Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations

12 ‘Sweet sell of sexcess’: the production of young women’s magazines and readerships in the 1990s

Anna Gough-Yates

 

 

 

 

Magazines produced for women have provoked vigorous debate in recent years. Politicians, journalists, religious groups, traditional moralists, educationalists, parents, youth workers, and health workers, are among the many groups who have commented on the commercial femininities represented in the pages of women’s and of young women’s magazines. ‘Teen’ magazines such as 19, J-17, and Sugar, as well as magazines aimed at older groups of young women in their twenties and thirties including Cosmopolitan, Company, and Marie Claire, are frequently criticized for their emphasis on sexual content, and for the sexual explicitness ...