Scientific analyses of women representation in men's magazines in the context of gender roles

Gender is the label that is attributed to genera by the society, apart from biological features. It is a label that tells women to stay at home and take care of her children and also tells men not to cry even if they lose someone they love or get hurt. These are the labels that have effect on the genders in terms of social forms and value judgements. Mass media and advertisements are the tools which impose judgements and patterns to individuals. In the age of consumption, every advertisement in written and visual media tells women and men what to wear, how to behave, how to talk and where to go. While shaping these points of people's lives, they also shape the gender roles in society. The consumption need of individuals never decreases. Popular culture and the need of consumption affect each other. At this point advertising works to prove that the need for consumption is an important and vital need for the individual and convince the individual. From the beginning of the researches about females to the present day, all theoretical studies show that women are often shown as a sexual commodity for sales and persuasion. This study also focuses on this assumption and aims to examine the representation of female image in advertising in male magazines and to examine how women's social role is handled in advertising in these journals. For this purpose, Esquire and GQ of lifestyle magazines were analyzed. In the men's magazines mentioned above, each advertisement containing women representation was interpreted relying on the facts of semiotics. As a result of the study, it has been observed that there have been some changes in the representation of women in advertisements over the years. These observations are presented in numeric data in the conclusion part.