Can you believe everything you read?
Women's magazines tend to focus on three things: health, home and, well, sex. Those aimed at twentysomething females seem to edge even more toward the last of these three, which makes me wonder if that's really the true preoccupation of women in their 20s.
Gender-focused linguistic studies report that men speak to "report" and women speak for "rapport." Part of this also means that women are relationship-centered speakers while men are information
centered speakers.
Somehow, in popular culture, relationship translates into sex -- no wonder the Washington Post reported that efforts to keep teens from having sex were not going so well. Magazines like YM and Seventeen tend to keep content pretty age appropriate, at lease when I read them in high school. But what's the next step? Cosmo, which features a "sex position of the week" on its Web site?
I'm not going to jump on the way the media portrays "the image of women," but I hate to be categorized as another sex-crazed twentysomething woman simply because my friends and I like to talk about our dating situations.
I think it's admirable that these magazines have, in recent years, made an effort to educate women about other issues like cervical cancer and date rape. But somehow I feel that those stories are read about as much as the science fiction stories in Playboy. Still, I can't completely knock magazine content because I was just as excited about "The Sex and the City" movie as the next cosmopolitan drinking woman.
Nonetheless, since speaking with an outraged friend about the content that reduces women to only their post-1970s liberated sex drives, I, like her, have made the commitment not to buy these magazines.
Do you think women's magazines like Cosmo are influencing young women, or do they just reflect the modern women's ability to embrace their personal freedom?
--- Kristen Rajczak
