Beyond the Mirror Metaphor

Beyond the Mirror Metaphor:
Magazine Exceptionalism and Sociocultural Change

By David Abrahamson, Northwestern University

The core idea which informs the concept of what might be called "Magazine Exceptionalism" argues that, in some important ways, magazines are indeed different from other media forms. If one thinks even briefly about newspapers, one comes to the conclusion that they are almost all geographically bounded in some way. If one thinks about broadcast, it is generally agreed that the medium is largely derivative. With this uniqueness of magazines in mind, I would like to (a) suggest a fundamental premise for further examination; (b) offer a handful of examples to support the premise; (c) speculate why my premise might be correct; and (d) take a few concluding moments, with your permission and for the sake of discussion, to undermine a fair portion of my entire argument.

My thesis is that what is unique to magazines, the essence of the claim to Magazine Exceptionalism, is that they not only reflect or are a product of the social reality of the times, but they also serve a larger and more pro-active function -- that they can also be a catalyst, shaping the very social reality of their moment. It can also be argued that magazines do this in ways that other forms of media do not.

Let us begin with a few historical examples. The first concerns a case in which a specific change in a sociocultural norm occurred which can with some confidence be traced back to a single magazine's point of view. The category under consideration here is magazines for teenage women. The first major magazine for teenage women was Seventeen, founded in 1940. As one observer once noted, it was the perfect magazine for teenage women to be read by the teenage woman’s mother. It was very chaste and very prescriptive, and all the other teenage female magazines that came after it generally followed the same editorial model.

Then something really exciting happened in the late 1980s. Another magazine appeared on the scene called Sassy. Are there any readers of Sassy magazine in the room? Anyone whose daughters read Sassy magazine? It’s gone now, because genuine originality does not guarantee economic success, and in the end it failed. But while alive, it was really quite an unusual magazine for young women. It was first published in Australia in 1970, with the title Dolly, by a somewhat unconventional company called Fairchild, who then brought it to the United States. If there was anything unique about Sassy magazine, it was that it rested on the premise that 14- and 15-year-old girls, middle class and upper middle class teenage girls, actually have erotic lives. And that was a terribly radical notion to be explicated in a popular magazine.

There were covers with cover lines on the order of "Your Virginity: Deciding When to Lose It." It drew an immediate reaction from the religious right and from groups such as the American Family Association, and the result was boycotts of advertisers products who did not withdraw their advertising. But suddenly, the world of the 14-year-old girl began to change, it seemed. And the effects of Sassy could be most easily documented by looking at what the other teen magazines suddenly saw what they had to do to remain competitive. Since that time, despite the swing of the general societal pendulum from liberal to conservative, all of the teen magazines today have a much, much more realistic point of view about the private lives of girls.

The second example is a macro-social societal effect. The story begins with Esquire magazine, and it goes back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. If we were transported back in time to that period, we would notice that there would be nothing in the daily press about such things as movie producers, television ratings, movie star salaries, etc. When there was a story about the economics of entertainment in the conventional press (as opposed to the quite thorough coverage in trade magazines such as Variety), it was always the exception. For instance, when the move Cleopatra cost a million dollars, it was a headline in Life magazine.

Now consider how much the business of entertainment, the economics of Hollywood, is part of the daily fabric of our coverage today. The question would be why? Why is there such an avid interest in the economics of celebrity? If you examine the record very closely, tracing it back to its basal root, you end up looking at the work of a single editor on a single magazine in the late 1970s. His name was Adam Moss, then in his late twenties. You might recognize the name because he went on to be the founding editor of a very well regarded magazine called Seven Days, and he serves today as the editor in chief of the New York Times Sunday magazine.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he had a senior staff position on Esquire, and, as a matter of personal interest, wondered about such things as: Who decides what movies get made? Who decides what actors get picked for what roles? Who decides what studios get bought and sold? How does the whole publicity machine actually work in creating and bringing the popular culture to the populace? As a result, he started to assign a series of stories about the business of entertainment. From those published pieces and those authors, one can trace other stories appearing elsewhere in the popular press. And it is probably safe to credit him and what he did with Esquire as having a serious effect on what we all regard as the normal content of the mainstream media today, with its unremitting emphasis on not only celebrity, but also the economics of the celebrity-driven industries.

My third example is a very large one. It speaks to both the decline of the mass-market, general-interest magazines in the late 1960s and the rise of the special-interest magazine -- the narrow-casted publications. The key idea is that this transformation not only reflected changes going on in society at the time. In addition, I would also argue, the rise of the special-interest magazine at that point was actually a catalyst, furthering a process that was already taking place. Such magazines have a special role in their readers’ lives, constructing a community or affinity group in which the readers feel they are members. Since many of the publications have as their central subject avocational pursuits, the magazines clearly served to encourage readers to be more active in their leisure interests. In many ways, these magazines not only are a product of the fractionalization of culture that took place at that time, but also drivers.

So the obvious question arises: Why might all this have happened? Why might magazines command this privileged position? I would offer a number of reasons: The first point is that magazines enjoy a unique closeness with their audience. If you think about the concept of "journalistic distance" -- the ideational distance between the producer and the consumer -- or look at the relationship of the magazine journalist to his or her readers, and then contrast it with a similar consideration in the newspaper world, something special is apparent. The editors and writers of magazines share a direct community of interest with their readers. They are often, indeed literally, the same people. There is no journalistic distance.

Another point: the editorial content of magazines is often specifically designed by its editors and looked to by its readers as something that will lead to action. It is not information for information’s sake. It is information that will allow the reader to do something -- and in many cases, to do something better. In many cases much of magazine reading is essentially avocational or "ludenic," and as people have or seek more leisure time, the connection to what they read may be stronger.

And now, with your permission and simply for the sake of the discussion which I hope will follow, I would like to close with a few thoughts that challenge my own position.

The first problem with my thesis is the whole matter of causality. How can we ever prove that one thing ever causes another thing? In my examples above, magazines have taken a particular editorial approach and, before long, there seem to be at least suggestive evidence that society has changed. There is, in effect, coincidence, but the provision of a final proof has as yet eluded me.

The second problem is that it is very difficult to discuss such matter and avoid the tiger pit of tautology. We speak of the effects that the media -- in our case, magazines -- have on society. But often the best evidence one can come up with for the effect of a certain media is manifestations in other media. It is very difficult to break the circularity. Perhaps the heart of the matter is that in a media-saturated culture, it becomes ever more difficult to separate what the media is doing from what the culture is doing. In many ways, culture itself has become defined by its media.

And I must close with a confession that while this is not a completely satisfying answer to me, I do hope it might lead to a further discussion of the issues -- a conversation in which I hope many of you will participate.

Thank you.