Players, Prices, Pixies: Exploring Masculinity across Magazines: An Abstract

Over the last 50 years, advertising in men’s lifestyle magazines continue to act as a medium to portray the evolving concept of masculinity as a reflection of commercial culture (Tan et al. 2013). According to Zayer et al. (2020), marketers and advertisers mirror these developments in their campaigns portraying multiple perspectives on masculinity to reflect gender (Tan et al. 2013; Zayer et al. 2020). This influx in mass media depicting different types of masculinity has led male audiences to re-evaluate and compare their own masculinity to those within media (Tan et al. 2013; Zayer et al. 2020). Therefore, the role of the male actor in an advertisement is of critical importance to image creation, interpretation, and critical analysis. The current study applies a comparative content analysis. This methodology focuses on how masculine appeals and objectification appear in the content of popular magazine ads. Findings contribute to the existing literature by detailing differences in masculinities and masculine appeals identifying which stable and fluid masculine attributes across magazine genre. According to these data, the ‘ideal’ masculinity across the sample that is communicated to male readers who construct their own variation of masculine identity and aesthetic through a process of encoding the advertisement content, retaining information, and later retrieving the information and replicating the public messages into their private lives. Findings presents descriptive evidence of masculine representation in the sampled public space. Future studies should investigate the psychological effects of advertisements on the behavior of men when exposed to advertisements over an extended period. Moreover, to gain a more comprehensive perspective of the psychological and social utility consumers derive from consuming advertisements, a cognitive processing model should be developed in relation to the masculinity appeals and target audience identity.