YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY?

hinner thighs, better sex, more money, less guilt -- all in a designer outfit for under $100. In the world according to the checkout-counter headlines, that is what every modern woman really wants. Oh, yeah, and a great-looking guy who's willing to commit to marriage and family when she's good and ready.

Scan the headlines for just one month's worth of the most popular magazines aimed at single, working women: "Are sex hang-ups sabotaging your love life?"; "18 signs he'd be great to sleep with"; "The secrets of men: What turns them on, what terrifies them, what they yearn for"; "5 sex wreckers and how to overcome them"; "Sex to write home about"; "How to find his G-spot."

Have you wandered into an adult bookstore, or is this how the average woman really spends her time?

Our Sunday Visitor sent identical copies of four relatively typical women's magazines -- Cosmopolitan, Redbook, New Woman and Jane, a new publication targeting Generation Xers -- to two experts on society, values and women's roles, asking them to comment on how these magazines portray women and shape attitudes.

"The paradox of American society that's being revealed here is that in a time when women are supposedly less defined by their gender than ever before, they're more obsessed with succeeding in the sexual marketplace," said Maggie Gallagher, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values in New York City and a nationally syndicated columnist.

"The argument that was made 30 years ago was that women are obsessed with beauty because the only hold they have is marriage, so they need to get a man. The interesting thing is that now that that is no longer true, that single women are not stigmatized, that you have choices about whether to marry and more choices in careers than women typically had 30 years ago, women seem to be even more focused on their bodies and their physical appearance than ever before."

Gallagher said that is due to "a culturally unregulated sexual marketplace" where the only goal is to find a sex partner. Gone is the period of courtship--or even a pretense of courtship, she said. Now the name of the game, at least according to these magazines, is sex.

"Young women are struggling to get a sense of their identity as a woman, and what we say as a culture is that there are no men and women. There are only people out there. At the same time, we have systematically attempted to remove any rules around the sexual act at all. That puts women at an enormous disadvantage," Gallagher explained.

"They're under enormous pressure to prove that they're attractive women by getting men to sleep with them. It's just kind of a pathetic equation."

But wait a minute. Someone is buying these magazines. In fact, lots of young women -- and many teens -- are grabbing up copies as soon as they hit the stands. Surely, they're not all pathetic.

After all, who wouldn't slip a copy of Cosmopolitan into their shopping basket to learn the"25 ways to get a man into a rock-solid relationship"? And how could anyone resist Mademoiselle's promise of "7 ways to relax fast" or Redbook's "One thing a wife should do for love. "

"I know feminists who tread Cosmopolitan," said Gallagher. "This transcends your particular set of political principles because the human need for affirmation of your sexual being is in-built. We are all born with the desire to feel that we are a successful man or woman. Right now we live in a society where the only way to get that sense of your own sexual identity is to have sex."

The obvious question is whether magazines are just following society's lead or actually creating demand and forcing trends?

Gallagher, who said the magazines reflect an "underlying social reality" but do not cause it, compared the magazines to television's "Seinfeld" and "Friends," saying that, like the characters in the popular sitcoms, people who regularly read the publications "have no great purpose" in life except to entertain themselves.

"There's no sense that your life is precious and it's important how you spend it and that how you act has consequences for yourself and others," she said. "It's very much a very short-term, self-focused life, which you would think would start to pall very soon."

Laura Garcia, who teaches philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey, agreed, saying that the magazines are extremely self-absorbed."

"The whole focus is on myself -- my body, my health, my looks, my sex appeal, my makeup, my nails. It's an incredibly superficial view of the world. When I looked at them, I thought of that song, 'I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world. Made of plastic. It's fantastic, "' Garcia said.

"Your mind is on vacation here. There's nothing here except the body, our appearance and sex and a sort of effort to pretend that we're just like men and all we care about is a good time in bed -- and the more often and with the more people the better."

Both Garcia and Gallagher referred to the magazines as "pornography" for women that use photos, stories and even question-and-answer columns more for titillation than for information.

"The idea that this is what women want, all that pretense -- it's just absurd. I am sure men would be delighted. This is written for men," said Garcia.

That's not the first time that issue has been raised. Just look at the covers, especially Cosmo with its notorious photos of busty beauties in low-cut getups. An article in a recent issue of Cosmo, in fact, was written by a man who confesses that he loves women's magazines.

"Many a man has flipped through women's mags at the newsstand or the dentist's office, hoping against hope to find a photo essay on sorority-house slumber-party lingerie," he writes, adding that beyond the "eye candy" are stories that "offer a tantalizing look at all the girls I was trying to score with."

Are these women's magazines, or turn-ons for recovering adolescents? If they're the former, shouldn't there be something more? Well, sometimes there is. Often there are health-related articles that might spur a reader to have a breast lump checked or keep an eye on a dangerously slim daughter -- although even those articles can be called into question.

For instance, Cosmo's article for Breast Cancer Awareness Month was illustrated with a full-page photo of a glamorous young model, naked except for a strategically placed hand. Facing her was an equally naked beefcake of a guy. Neither of them looked as though they were preparing to discuss a serious women's health issue.

The anorexia articles that appeared in almost every publication could fall into the "I-believe-the-magazine-doth-protest-too-much" category. Although all of them stressed again and again how magazines do not cause women and girls to take dieting to dangerous extremes, it is hard to get past the pages of fashion models who look near starvation, at best.

"They talk about little girls who don't eat, the dangerous diet craze," said Garcia. "Well, what do they expect? The entire focus is on that. It's about being appealing according to some model standards. They pick up messages from their moms and everybody around them, from these magazines and everything they see."

On some occasions, the magazines do print articles of substance on some social or political issue that has captured the national spotlight. But even then, Gallagher said, women are not given any credit for being able to make their own decisions or take an opposing point of view to that of the magazine.

"What has been universally true, even if you go back 100 years, is that women's magazines are incredibly directive. They give women marching orders on a wide range of issues in a way that's really very insulting," she said. "There's very little respect for their [readers'] intellect. There's a lot of celebration of their capacity to choose, but no respect for their ability to do so. "

If women are looking for practical information that might actually make their lives easier, happier and healthier, then their best bet is to turn to the magazines designed for "older" women -- the over-30 crowd, the women with husbands, children, jobs and a lot more. They're the old standards: Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle and the like.

"Once women marry and have children, the shift in the focus is really quite dramatic. I don't know if it's larger or nobler, but it's striking that the women who read Jane go on to read Family Circle," said Gallagher, who has written "The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love" (Regnery Publications, 1996).

"It's funny because you have these young women who are being femme fatales, and then there's this abrupt transformation -- if these magazines are any guide -- into women who are really quite traditional in their basic outlooks on the world," she added. "They're very concerned about their families, their communities, very home-based, regardless of whether they work or not."

Despite the apparent ability to switch from femme fatale to doting mother, single women who get a steady diet of the fantasy world promoted not only in women's magazines but throughout society could end up with poorer self-images because of it, Gallagher explained:

"These are certainly very degraded images of women, but compared to what? That's the sea in which young women find themselves. Are magazines worse than what you hear on the radio or see on television or see in the movies? No, I don't think so for the most part. We have a very degraded culture," she said.

"The easy assumption that this is what normal people think is probably the most destructive element of [the magazines]. It's not just that they're promoting something, but they're promoting it almost unconsciously, as if there were no other way of thinking about the world."

DeTurris is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor