Idealised, Sexy and Dissolute – The portrayal of contemporary women in the context of American pornographic magazines (on the example of “Penthouse”)

Abstract

This paper provides an account of the representation of women in contemporary American pornographic magazines and investigates the role that stereotypes and idealized cognitive models play in determining how a woman – as a word and a concept – functions in the contemporary pornographic press. It is predominantly based on the assumption that the ICM of a woman is a metonymic model comprising several submodels. As a matter of fact, the ICM presented in the analysed material, actually does not have a complicated structure. We can assume that the “Penthouse” magazine clearly popularizes one kind of woman based mostly on the submodels such as LOVE3 AND SEX, BODY, PHYSICAL TRAITS and PSYCHOLOGICALFEATURES AND PROCESSES4 which take dominance over the others and lead to discriminatory assumptions and generalizations.