Magazine Covers as Controlling Images

 

While waiting in lines at the grocery store or walking past magazine stands on the street, a woman is bound to see a cover similar to the one above. Magazines are everywhere, and their covers often signal what their target audience, women, are meant to care about. By boldly flaunting thin bodies and spreading messages that women should “sculpt” or “slim” parts of themselves, these covers become controlling images. 

Patricia Hill Collins describes a controlling image as a stereotype that controls “dominated groups” by dehumanizing them and asserting their inferiority (Collins 1986: 517). Magazine covers that emphasize thinness and extreme self-discipline assert to women that they need to remain small, indicating submission and inferiority. Messages like “control your appetite” tell women that their bodies being classically hot (presumably under the male gaze) is more important than their own feelings or bodily needs. In striving to become the girl on the magazine, women reduce their own worth to what their bodies look like, therefore dehumanizing them, and are relegated to a submissive role. 

In making a woman’s worth entirely based upon her thinness, these magazines have the ability make any woman a “stranger” within her own culture. A stranger, as defined by Simmel, is someone who has both “remoteness and nearness” to an in-group, thus making them an objective observer (Edles and Appelrouth 2020: 312). While women who follow these magazines and the celebrities within them may all share their identity, they all have the potential to lose in-group status once they fail to conform to standards of thinness. In not being extremely thin, a woman becomes a “stranger” because she has the “nearness” of being a normal woman, but the feared “remoteness” of being looked down upon by society for her weight. A woman who experiences weight gain then becomes a needed symbol to provide conflict to the standard. Even Kim Kardashian, someone known for her body and beauty, isn’t safe. This ultimately furthers the controlling image by asserting that women who do not conform to society's standards of weight must exist outside of it, furthering the relegation of women's behaviors.