About 15 or 20 years ago, a book was published about the hidden messages in print advertising. In Subliminal Seduction, Brian Wilson Key theorized that the ads you see in magazines, regardless of the item they are pushing, have been carefully designed to evoke specific images and emotions. These images and emotions will then lead you to the product in question. The means by which this is done are subliminal; they can't be discerned consciously, but are seen and recorded by the subconscious.
Hold that thought - I'll come back to it!
I first became aware of Cosmo back in the early 1960s, shortly after Helen Gurley Brown took over as Editor. She had just published Sex and the Single Girl, which was a HUGE best-seller, and the editors of Cosmopolitan decided that she was just the person to revitalize their somewhat tired women's magazine. Until then, it had been on a par with Redbook - a staid, text-heavy housewives rag, full of home-making tips, recipes, child-rearing information, and not much for the single woman. Face it, in those days, single women - girls - were to be pitied - they were simply women who hadn't gotten married yet, wives-in-waiting, if you will. Getting married, preferably to a man who could support you in stylish comfort so you wouldn't have to work, was the highest value for a woman; they had no value as singles. They were secretaries and nurses only because those were the best ways to find husbands, and they only worked until they could get married and quit. Teachers were... well, teachers were to be admired, but they would probably never Find a Man. It was all very '50s.
This was the cultural perception that HGB set out to change. She did it by presenting women as a strange combination of wives-in-waiting and worthy in their own right. She was one of the first to say that it was OK for women to seek and flirt and have sex and flaunt and date non-exclusively, which was a radical idea at the time. She presented articles about attainable sexy fashion (as opposed to Vogue unreachable fashion); how to enjoy sex, whether or not you were married; and how to generally live it up as a fully sexual being while single. She created the Cosmo Girl. The gasp resonated across the country.
In the process of transforming the magazine, she turned it into a soap opera. You can drop out for years, as I do, with the assurance that when you drop back in to check it out, you'll have missed nothing. The same articles, the same layouts, the same themes, have continued for nigh unto 40 years now: How to catch a man.
In the years since, the magazine has morphed into a manual for the single girl, preferably a big-city babe in her 20s with the perfect face and body, a glamour job that enables her to indulge in every fashion trend, and squadrons of gorgeous single hunks who frequent all the trendoid places she goes and are waiting breathlessly for her to make her entrance. The message pounded in on every page of every issue is that you can do whatever you want, baby, and you can manipulate and use and dump men as shamelessly as they have been doing to women since God wore diapers. The cover of each issue is loaded with teasers, most of them sexual, and the mag is full of depressingly repetitive articles about how to flirt, catch a man, make his your slave, fulfill both your sexual fantasies, and dump him when it's time to move on.
The entire magazine is an unrelenting drumbeat for sex, sex, sex. Even the book reviews are designed to make you a "more rounded" conversationalist, so you can - yup! - start a conversation with that hunk on the park bench.
What is NOT in the magazine, however, is much information about how to meet a suitable companion in ways that don't involve spaghetti straps and spike mules, or how to establish a friendship that may grow into love, or how to sustain a relationship once you get past the panting. In order for those things to happen, you need to step out of the Cosmo Girl whirl and take a long, hard look at yourself, your values, and your goals. And if you do that, you might miss the next hair color trend, or miss out on the latest advice on how to perform oral sex while hanging from a trapeze.
So what's going on here? Well, let's look at Mr. Key and his theory again. Whether or not you believe him, he does present a thought-provoking thesis: Underlying messages, however presented, sell stuff.
The underlying message in Cosmo is that try as you might, you can never quite measure up to the ideal Cosmo girl, and failing that, you will probably never Find a Man. Your life will be increasingly lonely as you age into a constant striver. As soon as you catch up with this decorating trend, or invest in that fashion or beauty trend, or lose that pesky and utterly unacceptable 10 "extra" pounds with the latest diet, or ply your newly updated sexual skills on some unsuspecting schmuck, the rules of the game will change and you'll have to catch up again. and of course, with all that work, there's no time or energy left to nurture those parts of yourself that might actually contribute to a serious relationship with a real man: thoughtfulness, consideration, intellect, honesty, giving...
So you have to keep buying this mag, baby, because it's your best and only hope of staying in the race, and you can't afford to drop out. You don't have to know how to establish a friendship with Mr. Average Guy or nurture a growthful relationship into love and intimacy - intimacy is just another word for sex, right? - because you'll never get to that point.
Forget marriage and all that stuff - you're a Cosmo Girl, and for you, the value is in the game.
And if you take this magazine seriously, you'll never stop playing games. And you'll probably never find what you think you want. And you'll always need this mag to show you how far you really are from the Really Successful Babes.
It's a message depressing enough to make the thoughtful reader immolate herself on a pile of back issues. What could be sadder than a 50-ish Cosmo girl?
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