What do you think of this idea to do research on Playboy magazine?

Question

Hey everyone,

I have to begin an undergraduate thesis of 10,000 words in September, which involves carrying out some research. I've had provisional approval to look at the representation of women in lad's mags but I want to alter my idea a bit and would like to get some opinions and feedback on my new idea - is it any good? :-)

So, I now want to look at "female perspectives of the representation of women in men's lifestyle and softcore p**n magazines". My research questions would examine 1. What do women perceive to be the differences between these two types of magazine 2. To what extent do women consider such representations of women in these magazines to be empowering or oppressive 3. What feelings do women have regarding the representation of women in each of these magazines.

I want to hold a focus group with several young women where we would discuss magazines such as nuts and zoo (lads mags in the uk) and Playboy (softcore p**n mag). After this, I want to conduct several one to one interviews with women, including hopefully women who have modelled in some of these magazines. This should give a variety of opinions - those that think its empowering and those who don't like it. It would also allow for discussion of censorship, p**n, feminism in the interviews so I should be able to develop some interesting arguments.

The reason i want to compare softcore p**n mags like Playboy with lads mags is because I don't perceive much difference between the two so I thought it would be interesting to see other women's views on this. For example, softcore p**n is sold wrapped because you can see female genitals in it, but some of the poses in lads mags are explicit - so i could explore with the women perspectives on censorship.

I don't intend to write a thesis slagging off women who pose in magazines - i want to discuss also how many women find it empowering to do this.

What do you think? Am i rambling on here or does this sound like a good plan? It's a rough idea so i know it needs fine tuned, just wanted to see if you think its good or not! Thanks :-) xx

Answer 1

Sounds interesting.

Answer 2

interesting.i hope you will find girls who will not be embarassed to talk about this with a stanger....

Answer 3

An excellent research project, indeed!  Kudos to you for taking on an issue that, for many, is controversial and contentious.

Three things to consider as you fine-tune your project:

(1) Be mindful of the concepts a) empowering, and b) oppressive.  As these two terms seem to be integral to an understanding of women's perspectives toward their own gender in men's lifestyle and soft p**n magazines, it's critically important that those two words be clearly identified and articulated (concept to variables to attributes, etc)

(2) You may want to consider some graduated scale (e.g., Likert Scale) to provide for a reasonable gauge for measuring the subjects' perceptions (e.g., 1 to 5).  This allows for a wider range -and level- of perceptions to be captured and it also makes it much easier to score, analyze and interpret the data you get back.

(3) And finally, in your solicitation of a random sampling (if indeed it is to be random), please consider females across a wide range of age cohorts (instead of just "young women").  This allows for "age" in itself to be a variable that may impact perceptions -and, by default then, your findings.

I wish you the best in this project and I would like for you to consider keeping me on a list of people interested in your results -thanks.

Michael