Cosmo’s Gospel

In today’s “On the Square” column, I look at the magazine  Cosmopolitan and the gospel it preaches so relentlessly. It is, as you’d guess, not good news. “On the surface,” I argue in The Cosmopolitan Life ,

Cosmopolitan portrays in bright zingy prose the exciting adventurous uninhibited life of the sexually-free single woman. This is what their readers must think of themselves, or what they want to think of themselves. That is bad enough.

But below the surface, and not too far below it at that, the magazine deals with their target reader’s anxieties and fears, and her surprising need for male approval. The main impression the magazine gives of its readers is that although they may be liberated from societal expectations for female chastity and from any need to find fulfillment in marriage and family, they are not strong, independent women. They are women out of a fifties television show. That is worse.