Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
fashion, cookery or family and home. They can also be actual fictions: romantic serials,
five-minute stories, for example. There are also the stories of the famous and reports
of events in the lives of ‘ordinary’ women and men. Each in its different way attempts
to draw the reader into the world of the magazine, and ultimately into a world of consumption.
This often leads to women ‘being caught up in defining their own femininity,
inextricably, through consumption’ (39). But pleasure is not totally dependent on
purchase. She recalls how in the hot July in which she wrote Inside Women’s Magazines,
without any intention of buying the product, she gained enormous visual pleasure
from a magazine advertisement showing a woman diving into an ocean surrealistically
continuous with the tap-end of a bath. As she explains,
We recognise and relish the vocabulary of dreams in which ads deal; we become
involved in the fictions they create; but we know full well that those commodities
will not elicit the promised fictions. It doesn’t matter. Without bothering to buy
the product we can vicariously indulge in the good life through the image alone.
This is the compensation for the experience you do not and cannot have (56).
Magazine advertisements, like the magazines themselves, therefore provide a terrain on
which to dream. In this way, they generate a desire for fulfilment (through consumption).
Paradoxically, this is deeply pleasurable because it also always acknowledges the
existence of the labours of the everyday.
They would not offer quite the same pleasure, however, if it were not expected of
women that they perform the various labours around fashion and beauty, food
and furnishing. These visuals acknowledge those labours while simultaneously
enabling the reader to avoid doing them. In everyday life ‘pleasure’ for women can
only be achieved by accomplishing these tasks; here the image offers a temporary
substitute, as well as providing an (allegedly) easy, often enjoyable pathway to
their accomplishment (56–7).
Desire is generated for something more than the everyday, yet it can only be accomplished
by what is for most women an everyday activity – shopping. What is ultimately
being sold in the fictions of women’s magazines, in editorial or advertisements,
fashion and home furnishing items, cookery and cosmetics, is successful and therefore
pleasurable femininity. Follow this practical advice or buy this product and be a better
lover, a better mother, a better wife, and a better woman. The problem with all this
from a feminist perspective is that it is always constructed around a mythical individual
woman, situated outside the influence of powerful social and cultural structures and
constraints.
The commitment to the ‘individual solution’ is often revealed by the way in which
women’s magazines also seek to construct ‘fictional collectivities’ (67) of women.
This can be seen in the insistent ‘we’ of editorials; but it is also there in the reader/
editor interactions of the letters page. Here we often find women making sense of the
everyday world through a mixture of optimism and fatalism. Winship identifies these