My mother told me not to talk to strangers: When is it acceptable to take advice from a women's magazine?

Dharshi Santhakumaran

The content of most women's magazines tends to be centred around the giving of advice to their readers. This advice appears not only in problem pages, but also in many of the features and articles.

This paper is based on data from interviews with twenty women and examines the ways in which readers make judgements as to when it is or is not appropriate to take advice from a women's magazine. My data suggests that readers are willing to accept the authority of the magazines to give "practical" advice, such as fashion and beauty tips. They are reluctant, however, to take advice on what they see as "personal" matters, such as relationships. I illustrate that despite the writers positioning themselves in the role of a sister or knowledgeable friend, readers do not always accept the authenticity of this position, instead constructing the writers as "strangers", who do not have the authority to give advice on "personal" issues.

This paper examines how readers draw these distinctions between the "practical" and the "personal", and as a result, how they define the relationship between magazine reader and writer. It concludes with a discussion of what this tells us about the construction of "self", and in particular beliefs about an "exterior" and "interior" self which seem to underlie the distinction between the "practical" and the "personal".