Why women are used in magazine front covers

Naomi Wolf, an author and activist, published a book in 1991 called The Beauty Myth explaining society's views on how beauty is perceived and meant to be to the reality of it. She says that in media, pictures of attractive women are used to appeal to women and therefore to sell products to women because women have been conditioned by our patriarchal society to want to look like the current model of beauty. So if they see something advertised with an attractive woman, they are more inclined to buy it as they want to look like her, suggesting that that product makes you look like her. It could be anything from clothing, diets, make-up to music and technology. It’s a way of persuading the reader to buy the product that they are advertising.

A woman on the cover not only attracts females but it attracts males too. Using an attractive woman on the cover creates sexual desire for men which will then make them more inclined to want to buy the product. Taking all this on board, I have decided to use two males and a female on my cover in order to attract both men and women and to hopefully increase the readers who are women as there seems to be a lack of women readers in the music magazine industry.

However, I do not wish to continue in the warping of society’s views of beauty and therefore I will not use models but women in the bands especially since my age range is at a point where beauty is key and society has a lot of pressure upon them to look a certain way. It also shows that it is possible for girls to be in rock bands rather than just a male dominated genre in the industry. Though, this will be difficult to get a women on the cover with most publishes of the magazine as there isn’t many bands or solo rock artists. On the other hand this will make us look for bands with women in or solo artists which will also keep the magazine fresh and up-coming, adding excitement and questioning into the magazine making them want to read more and therefore buy it, so for how difficult it may be, it could possibly work very well for the magazine to keep introducing new artists to the music scene.