Jan 32012

 

You’re probably familiar with this fake Cosmo cover, crammed with headlines overtly stating the subliminal messages that are not so subtly conveyed in most of the magazine’s issues. But, as anyone who’s ever read the magazine or even glanced at a cover while standing in line at the checkout, you know it’s not that far from the truth.

Whether it’s promising better sex, a slimmer waist or bigger biceps, these magazines cast our trouble spots onto their covers as a lure to hook us into reading them. Undoubtedly, lifestyle and fitness mags exploit our insecurities to sell more copies, but what effect does constantly being bombarded with these images and euphemisms have on our perceptions of ourselves?

Most of us look to various magazines for entertainment and guidance, especially the latter when they claim to be experts on a given topic, for example, fitness and health. Unfortunately, some of these magazines make you feel like shit on their covers while feeding you fragments of hope and encouragement on the inside. These glossy mags represent a strange dichotomy in our psyche — they’re constantly telling us how to be our best, but by someone else’s standards.

Did you know that years ago women’s magazines actually used average sized women on their covers? According to the Canadian Women’s Health Network, 20 years ago the average model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman, compared to a ridiculous 25 percent differential today. Now, this increase certainly has something to do with people getting fatter, but that doesn’t discount the fact that the media’s ideal model continues to whither away. Take a look at the comparison below. Exactly when did stick figures become the ideal?

[1]

 

Retouched photos of scantily clad models exhibit the central reason why women overestimate a male preference for thinness. It limits the feminine idea of beauty to specific physical characteristics, leading women to believe that they must possess these traits to get a man.

Ladies, you’re not alone in this game because fellas, they’re playing the same tricks on us.

A group of UCLA researchers did a study comparing pictures of shirtless men in magazines targeted to females vs. pictures of shirtless men in magazines targeted toward males. The result: (drum roll please…) The shirtless men in male magazines were massive in comparison to the shirtless men in the female mags[2].  Essentially, that dude you’re trying to look like in Men’s Fitness is bigger than the dude your potential girlfriend is actually attracted to.

Bros, these men’s magazines are depicting images of muscularity that, for the most part, women don’t find attractive.  And, this matters. A study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders looked at Cosmo and Glamour over the last 50 years and found that images of undressed men skyrocketed from 3 to 35 percent. Shocker: Heterosexual women enjoy looking at shirtless men[3].

At the end of the day, what we need to do is stop looking at magazines and TV shows as if they are a mirror into our future.  Muscles or boobs – both guys and girls incorrectly think they should have bigger ones.

Feeding into these images makes us easy prey for diet companies and useless supplements and drugs. Satisfaction has to be found within ourselves; every time we respond to these images we have to consciously wake ourselves up and remember that someone is playing a trick on us.

Ultimately, our distorted perceptions of what the opposite sex finds appealing has led us to live in the extremes—we’re all trying to be too thin, too boobed or too muscular, and it’s all too much.