Study Guide for Gloria Steinem article "Sex, Lies, and Advertising"

This article is one that is important for us because it lays out some concepts about women's magazines that will help you analyze your Cosmopolitan.

Often I find that many students have some trouble grasping some of the key concepts in the article, therefore I am providing this study guide. I will not collect these, however I want you to use the guide and fill it out and bring it to class to have with you during our discussion of the article. You will be glad that you made the effort later on when you need to talk about certain aspects of your Cosmopolitan in your magazine paper, and you also never know when info from this study guide could pop up in some kind of quiz or in-class short writing assignment.

Before you start the article, it will help you to know some basics. Gloria Steinem is probably the most famous woman from the women's movement of the late 1960's and 1970's in America. This is largely due to her role as the founder of Ms. Magazine, which she started up in 1971. Ms. was the first feminist magazine in the U.S. (at least, the first mainstream feminist magazine to achieve national renown.)

Steinem wrote this article in 1990, looking back at the early days of Ms. Magazine and talking about all the problems they had with getting good advertising into the magazine. If the magazine couldn't get enough advertisers to pay to put their ads in the magazine, the magazine would flop. In revealing the problems they had with advertisers, she shows us a lot of interesting things about the way that most women's magazines still operate today.

If you don't already know the origin and meaning of the term "Ms." you should go look it up now and jot it down.

Ms. started out in the beginning as a magazine with ads in it. Several years later, after years of struggling to get enough advertising, the magazine changed to a non-ad format and it is still that way now. It costs more to buy the magazine now because it is not supported by advertising revenues.

The first page: Steinem starts with an anecdote about meeting a Soviet official. This was in the 1980's during "glasnost," the period when the Soviet Union was changing from a system of Communism (where the press was totally controlled by the state) to a more capitalistic system. The Soviet official asks Steinem, now that we in the government cannot control the press totally as we used to, how can we still control it subtly. Steinem replied that you can control it through advertising. Of course she is not totally serious, i.e. not really making a serious recommendation to this Soviet official. She is trying to speak out about how she sees advertisers controlling the press and doesn't like it. The rest of the article will explain in depth the many ways that advertisers control the content of the media, especially women's magazines.

Here is a list of vocabulary words in the article that may be challenging. When you read an article like this it is important to look up words that you don't know. These words are marked with which paragraph in the article they appear in.

glasnost (¶1)
euphemistically (¶5)
subsidize (¶11)
quid pro quo (¶11)
aesthetic (¶17)
hierarchical (¶22)
inclusive (¶27)
derivatives (¶28)
carcinogenic (¶28)
solicitousness (¶29)
disproportionate (¶30)
tenure (¶31)
demystified (¶33)
demise (¶49)
coup (¶52)		 elicit (¶55)
Kafkaesque (¶65)
junkets (¶75)
parody (¶76)
scatological (¶78)
chutzpah (¶80)
scion (¶80)
demeaned (¶87)
debacle (¶88)
harrowing (¶89)
afoul (¶90)
disparate (¶94)
usurp (¶100)
encroach (¶100)
prerogatives (¶100)		 suffrage (¶101)
inadvertently (¶105)
demise (¶105)
stipulated (¶108)
adjacencies (¶112)
disparagement (¶113)
breach (¶114)
logistical (¶118)
marzipan (¶119)
critique (¶122)
lucrative (¶123)
parity (¶128)
ubiquitous (¶147)
payola (¶148)
nonproprietary (¶149)


How does Steinem define the term "complementary copy"? (This will be important for you to really understand for your magazine paper.)

When Steinem uses the terms "editorial" or "edit" for short, she is referring to all of the content in a magazine that is NOT ads. A magazine is made up of 2 kinds of content: ads, and editorial.

When Ms. Magazine began, they wanted to have better ads than the typical women's magazine. Explain how.

As you read the article, jot down each time there is an example given of one of these 3  things:

I. Reasons advertisers were reluctant to put ads in a feminist magazine.

II. Ways advertisers coerce women's magazines to put IN content that is favorable to the advertisers

III. Ways advertisers exert pressure on women's magazines to keep OUT content that they disapprove of.

What were women's magazines like when they first started out in the 1800's? Do you see any similarities to today's women's magazines?

Who is Helen Gurley Brown?

What is the link that Steinem sees between Cosmopolitan's emphasis on sex, and consumerism? Do you still see this in Cosmo?

On the last page, Steinem mentions the "carrot-and-stick technique." This means using positive reinforcement (carrot) to get a result you want, or using negative reinforcement (hit with a stick) to to get a result you want.