Differences Between Male and Female Orientated Magazine Articles Essay

Investigating the Difference Between Male and Female Orientated Magazine Articles For my investigation I decided to take stories sent in by readers to the magazines FHM and Cosmopolitan. FHM is aimed at men aged around 16 to 30, while Cosmopolitan is aimed at women of the same age. I thought it would be interesting to look at the differences between the two formats because I read FHM quite a lot, and some female friends of mine read Cosmopolitan, and I have often wondered what and how many differences and indeed similarities there are between the two magazines. I was also interested in the different ways similar topics were portrayed for the two different sexes. It helps me understand some of the language and gender issues I dealt with last year in English Language, and that is why I chose a stories page, it tells me more about the people who actually read the magazines than the people who write them. The stories I hoped would reflect the people who wrote them, and therefore the people who bought and read the magazines. It is also interesting for me because I want to become a magazine journalist when I leave university. Doing this investigation allows me to take a more in-depth look at what kind of people enjoy these kinds of magazines, and also it gives me a chance to look at the way these types of articles are presented in magazines, looking at things such as layout. I aim to find differences between the subject matter of the letters, the lexis used by the writers, the differences in grammar, the layout of the letters pages in the magazines and the general tenor of the stories. I also aim to reach a conclusion as to what... ... and "freezing my arse off". These slangy informal descriptions are very suitable for the FHM stories but hardly sensible for the Cosmopolitan story. Overall the articles conform closely with my hypothesis. The variances in the tenor were often and obvious. The male stories also conformed to my hypothesis in that they were competing as an incentive to win a prize, whereas the woman was not. The subject matters also matched my hypothesis. The male stories use mostly a different style of writing to the female articles, and indeed these contribute to them having very different effects on the reader. I think that my investigation has been a success. I have proved many of my hypotheses and my aim has been met. There is a large difference in male and female orientated magazine articles, in both style and substance.