| In this paper I will discuss Baudrillard?s approach to the relationship between contemporary culture and reality. I will look at the role of messages in contemporary magazines through the perspective of Baudrillard?s theories on hyperreality and simulation, transsexuality and mass media. I have selected as my sample, covers of magazines dealing with body image (4 women?s and 3 men?s magazines). The women?s magazine covers are all from 1996: Shape February issue, Chatelaine July issue, Self May issue, Flare March issue, and men?s magazine covers from 1996: Men?s Health August issue, Men?s Fitness May issue, and from 1994: Men?s Fitness December issue. I will look at these covers as an example of mass media that supports Baudrillard?s theories about hyperreality and transsexuality. |
| The headlines on the covers of my selected magazines suggest that body image is not real but manufactured and must be produced through tireless effort. For example, some headlines are: "Build a great body: powerful arms, strong back" (Men?s Fitness Dec 1994), "A Flat Belly Fast" "Great anti-fat foods" "Special Weight-loss issue" "Stop Losing your hair" (Men?s Health, August 1996), "12 new ways to build a better body" "Food you love (without the fat you hate)" "Best beach workouts" (Men?s Fitness, May 1996). In the women?s magazines there is a similar praise for weight loss, and focus on bodily appearance as an outcome of personal effort: "The truth about the new diet pills" Carbohydrates: Friends or foes?", "4 fast fat-burning workouts" (Self, May 1996), "Diet Wars: the fads/the facts" "Love your hips and thighs: 3 ways to work them sleek and |
| strong" (Shape, February 1996), "The have-a-ball workout" (Chatelaine, July 1996). These headlines, and the images that accompany them, invite the reader to replace the real with the hyperreal. Here we see that the virtual colonizes the real, and people in their lives conform to the simulacra, emulating models and crafting their bodies through exercise, hair removal, and plastic surgery to become cyborg-like. |
| Certain of the references to sex on the magazine covers clearly provide guidelines that lend themselves to simulation and the manufacture of experience, for example, "The ultimate sex guide" (Men?s Health), "Recharge your sex drive" "The Ultimate Sex Fantasy?" (Men?s Fitness) and "The Science of seduction: Do you really know what turns him on?" (Shape). These articles suggest that sexual interaction is something we need to learn in a calculated and technical way, rather than relying on instinctual responses and the magazines act as purveyors of sexual expertise. According to Baudrillard, "?simulation ? is the fading of the real and an attempt to manufacture it, in ?an escalation of the true, of lived experience? (Simulations, 12)?the cult of the immediate experience, of raw, intense reality, is not the contradiction of ?the simulacrum, but its simulated effect." (Connor, 56). The models for sexual intimacy described in magazines shape the way we interact and live our lives. Baudrillard?s point is that our scripts for living are all pre-constructed, all dictated and shaped by simulation. "Simulation takes the form?of manufactured objects and experiences which attempt to be more real than reality itself. (In Connor, 56). |
| One cannot help but wonder, what would our lives be like as real - untouched by those signification processes of simulation? We do not know because as Baudrillard claims, "the real cannot isolate or identify simulation, we can no longer isolate or define the real itself!" (Introducing Baudrillard, 115). For example the magazine covers give guides to relieve symptoms, physical and psychological, but do not discuss life situations or systems of oppression, that give rise to the symptoms, for example: "Secrets of Total relaxation" "Pain proof your back" (Men?s Health), "Stress relief in your own backyard" "Can homeopathy work for you?" (Self) "Tired? Cranky? Natural mood fixers" (Men?s Fitness), "Healthy Holidays: Kick fat, stress, guilt" (Men?s Fitness). The focus is always purely apolitical, personal, and generic ? it is assumed that people only need to learn the secrets and quick fixes for relief. Baudrillard claims today we are victims of an excess of protection and positivity ? "the unconditional "saving" performed by our technologies." (Vital Illusion, 81). Diet products and headache medications fix imperfect appearances and dispositions and shelter us from the anxiety propagated through our culture. In this way, these aesthetic technologies replace authentic health. Yet, underneath surface cosmetics, people die of new viruses ? poisoning from silicone breast implants, cancer, AIDS, and eating disorders ? anorexia or obesity. |
| In the images on the covers of the selected magazines, the men and women are similarly tanned, muscular, thin, hairless, and made to look flawless with strict fitness training, dieting, make-up, and airbrush techniques. As an example of photography from the postmodern era, Baudrillard contends, "?sexuality gets lost in the theatrical excess of its ambiguity and indifference" (Screened Out, 11). In exemplifying popular figures Madonna and Michael Jackson as "mutants, transvestites, genetically baroque beings, whose erotic ?look? conceals their gender indeterminancy" as ?gender-benders?, Baudrillard claims that the transsexual myth, with its androgynous, hermaphroditic variants, dominates over the sexual liberation myth. (Screened Out, 10). The captions on the magazine covers are primarily androgynous in content and appeal. Without knowing which captions came from which magazines it might be very hard if not impossible to differentiate the captions along gender lines. For example: "Build a great body: powerful arms, strong back", "A Flat Belly Fast", "Great anti-fat foods", "Special Weight-loss issue", "Stop Losing your hair", "12 new ways to build a better body", "Food you love (without the fat you hate)", "Best beach workouts", "The truth about the new diet pills", "Carbohydrates: Friends or foes?", "4 fast fat-burning workouts", "Diet Wars: the fads/the facts", "Love your hips and thighs: 3 ways to work them sleek and strong", "The have-a-ball workout", "The ultimate sex guide", "Recharge your sex drive", "The Ultimate Sex Fantasy?", "The Science of seduction", "Secrets of Total relaxation", "Pain proof your back", "Stress relief in your own backyard", "Can homeopathy work for you?", "Tired? Cranky? Natural mood fixers", and "Healthy Holidays: Kick fat, stress, guilt". Baudrillard contends that just like we are all potentially cyborgs ("biological mutants") we are also potential transsexuals, symbolically so (Screened Out, 10). Sexed bodies in the media and in the hyperreal mediated reality today become so similar that they are transsexual-like. This is an artificial product of change of the symbolic order of sexual difference, a play on the interchangeability of signs and on sexual indifference (Screened Out, 9). The transsexual is a play on non-difference and a form of indifference tending towards artifice (Screened Out, 9). |
| A look at the selected magazine covers exemplifies a kind of egotistical appeal in the medium to individuals who read the magazine. These magazines are focused, as the title of one such magazine aptly puts it, on the ?Self?. They epitomise the notion of self-help, self-consciousness, and self-obsession, with prescriptions on how to live better and how to work on body image in order to succeed. The self is constantly represented as a generic indifferent being almost transsexual-like. According to Baudrillard, in the transvestied regime the quest for identity and difference is found, as a kind of promotional identity which can be verified at every moment. (Screened Out, 11) Appearance is the dictant of what is the acceptable form, and what is not. The successful performance of fitness is what counts. This confers with Baudrillard?s description. "What we look for today, where the body is concerned is not so much health, what is a state of organic equilibrium, but fitness, which is an ephemeral, hygienic, promotional radiance of the body ?much more a performance than an ideal state ? which turns sickness into failure." (Screened Out, 11) The magazine headlines "Beauty, diet and fitness survey results: How do you measure up? What to do about it!" (Flare, 1996), and "Build A Great Body" (Men?s Fitness, 1994), emphasize the performance of fitness as an achievement of acceptable form. |
| In Flare magazine a feature entitled "Hair Now: Sexy cuts, colours and tips from the experts" tells us that there is an expert who decides the current trends, rather than fashion as an individual thing. Through the magazine, readers can learn the tips and secrets and become fashionable by simply following suit. It is not a creative but prescribed process. Chatelaine magazine similarly boasts "35 hot fashion deals" which readers presumably consume in imitating the models, thereby becoming hyperrealized. Baudrillard wrote that fashion and appearance in the transsexual era: "no longer subscribes to a logic of distinction? It is indifference. Being oneself becomes an ephemeral performance? We no longer pursue beauty or seductiveness, but the ?look?? It is not: ?I exist, I?m here?, but ?I?m visible, I?m image ? look, look!?? It?s a depthless extraversion, a kind of promotional ingenuousness in which everyone becomes the impresario of his/her own appearance." (Screened Out, 11-12) |
| According to Baudrillard, the mass media ?fabricate non-communication? and provide an excess of information, but cause us to lose access to real information and historical events (?Requim?, 169 in Connor, 54) (Vital Illusion, 78-79). The mass media process cannot even be potentially liberating or democratic because it is suppressed and controlled by the ruling groups, as an oppressive code, which denies response, prohibiting the audience from response (Connor 53). The media "confirms its audience?s muteness by simulating audience response, via phone-ins, studio audiences, viewer?s polls and other forms of bogus ?interaction?" (Connor, 53). In magazines, the simulated interactions range from advice columns to letters to the editor, as well as surveys, and quizzes, and horoscopes, and the editorial style which often ?communicates?, addressing or asking something of the reader. An example of ?bogus interaction? in the selected magazines, is a reader survey referred to in the headline "Breast size and confidence: shocking answers to our survey" in Self, 1996. This survey produces a representation of a unified group of women, giving them an identity, opinions, and desires. The presumed identity is a woman whose breast size is connected to her sense of self. Surveys that involve participation on the part of the reader mask the isolation of the reader and provide a virtual sociality with other women readers who do the survey and share her concerns. The survey results recreate a profile of the readership, which reinforces pre-inscribed gender roles. In the magazines the social becomes a simulated effect, and is not one produced through debate, democratic or liberating process. Rather, it is shaped by the questions asked in the survey and controlled by the answers already made up in the multiple-choice format. |
| Magazines, as forms of mass media have the ability to spread images of the ideal body type, generally with the aim to sell products. Baudrillard contends that "?all the modern media? have themselves a viral power and their virulence is contagious."(Screened Out, 13) Baudrillard explains that we are in a culture where bodies and minds are irradiated by the media, images, signs, programmes, networks, and signals "and, though that culture produces the finest effects, it comes as no surprise that it also produces the most lethal viruses" (Screened Out, 13-14). Our concern with image rather than real health produces lethal viruses such as anorexia, over-consumption, and non-sustainable lifestyles that damage the environment, animal and human populations. |
| In summary, I would say these magazine covers show body images and messages, which support Baudrillard?s theories of hyperreality, simulation, and transsexuality. They also demonstrate how magazines fabricate non-communication and create a simulated sociality that induces readers to participate in hyperreality. Of the postmodernists, Baudrillard is arguably one of the most fatalistic, leaving very little room for subversion, resistance or political action in the world. Just as Baudrillard claims we are potentially transsexual, he believes today we are transpolitical: "politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings, politically androgynous and hermaphroditic. Having subscribed to, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, we now merely wear the masks and have become in our minds, perhaps unwittingly, political cross-dressers" (Screened Out, 13). While Baudrillard?s position feels cynical and hopeless, perhaps there is some value in putting his theories to use in analyzing the ways the media works to distance us from our own differentiated experience and the possibility of ?real? action. |
| Works Cited |
| Books: |
| Baudrillard, Jean. Screened Out. Edited by Translated by Chris Turner. NY, NY: Verso Ltd., 2002. |
| ???, ed. The Vital Illusion. Edited by Julia Witwer. NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000. |
| Connor, Steven. "Postmodernities: Jean Baudrillard." In Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, pp. 51-60. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997. |
| Horrocks, Chris, and Zoran Jevtic. Introducing Baudrillard. Edited by Richard Appignanesi. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books Ltd., 1997, 1999. |
| Magazines: |
| "August 1996 Cover." Men's Health, August 1996, 1. |
| "July 1996 Cover." Chatelaine, July 1996, 1. |
| "March 1996 Cover." Flare Canada's Fashion Monthly Magazine, March 1996, 1. |
| "May 1996 Cover." Self, May 1996, 1. |
| Weider's, Joe. "December 1994 Cover." Men's Fitness, December 1994, 1. |
| ???. "February 1996 Cover." Shape, February 1996, 1. |
| ???. "May 1996 Cover." Men's Fitness, May 1996, 1. |
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| According to Baudrillard, in the twentieth and twenty first century, we find ourselves dominated by simulation: the use of models in all areas of society, and the collapse of the real with the imaginary, and the true with the false (Introducing Baudrillard, 108-109). Simulation, like a clone, collapses difference, replaces the real with the hyperreal, and resurrects myths of authenticity - threatening the real by simulating it (Introducing Baudrillard, 110). The hyperreal is informed by and replaces the real when the real imitates the models of the hyperreal. Today our realities are always mediated and built upon preconceived models, scripts for behavior, and even our perceptions are mediated through language. The physical world and our bodies are being altered through science and technology, and the way we live is exactly like science fiction, as we come closer to being cyborgs. Says Baudrillard, "The purpose (of simulation) is to mask the fact that the real is not real" (Introducing Baudrillard, 113). Just like Baudrillard?s example of Disneyland that acts as a mask to hide that the real America is composed of simulations, the magazines are similar in their effect, portraying a virtual world that becomes a hyperreal model by which readers attempt to pattern their lives, thereby masking the fact that people?s lives are composed of simulations. |
| Popular Magazines and Baudrillard's Theories on the Relation Between Contemporary Culture and Reality |
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