Throughout literature and from various disciplinary viewpoints, women’s magazines have been referred to as “guilty pleasures”.1 The recurrence of such an association is in itself intriguing, and it appears to nudge the intrinsic tensions – between pleasure and guilt, between desire and sublimation, between aspiration and mass culture – that are played out at several levels in and through magazine pages. I contend that these tensions are, in fact, productively leveraged by women’s magazines to promote their own, necessarily unbound consumption, fueling in turn ever more pleasure seeking and guilt.

Gendered Practices of Consumption and Genre Horizons

As Rosalind Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron recount in their panoramic historical survey of the women’s press, the rise of periodical literature aimed at women readers is indeed intimately tied to that of consumption: women’s magazines appeared in the 18th century, in the context of the expansion of a capitalistic model.2 These publications boomed in the 19th century along with capitalist industrialization, and as markets were increasingly segmented, addressing an audience of women also meant defining what “women” were, or rather ought to be.3 Therefore, the emergence of converging mass-market titles aimed at women can be located in urban centers of consumerism; these titles supported the budding sphere of marketed goods notably through advertising.4

This argument, tied to the democratization of print generally speaking in the 19th century, can be made in relation to all periodicals, which largely underwrote the development of capitalist modernity. Yet women’s magazines particularly emerge as a key site of and for consumption on account of their investment in “the instruction of femininity.” As cultural theorist Jennifer Craik argues, “desirable” femininity was to be constructed through consumption, which is also to say it was to be consumed, with magazines tying up morality, work, and pleasure in their discourses,5 as well as in their representations.

With such historical insights as a background, I would like to examine how significant changes in the scale and in the political and cultural implications of consumption (of goods and of related imaginaries) have contributed to steering the performance of femininity away from social norms and towards desire. Ultimately, I believe that it is at the juncture between consumer goods and cultural (re)production that the connectivity between femininity, pleasure, and guilt emerged – or, in other words, in gendered practices, genre productions, and the relational interaction between both through consumption.

By the post-Second World War period, mass consumerism was a total system encompassing political discourse, social models, and cultural representations.6 As this system boomed, markets became evermore segmented.7 The emphasis on pleasure advertised in women’s magazines was increasingly accentuated over work.8 Concomitantly, the levels of engagement with magazines were at an all-time historical high.9 I believe this is in large part due to their mediating function, of selecting and hierarchizing amongst a variety of goods. In that sense, it can be argued that magazines, at the time and in this context, fully realized the project that had overseen the formation of the medium: within the “democratic surround,” as Fred Turner terms it, they organized and regulated consumerism – along gendered lines.

When analysts at the time compared the surround to the one-to-many dynamics of mass media and of fascism, many found it to be enormously liberating. Even so, from the distance of our own time, the surround clearly represented the rise of a managerial mode of a control: a mode in which people might be free to choose their experiences, but only from a menu written by experts.10

Such dynamics would prove extraordinarily resilient, as demonstrated in periods of societal shifts – for instance, women’s liberation. Media theorist Hilary Radner has thus assessed the allegedly modern figure of the 1960s “Single Girl” in women’s (and fashion) magazines’ imagery:

The model may be free to wander but it is in a direction that serves the purposes of that which she sells. [The reader] buys a certain look that is presented as both immutable (an ideal) and the result of the purchase and use of goods that are by their nature evanescent, ever-changing. […] The Single Girl is ‘free’ to consume but her ‘freedom’ is constrained by the field of consumer culture itself, in which consumption is the single imperative.11

Leaning into the pleasures of consumption, women’s magazines have tied their representations of femininity to pleasure as well as regulation, be it, as in the 1950s, through social norms and moral imperatives; or, as in the 1960s onwards, through the expression of individuality and group conventions.

The example of fashion still serves, here: theorists (sociologists, in particular) have long teased out this interdependency between fashion and desire.12 I argue that the shift, from the 1950s onwards, from obligations to desire has had profound bearings on the ways fashion producers as cultural producers have interacted with their consumers – consumers who were, then, to be seduced. To this end, magazines’ pages appeared to set the perfect stage.

“Guilty Pleasure(s)”, or: How to Read Reception

Desire is the steppingstone of appropriating processes, which typically result in a magazine being bought; the latter is an invested practice, hinging on the relationship established between a magazine and its reader, in other words, on a ‘reading contract’. A reading contract is constructed issue after issue – since the press is predicated on temporal repetition – rather than on the satisfaction provided by individual features or even issues. A reading contract weaves a relationship, an anticipation, and a ritual. […] In the end, readers’ attachment to a magazine can also be measured implicitly, through the emptiness that its absence would provoke.13

Rather than offering my own readings of how pleasure and guilt are intertwined through magazine content – a process which would, at any rate, be heavily dependent on reception contexts – I propose to turn to some situated reception instances in which the two have been explicitly linked and discussed.

Several reception studies indeed highlight how the fulfillment of the desire serially constructed by women’s magazines provides readers with a form of pleasure – be it guilty or not. In fact, the notion of pleasure comes up in many studies dedicated to women’s magazines from the 1990s onwards, as an element contributing to their success, even in the face of blatant gender coercion. For literary scholar Ellen McCraken, women’s magazines work to establish a highly pleasurable consensus about femininity.14 Reader’s guilt, then, would derive from the realization of the exploitative dimension of these narratives; this, too, appears to be a dated phenomenon harking back to 1990s (post-)feminist scholarly circles – as the secondary sources quoted throughout this text demonstrate.

Janice Winship for instance, in her (self-declared feminist) study of English women’s magazines (1950s–1980s), underlines how the pleasure derived from her reading experience – which explains their enduring popular success – is juxtaposed with the rejection of the narrow models they propose, in the same, layered dynamic.15 The same can be said, of course, of other media staging fetishized practices of consumerism and femininity, for example cinema.16 The ambivalent pleasure found in the consumption of magazines themselves entails a reflexive, negotiated experience: “there is certainly an odd juxtaposition demonstrated so far of readers’ ability to take pleasure in magazines while simultaneously questioning that pleasure”.17

Another element in the consumption of/through magazines that has political ramifications is the site in which said consumption typically takes place: in the private sphere, in transit spaces, or in feminine spaces of sociability. Such contextual frictions bring to light another interplay between desire and repression, one that is particularly genre related: social reprobation. This dynamic is in fact ascribed to all gendered genre productions, as is the case, for instance, for romance novels.

Aside from their covers as displayed in kiosks, women’s magazines – as well as their imagery – seldom permeate the public arena. Like other forms of gendered and genre consumption, the pleasure and guilt derived from magazines are to be negotiated behind closed doors. Meanwhile, what legitimately pertains to the public sphere is very much determined by the discursive, visual, and textual framing of a topic in higher genres (such as news), that is, by “format markers” encoding content and conferring it value, or not.18 In other words, pleasure as well as guilt are the cornerstone of women’s magazine’s enduring appeal.

Indeed, such dynamics are very much fostered by magazines themselves, as their covers demonstrate. According to media scholar Mehita Iaqni, covers represent a material manifestation, in newsstands, of magazines’ function as commodities – which is how they enter public space.19 As such, covers’ main function is to define any magazine’s genre, and therefore to make them identifiable to consumers and, accordingly, “to construct, promote and maintain consumerism”.20 My own study of fashion magazine covers indicates that these are rarely representative of their inside content; on the contrary, they tend to offer a seamless surface which does not mirror the inner contradictions, or the miscellaneity of magazines’ pages and voices. In the magazine industry, cover production is the purview of the highest-ranking decision makers,21 who review each cover and frequently request adjustments. A number of specific codes also apply to covers (and not to the inside pages). Calibrated to appeal to the highest number of (potential) readers, these covers reflect a magazine’s profile and its place on the market, offering another illustration of how consumption practices are negotiated through media.

Format Affordances

Sustaining desire – and correspondingly some amount of guilt that follows its realization – is thus the modus operandi of women’s magazines, facilitated by their “format affordances”,22 that invite and juxtapose several possible modes of reading and engagement. Seduction, desire, and completion work in a cycle. Leslie Rabine, in her psycho-textual approach to fashion magazines, argues that magazines enact “fantasy as a structure”, oscillating between theatrical and real representations to offer readers manifold spaces for projection.23 For Jeremy Rifkin, desire is limitless – as opposed to need (which is limited).24 In women’s magazines, too, consumption can never be fulfilled and desire satiated, lest magazines stop selling new issues.25 And magazines are indeed uniquely positioned to feed into such continued, performative processes.

Douglas Holt notes how the success of any given imagery relies on imaginary horizons and familiar representations.26 Similarly, seriality and periodicity work to establish both familiarity and habit – and therefore continually renewed and immersive experiences. Readers themselves underline how unfulfilled-ness plays a role in their engagement with magazines.

A possibility that we must take seriously, having enumerated the pleasures of women’s magazines, is that in reality they disappoint, or that these pleasures are ambiguous. Some of the women who contributed to our discussions did express disappointment, along these lines:
Penny: if I read someone else’s, that I haven’t paid for, I usually find quite a lot in it, whenever I buy it I always feel dissatisfied cos somehow, you always, you flick through it, and you think, ‘Oh, I really wanted–’, you read the problem page, then you read this, that and the other, and then you feel slightly dissatisfied, I always think [U4].27

This quote unequivocally connects economic consumption and media consumption, and how the uneven relation between the two powers desire rather than hindering it. I contend that the oscillation between desire and deprivation is in fact fostered by magazines, relying on the fact that pleasure is always too short lived, fulfillment always lacking, or calling to be relived. In this way, what women’s magazines sell first and foremost is themselves.

In this regard, magazines – and magazine imagery, in particular, as their most potent platform of expression and projection – are eminently emblematic of the workings of mass consumerism itself, of which they constitute a microcosm. This no doubt explains why and how they have endured and, until recently at least, thrived.28

Simultaneously, this is also what makes them inherently heuristic as teaching objects and research material: fraught with surprises and contradictions, providing a glimpse into the social norms of a given period, and offering a taste of past guilty pleasures that are still relevant today.