No, but really, what does it mean to be a man? An exploration of advertising and the construction of masculinities

The present study explores the extent to which the representation of masculinity in advertising affects how middle-class, urban men negotiate gender in their everyday lives. The study takes a two-pronged approach by first providing an overview of the trends in advertising targeted towards men in the form of a content analysis of ads in Maxim, Men?s Health and Esquire with findings that suggest contradictions in the representations between traditional macho scripts and passive and sensitive masculinities. Two focus groups with middle-class, urban men were conducted, exploring how the men engage with represen tations of masculinity and how these images shape their gender identity. As with the content analysis, the focus groups suggest that there is a difficulty in categorizing masculinity and that it is fragmented with a multiplicity of meaning.