THE US REPORT

by Rebecca Day

Since I was a teenager, I’ve read Cosmopolitan Magazine. The articles, quizzes, and tidbits of information about relationships, sex and beauty made me feel like a more enlightened woman. For years, the Cosmo motto, ‘Fun, Fearless Female,’ represented the ultimate woman I thought I wanted to be. However, every time I would read a new issue, I always came across different parts of the magazine that would strike a raw nerve. Then I received a failing mark on a quiz, implying I needed to loosen up. I decided that letting a magazine influence how I should behave, based on what type of woman is acceptable to an editorial board, was no longer the right path for me.

Though Cosmo has always been a crusader for women and their position in the world, I never truly felt like I could relate to the magazine. Articles and sidebars like “Fascinating Facts About Rich Guys”(July, 2008) and “He’s Hot…but You Have a Boyfriend: How to Curb the Urge to Cheat”(Feb. 2009) didn’t interest me or represent me. I began my relationship with the magazine as a source of entertainment. But after months of reading it, I realized I was beginning to take the quizzes and articles about love and dating to heart. The articles that told women what to do to get men to worship them, and how to be just bitchy enough, became a textbook for how to transform myself into a girl that guys would love.

But what many people don’t realize is that the constant guidance on how to tweak your personality and style so that men will knock at your door illustrates how little women and men have changed. Most of the pages are devoted to how to flirt with a guy in a bar, or how to get a guy to propose. The ‘Fun, Fearless Female’ is really the woman whose main purpose is to preen herself so that she lands the perfect man. A few pages are devoted to finding the right job and managing one’s money, but the majority of the magazine content tells readers how men and women think about dating.

Towards the end of football season, as the playoffs came to a close, Cosmo featured an article with a female chef advertising her best Super Bowl snack food. The article began with the chef stating that normally she disliked sports, but Super Bowl was the perfect time for her to break out her best snack foods. There were other articles telling girls how to get ‘their man’ to stop watching the game and start listening to them. Considering those instructions, the snack foods article made me feel like I was reading an article written by a stereotypical housewife from the 1950s. Yes, including a page or two about how to make the best Super Bowl food is great, but including a female chef who doesn’t care for sports but loves cooking is a little outdated. I was interested in the game.

I understand that many women refer to Cosmo as ‘the bible,’ but I don’t see how flattening your stomach and trying to make a one night stand into a lasting relationship can be classified as a religion anyone would want to follow.

Suffragist "Mrs. Suffern," holding sign; crowd of boys and men behind in a 1914 photo. Since that time much has changed, yet much remains the same. From the George Grantham Bain Collection, US Library of Congress.Stereotyping has been a mainstay of sexism since the beginning of time. The fact that the top selling women’s magazine contains articles about topics like why men are more likely to cheat during certain times of the year says a lot about how little the female gender has advanced in terms of social standards.

Instead of reading articles about sex and decoding a man’s body language, a few more articles about women within the workplace, politics, and the individual woman would be a breath of fresh air.

To me, a ‘Fun, fearless female’ doesn’t spend her time obsessing over how to transform her life, she goes out and does it on her own terms. That female can’t be found within the pages of Cosmo—one big reason I’m no longer a ‘Cosmo Girl.’