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A Feminist Reading of Men's Health: Or, When Paglia Speaks, the Media Listens

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Abstract

In this paper Bloom analyzes the popular magazine, Men's Health, from a feminist perspective, locating ways that the magazine participates in an insidious form of anti-feminist backlash. She specifically analyzes the magazine to make sense of how its writers discursively position women in their relationships to heterosexual men and how they use the voices of women who call themselves feminists to promote an anti-feminist, pro-patriarchy agenda. She demonstrates that the “health” of men being promoted in this magazine is a mental health grounded in the maintenance of male privilege and power.

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Bloom, L.R. A Feminist Reading of Men's Health: Or, When Paglia Speaks, the Media Listens. Journal of Medical Humanities 18, 59–73 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025610726434

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