Men and Women in Urban Music Magazines

Men and Women in Urban Music Magazines

Two Sentence Summary Findings
In three major urban music magazines (VIBE, The SOURCE, and XXL) women are shown mostly in suggestive or partially clad clothing, while men are mostly demure in their dress. Most men in these ads were dominant, while women were either shown as vixens or were seemingly psychologically withdrawn from their surroundings.

Previous Findings
In “Beefcake & Cheesecake” (Spring 1999, Journalism & Mass Comm. Quarterly) Reichert, Lambiase, Morgan, Carstarphen & Zavoina found that women are more likely to be shown in a sexual role than men in ads from six magazines ranging from 1983 to 1993.

Important Foundation Literature
The foundation that I based my study upon would be Soley & Kurzbard’s “Sex in Advertising,” (1986, Journal of Advertising) which used a similar coding scale as I have. This coding scale categorizes the dress of the men and women in the ads as demure, suggestive, partially clad and nude. “Beefcake & Cheesecake” found that the amount of sexuality women portrayed in these ads had increased over time.

Corpus and Method
My corpus included looking at every full page ad in VIBE, The SOURCE, and XXL magazines for the month of June 2006. When looking at the ad I coding the individuals in the ads as male or female. After gender, I classified their dress as either demure, suggestive, or partially clad. Then I classified the poses of the individuals as sitting, standing or reclining, and I also coded the view of the cover subject, if it was their head, face, or torso being shown. Both quantitative and descriptive analysis was used in coding these ads.

Findings
In these three magazine I found that men were shown in more ads than women, however when women were in ads they were shown as the object of sexual desire, vixens, or psychologically withdrawn from their surroundings. Most of the ads in these magazine were for clothing so the men were mostly artists shown as masculine creatures, while the women were actually “posing” for the camera. Of the 25 men that were in these ads only 3 were shown as partially clad. Each of these three men were pictured playing basketball in “hoping shorts” and no shirt. Although this is thought of as partially clad, it is however socially acceptable. The women on the other hand were mostly suggestive, with demure coming in in second place and partially clad rolling in in third.

Conclusion
In this study I found similar findings as the study above, however, women were not depicted sexually as much as the “Beefcake & Cheesecake” study. In these urban music magazine men are almost always shown in demure clothing, ( maybe because in the hip-hop-homophobic world, nothing else is acceptable). Women are seen as accessories, and vixens, similar to the music video world.