images 20% of the time.

When Playboy launched in 1953, it was "not inconceivable to read it for the articles." Today, the magazine’s ads are targeting an audience of middle-aged, undereducated, underpaid men.

"Its vision of masculinity now looks constrictive... Playboy’s version of sexual revolution was never very empowering to women and gay men. But if the tactics of its advertisers is any indication, it’s not a very liberating mold for straight guys, either."
Objectification of Women Men's magazines objectify women in a variety of ways. From pornography and objectifying images to misogynistic ads, many men's magazines assume that their reader identifies as a heterosexual cisgender male, excluding those from the LGBTQ community as well as those outside the gender binary by implying that there is only one kind of 'real' man. Men's magazines assume that their readers who are heterosexual cisgender males want to objectify women, like sports, cars and working out.

In ads, women are typically used to promote products that are traditionally masculine. These include products such as cars and even fast food.

When women are not used visually, misogyny is often implemented to appeal to the audiences desire to feel more 'masculine.'

Pornography and objectifying images are a large part of the conversation here. Studies have shown that exposure to objectifying and dehumanizing images is directly linked to decreased empathy in viewers and sometimes increased violence. Furthermore, those who stop viewing these images are able to regain the ability to emphasize and can often go on to live fuller lives. These images are a huge part of the problem, because so long as men continue to objectify women, they will have difficulty understanding what it is like to be dehumanized in such a way.

"The majority of the pornography that saturates our hyper-mediated lives presents not images of “just sex,” but sex in the context of male dominance. And over the past two decades, as pornography has become more easily accessible online and the sexual acts in pornography have become more extreme, women increasingly report that men ask them to participate in sex acts that come directly from the conventional male-supremacist pornographic script, with little recognition by men of the potential for pain, discomfort, or distress in their women partners."