“What his willy wants you to know”: the construction of sexuality in women’s magazines

© 2016 Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Bennett FarhallThis thesis examines changes in the construction of sexuality over time in two Australian women’s magazines, Cleo and Cosmopolitan, focussing on four key feminist battlegrounds that have gained minimal attention in the existing literature. In doing so, it provides the most comprehensive longitudinal study of the sexual content of Australian women’s magazines to date. Taking a decennial snapshot approach, the thesis examines three magazines from the years 1973, 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2013, resulting in a data corpus of nearly 6,000 magazine pages and close to 1,400 articles, and covering the lifespan of the magazines. A feminist critical discourse analysis is combined with content analysis to engage with theoretical debates surrounding compulsory heterosexuality, female–female sexuality, pornification and the links between changes in the representation of heterosexual practice, feminism and postfeminism. Whilst there exists a significant amount of feminist scholarship that explores these concepts, there is a paucity of literature that investigates them in the context of women’s magazines. Given that these areas represent four critical facets of contemporary feminist theorising, the omission of these topics from previous analyses of women’s magazines represents a critical oversight in the literature. Ultimately, the thesis draws two central conclusions. Firstly, it contends that despite surface–level changes in sexual and relationship content across the data set, the underlying paradigm of hetero monogamy remains unchanged. As such, the thesis asserts that, despite a seemingly more diverse, empowered and liberated sexuality for women in the contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, in reality such feminist rhetoric masks an enduring model of sexuality, which rests on women’s sexual and emotional maintenance of male partners and their own self–objectification and self– surveillance. It therefore concludes that positive, active discourses of women’s self– reliance within the contemporary magazine content actually serve to mask significant inequalities between the sexes in such a way as to make them potentially more insidious and difficult to combat. Secondly, the thesis suggests that where more substantive qualitative changes in magazine content can be identified — in spite of the magazines’ enduring commitment to hetero monogamy — these changes rise and fall with the currents of the feminist movement. This finding implies a potential relationship between feminism and pop culture representations of sexuality, which has broader implications for feminist activism and research