For just $6, I had purchased a morally corrupting poison.
For just $6, I had purchased a morally corrupting poison.
B efore boarding a short flight, I did what I imagine most twentysomething women do: I bought a glossy magazine, Cosmopolitan. I’d never read it before — not even the battered and outdated copies at the nail salon — but I’m always open to in-flight entertainment and suggestions for my ever-growing lip-gloss collection. After I merely glanced at the headlines tucked between the seemingly endless advertisements for jewelry and body washes, it became clear that I wasn’t being offered harmless suggestions for a stylish wardrobe. For just $6, I had purchased a morally corrupting poison.
Editor in chief Jessica Giles introduced the Cosmopolitan issue with a short paragraph lamenting the “batsh** election season.” Giles prefaces an article about the “dawn of Black-centered fragrances in a stubbornly white perfume industry.” Pages later, the magazine’s beauty editor, Julee Wilson, complained that the fragrance industry is “super European and super white,” adding that “it seems like the fragrance business never got the DEI memo the rest of the beauty industry has doubled down on.” (She recommends eight perfumes made by people of color, but there’s no description of how any of them smells, so you have no idea which ones you might actually like.) I thought that, by the end of 2020, progressives had exhausted their ability to whine about white people and supposed racism, but Cosmo provides a fresh spin by decrying the devilish perfume industry.
Although Giles’s introduction praised “the possibility for young women to reinvent themselves — and, okay, take over the world — however they damn well please,” an article by Erika W. Smith bashed self-described “tradwives” who embody “ultratraditional gender roles” and produce social-media content that appears like a “pre–Feminine Mystique guide to middle-class white womanhood.” In other words, women can reinvent themselves however they like, so long as there isn’t a tenuous connection to anything traditional, religious, right-leaning, or white. Smith, Cosmo’s “senior astrology editor” and author of the book Astrosex: How to Have the Best Sex According to Your Star Sign, compared tradwives to women who describe themselves as “stay-at-home girlfriends” (SAHGs). Smith states that, “unlike tradwives, SAHGs don’t have any of the legal protections that come with a marriage license,” which might be important after a relationship split. Such a claim might lead to the argument that marriage is desirable and offers protections for women — but in Smith’s article, it doesn’t.
Maybe the reluctance to say anything positive about marriage emerges from Cosmo’s fatal allergy to sexual ethics. Cosmo includes a two-page piece by Nell Seiler, who “felt like a virgin again” after an eleven-year-long marriage ended; she provides an account titled “The True Tale of My Multi-Orgasmic Hookup with My Much Younger Handyman,” explaining that she slept with a 15-years-younger guy in his yurt while traditional Romanian dance music played. (Details are too scandalous to be repeated here.) There’s another article titled “Announcement: The Time to Masturbate Is Now” with the subheading “Seriously. What are you waiting for?” The writer, who advertises being “all about f***ing the shame away” and sells “erotic oracle cards,” states that there’s “something of a global masturbation gap” that might be attributable in part to a “lingering stigma or shame surrounding women’s self-pleasure.” Blissfully unaware of Christianity, the article asks, “Why aren’t all of us practicing [masturbation] on a regular basis?”
A less scandalous portion of Cosmopolitan on love and relationships featured an excerpt of Ana Huang’s The Striker, a forthcoming book about a romance between a star football player and a former prima ballerina; the novel should be reclassified from “romance” to “comedy” because it was laughably bad, largely because the female author was unable to write a single line convincingly from the male perspective. “Glossy black hair, creamy skin, light gray eyes fringed with thick lashes — she looked like a classic Hollywood star in the mold of Ava Gardner and Hedy Lamarr” is a sentence we’re supposed to believe a superstar footballer thought.
Cosmopolitan includes some interviews with celebrities, many of whom you probably have never heard of before. Singer and actress Dove Cameron, who has a new album, spoke about being “queer” and also her boyfriend. The centerfold featured some quotes from Noah Beck alongside sultry photos; he has tons of social-media followers and launched a clothing brand that specializes in “gender-neutral underwear.” There’s a long interview with the cover model Ashley Park, a singer and actress in Netflix’s Emily in Paris. Park beat leukemia as a teenager and, more recently, sepsis shock. Now she lives to the fullest by exalting herself as a victim of racism, stating that she previously asked herself, “What’s wrong with me?” And “the answer was usually like, ‘You’re not white.’” Park is dating her on-screen boyfriend, of whom she says, “I’ve never been with a straight white male who has been more generous or better to work with on a set.”
The magazine was not entirely bad, but it was wholly unimpressive. Over the more than 100 pages, there were only two decent articles: “We Need to Talk About Women and Concussions,” by Hannah Chubb, which addressed women’s brain injuries, and “Gen Z Doesn’t Want to See Your Baby’s Face on TikTok,” by Fortesa Latifi, which discussed exploiting children for profit on social media. But both were unmemorable because they lacked depth; you worry that the printed versions are unedited first drafts. (You similarly wonder whether there are any editors who organize the magazine, since there are recipes and instructions for edible “butter candles” that occur a few pages after an advertisement for an LED-light wrap to “tackle stubborn fat areas.”)
Women’s magazines can be dismissed easily as silly and vacuous. After all, Cosmo has an astrology section with predictions so benign that they apply universally, like you might make new friends. But the problem with women’s magazines isn’t their frivolity. Instead, the problem is that they consist of the views of far-left female activists who attempt cultural recalibration by promoting a depraved progressive lifestyle with the promise of empowerment and pleasure. The only moral framework endorsed by Cosmopolitan can be summarized neatly as do whatever you want, which isn’t a moral framework at all, and there’s an exemption in the fine print for right-wing women.
It is troubling that millions of women read this garbage, but even scarier that they like it.