Images of powerful women in the age of ‘choice feminism’

Abstract

A number of scholars and journalists have argued that Western culture has become ‘sexualized’. Both women and men, they maintain, are highly sexualized in popular media. At the same time, scholars have examined the sexualization of women as part of a broader cultural ‘backlash’ against the gains of second-wave feminism and women's increasing power in society. We contribute to both of these fields with a longitudinal content analysis of four decades of Rolling Stone magazine covers. First, we analyze whether both women and men have become more sexualized over time and, if so, whether such increases have been proportionate. Second, we examine whether there is a relationship between women's increasing power in the music industry (as measured by popularity) and their sexualization on the cover of Rolling Stone. In the first case, we do not find evidence that US culture as a whole has become sexualized, as only women – but not men – have become both more frequently and more intensely sexualized on the cover of Rolling Stone. In the second case, we find evidence that sexualized images may be part of a backlash against women's gains since, as women musicians' popularity increased, they were increasingly sexualized and under-represented on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Keywords:

• gender
• media
• sexualization
• feminism
• popular culture
• body

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Connell's (1987) and Riviere's (1929) studies provide micro-level insight to show how sexuality is ‘done’ by individuals. Our paper, in contrast, argues for the need to go beyond what individuals ‘choose’ in order to highlight some of the broader forces that shape those choices. As a result, Riviere's concept of womanliness as masquerade and Connell's work on doing gender and emphasized femininity, while relevant in terms of background, are not used here since we examine meso-level social forces.