Manna from the Glossy Pulpit: Food Advertising in Women's Magazines

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Manna from the Glossy Pulpit: Food Advertising in

Women's Magazines

Kira-Lynn Reeves

Marquee University

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MANNA FROM THE GLOSSY PULPIT: FOOD ADVERTISING

IN WOMEN’S MAGAZINES

Kira-Lynn Reeves

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate school,

Marquette University,

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of Master of Arts

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

December 2012

ABSTRACT

MANNA FROM THE GLOSSY PULPIT: FOOD ADVERTISING

IN WOMEN’S MAGAZINES

Kira-Lynn Reeves

Marquette University, 2012

Women’s magazines reach millions of readers each month, and have been the

subject of many academic inquires from media effects studies to feminist analyses. While

many studies have investigated female readers’ experience with these texts, or examined

the advertising content of women’s magazines, little research to date has focused on food

advertising. This liberal feminist critique explores the experience of reading the 2011

issues of the three popular women’s magazines, Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle.

Using Stern’s (1996) textual analysis method for advertisements, this study examines

how food advertisements in women’s magazines encourage women to think about food

and eating.

Food advertisements tend to align with the overall narrative constructed by the

magazine in which they appear: food is accessorized in Glamour advertisements as a

means for enhancing one’s life; in SELF, food is presented as both fuel and reward for

exercising; and in Family Circle, food represents a mother’s love and a woman’s realm as

the family’s grocery shopper, meal planner, and primary cook. Food takes on multiple

meanings through advertising and frequently suggests that a woman’s food choices are

indicative of her worth, personality, or success as a mother, for example. Possible

interpretations and implications of these food advertising observations are explored.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1

Background of this Study.........................................................................................3

Statement of the Problem .........................................................................................7

LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.13

Introduction ............................................................................................................13

Women’s Magazines and Their Readers ...............................................................19

Advertising and Fantasy ........................................................................................23

Women’s Magazines and the Thin-Ideal ...............................................................28

Food Advertising ...................................................................................................31

Summary ................................................................................................................34

METHOD ......................................................................................................................... 37

Research Goals.......................................................................................................37

Research Materials .................................................................................................38

Method of Materials Collection .............................................................................41

Method of Materials Analysis ................................................................................43

INSIDE THE WOMEN’S MAGAZINE .......................................................................... 46

Glamour: Feminism, Fashion, Fairytales, and Food ..............................................48

Finding MySELF ...................................................................................................54

Family Circle: Food, Glorious Food!.....................................................................61

Summary: Leaving the Illusion ..............................................................................70

FOOD ADVERTISING ................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.72

Food Advertising in 2011: A Brief Overview and Key Themes ...........................73

Key Themes ......................................................................................................... 76

To Die(t) For ..........................................................................................................77

Guilt and Regret ................................................................................................... 79

Exercise: Another Passport to Eating .................................................................. 83

Food Fantasies .......................................................................................................85

Smoke and Mirrors .............................................................................................. 87

Sex and Love ....................................................................................................... 89

Food, Family, and the Female................................................................................93

Food Glory ........................................................................................................... 96

Grocery Getter ..................................................................................................... 99

Other ....................................................................................................................102

Summary ..............................................................................................................104

CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................................. 108

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 115

INTRODUCTION

Hunger makes successful women feel like failures (Wolf, 1991, p. 197).

Picking up a Friday night Ben & Jerry’s fix at the campus convenience store, my

college roommate and I each grabbed a magazine as we passed the gleaming

display: Vanity Fair for her, Glamour for me, shimmering under the florescent lights like

treasure. We did so swiftly and silently, neither one of us making a comment or thinking

twice. Grabbing a magazine was like grabbing a bottle of water: we seemed to do so

instinctively, almost catatonically, with both a certain reverence and inherent need.

Simultaneously, it felt like a guilty pleasure: indulging in a frivolous purchase was

juxtaposed to feelings of urgency and necessity, like answering the magazine’s beckoning

call to be apprised of the latest fashion and femme fatale stories within. Back in our dorm

room, my roommate and I would cut out the glamorous, fantasy-style photo shoots to

decorate our walls. I let out the occasional sigh, but would not say what was on my mind

out of embarrassment, feeling weak as I mentally compared my features to the fiercely

stunning models in the advertisements. The lithe arms, the tanned and toned legs—so

different from my inherited thick inner thighs—shouted at me from the page, pointing out

what I am not, declaring what I should be. The ice cream suddenly soured in my mouth,

reminding me that foods like this won’t help me look like that.

My silence gave credence to the truth of these emotions, deepening the self-

consciousness I felt: at 19 years old I was 185 pounds, thighs dimpled with cellulite,

calves and arms stocky, undefined, not shapely. Though I miraculously passed through

high school without so much as a second thought to my weight or appearance, only

vaguely acknowledging the incredible smallness of the many 90-pound girls in the

hallway who seemed to attract guys, slowly my eyes were opening. There was a whole

skinny world out there: a world of salad-eaters and runners, activities I had previously

found repulsive, preferring three hours of swim practice to running a single mile. Now,

that skinny world was spreading before me like a giant chasm of hope and health,

sexiness and success. It seemed I had no choice but to jump in.

Six short years ago, I moved away from home and into the college dorm—a

setting both destructive and distracting to many that proved to be a place where I thrived.

Academically, emotionally, and physically, I embarked on four years of wonderful

change and discovery. I achieved high grades, secured great college jobs and internships,

and lost nearly 50 pounds. By graduation, a time to celebrate the pinnacle of all these

accomplishments, I was no longer the happy college student, proud and content to look

back on what I had done. For reasons unknown to me and alarming to my family, I had

become almost compulsive—obsessed—with calories, exercise, and a number other than

my GPA: my weight. When I should have been cheering myself on the loudest, I was

darkly whispering insidious suggestions about the size of my thighs and the sin of eating

those cookies, that ice cream, this sandwich. Unwanted, unbidden, and seemingly

uncontrollable, these thoughts pursued me post-college, at times distracting me from my

work, at other times, demoralizing me into an unfriendly person fixated on one goal:

getting thinner.

Food became a nemesis. Could I feel just as full without the almond butter on my

celery?, I wondered, or only drink coffee for lunch? Just how little could I eat in a day,

waking up to an even flatter stomach the next morning? Denying food went hand-in-hand

with seeing lower numbers on the scale, and a praising rather than punishing voice in my

head. I felt powerful: while others relied on bread, I eschewed carbohydrates and relied

on myself. While I watched people at the grocery store happily packing up their ice

cream, cookies, and crackers, I bought my salad greens and nonfat yogurt with

conviction. Over time, however, the sinfully caloric items in other shopper’s carts grew

appetizing, and instead of feeling proud that I would not have to burn off those calories, I

grew resentful of the vicious voice always demanding more miles and less food. I, once a

united front dedicated to my own health and happiness, had forged a terrible split into

two camps. It took years before I began to understand why.

Disordered eating was not my problem, I told myself and those close to me:

disordered thinking was, and I did not know how to stop it. What had happened to the

successful, self-loving college girl who took care of her body, was proud of her body, but

was not a slave to her body? I had made a positive life change by losing weight; now it

had turned against me. Too many nights, when I would normally be out running to

combat the stress of the day, I crumpled onto the couch, too lightheaded and hungry to

move. Hunger had become my new ally: it worked faster than running, was more

efficient than weightlifting. Hunger meant seeing 142 on the scale tomorrow, maybe

lower. Hunger meant weight loss.

Background of this Study

In her 2007 book Perfect Girl, Starving Daughter, feminist author Courtney

Martin unpacks the complexity of hunger in the lives of young women today as it

intersects with the emotional and physical self-destruction running rampant through this

demographic. Body image issues, eating disorders, and an overzealous need to achieve all

stem from the intense hunger women have adopted in their quest for perfection: “We

grow hungrier and hungrier with no clue what we are hungry for. The holes inside of us

grow bigger and bigger” (Martin, 2007, p. 21). Women attempt to fill these holes “with

food, blue ribbons, sexual attraction, [and] trendy clothes” (Martin, 2007, p.6), but the

craters inside remain, blasted out by the exhausting and continuous effort to be the most

effortlessly beautiful, smartest, and strongest girl. Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo

(1993) also cites the intrinsic nature of hunger in a woman’s life, especially as it is

captured and recapitulated by Western advertisers who pit women against their own

appetites, depicting hunger as “an insistent, powerful force with a life of its own” (p.

103)—a force only the most in-control women can occasionally manage.

Physical and metaphorical hunger does not only have to do with food or the drive

for achievement in a woman’s life; it is a cultural imperative and a defining aspect of

femininity. Hunger and hatred of fat, as Martin (2007) notes, has become part of every

young girl’s education: as she is introduced to the wonders of biology, she learns how to

put her body into ketosis, torching fat while carbohydrate-starved. Women learn to count

calories as adeptly as they balance their checkbooks, to compare themselves to other

women as constantly as they draw breath. Clinical nutritionist Alexis Beck (2010) notes

an increase in women who may not meet every criterion necessary to be diagnosed with

an eating disorder, but obviously suffer from a debilitating obsession with their weight,

eating, and excessive exercise. This phenomenon, defined as disordered eating, describes

any abnormal eating practices (CDPH, 2000), such as eliminating entire food groups,

rigid calorie restriction, fasting, using diet pills, and avoiding social situations that

involve food (Karras, 2008; Noll & Friederickson, 1998). Naomi Wolf calls such women

“mentally anorexic” (1991, p. 199) and describes the broader impact of this physical and

mental hunger on women and society:

She is politically castrate, with exactly enough energy to do her

schoolwork, neatly and completely, and run around the indoor track in

eternal circles. She has no energy to get angry or get organized, to chase

sex, to yell through a bullhorn, asking for money for…women’s studies

programs or to know where the women professors are. (p.199)

The war women wage on their hunger and their fat inevitably leads them to split

into two distinct people—a phenomenon noted by Wolf (1991) and echoed by Martin

(2007). Wolf (1991) remembers the childhood moment she discovered a fundamental

shift had occurred in her teenage cousin:

Still compact in a one-piece kid’s body, I was alarmed to think that

womanhood involved breaking apart into pieces that floated around since

my cousin seemed to be trying to hold herself together by a feat of

concentration…that could only mean, I thought, that when I was a woman,

I would want to get out of my own body into some little kid’s. (p. 201)

Martin (2007) argues that this ‘breaking apart’ involves becoming two warring

people in one body: the perfect girl and the starving daughter. The perfect girl heaps

accolade upon achievement in sports, academics, music, physical attractiveness, and

work, siphoning her strength and energy from the starving daughter she constantly

abuses. The starving daughter wants a rest, not a six-mile run after only four hours of

sleep, not another skipped dinner. But the perfect girl will have only strict discipline and

self-deprivation. On occasion when the starving daughter musters the strength to resist

her tormentor, indulging in ice cream or hitting the snooze button, the perfect girl exacts

punishment severe enough to keep the starving daughter silently cowering in the corner

once more.

There are moments when we read the honestly written word of another and think

she must have stolen her material straight out of our own minds. Reading Martin’s

perfect girl, starving daughter dichotomy was such a moment for me: her honest writing

lifted the bewildering body image battle going on inside myself out of abstraction and

into accessible reality. Illuminated at last, I could begin the long, meandering process of

analyzing my experiences, mining my memory for key points of influence and impact.

Encouraged by the brave women who had shared their stories before me, captivated by

the personal truth I found in the feminist perspective, and angry about what I had just

begun to learn about body image, the media, and the women at their intersection, I

dedicated the rest of my graduate school work to the study of how the media

communicate to women about food, eating, and their bodies.

Unexceptional as my struggle with eating, exercise, and self-acceptance has

become, repeating itself many times over in dorm rooms and waiting rooms and grocery

lines throughout the nation, virtually no woman—or man, for that matter—escapes the

very personal pang of disliking his or her own body at some time in his or her life. From

the occasional complaint about a bad hair day to dark, debilitating disease,

women disproportionately suffer from unhealthy relationships with food, eating

disorders, and lifelong cycles of binging, dieting, and self-deprivation. Some women

starve themselves to death; others purge their food, shamed by their appetite, disgusted

by their lack of willpower to resist eating in the first place. Still others gorge themselves

on enormous quantities of food—meals meant to serve a family of four—in an attempt to

fill the void left by the beauty standards their dimpled, flawed bodies fail to meet.

Statement of the Problem

Hungry, and still dissatisfied with our reflections, we have become a society

obsessed with our bodies and hell-bent on changing them to match the culturally

established parameters of attractiveness. We join gyms in droves; we try pills and push-

ups, calorie counting and cardio. Americans spent an estimated $46 billion on the diet

industry in 2005 (Hoffman & Rose, 2006), a figure consistent with research projections

over a decade ago (Smolak, 1996; Garner & Wooley, 1991). According to the

Association for Eating Disorder Awareness (AEDA, 2012), 80 percent of women in the

United States currently want to lose weight, while 80 percent of men want to either lose

weight or gain muscle. And in a nation facing the world’s most severe obesity epidemic

(OCED, 2012; CDC, 2011), we may be inclined to ask, is this a problem?

Unfortunately, just like the overeating that produced our excess pounds in the first

place, research indicates Americans are inclined to take dieting too far. Dieting is the

number one behavior likely to lead to an eating disorder (AEDA, 2012), and more than

one in three of moderate dieters will progress to pathological dieting (AEDA, 2012;

NEDA, 2010; Shisslak & Crago, 1995). By the time our children reach adolescence, they

have tried a variety of destructive dieting practices in attempt to control their weight,

such as smoking, skipping meals, and vomiting (Neumark-Sztainer, 2005). Alarmingly,

many studies have discovered that regular or constant dieting, fueled by the desire to be

thinner, is beginning as early as age six; fourth graders who should be learning languages

and long division are instead focused on the size of their stomachs (Gehrman, et al.,

2006; Davison, Markey, & Birch, 2000; Kater, Rohwer, & Levine, 2000; Gustafson-

Larson & Terry, 1992; Mellin, Irwin, & Scully, 1992; Collins, 1991). The National

Eating Disorders Association (NEDA, 2005a) reports that an estimated 10 million

females and one million males struggle with a clinically diagnosed eating disorder such

as anorexia—the deadliest of all mental illnesses. Millions more battle binge eating

disorders; across all categories, an inestimable number of cases go unreported or

undiagnosed each year, as patients must meet all criterion to be diagnosed with an eating

disorder (M. DiMattina, personal communication, October 4, 2011). Recent research

demonstrates that eating disorders, once thought to be a ‘white woman’ disease, do not

discriminate based on race, gender, or culture (Martin, 2007; NEDA, 2005b).

From dieting and disordered eating to excessive exercise and extreme makeovers,

we are living in a media-saturated culture that normalizes these self-destructive behaviors

and stretches them across every demographic. New recruits join the “cult of thinness”

each day (Hesse-Biber, 2007); in recent months, both ABC (Lovett, 2012) and NBC

News (Deam, 2012) ran reports on eating disorder trends and anorexic magazine models,

now considered “plus size” if they wear a size six. Our distracting and deadly

preoccupations with our bodies, food, and eating remain elusively multifaceted, hard to

predict and harder to control, triggered by biological, psychological, and social factors

such as the media (NEDA, 2004a). As my literature review will show, and groups like the

NEDA and AEDA confirm, the media contribute to the “narrow definitions of beauty”

and “cultural pressures that glorify ‘thinness’ (NEDA, 2004b) that impact all of us. The

average American spends 20 percent of each day watching TV (Nielsen, 2012), surfs the

Internet for over two hours a day (Frederickson, 2010), and may see up to 5,000 ads per

day, especially if living in an urban area (Story, 2007). This constant consumption leaves

us defenseless against media’s version of reality. Other nations around the world are

beginning to recognize this pervasive influence as worthy of correction: Israeli

lawmakers have banned clinically underweight models from advertising shoots and

fashion shows (Ostroff, 2012), while the United Kingdom has cracked down on overly-

retouched advertisements, and continues to consider placing black box warning labels on

fashion magazines (Sweney, 2011; Crumley, 2009), all in an effort to steer our vision

away from the distorted and back to the authentic.

Despite the exponential growth of social media web sites and constant

connectivity via Smartphones, American teenagers still spend four hours per week

reading magazines (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Recently, the Miss Representation

organization, advocating for gender equality and media literacy, reported that after only

three minutes of paging through a fashion magazine, three out of four teenage girls

experienced feelings of depression, shame, and inadequacy (March, 2012). In 1997,

researchers found that after only 13 minutes of exposure to fashion magazines, college-

age women reported less body satisfaction and a heightened desire to lose weight (Turner

& Hamilton). Magazine executives claim readership has increased by 11 percent over the

past decade in their “Magazines: The Power of Print” advertising campaign (Adams &

Ovide, 2010). The Magazine Publishers Association (henceforth MPA, 2011a) confirms

that magazines reach millions of readers each month through subscriptions and pass-

along readership—sharing the magazine with a friend (McCracken, 1993). While no

aspect of the media can be excluded as we attempt to understand how our culture is

impacted by the images we consume on a daily basis, magazines continue to be a vital yet

understudied aspect of the media landscape, particularly when it comes to questions of

food advertising.

I chose the religious metaphor for the title of this work because I wanted to

capture not only the persuasive power I believe media, like women’s magazines, exert in

our lives, but also the way we have embraced this influence over our perceptions and

choices. Magazines address our greatest culturally induced dilemmas: the size of our

waists, weight of our wallets, and wealth of material possessions (Winship, 1987). From

editorial copy offering “This month’s guarantee: Lose weight faster!” (SELF, November,

2011, p. 10) to the countless advertisements for makeup, fashion, and food, magazines

provide us with a cornucopia of information we devour like holy manna. Specific to food,

magazines provide an abundance of ads, articles, and recipes. Sometimes, these ads seem

congruent with other messages in the magazine about getting “summer-tone[d] in no

time” (Glamour, May, 2011, p. 170) or “feel[ing] calm and happy” (SELF, July, 2011,

cover); at other times, food advertising and other eating-related content seems

contradictory to the magazine’s emphasis on slim silhouettes, intense exercise, and

couture fashions for the petite.

Whatever form body dissatisfaction takes—clinical eating disorders or a

debilitating preoccupation with food, exercise, and her reflection—women live within

this epidemic of damaging behaviors, and our self-esteem continues to rely heavily on

our body image (Smeesters, Mussweiler, & Mandel, 2010; Fallon, 1994). According to a

recent survey by Glamour magazine (Dreisbach, 2011a), 97 percent of women think at

least one devastatingly cruel thought about their own body every day. Food is often

involved in the criticism, as one woman reports her personal mantra: “Fat ass. Don’t eat

that. You could probably use an eating disorder” (Dreisbach, 2011a, p. 306). Food, the

sacrificial lamb of weight loss, and its restriction is the number one way women learn to

control their waistlines and for many it becomes a life-long obsession. Given that women

may frequently find themselves at odds with food in our appearance-obsessed, media

saturated culture, how food is represented and advertised to a mainly female audience

becomes an interesting area of investigation.

This study seeks to further understand how food advertising in women’s

magazines—that is, publications primarily aimed at females—communicate with women

about food and eating. In a culture where women may find themselves affected by a

rigorous physical ideal and a subsequent negative relationship with food, how food

advertisements present their product and establish different contexts for food and eating

in a woman’s life becomes of interest. Food advertising takes up considerable real estate

in women’s magazines (McCracken, 1993) and is important to examine given our

society’s widespread, fractured relationship with food, resulting in the polarizing

extremes of the ‘supersized and super-skinny.’ In the following study, a feminist critique

of food advertisements and the women’s magazines they appear in, I analyze

advertisements for the messages they send to women about food, and connect these

interpretations to the broader messages about food and body shape. I will continue to

analyze and incorporate my own body image, eating, and media experiences recorded in

a personal journal throughout this process, aiming to more deeply understand our culture

as well as disclose my stories as so many other brave women have done before me. A

feminist critique, informed by feminist theory, traditionally aims to interpret the

representation of women’s lives in a given text and offer a new perspective that may

affect other readers’ interpretations and change how they approach future texts. The

liberal feminist perspective that informs this critique, explored further in Chapter Two,

respects the importance of the individual and encourages the sharing of personal

experiences as a valid method for understanding the world. The inclusion of my own

autoethnograpic content in this study is thus relevant to this feminist critique as I

incorporate key moments and memories from my life that have influenced my

relationship with food, my body, and my understanding of how I am supposed to relate to

food as a woman living in this society. Chapter Two will discuss further the relevant

research on women’s magazines, body image, and food advertising.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly (Schmich,

1997).

Introduction

Women’s magazines, publications aimed primarily at women, have been a widely

circulated staple of the American media landscape since the end of the Civil War

(Zuckerman, 1998). Since that time, these magazines have been addressing social,

political, and cultural topics of interest to females, and selling advertising space in order

to stay in print. As prolific sources of information and entertainment consumed by

millions of readers each year (MPA, 2011a; Storey, 2009), women’s magazines warrant

consideration from a variety of communication standpoints, including inquires on how

these texts fit into the lives of their female readers and how women use, relate to, or

reject magazine messages. In 2011, over 300 million magazines were circulated in the

United States, 90 percent of which were delivered right to our doors through paid

subscriptions (MPA, 2011c). Four of the top 10 circulated journals in the U.S. are

women’s magazines, including titles such as Family Circle and Better Homes & Gardens.

The women’s magazines alone represent over 82 million of the magazines being

delivered to home mailboxes all over the nation (MPA, 2011d).

As Mary Ellen Zuckerman notes in her historical account of women’s magazines,

these publications “survive, flourish…[and] endure” (1998, p. 241); indeed, titles like

Better Homes & Gardens and Good Housekeeping have been in circulation since 1922

and 1885, respectively (MPA, 2011a). The continuous popularity and longevity of

women’s magazines in particular make them impossible to ignore when considering any

question of gender-oriented media, and how these media influences our cultural

understanding of our roles, bodies, and lives. Like many scholars whose work will be

reviewed below, Zuckerman (1998) highlights the magazine’s ability to not only reflect

but direct the discourse women absorb on various issues, including beauty standards. The

media are now considered as much a risk factor in the development of low self-esteem,

body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating as other sociological and psychological

factors (NEDA, 2010). A substantial body of research shows a connection between media

exposure and women’s body dissatisfaction—a key factor in the development of

pathological dieting habits and eating disorders (AEDA, 2012; NEDA, 2010; Pipher,

1995). How issues of diet, eating, obesity, and thinness are handled by media is a chief

concern for our society; yet, food advertising, a prominent feature in women’s magazines

and our media landscape, remains underexplored in terms of the narrative constructed by

food ads and the messages they send on these topics.

To date, content analyses have quantified the most common types of food

advertising appearing in different women’s magazines (e.g., Lee, Bean, Galliford &

Underwood, 2009; Mastin & Campo, 2006) and other studies have combed television and

print food advertising for health and nutritional claims (Zwier, 2009; Jones, Andrews,

Tapsell, Williams, & McVie, 2008; Jones, Wiese, & Fabrianesi, 2008; King & Hill,

2008). However, little research has explored the nature and tone of food advertisements

aimed at women. The present research is important because it seeks to illuminate this

aspect of women’s magazines and the messages within food advertisements that may play

a role in the construction of women’s relationships with food, eating, and ultimately, their

bodies. In the following sections, the relevant literature on women’s magazines, food

advertising, and the link between the media and women’s body perceptions will be

explored. First, feminist scholarship on issues of women’s bodies in the media will be

reviewed.

Theoretical & Conceptual Overview

Historically, no group has more zealously identified the conceptualization,

representation, and controversy surrounding the female body as an issue of its own than

feminist scholars. From Susie Orbach’s landmark text, Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), to

the more recent work of feminist author Courtney Martin (2007), the issue of female

representation as framed by media has rigorously been studied under the feminist lens.

Feminist theory is composed of a variety of ‘feminisms’ embodying various goals, ideas,

and schools of thought concerning equal treatment of individuals in our society regardless

of gender and other characteristics such as race, class, and sexual identification. Different

feminisms may address, frame, and analyze societal issues, such as equal pay for women

and men, in varying ways. I draw on liberal feminism specifically in this work: the liberal

feminist perspective believes in the rights of the individual, including the right to equality

for women and men, eschewing social injustices based on laws and culturally-reinforced

gender roles that empower men and disenfranchise women (Tong, 2009). Also, the

autoenthongraphic portions I incorporate into this work, taken from my personal journal

kept throughout this process, reflects the liberal feminist perspective’s concentration on

and deference to the experiences of an individual. Liberal feminism also dedicates energy

to the issue of the female body and the continual cultural revision of its ‘ideal,’ arguing

that a woman’s body must be her own to define and use (Baumgardner & Richards,

2000). That “nearly every civilization has sought to impose a uniform shape upon the

female form” (Choi, 2000, p.63) makes the issue no less serious today as women

continue going to excruciating, even deadly, lengths to conform. Liberal feminism helps

me to answer questions about how women are communicated to and represented in food

advertisements in women’s magazines—how a woman’s relationship with food is

represented in these ads. To me, feminism in part means advocating for a woman’s

individual right to be free from a negative body image (and subsequent destructive

behaviors) that are thrust upon her by an unachievable physical ideal perpetuated by

media. A disproportionate level of importance is placed on the female form compared to

men, and no feminist perspective would suggest the solution lies in making men’s bodies

just as objectified as women’s. Rather, a liberal feminist seeks equality for women and

men by liberating both genders from an obsessively strict set of physical ideals. Women

can only be truly equal, and at equal advantage, in our society when their worth is not

established by appearances and their energy is not primarily funneled into how they look.

To regain control of the female form’s representation, feminist authors like Naomi

Wolf (1991) seek to explain exactly how the female body comes to be under societal

control. Wolf’s concept of “the beauty myth” postulates that images of beauty continue to

be used against women in our society by establishing an ever-narrowing set of parameters

that women feel compelled to live within. Though Wolf’s idea is not new nor a peer-

reviewed academic theory, it remains a critical text for many women who find that it

“resonate[s] with [their] own lifetime of experiences” (Kite, 2012). The beauty myth,

Wolf argues, is the counterpoint to every feminist achievement: “for every feminist

action, there is a beauty myth reaction” (1991, p.28), which restricts the acceptable

parameters of femininity, thus keeping women distracted and exhausted trying to achieve

the beauty standards, rather than seizing political opportunities or taking on challenging

projects. Evidence for the existence of the beauty myth, as noted by many scholars, is the

correlation between women’s successful equality gains in the workplace in the 1970s,

and the simultaneous decrease of the average model’s size by 25 percent in just a few

years (Douglas, 2010; Hesse-Biber, 2007; Maine & Kelly, 2005; Pipher, 1995; Myers,

1992; Wolf, 1991). The beauty myth explains this phenomenon: the feminist action,

achieving more workplace equality, was answered by the beauty myth as women were

told to shrink—physically take up less space—by media depictions of suddenly withered,

famous women.

More recently, feminist scholar Rebecca Coleman (2008) describes the ongoing

tension between women’s bodies and images of women’s bodies. While past feminist

inquiry used the binary of “body/image” (2008, p. 163) to illustrate this interaction,

Coleman argues that “body—image” (p.175) is a more appropriate and accurate

approach, accounting for how images can limit or expand a woman’s conceptualization

of her body. Coleman asserts that feminist scholarship must inquire about the

relationships women have with actual photographs of themselves and how they mentally

picture themselves. This will more accurately capture how a woman interacts with her

self-image, both real and conceptual, and help scholars to understand the complex

relationship a woman has with images of herself.

Sue Thorman’s (2007) work on the intersections of women, feminism, and the

media foreshadows Coleman’s (2008) assertions. Advertising images, particularly in

women’s magazines, position female viewers as spectators of a masculine-based ideal,

gazing into a fantasy world filled with “icon[s]” (Thorman, 2007, p.43) that women are

driven to reflect through “self-control (diet, exercise, etc.) and self-management”

(Thorman, 2007, p.43) like wearing the right clothes or getting a trendy haircut. In this

way, advertising gets women to look at themselves as males do, while males do; this gaze

spurs women to mimic the idols they see in their (supposedly) representative forum: the

magazine. Like Coleman (2008), Thorman’s (2007) observations demand that feminist

scholarship question how images are used to extend and limit a woman’s ‘picture’ of her

body—and the ideal female form.

McRobbie (1997) argues that feminist thought must continually concern itself

with women’s magazines, despite the faction of scholars who would rather dismiss the

texts, along with the images and advertisements designed for the male gaze. Summarizing

the feminist scholarship that has focused on teen girls’ and women’s magazines,

McRobbie notes both the stark opposition and the more accepting approaches to these

publications. McRobbie recognizes feminist authors who condemn these magazines as

damaging texts, full of advertisements that “[do] nothing but convince readers of their

own inadequacies” (p. 190), as well as those who see these publications as useful societal

indicators of women’s positions. Ultimately, McRobbie argues that there is an

inextricable relationship between feminist thought and women’s magazines, and rather

than attempt to break that tie, feminism should embrace the fact that these publications

“provoke” (1997, p. 191) intense questioning and keep scholars carefully monitoring the

portrayal of women in the media.

At first glance, magazines may seem to further the feminist cause by providing

the space for women to converse about topics pertinent to their lives; however, the beauty

myth ensnares these texts just as it does women: in order to have the revenue necessary

to exist, the magazine must incorporate advertising, and nothing makes more sense than

selling beauty products and fashion to a captive audience already vulnerable from the

images and articles recommending the latest fat-busting exercises or anti-aging tricks.

Women welcome these texts into their lives, digesting the messages from advertisements

and editorials alike. In the following sections, the relationship between magazines and

their female readers will be explored, along with the role of fantasy elements, advertising,

and the image-driven propagation of the ‘thin-ideal’ within these publications. Finally,

the small body of relevant work concerning food advertising will be reviewed.

Women’s Magazines and Their Readers

Popular women’s magazines are identified by many scholars as a primary channel

for communicating with women, pivotally influencing the lives of their readers (Ytre-

Arne, 2011; Durham, 2008, 1996; Gill, 2007; Gough-Yates, 2003; Zuckerman, 1998;

Caldas-Coulthard, 1996; Hermes, 1995; McCracken, 1993; Ballaster, 1991; McRobbie,

1991; Wolf, 1991; Winship, 1987). As a primary example of “women’s mass culture”

(Wolf, 1991, p. 70), the magazine has long been the primary source of content by women,

for Western, middle-class women, providing a rare forum where women’s issues are

principally represented. Because magazines provide a forum for women to communicate

with one another, women assign them to a position of high authority, allowing the

magazine’s messages to blast into their homes, their offices, and their lives. McCracken

(1993) corroborates this concept, asserting that these periodicals offer “a woman-centered

articulation of the world” (p.2), telling small narratives within a larger discourse that

“render thousands of aspects of life knowable and manageable” (p.2), making the

magazine a compelling source of information and instruction. As Carmen Caldas-

Coulthard (1996) observes, reading a woman’s magazine “is very difficult to

resist…because they deal with women’s lives and desires, they show ideal bodies,

represent ideal careers and ideal relationships. They also offer advice and hope through

many voices” (p. 251) to which women can easily relate. Throughout the years, Caldas-

Coutlthard (1996) notes, women’s magazines may have updated their outward

appearance and their visual content, but maintain a basic, static storyline that addresses

various issues from a female perspective. Despite their largely unchanging nature,

women’s magazines remain appealing to women because they unravel the problems and

simplify the complicated business of being a woman (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996).

Magazines “exude intimacy and a kind of sisterhood,” writes Zuckerman (1998,

p. xv) in her historical account of women’s magazines. Janice Winship (1987) agrees,

observing that magazines are like having a continuous “conversation with a friend” (p.82)

through a series of relatable narratives that come to satisfying and hopeful conclusions.

Winship (1987) also notes that most women purchase magazines as a means of

enjoyment, though the contents may drive them to creative thought or action like trying a

recipe the periodical provided. Researchers (1991) note that magazines serve as “friend,

advisor, and instructor on the difficult task of being a woman” (Ballaster, Beetham,

Frazer, & Hebron, 1991, p.124-125), which they argue is perpetuated by the femininity

myth the magazine tells readers about the disparity between the women they are and the

women they should strive to be. Establishing femininity—the right kind of femininity—

as a lofty accomplishment fraught with challenges, magazines then present themselves as

the helping hand, as Ballaster’s team (1991) argues. Corroborating the significant role of

women’s magazines in our culture, Caldas-Coulthard (1996) calls these texts “pervasive”

(p.250), noting their steadfast presence in our society with “a highly important role in the

maintenance of cultural values, since they construct an ‘ideal’ reader who is at the same

time both produced and in a sense imprisoned by the text” (p. 250). From headlines

declaring this month’s issue will help readers ‘improve their marriage’ or ‘lose 10 pounds

– fast,’ women’s magazines have long established themselves as their reader’s best friend

and confidant, while subtly controlling the conversation and continually reinforcing

cultural ideals that may vary with trends, but fundamentally remain focused on portraying

a set version of femininity.

In-depth studies investigating magazine readership reveal more about how women

negotiate the magazine’s dialogic dominance, and even overcome perceived harms to

continue reading their favorite, glossy newsstand staple. Extensive interviews with

women across demographics and nationalities validate how deeply women can be

influenced by the representation of their gender in magazines: one reader describes the

omnipresent ‘ideal woman’ that she sees in these publications as “sexy, beautiful,

intelligent, superwoman” (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 201). Some readers in Gauntlett’s cultural

investigation welcome these messages into their lives, enjoying that magazines “provide

an imaginary space of self-indulgence [where] I can play at being a different, more

glamorous, shallower, richer version of myself” (2002, p. 198), whereas others are far

more critical. One woman denounces them as “harmful—[in] that they encourage you to

question your life and your happiness and tell you what you ought to be doing and

feeling” (2002, p. 202), and for this reader, the worst part is that “women [are] telling

other women all this harmful stuff” (2002, p. 202). Gauntlett (2002) declares magazines

to be frequently paradoxical, reports that many readers do not always take their

magazines seriously, and cautions that even ‘un-serious’ readers “are still absorbing lots

of messages about what society (as seen through the magazines) thinks is important—

such as beauty and sex—and what readers can be less bothered about—such as serious

political issues” (p.206). Even the most casual encounters with magazines, then, put

consumers eye-to-eye with the media’s articulation of the world, and while today’s

generations grow increasingly media literate, we cannot possibly thoroughly process and

filter every message we receive (Martin, 2007) blocking out those we perceive as

harmful.

Like Gauntlett (2002), other scholars assert that “magazines are often read as

time-passers and an escape from a busy reality” (Winship, 1987, p.53)—that not all cases

of frequent magazine readership are intense or tumultuous. Hermes’ (1995) in-depth

portrayal of two life-long magazine readers uncovered that women nonchalantly pick up

magazines to fill brief pauses in activity, and may not read any magazines for months at a

time. Yet even these seemingly innocuous moments, Hermes (1995) argues, become

consequential as the magazine “provides unique forms of affirmation, reassurance, and

dreams of perfection” (p.63) for women that apply to their roles as mothers, wives, and

professionals. Women use magazines to navigate the outside world, absorbing the

practical advice on how to be a better female, regarding the publication as both friend and

foe, the object of both criticism and pleasure. Some readers value the magazine’s

editorials that provide a sisterly dialogue; others “enjoy the engagement with

consumerism” (Gauntlett, 2002, p.198) provided by advertisements and product

endorsements. One such reader displays her enthusiasm in an interview: “I love the

sensuality of them—the heavy shiny pages, the high production values” (Gauntlett, 2002,

p.198) that keep her reading each month.

While women’s uses for and relationships with magazines vary greatly, as seen

throughout the existing literature, the concept of the magazine as a ‘dreamy escape’

appears frequently, not far from the tongue of any experienced reader or the observations

of any researcher. Indeed, many scholars have noted the ubiquitous presence of fantasy

elements and themes in women’s magazines, particularly used in the magazine’s

advertisement content. Understanding magazines more thoroughly requires further

inquiry into the nature of advertising in women’s magazines, and the whimsy employed

therein. As Beatrix Miller, 1976 editor of Vogue magazine, said, “We are 60% selling a

dream and 40% offering practical advice,” (as qtd. in Winship, 1987, p. 11-12).

Advertising and Fantasy

While articles and stories from other readers do much to contribute to the cultural

dialogue within women’s magazines, advertising has also appeared between the pages of

these periodicals from their inception. Underscoring the crucial role advertising plays in

these journals, aforementioned scholars like Zuckerman (1998) note how print ads

“intersect with the magazine’s editorial content” (p. 74) and are thus as influential as any

other aspect of the magazine. As early as 1895, marketers targeted women’s magazines

as a way to win over the “‘buying department of the household’” and thus secure “‘the

patronage of the family’” (qtd. in Zuckerman, 1998, p. 61) through the woman’s

recognition and endorsement of a product. This cultural construct of the woman as the

family shopper has not changed, and indeed, in 2010, women were reported as making 83

percent of all consumer purchases in the United States, and 91 percent of “general

household purchases” (Hill, 2010, p. 144) including food. Advertising for such products

must successfully engage with female audiences, and not underestimate the financial

impact of failing to do so (Hill, 2010).

Women’s magazines and the advertising content that supports them have fused

together, making the magazine dual-purposed in a sense. The magazine caters to their

reader’s informational and entertainment desires, and catalogs products and services that

readers are encouraged to buy. Zuckerman explains: “With magazines still funded by

advertisers, the sell message persists. As has been true throughout their history, this adds

up to publications both helpful and limiting to the women they target. They remain

embedded in the consumer culture that gave birth to them” (Zuckerman, 1998, p. xv).

This idea parallels Coleman’s (2008) concept of bodies and images capable of both

extending and limiting women’s perceptions of their own physicality; Zuckerman’s

(1998) point reiterates the ability of an image, in this case advertisements, to do the same.

While advertising may inform readers of new products on the market, the magazine

inevitably ends up endorsing the product and the tactics used in the ad, regardless of

whether or not either conflicts with the magazine’s other messages. Caldas-Coulthard’s

(1996) summarizes the outcome of this content collision: “The sexually attractive woman

is the beautiful one who, to please men, is persuaded to buy the products being advertised

in the magazine. Editorial and advertising material are thus inseparable” (p. 255) and

women consume both types of content seamlessly while turning the glossy pages.

Winship (1987) explains that the combination of ads and articles establishes a delicate

balance between the basic goods needed in everyday life, and luxury items that establish

a dream world—the appeal of which makes magazines highly successful. By first

defining femininity, then advertising tangible tools for achieving desirability, women’s

magazines position themselves persuasively in the lives of their readers who are attracted

to the relatable, familiar, and often friendly voice of the favorite publications.

However, the simple “combination of entertainment and useful advice” (Storey,

2006, p.119) is not enough: the use of fantasy and escapist elements—the building blocks

of the ‘other world’ magazines create—furthers the appeal of the featured products,

deepens the connection between the reader and the magazine, and makes the magazine

and the advertisements agents of instilling desires (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996; Storey, 2006;

Winship, 1987; Zuckerman, 1998). From stilettos to diamond studs, luxury cars to

cashmere, the magazine features and promotes material goods in imaginary settings,

ripped from storybooks. Accustomed as we are to the images, we accept them without

question as we browse: the tangible existence of the image easily transfers to its contents.

In other words, the image itself does exist, even though its contents are built with the

tools of illusions: sets, props, costumes, makeup, and digital alterations. Only after

prolonged study with the aim to dissect these images do we start to see their fantastical

absurdities, though as Caldas-Coulthard (1996) argues “Visual pleasure is [still]

stimulated through beautiful pictures of people and things” (p. 252). Even the observation

that the photo shoot and advertising images are dream-like, creative constructs, no

amount of “knowing” can “cast the shadow of doubt over the dazzling, compelling,

authoritative images” (Bordo, 2003, p. 104) which become part of our realities and fuel

our desires. As Winship (1987) notes in her analysis of advertising:

We recognize and relish the vocabulary of these 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 of the

experience you do not and cannot have. (p. 56)

Janice Winship argues that women find this fantasy world fulfilling because

“women are placed first here. She is the centre stage and powerful. The magazines

persuade us that women, like the models, can succeed” (1987, pp. 11-12) and this

promise of success, along with the place of prominence in the magazine, builds the

foundation for how wildly successful these publications become. Women readers

ultimately buy and repeat-purchase these magazines for the outlandish fantasies and

advertisements for unaffordable, impractical items, not in spite of these features. Noting

that readers may still “complain about the amount of advertisements, too expensive

clothes, and the far-fetched fiction” (Winship, 1987, p.7)” women still respond to the

“dreamy lifestyle” (p. 13) presented in the magazine as “an image to aspire to” (p. 13) no

matter how outlandish, expensive, or impossible that image may be to achieve. For many

readers, this visual paradox draws them in rather than repels them from the periodicals.

One reader describes her fascination with advertising in women’s magazines:

I love to look at the latest fashions, exclusive purses and beautiful make-

up. It isn't about having the money to buy these things, but the possibility

of dreaming about it. To me this is a fantasy world, and I want the

stunning models to be in that world. If the magazines' models looked like

me… I wouldn't buy them! (Høgden, 2002, p.12)

While enthusiasm for this fake consumerist heaven becomes evident, several

questions arise pertaining to the consequences of women’s mass engagement with this

fantasy world. Where does this departure from reality leave women? Are magazines

merely a means of temporary escape, filling a dull moment, as Hermes’ (1995) analysis

finds? The implications for feminism and female empowerment remain central to the

question of women’s magazines, despite the fact that many readers report enjoying the

high-end advertising bombarding them from the glossy pages. John Storey’s (2006)

cultural studies approach to the connection between magazines, advertisements, and the

dream-like world they co-create suggests that

they generate a desire for fulfillment (through consumption). 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, a better woman. (p. 119-120)

Storey (2006) argues this poses a problem for feminism as the magazine and

advertisements present women as individuals uninfluenced by social norms which dictate

their purchases and behaviors. Thorman (2007) summarizes that magazines and ads must

create a mythical world through their content because “female desire and fantasy must be

enacted through narrative so that women as social subjects find new possibilities of

identification, engagement, and agency” (p. 72), without which there would be no

possibility of imagining women in the situations and materialistic conquests we see them

swathed in. Advertisements provide the space in which women can visualize this

engagement with the constant, active process of morphing themselves into the established

cultural narrative.

Thus the fantasy elements of women’s magazines fall under scrutiny from the

feminist lens, questioning whether or not drawing readers into a mythical world bent on

selling them a fantasy is a true act of ‘sisterhood.’ As women “fantasize about perfect

selves” (Hermes, 1995, p. 62) and ideal lives while reading magazines and gazing wide-

eyed at the advertisements therein, absorbing the directives and images they see, research

suggests the fantasy becomes a reality that women ruthlessly pursue, particularly when it

comes to achieving the perfect body (Durham, 2008; Martin, 2007; Wolf, 1991). In the

next section, the literature concerning the thin-ideal propagated by women’s magazines is

reviewed.

Women’s Magazines and the Thin-Ideal

An abundance of research explores the relationship between exposure to

magazines and print advertising and women’s reported body image (Anschutz, Van

Strien, Becker, & Engles, 2011; Knobloch-Westerwick & Crane, 2011; Sheldon, 2010;

Smeesters, Mussweiler, & Mandel, 2010; Dittmar, Halliwell, & Stirling, 2009;

Yamamiyaa, Cash, Melnyk, Posavac, & Posavac, 2005; Cameron & Ferraro, 2004;

Turner & Hamilton, 1997). Many other studies investigate women’s body image, media

exposure, and the concept of the ‘thin-deal’ (Prichard & Triggemann, 2012; Slater,

Triggemann, Fitch, & Hawkins, 2012; Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008; Hawkins, Richards,

Granley, & Stein, 2004; Gauntlett, 2002; Groesz, Levine, and Murnen, 2002). This

extensive body of literature leads the more recent investigators to acknowledge the

preponderance of evidence collected on this topic and state that “it is generally agreed

that the thin beauty ideal provided by the mass media has a negative influence on the

body image and eating behavior of girls and young women” (Anschutz, Van Strien,

Becker, & Engles, 2011). Taken together, these studies find that exposure to images

portraying the ‘thin-ideal’ results in changes to women’s reported body image, most often

by decreasing their body satisfaction, self-esteem, and increasing their acceptance of

unhealthy approaches to eating, such as persistent dieting. One key study found that

women will automatically compare themselves to advertising models, assessing their

need to diet and exercise based on how closely they perceive their own bodies to

resemble the women seen in magazines (Smeesters, Mussweiler, & Mandel, 2010).

Women predictably reacted to models heavier or thinner than themselves by reporting

stronger intentions to eat less and increase exercise after viewing the ads.

A few studies report an increase in body satisfaction after extended exposure to

images of ideal bodies appearing in magazines and advertisements, but find this result

mediated by the dieting practices of the participants (Knoblock-Westerick & Crane,

2011; Anschutz, Van Strien, Becker, & Engles, 2011). Women may get a ‘boost’ from

‘thin-is-in’ media images when they are engaged in behaviors they believe will help them

to reflect those images, such as dieting. Furthermore, women’s deep internalization of the

‘thin-ideal’ as the societal beauty imperative is corroborated across the literature, even in

studies that do not report exposure effects (Cusumano & Thompson, 1997), confirming

that media such as advertising and magazines are key components of women’s

acculturation into the slender-is-beautiful standard. In sum, women are clearly impacted

by the constant bombardment of media depictions of the lean female body, absorbing

these images and more often than not, striving to reflect them.

Along with advertising images featuring ultra-thin models, magazines constantly

run diet and exercise related articles which have been shown to increase reports of

unhealthy weight control practices in adolescents as well as adults (Utter, Neumark-

Sztainer, Wall, & Story, 2003; Choi, 2000). Choi’s (2000) ethnographic work with avid

female exercisers identifies titles like Shape and Cosmopolitan as catalysts for the

ruthless workouts pursued by women seeking to fix their currently “imperfect” body (p.

67). From getting the “ultimate body” to becoming “the happiest [you]’ve ever been”

(p.67), women continually receive the message from magazines that exercise, combined

with food restriction, is the best way to become thin, toned, and finally beautiful. Choi

reiterates the concept that female physicality is governed by specific, universally

accepted truths: the female body is flawed, requires reduction, and is only beautiful if

carefully sculpted. Unfortunately, other universal truths follow these: Choi confirms the

body dissatisfaction and self-objectification that results from this culturally imposed idea

of the feminine ideal.

Wykes and Gunter (2005), in their study of how print media influences our

collective understanding of what is ‘sexy’ and desirable in terms of the female image,

found that popular magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie-Claire, and Sugar do more than

supply the latest diet or sex advice: these magazines actually sell a definition of ideal

femininity for the heterosexual male that chiefly includes youthfulness, thinness, and

attractiveness. Echoing Wolf’s (1991) beauty myth concept, Wykes and Gunter (2005)

argue that these magazines suggest the only use of female empowerment is the ability “to

buy versions of themselves” (p. 82) since women are most decidedly not adequate as they

are. Similarly, Stephens, Hill, and Hanson (1994) apply the beauty myth to advertising

specifically, arguing that ads for diet and beauty products play a large part in the

perpetuation of the female thin-ideal. The team observed that advertising, perhaps more

than magazine articles, is poised to deliver a powerful blow to women’s self-image

because ads feature dazzling images of the beauty standard, usually in the shape of a

culturally exalted model, alongside a product, be it diet pills or eyeliner. This

juxtaposition implies the latter will achieve the former—a potentially damaging message

when the protein shakes or skin cream inevitably does not produce miraculous results,

and leaves behind the question of whether the benefits of such advertising outweigh the

harms of propelling consumers to pursue an unachievable ideal.

Luckily for the advertisers, as the literature reviewed above explains, women are

often enthusiastically inspired to chase after the materialistic and intangible lives

presented in magazines and advertisements alike. While expensive clothes and

accessories are frequently advertised in women’s magazines, so too are more practical

items such as food. Food advertising in women’s magazines has historically taken up a

significant portion of magazine content (McCracken, 1993) and continues to be a major

contributor to magazine advertising (MPA, 2009).

Food Advertising

The vast majority of food advertising research done to date focuses on the

nutritional and health claims made in the ads (Zwier, 2009; Jones, Andrews, Tapsell,

Williams, & McVie, 2008; Lohman & Kant, 2000; Hill & Radimer, 1997; Pratt & Pratt,

1996; Pratt & Pratt, 1995; Barr, 1989) or on food commercials aimed at children (Jones,

Wiese, & Fabrianesi, 2008; King & Hill, 2008; Cowburn & Boxer, 2007; Kelly &

Chapman, 2007; Story & French, 2004; Hill & Radimer, 1996). These studies usually

concentrate on a specific market, such as Canada or Australia, and look at marketing

across several channels including television and the Internet. While it is important to

understand what claims food advertisements make from a consumer standpoint and how

ads might influence impressionable children, these studies do not provide insight into the

narrative constructed by food advertising aimed at adult women.

Two content analyses conducted on food advertising in women’s magazines

reveal interesting information on the types of food most commonly promoted in these

texts. Mastin and Campo (2006) found that the majority of advertising in magazines

aimed at an African-American female readership promoted empty-calorie beverages,

fatty foods, sweets, and fast food. Only seven ads for fruits and vegetables appeared in

the sample spanning two decades. Similarly, Adams, Simpson, and White (2011) found

that in over 1,300 food ads appearing in women’s magazines from the United Kingdom,

only two percent featured fruits and vegetables while the rest promoted fat-and-sugar-

laden products. Both of these studies note the contradictory nature of the food ads to the

magazine’s other health-and diet-related content. Articles on calorie restriction and

exercise send a “mixed message” (Mastin and Campo, 2006, p. 281) to consumers, and

are diametrically opposed to the potato chips and candy bars advertised on the very next

page.

In one of the few studies examining the subtext of food advertising aimed at

women, Susan Bordo (1993) identifies distinct patterns in food ads: women should eat as

little as possible and always in private, focusing on diet products, while men should

enthusiastically and shamelessly devour high-calorie indulgences like Haggen-Dazs or

Duncan Hines frosting. The JELL-O ads depict slender women lounging in chairs in

figure-minimizing positions, declaring themselves ‘girls who can’t say no’ to dessert or

for whom “dessert [is] always on my mind” (Bordo, 1993, p.107) as though they barely

manage to control their unwieldy desire for sweets. These already thin women’s appetites

become associated with dark transgression in the ads that suggest only with reduced fat

and sugar products like JELL-O snacks can women stay so slim. In stark contrast, men’s

appetites are celebrated in food ads as guys are shown as adorable, confidant and

appropriately voracious in their crooning desire for sweets. An ad for Haagen-Dazs

shows a muscular, mostly naked man launching off of a diving board into a bowl of dark

chocolate ice cream. Women, who are juxtaposed to self-conscious, waistline-watching

references in food as, are instead encouraged to “Dive In” to their meager, portion-and-

calorie controlled frozen WeightWatchers dinner. The double-standard uncovered by

Bordo’s (1993) analysis lays a solid foundation for understanding the messages

communicated via food advertising about how women should approach eating, their

appetites, and the foods they crave.

Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) continue to examine print food advertising,

focusing specifically on ads appearing in women’s magazines. Like Bordo (1993),

Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) recognize the insinuations in food advertisements that

women’s appetites are unholy and dangerous, requiring constant surveillance and control.

Wilson and Blackhurst identify food advertisements as an understudied culprit of the

media’s influence on women’s body image issues, specifically the drive for extreme

thinness. Arguing that these food ads contain messages that normalize dieting and other

practices associated with disordered eating, the researchers cite several food

advertisements appearing in Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Fitness

during the 1990s. Magazines’ pervasive focus on dieting in general primes readers to

digest food advertisements, able to dictate to women not only what foods to purchase, but

how they should think about food, and how eating relates to the all-important goal of

being thin. Ads for Kellogg’s Special K cereal links eating with fitting into date-night

dresses, or their bikinis, and shames women into eating the 110-calories-per-serving

cereal to achieve a body worthy of these garments. Other food ads in Wilson and

Blackhurst’s (1999) analysis suggest that the featured product, like Quaker oats, is the

panacea for lost of social opportunities and wardrobe choices that accompany eating

chocolate and cookies instead. Messages like these suggest that women need to be

conscious of their eating habits as they directly impact their appearances, reinforcing a

fear of fat and appetite while simultaneously suggesting the solution: dieting. Wilson and

Blackhurst (1999) conclude that food advertising directly contributes to women’s

negative body image by reinforcing the thin-ideal and reminding women that unrestricted

eating puts them further from that ideal. While Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) contribute

significantly to the understanding of food advertising’s role in women’s magazines, they

do not outline a method used to conduct their analysis, nor do they provide a theoretical

underpinning for their work.

While Bordo (1993) and Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) begin to shed light on the

discourse of food advertising, much more investigation is needed to understand the

narratives constructed by food advertisements, and how these narratives may be

interpreted through a feminist lens, especially given the broader context of women’s

magazines, in which these ads so frequently appear. Little has been recorded on the

possible readings of print food advertisements aimed at women’s magazine readers, and

given the literature connecting both food, eating, and body image, along with the links

between the media and body image issues—a precursor for disordered eating—food

advertising can no longer be overlooked in the quest to understand how our media, like

women’s magazines, influence the intimate corners of our lives, like our kitchen pantries.

Summary

As this review demonstrates, women’s magazines have long been a part of the

Western media landscape, and enjoy a unique, complex relationship with their readers.

While presenting a female-centric forum for information and entertainment, women’s

magazines also engage in the development of dream-like fantasy worlds, encapsulating

the “consumer culture that gave birth to them” (Zuckerman, 1998, p. xv) through their

visually indulgent photo shoots and advertisements. The parade of beautiful possessions

and people raises several questions from a liberal feminist perspective as to how women

are to reconcile the ideal life they see portrayed in their magazines, including the perfect

body, with their own less-than-perfect realities. The relationship between readers and

magazines, the media’s overt value on thinness and physical perfection as the female

beauty standard, and the criticizing messages of transgression and guilt historically seen

in food advertising aimed at women all contribute to the cacophonous discourse on

women, their bodies, and their food. The current research seeks to single out the

sounds—the narrative—of food advertising in women’s magazines to isolate this voice in

the din and more deeply understand how food advertising communicates with women and

engages with the societal expectations placed on a woman’s appearance, appetite, and

eating habits. Though it is already clear that food advertising does more than just fill

space between a magazine’s feature stories, this research endeavors to listen closely to

the messages coming from food advertisements.

Magazines serve a pivotal function in women’s lives, supplying information and

dialogue on issues central to their lives; however, along with fitness articles and editorials

on managing an overbearing mother-in-law, magazines sell advertising space, becoming

an outlet for many additional messages capable of influencing women. To date, little

research has focused on food advertising in women’s magazines, despite its prevalence

(McCracken, 1993) and the obvious role of food in women’s body image issues and

pursuit of thinness (Blood, 2005; Bordo, 1993; Wilson & Blackhurst, 1999). This study

seeks to shed light on the narrative messages in food advertising, and how those

messages may be interpreted, taking the magazine as a whole into account. Chapter Three

will describe the research goals, materials, and method of analysis used to achieve a

deeper understanding of food advertising in women’s magazines.

METHOD

Mirror, mirror

All I see—

A monster taking over me

Thinner, tighter, on it screams,

I’m only eating in my dreams.

Mirror, mirror… - Researcher’s personal journal, 7/28/2011

Research Goals

The chief goal of this research is to understand the narratives constructed in food

advertisements appearing in women’s magazines. This study seeks to identify and

analyze the thematic messages food advertising communicates to women about food and

eating, how female readers are encouraged to think about food, and how these messages

may be interpreted given the thin-is-beautiful media landscape we live in.

Conducting a textual analysis achieves the goal of contributing to the literature on

food advertising, women’s magazines, and the media’s representation of the ideal female

form by approaching these questions qualitatively. While several studies to date have

examined the magazine from a more holistic approach (i.e. Caldas-Coulthard, 1996;

McCracken, 1993) and several studies focus on the health content of food advertising,

very few studies have endeavored to observe and interpret the meanings within print food

advertising aimed at women. This research is important to understanding more about the

highly nuanced relationship between women, food, and their bodies.

While focusing on food advertising in women’s magazines, this study also takes

into account the surrounding material in these publications as the context in which the

food advertising appears. Articles, images, and advertisements for other products are also

incorporated into this textual analysis as a means to more completely understand the

discourse on food, eating, and women’s bodies in these magazines. Since women can

derive meaning from all parts of a magazine, it is useful to analyze not only the food ads

obviously endorsing their products, but the editorial copy and other content

accompanying these ads that women encounter.

A final goal for this research is to intertwine my experiences with body image,

food, and the media, recording my observations and reactions as I immerse myself in

these magazines. By including personal narrative, I seek to illuminate aspects of this

research, and bolster the liberal feminist scholarship by declaring and honoring my

experiences as an individual. I also contribute to feminist scholarship by asking questions

about how women are represented by media—particularly media aimed at them, as in the

case of food advertising in women’s magazines. Adding my voice to the growing chorus

of women sharing their stories, I validate and affirm their efforts while continuing to

expose the harmful reality of having a disordered relationship with food and one’s own

body. My introspection and reflection upon my experiences reveals valuable insight into

these issues and I am compelled to document them in the interest of purposeful

storytelling, outreach to others who have or are suffering similar trials, and honest

research into a topic that I hold as timely and of critical significance.

Research Materials

To achieve the goals of this study, three different women’s magazines from the

most recent year at the time of this writing were read and analyzed. All 2011 issues of

Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle were read and analyzed, with a focus on food, eating,

and other body-related content. Food advertisements were removed from these magazines

for an in-depth textual analysis. These magazines were selected for two main reasons:

first, according to the Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) descriptions of these

publications, each emphasizes a different aspect of women’s lives. While SELF focuses

on “health, beauty, fitness, and nutrition” (SRDS, 2011a), Glamour concentrates on

“beauty and fashion” (SRDS, 2011b) and Family Circle “represents the strong connection

women have to their families” at which they are the center (SRDS, 2011c). Second, these

popular magazines represent large readership bases, all ranking in the top 60 magazines

by circulation (MPA, 2010); their guaranteed circulation rates in 2011 ranged from

SELF’s 1.4 million, to Glamour’s 2.5 million, and Family Circle’s 3.8 million, making

Family Circle one of the top ten most circulated magazines in the United States

(CondeNast, 2011a; CondeNast, 2011b; Meredith, 2011; MPA, 2011d).

A complete year’s subscription to each of these magazines was acquired for this

analysis to simulate the total content subscribers to these magazines receive in a given

12-month period and to capture the narrative trends seen throughout the year. The most

recent year was used in this analysis in the interest of being as current as possible. In

observing past issues of these magazines (e.g., Glamour, October, 2010; SELF, July 2009

& April, 2008; Family Circle, August, 2010 & March, 2009), no significant differences

in format or monthly features was found within each of the magazines. As stated in the

literature review, magazines closely adhere to their formulaic presentations to match what

their loyal readers have come to expect (Storey, 2006). Some magazines even attach a

“Special Feature” to each month that remains consistent over the years: Allure magazine,

for example, names January “the Makeover Issue,” March the “Insider’s Issue,”

September the “Fall Trends Issue,” and so on (SRDS, 2012). The unwavering structure

seen in women’s magazines has been described by researchers as the way the magazine

sets up and delivers on “textual expectations” for upcoming issues, which “have the same

structural format with the same set agenda for internal sections” (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996,

p. 252) each month. Magazines employ these regularities as persuasive tactics to keep

readers purchasing the familiar periodical (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996) that does not require

re-navigation and continual adjustment to changing feature sections.

A comprehensive search of Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle’s web sites, media

kits and SRDS information revealed no atypical practices or occurrences in their 2011

publishing year, nor did an Internet search return any news results to suggest 2011 was an

unusual year for magazine publications. Only Family Circle reported in September of

2011 that it would be reducing production from its standard 15 issues to 12 issues

beginning in 2012 in order to cut costs (Moses, 2011).

All full, half, and quarter-page food advertisements appearing in any issues of the

three magazines from January to December of 2011 were included in this study to get a

comprehensive look at all such advertising appearing in print for an entire year. Food was

defined as a solid, edible item or product, including beverages and restaurant items. Ads

for diet supplements, vitamins, and ads for over-the-counter or prescription medications

were excluded as these items are not designed to serve as primary meal, snack, or

beverage components, but rather are items tangential to eating. Magazine articles that

commented significantly on food and eating were also marked for closer analysis; for

example, an article titled “The Summer Foods Even Skinny Chicks Eat” (Jio, 2011, p.

102) was critically read to understand the message sent to women about food and eating

through editorial copy in the same magazine. Other advertisements and articles that stood

out as pertinent to understanding these magazines and their various narratives were also

incorporated into this analysis.

To achieve my goal of supporting this research with my own experiences

regarding women’s magazines, food, and body image, personal narrative has been

incorporated throughout the study. This narrative, italicized in the text for easy

identification, captures my experiences reading women’s magazine, wrestling with my

own food and body image preoccupations, and encountering the body image issues of

other women. Heeding the advice and efforts of previous scholars who have practiced

autoethnographic inquiry, I critically read the autoethnographic accounts of others, such

as Lisa Tillman-Healy (1996) and Megan Axelsen (2009), on their battles with body

image and disordered eating. Best practices for using this method were also reviewed: for

example, according to Spry’s (2001) account of ‘good authoethnography,’ personal

narrative must strive to be well written, highly reflexive, and emotionally engaging as to

forge a relationship between myself and my reader. Careful writing and re-writing of my

narrative, based on an evolving understanding of my experience, was necessary as I

gathered evidence from my past and current experiences. In other words, my narrative

aims to accurately identify and explain the “situatedness of [my]self with others in social

contexts” (Spry, 2001, p. 710), and remains vigilantly critical and cognizant of the

influences on my emerging explanations of my experiences throughout the research

process.

Method of Materials Collection

After obtaining each issue of SELF, Glamour, and Family Circle magazine from

January to December of 2011, I went through each magazine to ensure each periodical

was complete (i.e. no pages missing, illegible). Then, I spent time with each issue,

recording observations, reading articles, and identifying all full, half, and quarter-page

food advertisements present. The ads were removed from the magazine for ease of

organizing, analyzing, and comparing with other ads. If ads appeared on both sides of the

same page, the page was marked with a post-it note for future color photocopying to

separate the materials. I color photocopied any food ads as necessary, indicating the

magazine name, issue, and page number on the back of the photocopy for citation

reference.

While going through the magazines for food advertisements, I also marked any

other content in the magazine that significantly contributed to the magazine’s narrative on

food, eating, or women’s bodies. For example, articles promoting a certain meal plan, or

reporting on dieting, disordered eating, and body image issues among women were read

and analyzed for their messages on these topics. The analysis of this content provided a

comprehensive look at the magazines as a whole, and provided a broader understanding

of the context of these magazines, in which the food advertising also appears.

Furthermore, examining the complete magazine allowed for a richer analysis of the food

advertisements and overall messages that these publications send to their female readers,

and how these messages encourage women to think about food and eating.

To identify the critical components of my personal narrative, I examined past

journals, saved poems, photographs, remembered events, conversations, and emotions

that helped me to explain my experiences with body image issues and food despite a

positive lifestyle change. As feminist author Courtney Martin (2007) achieves in her

account of the bad body image epidemic among Western women, I needed to record my

significant experiences to lend credence to the accounts of others and add my voice to the

chorus of those revealing personal truths that speak to a larger phenomenon.

Additionally, I continued writing accounts of new experiences, revelations, and

observations throughout the research process.

Method of Materials Analysis

I conducted a textual analysis of the food advertisements taken from the

aforementioned magazines, following Larsen’s assertion that textual analysis “brings out

the whole range of possible meanings” (1991, p. 122), and allows for the systematic

organization of themes and patterns in the data that point to a larger discourse. Textual

analysis provided the most appropriate method for this study as it accounts for the full

range of symbols, from words to colors, appearing in the advertisements, and inquiring

after their larger cultural meaning and how they are encouraging the viewer to think

about and relate to food.

After removing or photocopying all food advertisements out of their magazines, I

used a postmodern approach to systematically determine and organize meanings that

emerged from the ads based on Stern’s (1996) approach to advertising texts. First, I

examined the ads based on similar word and scene choices—“the parts or literary

attributes” (Stern, 1996, p. 61) of the materials. For example, all ads that prominently use

words like “Yes” or “Absolutely” or display similar scenes, such as a woman sitting on a

couch with her child, were placed in the same pile. Next, I reorganized the ads based on

how they constructed meaning from these individual elements: while different ads for the

same product initially presented many common parts, closer examination of their

communicated meaning separated them into different themes. Lastly, I pulled out the

underlying assumptions and meanings present in the ads, and developed subthemes

within the larger categories.

Weaving my personal experience throughout the body of this study was achieved

by writing, rewriting, and reorganizing my narrative into its most authentic and accurate

form. In addition to careful rewriting and reflection on the experiences I have had, I

continually asked for corroborator’s opinions and reviews of my emotional engagement

with the reader—that is, as Spry (2001) defines good writing, avoiding mediocrity by

striving to “transform readers and transport them into a place where they are motivated to

look back upon their own…identity construction” (p. 713).

In summary, the current study utilized textual analysis to discern the messages in

food advertising found in women’s magazines. Allowing for a richer understanding of

this important media outlet, this study looks for the emergence of themes in the messages

sent to women about food and eating in food advertisements and women’s magazines in

general. Specifically, I used Stern’s (1996) textual analysis method for identifying and

organizing messages in print advertising, and analyzed the messages sent through

editorial copy in the same magazines. Interwoven into this analysis, I narrated my

experiences with body image and women’s magazines, using my own voice to

authenticate the experiences of others, as well as follow the feminist approach to inquiry.

The ultimate goal of this study is to provide new and deeper understanding of the

relatively unexplored role of food advertising in women’s magazines and contribute to

the discourse on women’s body image issues—a topic of very real importance to the

many women who struggle with their perceived reflections each day.

The black hole of ordered distraction: counting calories like precious coins daily

scrounging for fewer, fewer. Learn to resist, punish. Purge desire for resolve, sensuality

for success. Narrow measurement—no room on the waistline for error. Imperfection be

damned like a sin of the skin: pulled, corrected, taut & tan.

Ribs that can be counted, vertebrae that fingers can scale like the sad foothills of

a soul consumed with petty lists instead of poetry. Worry over wonderment at the world,

reduced to numbers, nibbles, crumbs. And drifting deeper down the black hole.

- Researcher’s personal journal, 5/2011

INSIDE THE WOMEN’S MAGAZINE

Every magazine tells her she’s not good enough,

The pictures that she sees make her cry.

Perfect only in her imperfections… (McLaughlin, 2007).

Inside a magazine, time stands still. The passing minutes thud along like a clock

in a distant room, but while reading, the surrounding world fades into a muffled murmur,

and I feel I am being held in a safe, warm, sunbeam where the entire world is

explainable, even down to the most horrific events. If this brave woman can tell me and

all Glamour readers about her sexual assault, then no challenges are insurmountable. If

the busy mother of six had time to remodel her historic farmhouse kitchen, then surely I

can do more to make my living room hip. While suspended inside a magazine, life moves

at a more reasonable pace. In the quiet room where I am sitting, I can hear my heart

beating, feel my chest breathing, and sense the information trickling into my greedy

brain. Who could resist knowing Sarah Michelle Geller's secrets to looking her best?

Why wouldn't I make time to read about Jillian Michael's plan for me to lose eight

pounds this month? The distinct feeling of inclusion is intoxicating and addictive. I only

want to keep reading.

In 2011, Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle magazines landed among the 60

most circulated women’s magazines (MPA, 2011d) and produced a total of 39 issues:

Glamour and SELF each circulated 12 issues while Family Circle produced its standard

15 issues (delivering extra installments in April, October, and November). Reviewing

each publication’s past media kits reveals no irregularities in production for these

magazines in 2011; however, Family Circle announced in September it would be cutting

back to only 12 issues per year to reduce costs (Moses, 2011). Between them, the three

magazines printed a total of 7,161 pages, reached millions of readers, and ran 554 full,

half, and quarter-page food-and-beverage advertisements. Family Circle ran a total of

409 food ads in the last year, accounting for the majority analyzed here, while coming in

second behind Glamour for total number of pages, suggesting a high food ad ratio to

other content in Family Circle. Indeed, paging through a given issue of Family Circle is a

start-and-stop experience when looking at an average of 28 food ads for every 160 pages

of magazine. Conversely, Glamour printed the least number of food ads—59 total—

while publishing nearly 500 more pages during the year than Family Circle. SELF

consistently printed the slimmest magazines of all three publications in 2011, some 600

pages less than even Family Circle, while including 86 food and beverage ads throughout

the year.

The ratios of food advertising to other content in each of these magazines

corresponds with their mission statements and general categorizations by the Standard

Rate and Data Service (SRDS), all of which are reviewed below. That the majority of ads

came from Family Circle can be explained by the magazine’s target audience: women in

their early fifties who are focused on their role as matriarchs in their homes and their

communities (Meredith, 2011), and are thus more likely to be planning meals, preparing,

and serving food than the younger readers of Glamour. Likewise, SELF includes food

and diet-related feature sections in every issue as a part of their fitness and health foci

(CondeNast, 2011b), and their advertisements follow suit, tending to focus on workout

apparel and footwear. The food and beverage ads that do appear in SELF are more likely

to refer to physical activity or dieting than ads in the other periodicals.

Before delving further into an analysis of the food advertising appearing in

Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle, establishing a broader context for these magazines is

useful, especially when trying to evaluate how food and eating are handled as a part of

the overall discourse of these publications. To better understand the identity of each of

the magazines, the following sections explore each magazine in turn, including their self-

defined purposes, readership demographics, and circulation rates. While magazines use

many metrics to calculate readership such as paid subscriptions, sales, and online use, I

highlight each magazine’s 2011 rate base as the key indicator of circulation size. A

magazine’s rate base refers to the circulation amount they guarantee to advertisers (Fine,

2006), making it of prime interest to any study concerned with advertising specifically.

Finally, my observations, analyses, and interpretations of each of these magazines are

explored below.

Glamour: Feminism, Fashion, Fairytales, and Food

According to the magazine’s media kit, Glamour “helps every woman become the

‘Do’ she was born to be. Smart, chic and all-American, Glamour gives readers exactly

what they need to transform every part of their lives: from their closets to their love lives

and beyond” (CondeNast, 2012a). While parent company, CondeNast, cites Glamour’s

print audience as 12 million strong at the time of this writing (2012a), Glamour’s rate

base was listed at 2.3 million in 2011, with women, mostly between 18 and 49 years of

age, making up 94 percent of their audience (CondeNast, 2011a). The publisher’s

positioning statement describes Glamour as “often optimistic, always inclusive, beyond

empowering and can always separate the Do's from the Don'ts. If Glamour had a

campaign slogan, it would be Yes, She Can” (SRDS, 2011b).

The ‘girl-power’ feminism evident in these self-definitions is both indicative of

Glamour’s decent intentions and apparent ignorance of how short the magazine falls in

terms of true female empowerment. By “helping” women to become “a ‘Do’”—

Glamour’s code for fashionable, professional, and successful—the magazine asserts that

women require help to achieve acceptable traits they do not otherwise posses. This idea

reverberates throughout Glamour’s monthly installments of the “How to Do Everything

Better Guide” and the constant categorizing of fashion, food, and social behaviors as

either “Dos” or “Don’ts;” it is repeated through advertising and editorial copy alike. The

“Dos & Don’ts” culture within Glamour is pejorative, conforming, and oversimplified,

teaching women it is acceptable to view the world through this non-nuanced lens. Rather

than celebrating women, this discourse incites self-criticism and judgment of other

women, encouraging women to not like themselves and constantly seek change. From

tweeting (September, 2011) to bikinis (June, 2011), Glamour has “Dos & Don’ts” for

every imaginable social and sartorial choice.

The language of self-change fills Glamour’s pages. From articles like “5 New

Things to Do With Your Eyes!” (September, 2011, p. 215) to ads like Nike’s “Make your

body. Make your life” (September, 2011, p. 138), a central theme emerges: women do

not find themselves in an acceptable state naturally. Our eyes need “new things” done to

them and our bodies need to be ‘made.’ We need “101 Ways to Look Hotter Now” (May,

2011, cover) and the extensive article on how to protect our health against new

environmental threats. Vacillating between genuine, research-based information and

fluffier content, Glamour juggles many ‘hats’ as it strives to report, inform, and reform

the imperfect woman (the reader). While helping women battle the elements or ask the

right questions at their next doctor’s appointment, Glamour’s goals feel noble, born out

of sisterly concern; while garrulously sharing “10 things to do with a bobby pin”

(October, 2011, p. 130) to a celebrity’s recent “Don’t Moment” (February, 2011, p. 40),

Glamour seems far more committed to the shallow, petty, and appearance-based ‘tips’

that take up the majority of the magazine’s real estate.

Glamour has mastered appearing to champion women, while backhanding them

on the same page, let alone within a single issue. Monthly features like, “Hey, It’s OK…”

recount all the shortcomings of simply being human, like skipping a workout after a hard

Monday or not having “the foggiest idea of how to talk to a three-year-old” (August,

2011, p.42). Momentarily endorsing what sounds like “Don’t” behaviors, the magazine’s

discourse flip-flops between acceptance and criticism. While celebrating the “Women of

the Year,” (December, 2011, cover), Glamour also prints ads with language such as “Be

the girl you were too lazy to be yesterday” (Glamour, September 2011, p. 89). Thus the

magazine’s editorial copy and advertising choices frequently oppose one another, co-

constructing the general voice of the magazine in a contradictory manner. Glamour

continuously runs the Lancome ad featuring actress Julia Roberts (for example,

September, 2011, p. 34), an ad that has been banned from circulation in the United

Kingdom after it was deemed too egregiously retouched to be used as a representation of

reality (Sweney, 2011), and prints articles renouncing Photoshop® overuse in the

magazine industry (Dreisbach, 2012). More than happy to tip its hat to the issues of an

outrageously airbrushed media landscape, Glamour still participates whole-heartedly in

the process, clearly retouching each picture they print to stunning flawlessness, and thus

contradicting itself in preaching and practice. Likewise, while claiming to be against

women’s “unproductive body griping” (Dreisbach, 2011b, p.162), Glamour publishes

entire articles that end up showcasing exactly that: from cellulite to belly bloat, Glamour

highlights these flaws and expands upon their readers’ biggest body complaints. Instead

of just offering expert advice on overcoming self-scrutiny, Glamour prints messages that

focus on these imperfections, and encourage self-criticism among women, all while

claiming that the article will “get [you] the body you were born to have” (Dreisbach,

2011b, p.162). The obvious question aside (wasn’t I born with the body I was born to

have?), if Glamour harbors any real goals of supporting their women readers, can ads and

articles in such clear contradiction to one another be chalked up to the price of doing

business? In articles that point out the “the organizational disasters of your life, including

your purse!” (May, 2011, p. 190), and tell readers to “Get Your Sh*t Together,” Glamour

reminds women that her fridge and her purse are two of the biggest “organizational Black

Holes” (November, 2011, p. 182) in her life. It seems unlikely, given a woman’s

hopelessly disorganized natural state, that she could achieve any accomplishment worthy

of being a ‘Woman of the Year.’ Contradictory tones and topics sit side by side in any

given issue of Glamour, whiplashing readers between companionable sharing and

patronizing criticism that women simultaneously read.

Month to month, year to year, the Glamour gospel does not change, even as it

speaks out against the damaging media representations of women. After awhile, reading

these headlines does not incite feelings of friendly banter, like a cheerful older sister’s

chiding; rather, Glamour becomes a demeaning, scolding agent of change. Yet rather

than refusing to listen to the often harsh critique, one in ten American women reach for

Glamour on a regular basis (CondeNast, 2011a); the fairytale escapes the magazine

provides may help to explain this counterintuitive loyalty.

Opening an issue of Glamour is like opening the door to a glistening

wonderland— a candy-coated spectacle of fashion and fragrance, makeup and men,

baring enough skin to be rated R. Where food advertising, exercise moves, and recipes

absorb the space in SELF and Family Circle, ads for shoes, eye shadow, and perfume

dance in spectacular color and unrealistic settings. Glamour’s monthly fashion shoots

near the end of the magazine provide dazzling, escapist imagery that takes the reader on

road trips and safaris in unaffordable designer pieces. Particularly in December, Glamour

accelerates into holiday overdrive. The first ten pages are exhilarating to the point of

sensory shutdown: giant candy canes in gorgeous hues; women adorned in sequined

miniskirts, absurdly shaped heels, walking through snow-kissed scenes with perfect curls

and meticulous makeup. It takes extra effort to shake off the daydream and question its

validity: in real life, no one would wear these outfits on the street (much less in a

snowstorm), and nowhere do these fantastical settings exist—they are just sets in a

studio.

But the fairytale persists: on the next page, riding through a sundrenched field of

tall grass on white horses, two lovers are passionately embracing. Ralph Lauren Romance

provides this “love story” (Glamour, December 2011, p. 29) in a fragrance, bottling the

imagination and lust for this summer-in-December interlude. Will wonders never cease?

On the next page Tiffany & Co. brings us back to more seasonable weather conditions

(though no more realistic) as a woman in seven-inch heels climbs a snowy staircase next

to another male Adonis concealing a little blue Tiffany’s box behind his back. The magic

of these fairytales is irresistible, and imagining oneself inside of them is inevitable. Once

again, it hardly seems Glamour is on the side of women when selling them a life that is

far from real and yet seems to be just out of reach, keeping them hungry—but for what,

women have no idea.

In this advertising pressure-cooker of an issue—one of the largest Glamour

printed all year, only three food advertisements appear. Despite their comparatively small

amount of food and beverage promotions, Glamour has no trouble keeping food, weight,

and exercise at the forefront. Though much sparser than in Family Circle and SELF, the

food advertising in Glamour has certain attributes that make it stand out in an already

commercial-saturated text. The ads are almost always full-page: only a handful of half of

quarter-page food advertisements appeared in any 2011 issue of Glamour. Also, the ads

employ bright colors and elements of fantasy that both stand out and align with

Glamour’s artistic fashion spreads. In a nearly 200-page issue with only one food

advertisement, the November issue has no shortage of commentary on food and eating.

From the “10 Healthy Foods (that come in a wrapper)” article (Glamour, November

2011, p. 113) to the in-depth story on a couple who lost 300 pounds between them, to the

three pages of recipes at the back of the magazine, food still features heavily in Glamour

as an important fixture in women’s issues.

I scan the list of packaged healthy foods and cannot help but smile smugly: all

except the VitaMuffins and cookies are in my pantry. An unnatural and overly-proud

response. Eating healthy should be the thanks I give to my body for all it does for me.

Instead I find myself patting my own back on the magazine’s behalf. Good girl, you

listened to Glamour. What’s wrong with me? I sigh, but I know the answer: inside this

world, content is king. I am merely serving my magazine master.

Finding MySELF

With a rate base of 1.4 million in 2011 (CondeNast, 2011b), SELF magazine has

the smallest circulation of these three magazines, though it is estimated to reach an

audience of 6.5 million at the time of this writing and enjoys an online readership boom

(CondeNast, 2012b). Like Glamour, 94 percent of SELF readers are female with a

median age of 38 (CondeNast, 2011b). According to their media kit, “SELF informs and

inspires women about fitness and beauty, diet and health, style and happiness — all to

help them improve their well-being, achieve their goals and become their vision of their

best self” (CondeNast, 2012b). The publisher’s positioning statement echoes this idea

that SELF leaves readers feeling, “empowered. Inspired. I am in charge. I choreograph

my life” (SRDS, 2011a). SELF’s focus on diet and exercise throughout its average 150-

page issue emphasizes the idea of being “in charge,” particularly of one’s body.

Like Glamour, SELF is clearly female-focused, and professes its dedication to

women’s power. Where Glamour features the “it” actress, singer, or model of the

moment on their covers (from Kate Winslet in April to Rhianna in September), SELF

regularly features people known for the physical accomplishments like trainer Jillian

Michaels (January, 2011) and weight loss success story Jennifer Hudson (September,

2011). Popular and successful women, from Zooey Deschanel (July, 2011) to Kim

Kardashian (April, 2011), occasionally take the SELF spotlight (Kardashian also

appeared on Glamour’s February cover), though SELF makes a show of their figures

rather than their careers by positioning all of their cover women suggestively: if the the

women are often scantily clad or lounging suggestively. Headlines and cover photos from

Glamour suggest the fantasy-land of sartorial and sensual bliss inside, while SELF primes

readers for a girly version of boot camp; where Glamour’s cover prepares readers for the

latest makeup and fashion trends, the SELF cover gets readers ready for new workout

routines and meal plans.

While SELF and Glamour share advertising similarities—the infamous Julia

Roberts Lancome ad serving as SELF’s back cover for three months of the year

(February, September, November, 2011)—SELF’s sparser makeup and clothing ads are

less about fashion and more about the ‘fit, slim, and young’ trifecta. Ads for clinical

strength anti-aging creams and procedures like Botox (April, 2011) replace Glamour’s

nail polish spots; yoga pants and running shoes are regular promotions, while the couture

brands like Prada and Ralph Lauren do not appear. If the already slim and toned women

on the covers of SELF were not enough to cue reader’s to SELF’s primary focus, a year’s

worth of headlines suggest its intense, weight-watching focus: “Burn 1,000 calories, It’s

Fun, We Promise!” (December, 2011), “Burn 750 calories” (October, 2011), “Burn 300

calories” (January, 2011), “Burn 100 calories in 10 minutes!” (July, 2011). Each and

every cover features most, if not all, of the following words: slim, thin, tone, boost, lose,

skinny, drop, burn, fat, weight loss—supporting past research that women’s magazine

covers consistently “focus on improving one’s life by changing one’s appearance”

(Malkin, Wornian, & Chrisle, 1999, p. 647). All at once, the culmination of these words

screaming in giant, bold, black text that our bodies need serious work is overwhelming

and accusatory; in small doses, perhaps the headlines offer motivation, somehow assuring

that readers can “Make today happier” (March, 2011) or “Feel calmer every single day”

(February, 2011). It is this message that first reaches and allures readers; as Carmen

Caldas-Coulthard (1996) explains, “The headline is crucial…[headlines] are the most

important powerful persuasive and auto-promotional tool used to attract magazine

readers” (p. 257) and they reappear multiple times throughout each issue. Headlines

define much of the magazine’s content, and while Glamour and Family Circle may

feature headlines like “How to Lose 10 lbs fast” (Family Circle, March, 2011) from time

to time, they are more diversified in their cover content, priming readers for money-

saving advice or health news. SELF leaves no room for doubt, from cover to cover, that it

fixates on fitness, diet, and the physical results. Like a fitness-fanatic friend, SELF bursts

with waist-slimming tips, exercise moves, and muscle-building meals, all targeted at the

most personal of possessions: the body. To cram in all of this month’s bouncy and bright

content dedicated to the enormous project of the “self,” the magazine employs an

unusually small typeface, giving the text a fine print feeling, requiring careful study and

attention to detail. Articles like “Your Body Makeover Starts Here!” (Murphy, 2011, p.

150-153) and “Do You Need a Five-Year Plan?” (Ruddy, 2011, p. 154-157) run back-to-

back in the September issue, showcasing SELF’s attention to the mental, emotional, but

above all, physical strength of their readers. From May’s skin protection advice to

October’s cancer need-to-knows, SELF, like Glamour, seems to provide women with

information genuinely intent on helping readers stay healthy. But more often than not,

this advice is couched in examples of wrong-doing that needs correction, even when it

comes to emotional health. Offering expert happiness-boosting guidance, SELF provides

case studies of real-life women categorized as “the social media addict” (October, SELF,

p.156) and the overextended “mega multitasker” (p. 158), reinforcing wrong-doing as the

female default even while trying to ‘help.’ Puffy stories from readers like “Too fat for the

gym” (Todd, 2011, p. 34) and “I cheated on my husband with food” (Whitely, 2011, p.

42) seem included for how outlandishly they warn against over-eating and under-

exercising as the ultimate in misery. SELF’s ruthless diktat, “Fitter, slimmer, younger”

(August, 2011, p.108), repeats throughout the magazine’s monthly installments on

exercise, food, and perhaps most disturbingly, its highly sexualized photographs and

advertisements.

Perhaps to avoid overwhelming the average American woman who wears a size

14 (Peeke, 2010), SELF breaks down the project of achieving the tighter and more toned

body into manageable pieces. Articles concentrate on “thinner inner thighs” (October,

2011, cover) or sleek six-pack abs (February, 2011) in extended feature sections, talking

toning tips with celebrities, and working weight-loss into every moment of their reader’s

day. Exercise is a constant activity in SELF: one article describes how to work your abs

in the car, in bed, and even at work, giving “belly pooch the pink slip” (February, 2011,

p.114). Even in an article about hair and skin care, SELF squeezes in a workout reference

by printing photos of fierce models in warm-ups, clutching dumbbells. Shoe ads from

Puma and Reebok showcase the female model’s thighs: front or back, muscles bulging,

definition bursting through her tiny shorts. The woman in the Reebok ad wearing her

toning shoes turns to stare at her rear end reflected in the aquarium glass (March, 2011).

Sadly, it seems she cannot focus on her fun outing, but must check on the progress of her

workout, physically attached to her feet at all times.

Inside every issue of SELF, readers can add to their collection of pullout

cardstock cards with advanced strength, cardio, and yoga moves like the contortionist

“back beautifier” or punishing “belly-banisher” (April, 2011, p. 126) that appear only

possible for the already fat-free woman pictured. While calling readers to the cardio

kingdom, SELF suggests that exercise is effortless, “sexy, and empower[ing]” (March,

2011, p.113), and the magazine spares no space for images that do not overtly connect

fitness with sexual attraction.

Paging through an issue of SELF is enough to make the modest blush. This is the

land of the nearly-naked woman, clad merely in spandex shorts and a sports bra, a bikini,

or in a few cases, nothing at all. Accompanying each article, from “Sculpt like a start” to

“Eat up to slim down,” the woman pictured is ripped, blemish-free, and invariably

wearing as little clothing as possible. In one photo, a woman is washing windows in only

her panties and tank top (July, 2011); in another, she is provocatively posed in just her

underwear and sweater—while checking her email (January, 2011)! Ads for Zappos!.com

picture women wearing only shoes, their backsides and breast barely shielded by text

boxes (September, 2011). In one of SELF’s sisterly-sounding zen installments, usually

the last page of the issue, a completely naked woman is standing on a rock, butt toward

the camera, arms outstretched to the mystical seascape spread before her. The real setting

but completely unrealistic story that anyone would find themselves standing naked in this

spot makes the scene more absurd than the photographic fantasies in Glamour, and more

exploitive. Adding insult to absurdity, the blurb on the page encourages readers to “Live

as if your body were perfect” (August, 2011, p.143), a difficult demand after 140+ pages

of being told—and shown—that our bodies are anything but, while SELF shamelessly

endorses movie star Shenae Grimes as having “perfect legs” (October, 2011, p. 68). In

fact, SELF makes it abundantly clear that only one body type is truly feminine and

acceptable.

Throughout every issue, every single woman photographed in SELF magazine has

the exact same body type: boy shaped. All of the women pictured in SELF look identical

to one another from the neck down: narrow hips, small bust, long legs, straight waist, and

visible abdominal muscles. Plus size or petite women are nowhere to be found. Where

Glamour photographs and celebrates the curvy woman on a regular basis, especially

when offering wardrobe advice, SELF exclusively endorses the athletic and uncannily

muscled female form. This single body type, touted as the pinnacle of female beauty and

empowerment, serves to exclude those whose reflection does not match, because no

amount of diet and exercise will change a person’s height and bone structure.

Inside SELF, fitness tends to be the primary focus, followed closely by food.

Articles and food ads abound in this magazine: with 86 food ads appearing throughout

2011, SELF comes in ahead of Glamour’s 56 food ads, despite a consistently shorter page

count per issue. Though food advertising in SELF, like Glamour, is much scarcer than in

Family Circle, the ads that do appear align closely with the diet, fitness, and exercise-

focus of the magazine. Just as Glamour’s food advertisements matched the whimsy of the

magazine’s other content, SELF’s food advertising, from protein bars to sports drinks,

also match the magazine’s lean-and-mean mission. SELF’s ubiquitous food-related

content like diet news and meal plans compliments the magazine’s diet-consciousness but

the sheer amount eating advice starts to contradict the flab-free women pictured on nearly

every page. As Sharlene Hesse-Biber explains, “the conflicting ‘eat/be thin’ message is

not new…[and] the diet industry has been quick to capitalize on a solution” (2007, p.165)

in the form of diet food products, like the sugar-free JELL-O and WeightWatcher’s string

cheese SELF regularly advertises. Food ads in SELF are more likely to only a half or

quarter-page, unlike Glamour’s full page ads. Also, when SELF includes its monthly

recipe set, every nutritional detail is spelled out whereas Glamour’s featured recipes did

not usually come with nutritional information. Through images and language, food ads in

SELF regularly make a direct connection between food and exercise, and while working

out is an unequivocally positive topic in the magazine, food and eating are consistently

associated with regret and “guilt” (December, 2011, p. 8). Articles like “Eat up to slim

down” (April, 2011, p.78) or “Turn off your body’s hunger signals” (October, 2011, p.8)

in SELF suggest that food is another tool for readers to use in the health and weight-loss

arena. Even more so than Glamour, food is a major pillar of SELF’s content and the food

ads that appear in the magazine align closely with its diet-and-fitness focus.

Just as I devoured Glamour’s food tips, I find myself scribbling out a grocery list

after reading SELF’s March meal plan, hoping to drop those eight pounds the magazine

all but guarantees I’ll lose. Sitting with my 12 dog-eared copies of SELF fanned out

before me, a stack of those exercise cards and ripped out meal plans, one clear thought

scuttles across my harried brain: there are calories to burn, pounds to shed, and yoga

tank tops to sweat through. I lose the urge to pick up an issue and dive inside the way I

did initially—the way I still do with Glamour. Instead, I recoil, hug my knees, and stare

out my living room window. Why this adverse reaction? Is it the slim women smiling back

at me, gleaming teeth, toned muscles galore? If they aren’t sitting in a position that

emphasizes their legs, they are in a bikini, like Gwyneth Paltrow on May’s cover, or

coyly (albeit awkwardly if I think about) lifting up their sweater to reveal their fabulous

flat stomach like Ms. November. Is it the glaring white cover that makes the neon,

italicized title look demanding? “Change yourSELF is what it seems to mean. I start to

believe I could somehow lose my curvy hips for the narrow, fat-free frames I see.

My fiery desire to rebel against the incessant demands—work out this much, eat

only this, drink only that—quickly fizzle out. Before long, I am nodding my head along

shamefully, ripping out all the exercise cards, confessing silently to the magazine that

yes, I really should only eat 1,400 calories a day, and I really should have pushed myself

much harder on my run, and I really DO need to make up the workout I missed earlier in

the week…After awhile, these thoughts become a punishing chorus that pushes me to

tears. SELF is a world of women who have arrived at the pinnacle of female strength and

beauty, disciplined and “empowered” by their workouts. If this is feminism’s new form—

a reclaimed and self-defined ideal—I am not in the club. Looking at them, and then at my

much rounder stomach, leaves me feeling anything but empowered.

Family Circle: Food, Glorious Food!

After 79 years of publication, Family Circle is a magazine legend with a rate base

of 3.8 million (Meredith, 2011a), and an estimated monthly audience of over 18 million

readers (Statista, 2011); as an added advantage, this massive audience is extremely loyal

to Family Circle with nearly half of its readers rating the magazine as their favorite and

reporting consistent readership month to month (SRDS, 2011c). Family Circle’s media

kit declares that there is “an intimate bond, an emotional connection between the

magazine and its readers” as “the most trusted source of information for taking care of”

their families (Meredith, 2011a). Similarly, Family Circle’s mission statement declares

that the magazine “celebrates today’s family and champions the women at its

center…[and] helps readers look and feel their best by delivering the latest health, diet

and fitness news, and beauty and fashion tips” (SRDS, 2011d). Though the magazine’s

readers have a median age of 52 (Meredith, 2011a), significantly older than the average

readers of Glamour or SELF, several content similarities exist. The same workout clothes

are advertised in all three magazines, along with eye makeup targeting those dark circles

plaguing women of all ages. Scanning the table of contents reveals that the unchanging

feature sections for Family Circle, “Style, Health, Food, and Home” (for example, April

17, 2011, p. 1-2), closely resemble the formulaic installments in Glamour (“Glamour

Beauty, Glamour Fashion, Your Health & Body”) and SELF (“Easy Beauty, Your Style,

Fit Body, Love Your [August]” (Glamour, July, 2011, p.23; SELF, August, 2011, p.8).

Family Circle does not make readers dig for the table of contents, consistently placing it

one page turn past the cover, lending itself to easy reference; Glamour makes readers

wade 15 to 20 pages deep on average, lulling them through the lusty Ralph Lauren ads,

while SELF readers must navigate at least four pages of makeup, car, and Nike® ads

featuring Ms. Flat-Abs.

Family Circle addresses women’s concerns on exercise, fashion, food, sex, and

money as readily as the other magazines, though it does not prioritize or approach these

topics in the same way. In fact, Family Circle expands the docket to include kids,

marriage, homemaking, family vacations, and showcasing women’s domestic and

professional pursuits and accomplishments as well. Whereas Glamour’s version of

feminism harkened from the “you go girl!” sentiment, and SELF’s from a tireless

commitment to physical prowess, Family Circle suggests female empowerment derives

from care giving and multitasking while managing multiple roles. Rather than simply

rejecting the traditional, Mom-as-homemaker family structure, Family Circle sends it into

hyper drive.

Family Circle’s covers suggest this at first glance: never featuring a woman, food

is the model on all but five of the 15 covers published in 2011. Tacos (April 1) and pie

(July) replace the famous and the buff women on the covers of Glamour and SELF.

When food is not the star, a tasteful bouquet (May) or holiday decorations (December)

take its place. Compared to holding the sensually smooth Glamour, which feels like a

substantive book, serious in its heavy weight like a text of great importance, Family

Circle feels like a crinkly pamphlet despite the same average number of pages per issue.

The sheen, heft, and production glitz are exchanged for the more practical matte finish

and homely pictures. In some ways, Family Circle looks and feels more approachable,

but not as eye-catching or sexy as the sleek muscles of bikini-clad Gwyneth Paltrow

(SELF, May, 2011). While the family and home take center stage, evidenced by Family

Circle’s editorial and advertising differences, glamorizing the self is far from abandoned.

The thin, young, and fit trinity is worshiped inside this women’s magazine, too,

elongating the intricate to-do list of being a woman.

Categorized under the headline “Health,” this monthly portion of Family Circle

incorporates holistic wellness and reports the latest fitness and food news aimed at the

whole family. Exercise is not always mentioned on the cover page of this installment,

making Family Circle’s tone far less narcissistic than Glamour or SELF. January’s health

section headline, “Use it or lose it” (p. 95) is not chastising about holiday weight gain,

but encouraging readers to use all of their vacation days to relax or spend time with

family. An article called “Hello Gorgeous” (White, 2011, p. 30) opens a six-page spread

on assembling beautiful bouquets, not a parade of airbrushed beauty queens in priceless

makeup and garments. Walking is often emphasized as an energizing and stress-busting

activity, rather than a gut-diminishing regimen, as “exercise should relieve anxiety, not

worsen it” (Mattheis, July 2011, p.97) according to Family Circle. Though the “Health”

section is somewhat of a relief after the domineering tone of SELF and regularly features

pictures of real women (read: size 12+, curvy, short), tan, toned, sports-bra clad athletic

goddesses are not absent from the photos in this section. She’s running the stairs in June

to “lose more weight in less time” (Mattheis, 2011, June, p. 148) and revealing the “slim

down secrets” promised on the August cover. These token elements anchor the magazine

to the beauty myth, even while its genuinely friendly and helpful tone distance it from the

arrogance and self-involvement seen in Glamour and SELF. At times, Family Circle feels

cozy, mature—a haven where women have relinquished the obsession with their faces

and frames. At others, the commitment to readers’ wellness feels undermined by the edict

to be thin and young.

The articles and advertising in Family Circle vary to match its more diversified

scope, covering topics and products not seen in Glamour and SELF. Ads for home

laundry detergent, dog food, and vacation destinations make frequent appearances;

articles on raising teenagers, keeping the family dog healthy, and remodeling the house

are staples. Even some issues addressed in all three magazines, like social media usage,

take on a more substantive feel under Family Circle’s pen, posing answers to more

complicated scenarios than Glamour’s simplistic “Dos and Don’ts” binary. However,

familiar themes arise in these Family Circle features: “Clutter Control” (Stebbins, 2011,

p. 21) tackles the whole disordered house, while right after Thanksgiving, an extra issue

helps us fight “Against the Gain” (Bingham, 2011, November 29, p. 73) to lose ten

pounds during the holidays. Even the beloved family dog or cat cannot escape the

pressure to be fit in June’s “Slim down your pet” (Shatzman, 2011, p. 104). The idea that

women constantly encounter chaotic disarray in their homes and fat encroaching on every

family member continues to be perpetuated in Family Circle, even amidst unique,

helpful, and timely advice like “How to buy a tablet” computer (Tynan-Wood, 2011,

September, p.109) or the most useful new apps for the Smartphone (2011, March). An

advertisement for Lee jeans features a slender woman, measuring tape around her waist,

showcasing the instantly “slimming” (2011, May, p. 56) fit that defies the old “mom

jeans” (November 29, 2011, p. 51) style. Products target women in their primary role

according to Family Circle, motherhood, while simultaneously distancing women from

the stereotype that mothers are stylishly less aware. Walmart’s ads follow a mom around

the store as she buys workout clothes, makeup, and shampoo to get “crazy-shiny hair like

women in shampoo commercials” (2011, March, p.127). Family Circle’s entrenched

consumerism runs even deeper than Glamour’s, and though often focused on similar

pursuits, must expand to include not only beautifying the reader herself, but her home,

children, and life. Thus ads for new carpeting, photos of stunning dining rooms, and

fashion shoots for this fall’s designer teen looks fill up Family Circle and their readers’

to-do lists. Even in an ad for window blinds, the model states, “I go a million miles an

hour” (2011, February, p. 109), reinforcing busyness as the new symbol of successful

womanhood. Multitasking is to Family Circle what fitness is to SELF: the holy grail—the

ultimate embodiment of twenty-first century femininity, and a badge of honor in the

battle of being female. Despite the exhausting nature of this existence, Family Circle

half-heartedly attempts to dissuade readers from doing too much, burying phrases like

“nix multitasking” (Reyes, 2011, p. 183) into an article which, just as SELF’s occasional

‘love your body’ message, is too little, too late.

What is most striking about Family Circle is the sheer everything-ness women are

represented as being. Phone pinned between shoulder and ear, one hand typing, the other

reaching for her coffee mug, each woman portrayed throughout one issue of Family

Circle is multitasking while juggling her multiple roles. She is making dinner, answering

email, taking the dog to the vet, wrapping presents, and sipping a homemade latte on the

couch while her children gallivant around her. Nails manicured and face painted, she is

keeping track of her teen daughter’s driving habits. She knows how to be the perfect

listener, an energetic lover, and a problem-solving-super-mom. She has a stash of recipes

and chocolates at the ready for an impromptu get-together. She clips coupons, erases her

fine lines, and takes an antidepressant. The patio is embellished with new furniture and

glassware each spring and her homemade decorations for Halloween transform the living

room into....well, into something straight out of a magazine. She “bake[s] to perfection”

(2011, November 1, p. 166), polishes the furniture, and straightens her hair. In one ad,

she talks with her pharmacist, walks on the beach with her husband, and checks her

Smartphone all at the same time (Aetna, 2011, November 1). The bombardment of to-dos

and the escalating pressure to purchase soon overwhelms to the point of numbness,

making quotes like “36% of moms don’t have enough time to focus on themselves”

(Cohen, 2011, March, p.128) seem self-evident. Womanhood becomes synonymous with

productivity in Family Circle, the person and the action blurring until the female is a

walking conglomerate of products and services rendered for others.

Despite this flood of information and activities, the chief medium for expressing

femininity and the primary tool in caring for others is clear: food. About 17 percent of

Family Circle is comprised of food advertising, averaging about 28 food ads per issue,

compared to SELF’s seven and Glamour’s five. Though Family Circle prints more pages

per month than SELF, and fewer than Glamour, the magazine has the largest ratio of food

advertising to all other content of the three publications. Unlike Glamour and SELF,

Family Circle runs a considerable number of quarter-page food ads each month, in

addition to half and full page ads. Monthly food tips and news blurbs are also squeezed

into the margins giving readers “3 new ideas for cucumbers” (2011, June, p. 168) or

information on the healthiest types of nuts (Bingham, 2011, October 1). In stark contrast

to both SELF and Glamour, Also differing from the two other magazines in this study,

Family Circle food ads are more likely to have a celebratory tone, connecting food with

holidays and family milestones like birthdays. Whereas SELF tends to feature food in a

dieting context and Glamour touts a product’s coolness and convenience, Family Circle‘s

monthly “Food” section starts with a photo of a fresh, whole food, from bananas in

January to basil in June, and continues with page after page of recipes, all accompanied

with nutritional information, similar to SELF’s presentation. Articles about food

throughout Family Circle do not tend to focus on weight loss or exercising: “Think

Positive!” (Tynan-Wood, 2011, January, p. 18) is the title of a January article about

eating healthier rather than dieting, and “Eat bright” (Bingham, 2011, July, p. 100)

playfully shows readers how to incorporate more produce variety into their lives. Food is

less likely to be associated with transgression and guilt, and more often contextualized as

a necessity and opportunity for enjoyment in Family Circle.

Intermingled in this section are the majority of the issue’s food advertisements.

Though some food ads appearing in Glamour and SELF also turn up in Family Circle

throughout 2011, the sheer amount of food ads in Family Circle, as well as the variety of

ads, makes Family Circle’s food advertising much different from the other two

publications. Ads for children’s cereals and lunch products appear, aimed at the female

reader in her role as a mother; ads for steaks and salad dressing address women as meal

planners and grocery shoppers—all products unseen in the magazines targeting younger

demographics. While Glamour and SELF have more in common when it comes to food

related content and ads, Family Circle stands apart in sheer amount of material and the

wider variety of its portrayal. However, just like Glamour and SELF, the food ads in

Family Circle align closely with the magazine’s chief topics: home, family, and child-

raising.

Where to begin? Unlike closing the pages of Glamour or SELF, where the task at

the forefront of my mind seemed clearer—go shopping, go work out—finishing a single

issue of Family Circle leaves my head spinning. Not just grocery lists or exercise moves

now, but craft projects, recipes, home to-dos as well. But just as with SELF, eventually

the cacophony gives way to one, resonating note—the central theme Family Circle

recapitulates in every issue: be everything, do it all. Through a modernized lens, hip to

current trends and Smartphone apps, Family Circle still paints a picture of traditional

values and gender roles. In the circle, home, family, and food are sacred; so are the

body, the face, and the career. If I let this magazine set my expectations for middle age,

then I will have heaped collectivist concerns upon the same slavish attention to beauty,

figure, and fashion I feel compelled to give now—and the need to be slim and young will

never go away. Being a woman in Family Circle’s image leaves me feeling drained for

my future self.

Unfortunately, I am noticing something about the young women in my life: they

are already tired. The high-achieving, octane-energy colleagues and friends are already

beat. I see it in them as I have come to pluck it out of my own reflection, catching the

dark circles, the dogged expression. I hear it from them in the office and as we

commiserate in my kitchen. “I used to work out every day,” we lament. “I used to get up

at 4am, go to the gym, be at work by 6:30. I used to be so productive.” Now we drag

ourselves home rather than to Bootcamp, order the sandwich rather than the salad.

We’ve had it.

Our magazines tell us “Hey, it’s okay to pack on the concealer and call it sleep”

(Glamour, February 2012), and how to “Erase 8 pounds” (SELF, September 2011,

cover), but we are the kind of tired sleep cannot fix and disenchanted with the hollow

accomplishment of losing weight. We need what I have come to call “soul sleep”—a

rejuvenation of spirit and true self-acceptance. Though they provide us with endless

pieces of absurd advice—… “Go ahead! Have a Steamy Summer Fling!” (Glamour,

August 2011, p. 110): our magazines do not teach us how to nurture ourselves. We

wonder where all our energy went (we expected it to last until we were at least 40) and

how women in their 50s balance a home, career, and kids. Does the body image battle

ever come to a ceasefire? Will we ever get to embrace ourselves? Family Circle doesn’t

make me think so.

Summary: Leaving the Illusion

Aimed at different demographics and focused on different topics, three of the

most popular women’s magazines in circulation represent a cross-section of the content

consumed by readers. Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle spend unequal amounts of time

on similar topics such as fashion, fitness, food, and family issues, though each of their

mission statements asserts that they publish their material with their female readers in

mind. Despite the many differences between these three publications, their ubiquitous

monthly attention to food speaks greatly about the role food and eating play in the diverse

versions of ideal femininity represented by these magazines. Whether focused on fashion,

fitness, or family, all three place food prominently in print and incorporate food

advertising. And in all three magazines, food advertisements tend to reflect the

publications focus: food ads in SELF regularly reference diet and exercise while food ads

in Glamour evoke a sense of youth and fun, using bright colors and imagery similar to

their fashion photo spreads. Family Circle’s focus on family and child-raising is reflected

in the types of food advertisements found in the magazine as well. In the next chapter, the

food advertising appearing in these magazines will be analyzed and interpreted for

greater understanding of the messages sent to women about food and eating through these

ads.

Foraging through over 5,000 pages of magazines induces sensory overload—the

blazing colors and headlines, the endless stream of articles and objects, clamoring for

attention. Glamour invites readers in to its glittery, materialistic web; SELF guarantees

the dream body, and Family Circle, the dream life. I walk away from my stack of

magazines—all read, all carefully studied—on knees-turned-to-jelly. The endless parade

of "Dos and Don'ts" (a Glamour feature), Drop 10 workout moves I feel pressure to do

right this instant (SELF) and the omnipresent tips for cooking, decorating, and

organizing (Family Circle) that produce a sense of urgency all culminate within their

own pages to produce an overwhelming feeling. I am inundated by everything I am not,

all the latest trends my home and closet do not resemble, and as always, the size-two-slim

body I do not possess.

The magazine caresses with the same page that slices into my ego, and when the

inevitable moment comes to put the magazine down and walk away, the harsh world

comes back into focus. Money is not spilling out my pockets to afford that gorgeous

Michael Kors sundress, and I will not be walking through my front door into a lakefront

mansion decorated by Crate & Barrel. I have not lost eight pounds, still splurged on that

muffin at Starbucks this morning, which SELF just told me was my entire day's allotment

of saturated fat and sugar, and, oh yes!—Family Circle did not in fact solve all of my

holiday planning dilemmas. The magic of the magazine lingers, and continues to color

my eyes for hours after reading. I happened to choose a private bathroom stall after

reading one issue of SELF, and lost 20 minutes of my morning examining my waistline in

the mirror, displeased with how my stomach was pushing on the top of my pants. No

women in the magazine looked like this. And these pants are a size eight! My stomach

growls, and I groan in response. The magazines told me, “You have a lot of work to

do” and this feeling stays with me for the rest of the day.

FOOD ADVERTISING

Our bodies are the places where our drive for perfection gets played out. Food is

all around us, as are meals and the pressure that goes with them, (Martin, 2007, p.

17).

Blueberries -30 – carb

Coffee – 40 – some fat

Yogurt – 80 – protein

Celery – 10 –

Avocado - 50 – fat

Protein shake – 160

I open my copy of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and this scrap of paper floats

out—just one dozens I find floating around my desk, purse, on napkins, the back of a

grocery lists. And ironically in the margins of the books I pour over trying to unravel

WHY women—why I—do this in the first place. I am a walking calorie calculator, a

database of the foods I eat stored permanently in the judgmental spreadsheet of my mind,

taking up precious space I angrily want to reclaim for higher uses. It was the easiest

habit I ever got into, and now it is as automatic as blinking. Another moment lost to the

criticizing voice spreading its venom through me…too fat, too weak, too full. Eat less, do

more, run harder. There’s always someone thinner.

I will learn how to shut you up. I will listen to the brave, unabashed women, the

spoken word artists coming through my iPod while I go for a morning run. “Praise the

miracle body,” they say. “Do not let this universe regret you.”

- Researcher’s personal journal, 2/7/2012

Food Advertising in 2011: A Brief Overview and Key Themes

The Nielsen corporation estimates that over three million U.S. dollars were spent

on advertising in magazines in 2011—up seven percent from the year before in the first

quarter alone (2011, June 10). Food advertising in magazines has been identified as

influentially superior to other mediums such as television and radio in terms of affecting

consumer purchases (MPA, 2009). Coffee, snacks, and soft drinks lead the list of

products consumers are most apt to buy after seeing ads in magazines versus on the

Internet or TV (MPA, 2009). The apparent success of magazine advertising for food

products does not come without a price, however. In 2011, companies like Kraft Foods,

Campbell Soup, and Nestle landed among the top 15 biggest spenders on magazine ads,

beating out major corporations like Disney, Ford, and Chrysler; Kellogg, Pepsico, and

Mars Incorporated all spent more than large retailers like Sprint, JC Penny, and Gap

(MPA, 2011b). Kantar Media reports that advertisers spent over 3.2 million dollars

promoting food and restaurants in just the first quarter of 2011 (2011, June 13). Given the

financial force behind food advertising and its ubiquity on the airwaves and in print, the

likes of Kraft and Kellogg developed restrictions on marketing food to children in 2011,

working to reduce the number of sugar and fat-laden products aimed at kids (Seidman,

2011) across the media landscape.

While the marketing of food to children should remain a primary concern, there

are other vulnerable populations encountering food advertising on a daily basis. As the

previous chapters demonstrated, women’s ongoing body battles may leave them

susceptible to any information or persuasion when it comes to food and eating—topics

already at the forefront of their minds. Combined with women’s complex, and perhaps

subordinate, relationships with their dizzying and often demanding magazines, food

advertising has the potential to significantly influence the discourse facing female

consumers. Certainly for the magazines in this study, food and eating are featured

prominently in the editorial content, and food advertising accounts for a considerable

amount of the print in between.

Of all the 554 food ads appearing in the three magazines throughout 2011, 347

are unique and 208 ads are duplicates, appearing multiple times throughout the year and

in some cases throughout all three publications. When I removed the food advertisements

from the magazines, I noted the magazine, month, and page number on the back of each

ad, allowing me to comment on which publication(s) a particular ad appears in.

Throughout the following analysis, I include information about how many times and in

which journals a particular advertisement appears, enriching the interpretation and

understanding of the ad’s potential audience. Working with the ads outside of their

magazines allowed me to identify patterns and themes across print food advertising

aimed at women—not just across food advertising in one publication. The rest of this

chapter will define, explain, and interpret examples for these themes, connecting them to

the broader context established in Chapter Four for Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle.

First, I will address a few general differences and similarities in the types of ads

appearing across these three women’s magazines in 2011.

While some food advertisement crossover occurred among all three periodicals,

each magazine primarily stuck to ads and products congruent with their primary focus:

Glamour’s food ads are for the trendy twenty-year old concerned about watching her

figure; fitness features predominantly in SELF’s food ads, and the ads unique to Family

Circle target women as mothers, grocery shoppers, and the orchestrator of weeknight and

holiday meals alike. For example, quarter-page ads for frozen alcoholic beverages appear

only in Glamour, touting the non-hassle, party-ready product. Campbell Soup ads appear

exclusively—and in abundance—in Family Circle, as do ads for basic ingredients like

vanilla extract or dry seasonings. Poweraide Zero sports drink ads are unique to SELF.

Ads for Skinny Cow diet products crossover between the pages of Glamour and SELF,

like the Philadelphia Cream Cheese line shown in both Glamour and Family Circle

(apparently too indulgent for any of SELF’s strict meal plans). Only two instances of ads

appear in all three magazines throughout 2011: the WeightWatcher’s product family and

Crystal Light beverage mixes. No matter how dieting, weight, and calorie-counting are

prioritized by each of these magazines, they all included food advertisements for diet

food products.

Restaurant ads offer a final notable difference in the food ads found across these

magazines. All but four issues of SELF contain an ad for Ruby Tuesday restaurants. No

restaurant ads ran in Glamour, but Family Circle has full-page promotions for

McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Moe’s Southwest Grill. These fast-food chains suggest

Wendy’s sophisticated fresh berry and chicken salad is appropriate for the discerning

taste of the 50+ Family Circle reader, while McDonald’s and Moe’s focus on women as

mothers, feeding their children well while making them happy. Even in just a few

restaurant advertisements, the essence of the host magazine shines through, suggesting

that women encounter a fairly uniform discourse on food while reading a particular

magazine. In each magazine, I found at least one ‘token’ food advertisement aimed at

outside demographics, such as Glamour and SELF’s Sun Chips ad, featuring a mother

and her son, or the young couple on a date in one of Family Circle’s Oscar Meyer ads.

Striving to be inclusive, perhaps to catch the eye of the infrequent reader flipping through

the magazine in a check-out line, these few ads acknowledge women outside the

magazine’s standard readership, though the majority of food ads seem contoured to the

periodicals’ principal audience. As the following analysis reveals, despite the

standardization of food advertisements within a given magazine, the ads construct a

multihued narrative, replete with directives, temptations, and criticisms, on how women

should think about food and eating in their lives.

Key Themes

Through choice words, emotionally-charged images, and an intricate web of

associations, food advertising in women’s magazines communicates a complex and

nuanced set of messages about what food means in a woman’s world. These messages

encourage women to think about food in certain ways, often directly connected to a

specific role women may enact in their lives like mother, friend, shopper, or athlete. Four

main themes emerge in my analysis of food advertising: 1) To Die(t) For captures how

food is often associated with diet and exercise through ads that promote “skinny” food

products as virtuous, eating as a guilt-ridden activity, and ads that ultimately connect

food to the higher purpose of being thin; 2) Food Fantasies employ whimsical imagery

and language in ads that present food as something beyond itself, encouraging women to

see food as synonymous with adventure, sex, and love; 3) Food, Family, and the Female,

demonstrates how women achieve successful motherhood and homemaker status through

food, and reinforces traditional gender roles with shopping, cooking, and serving food

framed as female pursuits; and 4) Other comments on food advertisements that did not fit

into an aforementioned theme. The ads in this category are basic food promotions,

highlighting the existence or features of a product without an expressive subtext. These

four themes capture the repeated and pronounced meanings I interpret across the variety

of products, advertising approaches, and the magazines in which the food advertisements

appear. Several subthemes emerged during my analysis, serving to more thoroughly

explore the nuances at work within the larger categories, and will be discussed within

each of their respective themes.

To Die(t) For

Though diverse in their advertised products and visual displays, the food ads in

this theme connect food to the concepts of thinness and fitness. Like the editorial content

of Glamour, SELF, and Family Circle, the ads may approach thinness from different

paths, but clearly communicate with exacting language and unmistakable images that

food exists to help women stay or become skinny. Ads in this theme regularly announce

calories, carbs, and fat grams. Some ads use nutritional statistics to suggest that a food is

not sinful, which reinforces the idea of sinful eating in the first place while persuading

women to purchase the product. Another notable subtheme of diet-focused food

advertising includes the correlation of eating with exercise. These ads, which mostly

come from SELF, reference exercise as a prerequisite to eating and imply food is

primarily fuel for working out rather than necessary in general.

The food ads most blatantly touting weight loss and calorie counting come from

the Atkins diet and the WeightWatchers’ ad campaigns. Barely bothering to promote

their shakes and bars as “delicious” (Family Circle, 2011, June, p. 71), the Atkins ads,

only present in Family Circle, spend most of the page promising a 15-pound weight drop

in just two weeks. This is the real appeal of the products—not the taste or nutritional

value—but the far more important guarantee of fast and significant weight loss.

WeightWatchers, on the other hand, lets their name imply the purpose of their products,

and spends their extensive ad campaign—one of the largest in this study with 16 different

advertisements printed in all three magazines—giving women permission and incentive

to buy their food. Using positive language, WeightWatchers encourages us to say “Yes”

to their light string cheese and “Absolutely” to their coffee cake (SELF, January, 2011, p.

69), while the words double as an assurance of the food’s rich flavors. The

WeightWatchers point-counting system, printed small but still visible in all of the ads,

reminds women that this food is about weight loss.

Likewise, an ad for Multigrain Cheerios cereal reads “More Grains. Less You!”

while touting its 110 calories per serving (Family Circle, February, 2011, p.133).

Wearing a dress made out of the cereal, the computer-drawn female figure in the ad is

complete with a tightly cinched waist. The low-calorie food is designed to help women

physically reduce themselves (“less you”), which the ad suggests is a positive result. In

one ad for Special K cereal, the product itself nowhere in sight, a slim, toned woman

sassily poses on the beach in her fire-engine red bikini (SELF, June, 2011). Without

mentioning Special K’s calories or taste, this ad communicates even more piercingly than

all the others that the sole value of this food lies in its potential to help women attain the

model’s body. Food becomes an afterthought in these ads; carefully monitoring the

waistline is the focus.

The pursuit of ‘skinny’ does not stop at food ads for cereal and JELL-O: ice

cream, candy, and alcohol get corralled into the diet mold as well, continuing to

emphasize the importance of calorie control when women and food collide. Ads for

Skinny Cow ice cream and candy, found in Glamour and SELF, are similar to the

WeightWatchers ads in terms of nutritional information display, but are even more

energetic in the presentation of their products than WeightWatchers positive language.

While the calorie and fat grams of an ice cream sandwich are highlighted, the prime real

estate of the ad is taken up by exclamations like “Skinny Cow candy is to die for!”

(SELF, September, 2011, p.121) or a love-letter to Skinny Cow signed by one woman’s

“Butt & THIGHS” (SELF, May, 2011, p.106). These bold statements are compounded by

the reminder that women approach eating with their ‘problem areas’ in mind, devoted to

controlling their bodies. Eye-catching as the flashy proclamations are, they do not allow

us to miss the cartoon cow in the corner of all Skinny Cow advertisements. With her

yellow waist-measuring tape looped provocatively around her, the slender cartoon cow is

reclined in a sexually prone position. Even female bovines cannot escape the edict to be

thin, as this ad reinforces not only the association of these products with ‘skinniness’

rather than taste, but also the overarching theme that women must always be conscious of

what they eat as it affects the size of their bodies. Choosing a ‘skinny’ dessert does not

excuse a woman from being a cow that eats dessert in the first place.

Guilt and Regret

The Skinnygirl Cosmo ad continues to apply that loaded word to products meant

for enjoyment and relaxing, and takes calorie-talk to the next level. Skinnygirl,

represented by another computer-animated, size-0 female figure, invites women to serve

this low calorie, “zero guilt” drink at their holiday parties (Glamour, December, 2011,

p.242). An ad for FiberOne yogurt also touts its 50 calories and “zero guilt” (Family

Circle, April 1, 2011, p. 93). In these ads, calories are not printed just as a green light—

an indication that a product is sufficiently ‘light’ enough to eat. Rather, the diet product

alleviates thel feelings of guilt and transgression it suggests are normally associated with

eating. These ads do not just put the calorie information front and center, but use

language, including the product names, that reinforce the idea that food carries guilty

implications in the first place for women. The preponderance of diet foods advertised,

especially in SELF, compared to non-diet food products presupposes and perpetuates the

stereotype that women are continuously dieting and counting calories.

Perpetuating the idea of guilty eating, three different SnackWell’s ads proclaim

“Be bad. Snack well” (Glamour, June, 2011, p. 143). In one ad, a pair of black leather

stiletto boots, walking away from us down a dark alley, fills the page. Encouraged to

sense sin and danger, this ad evokes impressions of sex and prostitution. This woman is a

risk taker—not afraid to eat the 130 calorie pack of fudge-drizzled popcorn that “lets you

be bad, and still be good.” The few pieces of chocolate-drizzled popcorn featured are

“deliciously indulgent,” perpetuating the concept of sin associated with chocolate, and

snacking in general. In another ad, we see a the young, sexy owner of the stiletto boots,

also wearing a racy leather jacket and skin-tight pants, taking off her motorcycle helmet

provocatively, lips parted. The final installment of this ad campaign, which ran entirely in

Glamour, features a skinny young woman, clad in panties and a silky tee, pinning her

boyfriend to their disheveled bed by standing on his back. All three ads build on this edgy

innuendo, and position sexual attraction as the source of female empowerment, consistent

with Glamour’s dedication to the young and sensual. At first it seems like these ads might

be saying ‘be a bold, daring, playful woman’ but eat mindfully when snacking, in calorie-

controlled segments. But the second heading reverses any hope of this more positive

message when it says these 130 calorie packs “let you be bad.” So women are bad for

snacking, especially on something that is drizzled with chocolate, but are also good for

having only the “perfectly proportioned” diet food. The ad dares women to go on, “be

bad,” rather than giving them diet-approved permission, and in this way “diet foods can

represent both sin and atonement—one stop shopping for guilt-free pleasure” (Hesse-

Biber, 2007, p. 165). While chocolate, ice cream, and popcorn are inherently sinful, the

diet versions offer redemption.

Capitalizing on this concept of being good by choosing certain foods over others

and associating eating with working out, an ad for California almonds depicts a woman in

workout clothes eating a bowl of chopped almonds and fruit. Presumably smiling about

her “handful of good intentions” (Family Circle, July, 2011, p.8) that should carry her

until lunch, the ad comments not only on this part of the woman’s day, but how she

should eat for the rest of it. Though many food advertisements in this analysis promote

snack foods, this ad contradictorily suggests that breakfast should last until the noon

meal, discounting the need for snacking. While glorifying exercise, the ad also subtly

slams the woman by calling to mind the cultural maxim ‘damned by good intentions.’

Invoking these proverbs to make a point about food and female eating, the California

almonds ad suggests that although the woman worked out and is eating a healthy

breakfast, she is likely to ‘screw up’ later in the day with her mere ‘good intentions.’

Two other ads from the California almond campaign, which ran five different ads

multiple times in SELF and Family Circle in 2011, cite the inherent sin of snacking and

offer almonds as the salvation. The practical and sleek layout of the ads might not have

fit with Glamour’s zeal for the fantastical visuals, but the ads target younger and older

women. A trio of attractive, women with noticeably toned arms hover around a bowl of

plain and chocolate-covered almonds, or as the ad calls it, “A handful of chocolate-

covered permission” (SELF, March, 2011, p. 87). Though none of the ladies are eating,

and indeed the bowl looks untouched, the ad insists we can “Maximize goodness and

minimize guilt” by having just a ‘handful’ of the healthy almonds and just a taste of

indulgent chocolate that the ad is authorizing. Similarly, an ad for Blue Diamond

almonds, oven-roasted in dark chocolate powder, suggests that we “Indulge and feel good

about it” (Family Circle, March, 2011, p. 122). While a slightly more positive message

than ‘don’t feel guilty,’ this ad suggests chocolate is an indulgence to feel bad about, as

chocolate is often associated with sinfulness in our culture (Rosenblum, 2005) and likely

to be framed as a female transgression (Barthel, 1989).

Another ad from California almonds reads that the nuts offer “A handful of no

regrets…a simple snack without the guilty aftertaste” (SELF, October, 2011, p. 92).

Women are once again encouraged to think about eating as a blameworthy activity, and

even though the ads provide consent to eat, women are not shown actively consuming

food. The prescriptive and judgmental nature of these ads drew criticism from the

Sheppard Pratt Center for Eating Disorders, which condemned the ads for telling women

they “should feel guilty or experience regret if they eat certain foods” and that they

should “rely on external permission to eat” (Clemmer, 2011). Rather than encouraging

women to listen to their natural hunger cues, rather than liberating women from the

endless lists of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, these ads cultivate the dichotomy of shame and

potential redemption through dieting.

Exercise: Another Passport to Eating

Food advertisements also construct a narrative that inextricably links eating with

exercise, in addition to calorie-counting and waist-watching. Most commonly found in

SELF, consistent with the magazine’s fitness fanaticism, these food ads indicate that

working out is a prerequisite for eating, and eating is a reward for working out. Pure

Protein bars are for “when you’re done working out” and an ad for Pure Protein gelatin is

recommended for staying in shape “because you’ve got better things to feel guilty about”

(SELF, June, 2011, p. 107). It is unclear what exactly women should feel guilty about

instead, but the message persists that eating begets guilt in a woman’s life unless she is

careful about what she eats and how much she exercises.

Two-page ads for Tyson Chicken Breast Strips subtly criticize women for

probably not being able to run a “5-minute mile” (SELF, January 2011, p. 58), but still

assert that women will cook lean, vegetable-filled meals after their sub-par workout. Page

two features a thin female model preparing vegetables, provides healthy dinner recipe

ideas, and suggests evening activities such as “Go for an after-dinner jog” or “Do some

at-home yoga with the kids” (p.59). Reaching beyond what goes on a woman’s plate and

into what goes on a woman’s schedule is an invasive liberty taken by these ads, designed

to further influence a woman’s thoughts about eating. Exercising before eating to ‘earn it’

and working out again after dinner to ‘burn it’ is the subtext in ads that marry food and

exercise. One ad for ready-to-cook egg whites takes this union even further. The carton is

split open, revealing a yoga mat inside (SELF, March, 2011). Exercise not only takes

precedence over nourishment in this ad, but exercise becomes the nourishment—the food

itself. Women are encouraged to prioritize exercise over eating, and consider food mere

workout fuel. Corresponding with the editorial content of SELF, these food ads reinforce

the magazine’s message that food, subservient to fitness, is neither a reward nor a right,

but an earning. Guilty, and sin-ridden, the eating female is thus further constrained when

it comes to food.

Taken together, the food advertisements in this theme instruct women that eating

involves calorie caution, temptation-resistance, and exercise. The near-unanimous

mention of calories in these food ads, and the slavish attention paid to female thinness,

send a clear message: women, particularly those targeted by SELF and Glamour, should

think about food in terms of losing weight, staying ‘skinny,’ and exercising to help

achieve those goals. Between guilt and indulgence, permission and regret, women are

damned by eating, and encouraged to eat in the same food advertisement. In a sense,

these ads are not really selling yogurts and protein bars at all; in fact, they are not even

really asking us to enthusiastically purchase the ‘yummy!’ 10-calorie, radioactive-looking

gelatin. Food advertising that positions diet and exercise as the thresholds to eating is

selling women a body—the thin-ideal body. The products are almost an after-thought, a

means to an end that women will buy in pursuit of that culturally-idolized image. As

Wilson and Blackhurst (1999) conclude in their analysis, ads that make such a strong

connection between diet, exercise, and eating directly contribute to the epidemic of poor

body image and possibly destructive eating habits as women strive to achieve the

physical ideal presented by the models selling women their food. The advertisements

analyzed here preclude themselves from merely reflecting women’s nutritional concerns:

they help create and continue calorie-counting as a normal practice for women, while

reinforcing the associations of guilt, sin, and transgression with a woman’s eating habits.

Food Fantasies

Just as food advertisements that link food with diet and exercise are ultimately

selling women on the idea of the thin-ideal body, the food ads in this theme are selling

women something more than chips and salad dressing. Food advertisements in this theme

are categorized by splashes of fantasy that distract us from what the food actually is, and

sell us on what the food can mean or accomplish for us. Food can improve our

personality and foster our relationships. Food is love, sex, and adventure—not just iced

tea or chocolate chips. Colorful and imaginative, these ads create alternative realities and

give food astounding capabilities. Further diversifying the narrative of women, eating,

and food, the advertisements in this theme depart from fat grams and fitness; instead of

implying that food is sinful, these ads present food as fun and exciting, ultimately up-

selling food as more than it appears to be. Food becomes a medium through which

women can enhance their lives and experiences with those around them.

An ad for Oscar Mayer Sandwich Combos claims that they will “make your

lunchtime as interesting as Jewel’s” (Glamour, Sept., 2011, p.306), as the boxed lunch

sits amongst the spilled contents of the famous singer-songwriter-actress’s purse.

Designer makeup, a BlackBerry, a seashell, and airline tickets litter the page, evidence of

Jewel’s exciting and privileged life. The message here is that when eating what Jewel

supposedly has for lunch, a woman can shrug off her own, less glamorous life and attain

a smidgen of the idolized Hollywood experience. Though the boxed lunch contains

pedestrian items like turkey and crackers, the item is enticing because of its higher

aspirations that women, in turn, are enticed to pursue. Likewise, T.G.I. Friday’s frozen

entrees, also advertised exclusively in Glamour, tell women to stop being “boring”

(October, 2011, p. 256) and become more exciting by changing what food they purchase.

These ads are associating eating with women’s (currently dull) personalities and

lifestyles, suggesting that self-enhancement, a persistent theme throughout Glamour, can

be achieved through food.

Nestea Iced Tea also makes the connection between a woman’s character and the

products she consumes. This “refreshing iced tea for the bold” is for the woman in the ad

who is provocatively leaning across her man to reach the iced tea. “YES makes the first

move” (Glamour, August 2011, p. 113), the ad declares, confirming the sexual innuendo

seen in the image, and construing the woman’s playful promiscuity in a positive

connotation. Much like the aforementioned SnackWells ad campaign, this ad equates a

woman’s sexual prowess with female empowerment. Another ad depicts a woman

overlooking the ocean from her vintage convertible, drinking the iced tea by herself.

“YES takes the scenic route, YES makes the first move, YES laughs louder, YES opens

every door…” the ad rhythmically chants at us, providing what sound like personal

mantras (Glamour, July, 2011, p. 81). The subtext here is a repertoire of desirable

feminine traits that women are meant to aspire to: being strong, independent, and

ambitious, just like “the YES tea.” This ad also tugs on the cultural stereotype that

women have difficulty saying ‘no’ and should strive to ‘do it all.’ Though the occasional

magazine article encourages women to reduce their overextended workloads or say no to

a friend, busyness and doing for others are often framed as ideal femininity, especially in

Family Circle. That these ads appear exclusively in Glamour, though, makes sense as

their images rely on sex and materialism to depict the liberated female.

These ads market their food or beverage as a source of attractive personality traits

that women can attain through consumption—a play on the ‘you are what you eat’

maxim. Just as Oscar Mayer will make a woman more interesting, or Nestea will make

her more outgoing, another ad campaign contends that buying pork makes her “vibrant”

(Family Circle, Sept., 2011, p. 229). Life-size images of pork ribs and kabobs dominate

the three Family Circle ads, framed by the boldfaced words “Be amazing” (July, 2011, p.

125) or “Be inviting” (December, 2011, p. 179). Despite the enormous pictures of pork, it

is clear that the ad is not asking the meat to be any of these cheerful adjectives; rather, the

ad calls for women to adopt an ‘inviting’ cooking repertoire and a ‘vibrant’ energy. In

small pictures across the top of the ad, we get visual confirmation of this call to action: a

woman enthusiastically prepares dinner with her daughter, and another socializes

vivaciously with her guests, all brought to her by her magnetizing menu. Women are

encouraged to see food as a means of self-expression, of saying something about who she

is. Food transcends its status as inanimate, and becomes capable of commenting on the

content of a woman’s character, not just her stomach.

Smoke and Mirrors

While some food advertisements in this category are busy anthropomorphizing

their products, others are stretching reality in a different way, attempting to convince

women that a seemingly ordinary food is more than it appears. Food ads in this subtheme

employ whimsical visuals to suggest that familiar products should not be taken at face

value, but looked at closely to reveal their enticing, hidden nature. The text in these ads is

often juvenile, especially considering the majority of ads in this subtheme appear in

Family Circle. Perhaps evoking the busy matriarch’s inner child or providing an escape

from the demands of older adult life, the ads hope to make a positive impression that will

compel her to grab the item off the shelf at the next opportunity. Distinct from ads that

encourage women to adopt the labels given to the food, these ads also depart from the

diet and exercise discourse seen in the previous section. In this subset, only two ads

mention calories or fat-grams in ultrafine print, and none relate to exercising; indeed,

there are more unhealthy food items advertised in this category than any other. From

chips to candy, these products represent a notable storyline in the narrative on women

and eating.

For example, the Tostitos Artisan Tortilla Chips advertisements ask, “When is a

tortilla chip more than a tortilla chip?” (Glamour, 2011, p.190; SELF, 2011, p. 109) The

photo progression in the ad leads from the tortilla chips to freshly-picked peppers. It is

important to note this ad does not appear in Family Circle; its presence in the other

periodicals aligns with Glamour and SELF’s theme of self-improvement for the woman

who does not find herself naturally polished or buffed enough, but needs to change,

striving to be more, just as these chips transcend themselves. The idea that tortilla chips

can retain the properties of fresh vegetables is painstakingly sold with a straight face in

this advertisement. Women are encouraged to suspend their disbelief, and allow the ad to

sway them into believing this tortilla chip provides not only an upscale experience, but a

serving of healthful foods.

Just as the chips are made synonymous with fresh vegetables, four ads use fruit to

transform the original product from packaged to freshly-picked. “Get real. Get Jelly

Belly” (Family Circle, July, 2011, p.21) reads an ad for the jelly bean candies, several of

the beans scattered on a mirrored surface. The red bean’s reflection reveals that it is really

a cherry; the green bean is really an apple, and all of the beans reflect whole fruits. The

Jelly Bellys, impossibly balanced on their curved ends, seem to be standing in order to

more fully reveal their hidden identities. Similarly, a bushel of fresh strawberries springs

from the bite taken out of a frozen Edy’s Fruit Bar which is equated with “real fruit,

naturally” (Family Circle, July, 2011, p.43). With the visual juxtaposition of the products

to fresh fruit, these ads build the connection that consuming these desserts is transposable

with eating healthy, vitamin-rich foods. These snack and dessert ads deviate from their

chocolate-covered counterparts, as the warnings or permissions women may have come

to expect from food ads depicting such ‘sinful’ products are nowhere to be seen. Inviting

and playful, the ads in this theme are eerily free of any direct mentions of the foods being

‘guilt-free,’ though the visuals cue us to think of the chips and candy as fresh produce

that is naturally faultless. This facet of the narrative composed by food advertising aimed

at women is designed to entice by subverting the real qualities of food and getting women

to see it as something other than it is, relying on fantasy rather than fact. Other ads in this

category chose more literal—and risqué—elements to influence how women interpret

food.

Sex and Love

Food adopts the ultimate fantasies in this subtheme, and attaches the ideas of sex

and love to some of the richest foods advertised in this analysis: pizza, pasta, and

brownies all appear, and the freedom from associations with guilt, regret, or ‘being bad’

continues. In fact, they meet their antithesis in the decadent images that suggest bliss and

bounty, passion and pleasurable eating, rather than avoidance and restraint. The bouncy

tenor seen in other ads within this fantasy-based theme persists here, but pulls on a more

visceral cultural thread, and adds another factor to the discourse of women, food, and

eating.

Food becomes synonymous with sex and love in these ads; women are

encouraged to see food as symbolic of something greater, deeper, and more meaningful

than a can of cherries or a bottle of salad dressing. Interestingly, these products tend to be

viscous, like creamy sauces or lusciously melting peanut butter and chocolate, adding to

the sensuality of the ads and helping to evoke the sexual connotations. Through powerful

visuals and choice language, these ads unmistakably perform sexuality and recapitulate

culturally recognized innuendos. For example, the text in one Newman’s Own pasta

sauce ad reads like the beginning of a dirty joke: “So, crushed tomatoes, basil, olive oil,

and spices walked into a jar...” (Family Circle, Nov. 1, 2011, p. 160). In another, a pizza,

anthropomorphized with the gift of speech, tells a neighboring salad, “OMG, you look

amazing. Who are you wearing?” (Family Circle, May, 2011, p. 184), a play on the

colloquialism ‘what are you wearing?’ In two other Newman’s Own ads, fantasy comes

even more to the forefront, as the salad dressing says, “Part of me is extra virgin, but I

know exactly what I’m doing” (Family Circle, August, 2011, p. 167), leaving the

implications to our imagination. “If pasta could fantasize, this would be noodle nirvana,”

says the ad for creamy alfredo sauce, bathing a bowl of pasta in its rich whiteness

(Family Circle, August, 2011, p. 23), and leaving women to do the real fantasizing at the

ad’s suggestion.

The Newman’s Own products, only found in Family Circle in this analysis, deal

in the tantalizing language of sex, which might be seen as a revisiting of the idea that

eating is sinful, but the jaunty nature of these ads and the richness of the products

advertised does much to distance them from this concept. Ads like those from Newman’s

Own are playful rather than promiscuous—a theme that tints the pages of Glamour.

While these ads encourage women to fantasize about and relish food, women have yet to

be shown actively consuming food—until now.

Only one out of 347 ads in this analysis shows a woman with food actually in her

mouth. A young, redheaded woman has her lips wrapped around an Oscar Mayer angus

beef frank protruding from her boyfriend’s mouth. The phallic nature of the picture is

overwhelming: his bared teeth and flexed jaw position him as the source of the sausage,

suggesting he has the firmer grip while her fingers support the hot dog as it enters her

softly opened mouth, her cheeks puckered inwards as though she is sucking on a straw.

The sexual overtone is weakly diverted by the words “Love at first sight” (Family Circle,

2011, p. 161), as the couple is looking at each other across the sausage, and one has to

wonder what love has to do with this scene. Is it the cultural maxim that guys like a girl

with an appetite, who doesn’t just order a salad? Or is she ‘in love’ with the release of

eating this fattening food—perhaps the first time she has eaten such a food in months

while searching for a relationship? It is significant that the woman is not alone in the one

and only ad that shows a female eating—not just about to take a bite. Something about

the male’s presence in the ad gives the woman permission to eat, revisiting the idea that

women need external approval to consume, while associating eating with sexually

pleasure, intimacy, and love.

And food becomes synonymous with love in several food ads: chocolate and

cherries transcend their simple status when used by a woman in her baking. Just as

women are steered to think of food in terms of sexual fantasy, these food ads also

communicate a very clear equation to women: food = love. An ad for Toll House morsels

asks, “Who would you bake some love for?” (Family Circle, August, 2011, p. 53), as two

women work together over a mixing bowl. Though brownies and cookies appear to be the

tangible end result of a woman’s efforts in all of Toll House’s ads, each and every one

directs women to “Bake some love.” Betty Crocker cookie mixes also provide women

with three simple steps to follow: “Pour. Mix. Love” (Family Circle, December, 2011, p.

153). Food is presented in these ads as a viable vessel for not just expressing love, but for

a woman to enact love. In an ad for Lucky Leaf cherries, where women are instructed to

“Bake your heart out,” the product spells “I love you” (Family Circle, December, 2011,

p. 109)—again gifted with the power of words, food now speaks through her and for her,

capable of rendering the most heartfelt sentiments. Similarly, in an ad for Barilla noodles

and pasta sauce, the two products represent the most classic, towering romantic heroes of

all time: Romeo and Juliet. Food is granted a substantial identity through food

advertising: a voice, a heart, a mind, even archetypal characters to portray. Food has been

the gateway to a more glamorous life, a more gregarious personality, and sexual intrigue:

now food has become a physical, consumable representation of love.

Drawing on a range of cultural icons, hot-button phrases, and sexual symbolism,

the ads in this fantasy theme represent a significant portion of the discourse on women

and eating, as told by food advertising in women’s magazines. In these ads, women are

led down different avenues of thought toward food and eating that share a common

thread: food is so much more than just food, and can make daydreams a reality. A

completely different chapter is added to the story of woman and food by these ads, which

thoroughly depart from the tone of diet and exercise-based food promotions. While it can

be argued that associating food with sex and love is more pleasant to most women than

thinking of WeightWatchers and workouts, shrouding products in a veil of fantasy is also

problematic. JellyBellys are not real fruit in a sugary disguise; cookies alone cannot

substantiate a loved one’s emotional needs. Fortunately, an extensive collection of

advertisements analyzed in the next section instructs women on how to successfully meet

the needs of her family and fulfill the many duties of being female through food.

Food, Family, and the Female

Continuing to equate food and love, food advertisements dramatically shift their

focus in this theme to the multiple roles a woman may enact in her life: mother, wife,

cook, homemaker, and shopper. Food advertisements in this category do not send sensual

messages, inviting women to take pleasure in their own eating, nor do they concern

themselves with calories or cardio, though the women pictured in these ads remain

invariably slender and young, despite the fact that they supposedly have multiple

children. Rather, these ads reinforce the traditional gender roles by portraying women as

the grocery getter, the family cook, and the resident nutritionist. Food, as demonstrated in

the visual and textual messages of these promotions, is a way for a woman to be a good

mother, attentive and involved with her children, and spending time with the family.

Food provides a medium for women to garner recognition and appreciation from those

around her, as well as triumph over the pressure-filled holiday season. Women are

encouraged to see food as an asset and a tool they expertly wield to create precious

moments on holidays and every day. The ads in this category present a woman as an eater

only by association with her family: the food in front of her came from her, but ultimately

is not for her. Though she partakes in the family dinner, has dessert with her daughter,

and dons the famous “got milk?” mustache with her son (Family Circle, August, 2011, p.

13), her eating is an act of engagement, creating a special moment for others rather than

eating entirely of her own volition.

Notably, every ad in this category comes from Family Circle. This is logical

based on the nature of the products advertised, and the way the ads communicate with

women about food and eating. Family Circle, the overwhelming provider of food

advertisements for this analysis, is also the only one of the three magazines used in this

study to include ads that target a woman in her role as the family’s primary grocery

shopper. These ads marketed a cereal to women that is clearly for her child’s

consumption, and as the younger readers of Glamour and SELF are less likely to be

mothers—or less likely to be reading those publications for child-rearing information—it

follows that such advertising would be absent from those periodicals.

Magazines commonly portray women as the “emotional referee and relational

workers in the family” (Corrigan, 1997, p. 88), and the majority of the food

advertisements in this category follow suit, especially when it comes to building a happy

relationship with her children. In a series of black and white Polaroid snapshots, women

and their children make various desserts with Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereal. The

nostalgic-looking ads encourage women to “Carve out some time with your little

pumpkin” (October, 2011, p.112) to make Halloween treats and “Don't let summer days

melt away” (July, 2011, p. 138) without spending this quality time with her two small

children. The warm, homey scenes evoke childhood memories, and call women to make

new ones with their own kids, using food as the catalyst for interacting.

Similarly, ads for Skittles and Starburst candy show mothers lounging on the

couch with their children sharing the sweets because “they're only kids for so long” (July,

2011, p. 13). Mother and son toss the Skittles in the air, defying the ‘don’t play with your

food’ rule, while Mom and daughter make bracelets out of Starburst wrappers. The

mother-daughter ad reads, “Finally a fashion statement the two of you can agree on”

(August, 2011, p. 93)—a highly gendered message assuming and reinforcing several

stereotypes: that women are concerned with fashion and appearance, and that mothers

and daughters feud and judge one another on their sartorial choices. While women are

being encouraged to see food as a means of memory-making with their children, these

ads also return to questions of when and with whom women can eat. The only time a

woman is about to eat candy—or any sweets at all—she is with her son and the Skittles

are failing toward her mouth, but when she is with her daughter, neither is even about to

take a bite. It is only implied that they did. These circumstances repeat in an ad for

Banquet’s individual frozen pies, or as Mom sees them, “Homework bribery in a warm,

flaky crust” (January, 2011, p. 39). Mom and daughter sit at the kitchen table with their

pies, forks poised, but again neither is actively eating. The daughter looks incredulous,

obviously unaware that dessert was coming with a caveat, while Mom looks on with an

amused but authoritative gaze.

Food, in addition to being a way of bringing children and parents together, is also

framed as an essential component to good parenting; the products a woman chooses for

her children indicate what type of parent she is. For example, the iconic “got milk?” ad

campaign describes celebrities like Angie Harmon and Sofia Vergara as ‘role mothers’

for serving their children milk, and doing their job of setting the right example by

drinking it, too. Similar to the advertisements that suggest a woman can “Be amazing” by

serving pork, these ads suggest that a woman can become a better mother based on the

products she supplies for her children. The most potent and emotionally charged

examples of this theme are the two-page Gatorade spreads. The ads feature mothers

cheering or crying from the stands at her child’s sporting event while their son or

daughter makes a winning play. The intense text of the ads, “I’ve memorized your

playbook, I’ve made these bleachers my second home, I’ll do whatever it takes to help

you BECOME” (January, 2011, p. 41), oozes with virtue and self-sacrifice—a cultural

expectation placed on mothers. Gatorade, positioned as the product to provide the

adolescent athletes, ultimately takes a back seat in these ads that are selling women a

particular version of motherhood that includes absolute selflessness and deep dedication.

Food Glory

Motherhood is not the only role in which food advertising asserts women should

excel: women are encouraged to show equal devotion to the whole family through their

cooking. In turn, advertisements in this subtheme also suggest that women earn

appreciation, praise, and a sense of achievement from the food they prepare. Many ads in

this subtheme come complete with a recipe printed on the page, aiding women in

realizing their full potential as their family’s meal preparer. For example, an ad for

Johnsonville sausage includes a rigatoni recipe at the bottom of the promotion, while

explaining “The second helping. It’s how your family says ‘Thanks, Mom’” (February,

2011, p. 85). Another ad for Velveeta features a chicken recipe, and a woman wearing an

apron that reads, “Trust us, this cook will be kissed,” (December, 2011, p. 169). Not only

do these ads imply that a woman garners gratitude from her family because of food, but

how her family responds to the food she prepares should be taken as a serious and valid

indication of how they feel about her. Pepperidge Farm pastry shells guarantees that

women will “eat up the praise” while her family eats up her appetizers (December, 2011,

p. 31); Campbell’s soup ads, providing more recipes for her repertoire, reassures that

“compliments? You’ll get ‘em” (November 29, 2011, p. 79) and promises “you’ll be

soaking up compliments” (February, 2011, p. 173). It is interesting that these ads tell

women to “eat up” flattery rather than food, suggesting that a woman feeds off the

compliments she receives on her cooking—that her sustenance comes from keeping her

family happy and fed. Again, women may be positioned in an eating situation, but she is

meant to get satisfaction and enjoyment as the provider of the meal rather than a

consumer of it, and thus is never shown actually eating. And again, these ads create a

highly gendered, deeply traditional discourse on cooking, blatantly assuming that women

are the family meal preparers and that food is a female subject matter.

While some ads guarantee food will generate praise and appreciation for women,

other ads talk to women from ‘behind-in-scenes’ to help ensure their success. Another

Campbell’s soup ad helps women “give your meat and potatoes guy a meat and potatoes

dinner…for around $4” (December, 2011, p. 65) while another provides her with a “fool-

proof recipe” (September, 2011, p. 192). Equipping women with ultra-economical recipes

and husband-pleasing dinner ideas, these food advertisements position themselves as

women’s allies, eager to aid her in earning those compliments and feeding her family.

Just like women’s magazines, these ads adopt the intimate and informal tone of a friend;

and just like women’s magazines, food ads also take liberties with this tone, not-so-subtly

suggesting that women need all the help they can get in the kitchen. Sprinkling sliced

almonds on the asparagus she is serving her family lends her “instant culinary credibility”

and “sudden sophistication” (April 1, 2011, p.105) that she was previous lacking. That

this ad is another installment in the California almonds ad campaign is likely

unsurprising, given their tendency to criticize women’s food choices as a means of

promoting their product. Campbell’s Soup, a moment ago speaking to women in a

supportive tone, now offers women a simplistic taco recipe that “requires: one skillet, no

skill” so the untalented in the kitchen need not fear (November 29, 2011, p. 27). In an ad

for Crystal Farms hash browns, a woman sits in a meeting at work, though she is not

participating: she is busy grating potatoes. “Who has time to make cheesy hash browns?”

asks the ad, then answering “You do” (April 1, 2011, p. 113). Absurd and gendered to the

hilt, this ad unashamedly insinuates that a woman would be more focused on cooking

than on her career while at work; the subtext implies that her career keeps her out of the

kitchen, so she requires the pre-shredded potato product to maintain some semblance of

work-home balance. Food advertisements like these are perfect examples of how

“advertisers…[construct] women as independent and in control, but only thanks to

particular commodities” (Corrigan, 1997, p.74), using the results of feminism to further

the reach of consumerism. The more successful a woman becomes, the more advertisers

can lure her into relying on material goods to manage all of her responsibilities. The same

concept of feminism that fell short of inclusive, true empowerment in Family Circle—

based on a woman’s busyness and ability to juggle multiple roles—recurs in these ads,

demonstrating how penetrating such ideas can be, infiltrating every corner of a woman’s

magazine with the potential to reach beyond.

Grocery Getter

Another nuance in the women-and-food narrative emerges when food

advertisements assert a woman’s reliance on consumer products and combine that with

messages of what it means to be a good mother. In other words, the food advertisements

in this subtheme merge the two previous concepts: a woman’s worth as a mother is

determined by the food she serves and a woman must purchase certain commodities in

order to achieve successful motherhood status. Targeting women as the family grocery

shopper, these ads directly address women as mothers, presupposing both of these roles,

and clearly asserting that both are virtuous feminine pursuits. Women get the message

from these ads that not only is grocery shopping a distinctly female job, but overseeing

their child’s nutritional wellbeing is also squarely on her shoulders. The overt gender bias

in these ads, even though only a fraction of them actually depict an adult female, makes it

impossible to imagine any of them appearing in a men’s magazine.

As with all of the ads that encourage women to think about food as a motherhood

and family matter, all but one of the food ads discussed in this subtheme hail from Family

Circle, and while they do not communicate with a woman in terms of her own eating—

not even her participatory consumption as discussed in the previous section—they are

still an important part of this analysis as they construct and perpetuate a concept of

female consumerism as it relates to food. Also, the sheer amount of advertising that

addresses women not as an eater but as a purchaser of food makes it impossible to ignore

these ads, and how they advise women to think about food: not as sustenance for

themselves, but for enjoyment and nourishment of others.

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For example, an ad for Eggland’s Best eggs, one of the few ads that pictures a

woman, and the only one that comes from SELF, reads “For my family, only the best

nutrition” (SELF, June, 2011, p. 113) and women are encouraged to “treat your family”

to “the best” Bob Evans pork (Family Circle, December, 2011, p.110). Less than twenty

of the 347 unique food ads appearing in SELF, Glamour, and Family Circle in 2011

picture males, and three of them are included in this subtheme. Father and son play video

games in a Coca-Cola ad, have a water fight in the yard in an ice cream ad, and playfully

fight over a hot dog in an ad for Oscar Mayer. Without the help of written instructions,

these ads clearly communicate that women should purchase these products to create these

experiences for the male members of the family. Though she is not taking part in the

scene, the fact that the ads appear in Family Circle amidst many other ads that more

directly connect the woman with grocery shopping and providing the family with food-

centric moments reinforces the idea that the woman is responsible for stocking the home

with the soda and hot dogs for the men’s enjoyment—and that in turn should bring her

pleasure. From guardian of the family’s health to provider of memory-making snacks,

these ads suggest that what a woman puts in her grocery cart says just as much about who

she is as a mother and wife as her family’s response to her cooking does.

While grocery shopping for the whole family is plainly important, the number of

food advertisements promoting children’s products to women suggests that a woman’s

children are of primary concern when heading to the grocery store. In these ads, women

are largely invisible, save for the cartoon renditions of Wilma Flintstone, though they

carry the crucial responsibility of feeding their children nutritiously and making their

childhoods blissful. The one human woman seen here hovers in the background while her

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children run for their waffles: “Nutrition has never had a tastier disguise” than the whole

wheat hidden in the Eggo’s (Family Circle, December, 2011, p. 61). A small boy,

unlikely but gleefully, clutches a bunch of broccoli as the Chef Boyardee ad tells Mom

“Until this happens, keep the secret” that the pasta is stuffed with a serving of vegetables

(Family Circle, March, 2011, p. 165). Part of enacting superior motherhood, then,

involves successfully deceiving one’s children into eating well without encroaching on

their fun. Numerous ads for Kellogg’s kid’s cereals gives women “an easy and FUN

way” to make sure her children are not among the nine out of 10 who lack fiber-rich diets

(Family Circle, September, 2011, p.176) or the energy they need to get through their “big

days” at school (April 17, 2011, p. 44). An ad for cereal bars lets a woman

simultaneously be a “cool mom” and a “smart mom,” giving her kids a colorful,

chocolaty snack they will want, while sneaking in extra vitamins (March, 2011, p. 135).

By providing her children with Lunchables, a woman really gets them “ready to light up

the world” (September, 2011, p. 54), just like buying Gatorade helped them “Become.”

These ads once again suggest that women rely on purchasing the right products to be

good mothers.

Reinforcing rigid gender roles related to grocery shopping and childrearing, these

food ads contribute significantly and uniquely to the discourse on food found in women’s

magazines. Acting as the primary food purchaser for the whole family, especially the

children, a woman further demonstrates her value as a capable mother. The ads analyzed

in this theme present food as a way for women to show her children love, create fun

family moments, enact positive parenting, and receive recognition and confirmation of

her self-worth. That these ads do not address women in terms of their own eating sets

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them apart from the discourse created by other ads in this analysis, such as those that

position a woman’s food in relation to exercise; still, they develop a critical commentary

on how women should approach food. Food is the medium through which women are

told to express and prove themselves, and ultimately accomplish an idealized version of

femininity.

Other

Amidst the hundreds of food advertisements in this analysis that use arresting

visuals and powerful words and contribute to the discourse centering on food and eating

in women’s magazines, other food advertisements did not present content with an

emotional charge or gendered hook. After repeated observation and inquiry, these

standard advertisements did not align with any of the aforementioned themes that

emerged from this critical textual analysis. From pretzels to frozen vegetables, lunchmeat

to grape juice, these ads offer a visual tour of the local grocery store without

communicating a strong subtext about how, when, where, or with whom a woman should

consider eating. The ads in this category are basic promotions, announcing a new

product, or reminding women of what is available for purchase. Though they present

commodities and at times attempt to demonstrate the value of a product, the ads do not

send the message that women require these food and beverage items to achieve anything

more than a fuller fridge and pantry. For example, an ad for Twining’s tea displays the

brand’s family of flavors, and the text explains how their tea is brewed. The scene has a

relaxed appeal, and a sense of richness in choices, but does not attach the tea to any

cultural context or incite an emotional response. Other ads introduce new products like a

California Pizza kitchen frozen pizza and appetizer combo “now in your grocer’s freezer”

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(Glamour, June, 2011, p. 230) or new soup flavors from Campbell’s. With minimal text

and large, inviting photos, the food products are simply displayed in the ads, which

occasionally tout the product with nondescript adjectives like ‘tasty’ and ‘fresh.’

The majority of food advertisements seen here come from Family Circle, which

again coincides with the magazine’s food focus, and propensity for ads that target women

in their roles as mothers and family grocery shoppers. Piggy-backing on the ads that get

women in the store to purchase products that make them good parents and spouses, these

ads expose women to brand names and products that may catch their eye again at the

store. Ads from Glamour tend to feature convenience items like individual frozen pizzas,

crackers, and Starbucks coffee products, effectively targeting single women who are far

more focused on trends, men, and their young careers than cooking and grocery

shopping. Two ads from SELF—and the only two from that magazine that did not overtly

associate food with diet and exercise in 2011—announce a new flavor of La Croix

sparkling water, and remind readers of the “all natural ingredients” used in Rold Gold

brand pretzels (SELF, May, p. 133). Straightforward food advertising may not be

exclusive to any one magazine in this study, though ultimately the highly gendered and

subtext-laden ads stand out far more in each publication. An ad for Stouffer’s frozen

lasagna may be eye-catching with the picture-perfect farmland as the lasagna’s backdrop,

but is easy to page past without giving it a second thought. Like a television commercial

seen dozens of times, these ads are immediately recognizable as just another piece of

marketing in an already oversaturated landscape—easy to pass by, barely catching the

product’s name. Relying on visuals to make a fast impression, these ads may use bright,

fresh fruits and vegetables that pop off the page, but do not draw readers in with any

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intrigue or strange association, like a yoga mat in a carton of egg whites or a jelly bean’s

reflection in the mirror. They lack emotional engagement, cultural cues, and commentary

on how food operates in a woman’s life, quite different from the other ads in this analysis

that actively encourage women to relate to food in certain ways. The presence of these

ads in women’s magazines does further communicate food’s importance in a woman’s

life; without directly persuading her to buy the product for her family, her diet, or her

self-enhancement, these ads do reinforce that food is central and ever-present in a

woman’s day-to-day life. Though the ads in this category are largely unremarkable in

terms of how they communicate with women about food and eating, they still add to the

sheer amount of food exposure women get in these publications, and further suggest that

women are thinking, planning, and seeking information about food.

Summary

Food advertising in women’s magazines constructs a complex and highly nuanced

narrative on how women should think about eating across different contexts and

responsibilities in their lives. From fitness to family, escapism and childrearing, food is

framed in these advertisements as an active ingredient in the life of a female, and the

vehicle that drives her success as a mother, wife, and woman. Women are encouraged to

see food in multiple ways that often do not have to do with her engaging in the act of

eating, but feeding and providing food for others. Largely taken from SELF magazine, a

set of food advertisements build a firm connection between eating and exercise, sending

women the messages that food is workout fuel and exercise is a prerequisite to eating,

and eating is an acceptable follow-up to exercise. Other advertisements tell a story in

which food fulfills women’s fantasies, from offering a more glamorous lifestyle to

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evoking sensual and emotional pleasures. Still other food ads address women as mothers

and grocery shoppers, reinforcing not only traditional gender roles by assuming that

women fulfill these family responsibilities, but also the social expectations that women

are mothers in the first place.

Women are funneled down different avenues of thought when it comes to eating

based on who they are with and what they are doing, though only one woman is actually

shown eating, and the phallic symbol and blatant sexual connotations in the ad control the

message. According to food advertising, eating is a way for women to socialize, achieve

the ideal body, spend time with their kids, and fuel a workout. Food is a way for a woman

to express love, engage in sexual fantasy, and demonstrate her good motherhood. Food

takes on an impressive range of capabilities in advertising, not the least of which is

directly communicating with women on the various aspects of her life and how food fits

in. Liberal feminism recognizes the uniformity in these messages that hold women to a

certain physical ideal and seek to control the female form by influencing what a woman

eats and how she relates to food. Also, liberal feminism challenges the traditional gender

roles displayed in many food ads that depict the female as responsible for her family’s

food gathering and preparation. Broader cultural elements, visual cues, and exacting

language all combine to make multilayered messages that extend beyond a woman’s

eating habits and critically comment on her body, her personality, and ultimately her self-

worth.

Disappointed today after a conversation with my friend Ellie—the friend who has

somehow liberated herself from the cult of thinness, the one I can mentally lean on when

I feel the urge to suppress my hunger, run an extra two miles, enumerate every calorie

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I’ve eaten today.. Ellie, only a few years older than I, has courageously been through the

body image jungle many times. Sometimes I see her snack on edamame and almonds;

other times, a large Twix candy bar. Sometimes, she wants to jog together at 7am on

Saturdays; other times, she wants to lounge unproductively all day and get together for

burgers and fries later. No matter what mood she is in, Ellie does things to feel good—

someone who taught me through conversation and example that ‘skinny’ is not a

character trait, relentless exercise is not a justifiable form of corporal punishment, and

eating is not a sin. In her eyes, we are here to relax, enjoy, and indulge.

How many times I’ve heard her say “Who cares?” while laughing off another

Saturday night of pizza and ice cream? How often have I listened in peaceful awe at her

wisdom that makes what I’m feeling seem like less of a crisis, and a lot less lonely. Ellie’s

stories give me hopeful assurance that I, too, will exit this ‘phase’ and stop thrashing

through the body-bashing bayou.

And here she was, as I ate my veggie-hummus wrap, Ellie eyeing my lunch with a

subtle smugness all too familiar to me, and telling me she has been eating only 1,200

calories a day, going to spin class twice a week, and having an apple—if anything—for

dinner. Ellie has lost four pounds in the last 10 days. Her glee is palpable; her current

surge of willpower effortlessly tramples over any hint of desire for my latte.

At a loss for other words, I offer her eager countenance the congratulations and

praise it greedily seeks, gently tell her to not eat any less than she is, and, against my

will, tell her she should “ride the wave” of motivation while she can, watch the scale

number drop. Secretly, a part of me deflates: the part of me that looked up to Ellie,

idolized her sunny outlook on life’s enjoyable bounty, and sought support from her rock-

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like sense of self-worth, feels that rock start to crumble beneath me. Even Ellie, with her

upcoming wedding and summer abroad, cannot always resist the call to calorie

confession in the name of losing weight. Even Ellie still trudges through the jungle.

- Researcher’s personal journal, 3/15/2011

108

CONCLUSIONS

Passing magazines back and forth at coffee shops, on trains, at the office, women

exchange them like friendship currency. When I was an intern, a coworker with a dozen

subscriptions would smilingly drop a whole stack on my desk for me, like homework.

Here: read, study. Learn what it means to be a woman in America. What to buy, how to

dress, what to cook, how to look. Their inviting covers, smooth skin, alluring headlines

like promises from a magical elixir, we must have them. They are an item of accessible

privilege, an affordable extravagance, no more necessary for survival than a bag of

M&Ms. Even as we joke, “Here’s some trashy reading for you,” we deliver these (anti-

care) packages to one another, unintentionally endorsing their messages. A passport to

womanhood, and an ambassador of friendship, we justify them by our collective

acceptance, and the magazine escapes criticism and suspicion.

What we need from feminism now—what we need from each other—is the gift of

that ‘soul sleep’ where we retake our energy, and learn what no magazine, no high

school health class, no internship teaches us: to nurture ourselves. We need to bond with

the word ‘no,’ reject the impossible beauty standards that only distract us, and ask

ourselves if wifehood, motherhood, and homeowner are roles we truly want. Right now,

our glossy pamphlets inculcate us with the very messages that make us tired, disguised by

new headlines. It’s like the old parable: if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.

We buy each other coffee, join gyms together, cover for one another when we are behind

on projects. We give each other stop-gaps, band-aids for the gaping holes of our energy

drains. We feed each other—for a day.

But, if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

109

We need to teach each other to live.

While in the final days of drafting this work, a tremendous movement took place

that not only underscored the importance of studying women’s magazines, but offered the

brightest ray of hope for the future of women and their relationships with their bodies.

The MissRepresentation organization, producer of the documentary film by the same

name, partnered with other media activist and feminist groups to run the three-day

KeepItReal Challenge. Mobilizing women via social media—Twitter, Facebook, and

Instagram, a photo-sharing website—millions of women around the world blogged,

posted pictures, and sent messages to women’s magazines, challenging their editors to

commit to printing one un-retouched image per month. Women called for magazines to

do more to help curb the negative discourse on the shape, size, and significance of

women’s bodies. Vogue, Marie Claire, and Lucky magazines responded positively to the

movement, though none made outright commitments to it. But the most motivating and

hopeful part of this online movement was reading the inspiring words of women shouting

out to the world that they love their bodies and want other women to love themselves,

too. The network of support weaved by this massive exchange of experiences, thoughts,

and affirmations felt like a certain and unstoppable dawn in the darkness of women’s

battles with dieting, food, and their reflections. Women declared their beauty, not in spite

of their “flaws,” but because of their uniqueness. Women chose to express gratitude for

all their body lets them do, rather than lament what it does not look like. Women

rejoiced.

In a culture where “fat talk,” degrading one’s body in conversation, has become a

social norm (Britton et al., 2006), the deluge of positive, body-loving messages from this

110

movement was particularly breathtaking. Research shows women feel they are expected

to self-degrade and bad-mouth their bodies in conversation. Communicating body

dissatisfaction regularly has become a symbol of femininity, a sign that a woman is a part

of the club. With vigilance, perhaps this can be reversed if women continue to recognize

and openly reject the media’s perpetuation of a thin-deal that breeds dissatisfaction,

disease, and a diminished quality of life for all of us.

Movements like the KeepItReal Challenge not only affirm the necessity of

continual media study, but also anecdotally confirm the substantial existing literature on

women’s body image and media exposure. Countless studies point to the media, women’s

magazines and advertising in particular, as culprits of body dissatisfaction in women—a

precursor to excessive dieting or exercising, disordered eating, or in extreme and

potentially lethal cases, clinical eating disorders. How a woman feels about her body in

comparison to the images of other women she encounters everywhere, everyday, directly

impacts her relationship with food as she struggles to sculpt her shape and size to the

propagated thin-ideal.

Psychologists, sociologists, and physicians alike will confirm that “it is not

possible to talk in any meaningful way about…women who feel unhappy with their

bodies without acknowledging the connection between women’s experience of their

bodies and their eating patterns” (Blood, 2005, p. 123) as women use food to control their

size. Some women overeat to distance themselves further from an ideal they know they

will never reach; others pick at crumbs and spend hours on the StairMaster to reach it

(Martin, 2007). Whatever way it manifests in a woman’s life, the issues of body

dissatisfaction and disordered eating hinder, distract, and burden their potential. In the

111

words of Naomi Wolf, “if a woman can be made to say, ‘I hate my fat thighs,’ it is a way

she has been made to hate femaleness” (1991, p. 197). From a liberal feminist

perspective, this is a matter that deserves resources and attention, as still more women

than men suffer from disordered eating. The goals of feminism in this case are not to

redistribute obsessions with food and body size among men, but to put an end to a

cultural discourse that dictates the thin-ideal to women in an attempt to control the female

form, places iniquitous value on a woman’s appearance, and continues to perpetuate

traditional and biased gender roles. Ads that connect eating with sin and transgression

reinforce the idea that a woman’s unwieldy appetite must be controlled in order to

maintain a slim figure; ads that connect food with dieting, calorie-counting, and exercise

do the same, while suggesting that women select and eat certain food products with

dieting at the forefront of their minds. Finally, many food ads display women as the

grocery shopper, meal planner, and cook of her family’s food—responsible for taking

care of and pleasing others through food. No ads in this analysis depicted men taking part

in these activities. The messages in ads that food is the ‘woman’s realm’ emphasize

conventional gender biases, and adhere to traditional family roles for men and women.

Liberal feminism thus supports the idea that these food ads are part of a broader culture

issue: women’s enduring inequality in terms of media representations and assumptions

made about women’s interests and roles. Also, that a woman’s food choices can be linked

to her self-worth is a construct rejected by the liberal feminist perspective which asserts

that a woman’s worth be unstipulated by her appearances or other outward indicators. In

order for women to achieve equality, women must not be subject to judgments and

112

stereotypes, like the ones made by food ads that comment on a woman’s body or her

parenting in relation to her food choices.

Women’s magazines continue to be a subject of scrutiny for feminist scholars as

well as media researchers and activists. As feminist scholar Angela McRobbie (1997)

asserts, continual monitoring of these periodicals is of utmost importance to keep abreast

of the messages being sent to women and how their lives are being socially constructed.

Keeping an eye on these magazines requires examining the whole magazine, including

the relatively unexplored subject of food advertising. Given the sensitivity of the subject

for women living in a weight-obsessed culture, such advertising has gun-powder potential

for influencing how women think about and relate to food, and consequently how they

conceptualize of and treat their bodies.

As seen in this analysis, food advertising largely aligns with the publication in

which it appears: food ads in Glamour, while few and far between, communicated to

young women that food is less important than celebrity gossip, and joined SELF in

mainly advertising diet food products. SELF’s food ads associated eating with working

out, the magazine’s activity of choice for women—the supposed source of female

empowerment. Ads in Family Circle targeted women’s mothering and homemaking

responsibilities, and suggested that food was the path to giving and receiving love, taking

care of husbands and children, and at times, the way to realize her own fantasies. Food

advertising targets women just as the magazine’s do: first, the ads identify a woman’s

needs, desires, roles, and problems; then, the ads offer themselves—food—as the

panacea, taking on multiple shapes to be more than just food. Through the compelling

113

diction in these ads, women are encouraged to see food as a tool for carving the ideal

body, for escaping, for sinning, and for being redeemed.

When food advertisements do more than market available products, reaching into

women’s lives to comment on the size of their thighs, the energy in their personalities,

and their parenting skills, then food has been given a very loud and potentially dangerous

voice. Millions of women, myself included, already live with a body-criticizing, food-

conscious tape continuously playing in their heads. Most of us need food to have less of a

say in our day-to-day lives, not more—and especially not in magazines already brimming

with images of the ideal body and endless articles on how to get it. Women have enough

to do without also living up to food advertising’s version of appropriate motherhood, or

ideal workout regimen. Past research findings have come to the consensus “that

advertising creates unfair expectations in women because ads hold up an unattainable

beauty ideal” (Frith, Shaw, & Cheng, 2005, p. 67), most frequently in the form of a

specific body type, but may also exploit a range of women’s insecurities. Food

advertising proves to be no exception (Bordo, 1993; Wilson & Blackhurst, 1999), and if

its voice grows louder, more nuanced, and more ingrained with the already-influential

and powerful themes found in women’s magazines, it will require continual observation

as a part of the media landscape women must traverse, negotiating and balancing their

food, bodies, and lives.

This morning when I woke, for several long moments, I just lay. Marveling at how

well I felt…how whole I am, an immense appreciation and sense of wonder flooded over

me. I pictured my closely-packed organs, humming about their business, my heart

pumping leisurely and cheerfully. I felt my relaxed muscles flowing around my bones,

114

ready for action, content just as they are. I thought about all the hard work going on—

while I just lay!—looking at the light breaking in through the curtains my mother made.

How. Amazing. My body working so hard for me, completing a million miraculous tasks

a minute. I thought of a quote from architect and philosopher Alain de Botton:

“Astonishing and unnerving that our hearts haven't had a single break, not one, since

many months before we were born” (2011).

While I complain about how much I need a rest, I have never given a thought to

how much my body might really like a break from ye old taskmaster-me. And it does not

even get a say! I control the voice, too. And how often I use it to say—no, not right now.

I’m busy, go away.

But that is not the worst offense. Just for a moment, just a glimmer—I slam into

the utter absurdity that I have spent so much time criticizing, verbally and mentally

disparaging this unimaginably intricate body that silently follows my every command,

facilitates every thought and ambition.

This body that lets me run, swim, dance, sing badly, laugh loudly— that makes it

possible for me to walk my dog, hug my father, listen to my grandmother, kiss my

boyfriend. This body that has tasted Italy, climbed Montana, and soaked in the Atlantic.

Just for a moment…just a glimmer—but it was there! A glimpse into a life spent

loving this body, and living in humble gratitude and wonder for all it does. All it lets me

do. I start to wash away the stains of criticism from my mind. I start packing up the junk

the body image beast moved in with, scales, calories, and inadequacies based on false

realities. I let the marks from my pinching fingers fade from my skin, and I find there is

another way to be. - Researcher’s Personal Journal, 5/5/2012

115

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