It seems Dr. Baily of Northwestern University has provided supporting evidence for the hypothesis I presented concerning gender and attractiveness.
Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate  they get aroused by both male and female images,†Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation…”
– The New York Times (user: nobugs, pass: nobugs)
your magazine rack observation is partly correct….mass media supposedly reflects the public’s interests in their content, ….but also I think there are larger forces at work, such as marketing and advertising, and a general bias towards selling items and selling images of beauty/attractiveness etc. I’m not entirely convinced that by putting women and men on the cover of ‘women’s interest’ section magazines equals ‘women are interested in men and women’ so much as ‘the people who write these magazines think/say women are interested in men and women’.
of course i may be reading too deeply into something that is merely a lighthearted blogpost.
Yeah, it was lighthearted blog post.
Anyways, now that you bring up the issue, we have a chicken and egg problem. Do people like fashionable things because they’re told to like them, or do they like things without being told, and then fashion professionals pick up on that?