Media Semiotics: An Introduction, Second Edition by Jonathan Bignell 2002

"Magazines contain ads, editorial material contains ads, the front covers of magazines are ads for the magazine itself, editorial material 'advertises' mythical masculine or feminine identities to readers, and to complete the circuit, magazine publishers advertise the spending-power of their typical readers to advertisers in order to attract more ads. This emphasis, as we shall see, has major implications for a semiotic analysis which investigates how magazines relate to ideologies of consumerism and to ideological representations of masculine and feminine identity."

"Women's magazines delimit the shape of what Winship (1987) calls a 'women's world'. Winship argues that this world is mythical. a construct built out of signs: 'the woman's world which women's magazines represent is created precisely because it does not exist outside their pages."

"The semiotic codes of women, magazines work to construct a mythic world of the feminine, which compensates for the lack of a satisfying social identity for real women."