Magazine Report--Liz Herbst, Josh Kovacs, Lindsey Landversicht and Erin Scott

                Our group was faced with the tasks of scanning through a men’s and women’s fitness magazine. We had to categorize and count how many ads depicted certain features.  The first magazine we looked through was a men’s one. The magazine we looked through was called Flex and it was published in November of 2005. In the Flex magazine we found a total of 93 ads that fit into the categories that we were given. Out of the 93 ads we found we tallied up and found the percentages of each category and we discovered that 78% of the ads depicted dietary supplements, 3% of the ads were bodybuilding equipment and 14% of the ads were based on a knowledge system. In addition there were about 5% of ads that mentioned competitions and 0% rounded out the clothes and the cosmetics in the men’s magazine. I think we were all shocked on how many dietary supplements they put into this one magazine. After we found the percentages we then found examples of positioning the reader as inferior, promising of transformation and hegemonic masculinity.  The picture that positioned the reader as inferior was a black male standing and showing off his muscles while staring upward which makes him look better than everyone. The picture that showed transformation is a man that looked sad, out of shape and bad posture then shows him happy, standing straight and ripped. The picture of hegemonic masculinity was an older man that was in shape and happy.  Next my group and I had to do the same exact thing but we had to look through a women’s exercise magazine.  The magazine we looked through was Muscle Fitness and Hers and it was published in July/August of 2008. In the magazine we found a total of 18 ads that represented the categories given to us. We had six different categories to put the women’s ads in and we found out that about 17% of the ads depicted athletic competence, 33% was ambivalence, 17 % was sexy babe and 11% rounded out hyper heterosexual, all American-girl next door and soft pornography. Just a few examples of the ads that we picked out to represent the categories was for the hyper heterosexual we picked out an ad of a female flirting with males in the gym and for the athletic competence we picked out an ad of a female running  around to get her daily exercise in. Our numbers really weren’t that high in the women’s magazine because there weren’t as many ads as there was in the men’s magazine. Flex had more advertisements whereas Muscle Fitness and Hers had more articles than ads.