> There are a lot of things that are wrong about women's fashion (fashion
> design is also a very male-dominated profession) and women's fashion
> magazines (see, for instance, Liza Featherstone, "Faking It: Sex, Lies,
> and Women's Magazines," <http://www.alternet.org/story/ 12543/>), but
> one thing that women's fashion magazines do and that Hustler and much
> of other straight porn magazines don't is to address women squarely as
> readers.
In my view, that makes these fashion magazines yet more effective ideological tools! Any system of stratification must shape the worldview and behavior of the subordinate groups just as much as it valorizes the dominant groups. (Fashion magazines directly addressing women as readers is exacerbating the ideological problem here!)
> The fashion magazine market in terms of production and
> consumption seems to be far closer to gender equality than the straight
> porn market, which overwhelmingly caters to men and neglects to address
> most women as consumers.
False analogy. Male models and male fashion are not quintessentially masculine: e.g., the ridicule of the metrosexual, gossip about gay male models, etc. Men paying lots of attention to fashion mags are stigmatized; women who pay lots of attention to fashion mags are not. Moreover, gender equality is more than creating markets with proportionally representative consumer bases. That's a strangely market-oriented definition for a Marxist! Whether or not a particular media segment has a large or small women consumer base is absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether or not that market segment contributes to gender inequality. (Largely women-oriented mags can effectively reinforce traditional gender roles, and male-oriented mags can have little to do with female subordination.) The crucial question is not "who is reading this?"; the crucial question is "does this content reflect and reinforce gender stratification?" Granted, a more difficult question, but that's what we need to analyze.
Miles