Cosmopolitan is the best-selling magazine of its kind. And for good reason.
It’s doubtless a product of the ’60s era of rebellion and lovin’. Feminism went from rallying for equal rights to encompassing the rejection of women’s role as the “moral agent.” Premarital sex was shaking off its status as taboo, and the women of the ’60s were spearheading the initiative.
Cosmopolitan.com’s “About Us” section offers a little historical insight into the role Cosmopolitan had in American women’s lives. It was a magazine that encouraged women to take advantage of their new position in society as employees and as sexually liberated people.
Thus Cosmo lauds women for being independent and “fearless” — as it likes to define its readership. It is a magazine that claims to adhere to feministic qualities, saying it “acknowledges that while work is important, men are too. The Cosmo girl absolutely loves men!”
What may have started out as a magazine aiming to catalyze social change, is today just an agent that perpetuates the emotionally dependent female stereotype. Cosmo, in almost all its articles, reminds women that sex is the ticket to happiness. Not only that, but by being worthy of sex (and you can become worthy by reading the tips and articles Cosmo offers), you are given value as a woman.
While rooting for sexual freedom is fine by many standards, Cosmo crosses the threshold into anti-feminism when sexual freedom and sexuality define femininity. All the articles in Cosmo are not necessarily geared toward women in the workforce. In fact, according to Cosmopolitan.com, only 51.3 percent of its readership is employed full time.
Cosmo is a magazine specifically directed to white, middle-class women ranging from 18 to 34 and 34 to 39, according to Cosmopolitan.com. With articles whose subjects consistently address sex, men, female health and beauty, readers can’t help but think what is feminine is those very things. Because Cosmo’s main theme is men and sex, and because the magazine is directed at women, the magazine establishes a radically anti-feministic definition of women. Their value is merited solely by men, because all their efforts — looking beautiful, being healthy and being a sex goddess — are geared toward pleasing their male counterparts.
With a title as the No. 1 one magazine among females 18 and older, Cosmo is doing a great job and reaching, and preaching to, women.
Cosmo’s underlying principle is to support sexual freedom, but in fact, it limits women to that particular aspect of their lives.
First, it limits them by defining them as sex objects, things that can find all their worth in the level of their sexpertise.
Second, Cosmo tells a female reader that if she is not good at sex, if she is not aesthetically pleasing and if she is not on the hunt for, or allowing herself to be hunted by, men, then there is nothing left of her worth noting in this No. 1 magazine. She is excluded, on Cosmo’s terms, from the realm of femininity.
Another limitation is Cosmo’s negligence of minorities. Its targeted population is clearly — and almost explicitly — white, middle class females. Advertisements within the magazine do an even worse job at accounting for minorities.
If groups — black, Asian, Hispanic, lesbian, etc. — are left out of the magazine that aims to provide a definition of femininity, they are being denied acceptance by such a prominent magazine into the feminine realm. The skewed representation of white women reflects Cosmo’s almost explicitly stated view that womanhood is left to white females as opposed to all females.
Nonetheless, Cosmo does a great job at nabbing large audiences. And that’s great. Couples’ sex lives are probably greatly enhanced by the sexual advice given to readers of Cosmo.
But this sexual freedom that women have now, and which Cosmo lauds in nearly 200 pages of content monthly, has created great responsibility, which Cosmo largely ignores.
Cosmopolitan’s “About Me” asserts that it “is feminist in that we [they at Cosmopolitan] believe women are just as smart and capable as men and can achieve anything men can.” But when they have a magazine unyieldingly devoted to sex, both genders are reduced to mere pawns in the game of sexual hook-ups. Humanity becomes devalued as a whole.
This is not to say that women shouldn’t read and enjoy Cosmopolitan.
Women should read it knowing Cosmo’s purpose.
And then they shouldn’t take it too seriously.
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JJanowiak 2 years, 1 month ago
Whatever credibility Cosmo might have as a magazine that celebrates female sexuality is lost in the thicket of bone-thin models shot through a male's gaze and perpetuated by an advertising model meant to sell products ostensibly to attract shallow men to girls with pretty handbags. Ariel Levy "Female Chauvinist Pigs" thesis at work!
William 2 years, 1 month ago
I'm always happy to here the insight of a girl who sees through these detestable machines for objectifying and empty societal ideologies (of both women AND men). Women do not look like that. Women should not want to look like that. Women will not find satisfaction out of doing the things Cosmo says. Women with the views professed in that magazine are shallow, self-destructive, and vain. Men do not look like that. Men should not want a woman to look like that, or like anything but herself. Cosmo caters to a minor perspective shared by men who are shallow, self-destructive, and vain. Try to see past the glamor. They're selling poop on the store shelves.
TylerBranson 2 years, 1 month ago
So the idea, then, of your column is to say that, if you are reading Cosmo thinking you are getting a good steady does of intellectual fervor that articulates what it means to be a woman with all its racial, gendered, and economic inclusions, then watch out, because it's not? What consumer expects this from Cosmo in the first place? And maybe we should give the consumers more credit--surely they know it's more or less "low-brow." And, of course, the magazine industry, Cosmo included, has its shortcomings with its representations of sex and women--but to attack the magazine for its lack of intellectualism and not appealing to a broader audience (outside its niche market)--i.e., wanting the magazine to be a different magazine--is going at it the wrong way, don't you think?
jbirdwell 2 years, 1 month ago
Although you raise some really excellent points about what the meaning of feminism is and how racial minorities are underrepresented in magazines (which, by the way is a problem in nearly all mainstream magazines), you fail to mention some very important details. You briefly alluded to the fact that Cosmo's roots were in the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. Before then, women had to hide their copies of Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in their apron pockets while preparing a roast dinner for her husband. Cosmo offered an outlet for women that had truly never been offered before. Women were not supposed to talk about sex, think about sex, and certainly weren't supposed to expect an orgasm. I am so thankful for publications like Cosmo and women like Helen Gurley Brown (the first editor of the Cosmopolitan that we know today) who told women it was OKAY to be sexual. So yes you do raise some valid concerns about the magazine, but don't chastise a truly revolutionary publication that has really reflected a change in the way people think and talk about sex.