On Cosmo
♠
Like most of my more shameful addictions, my love affair with Cosmopolitan magazine began as a clandestine habit. Along with watching poorly made romantic comedies and tweezing small hairs from various parts of my body, reading Cosmo was a sort of therapy that I employed when I felt stupid and ugly. You can’t fix stupid in an afternoon, but you can make yourself forget about why it seemed important in the first place.
“Cosmo,” I would tell my skeptical friends, “has it all.” 43 ways to please your man in bed? Check. A bad reaction to a waxing incident? Cosmo’s got the solution. Cosmo teaches girls how to find a flattering dress for their individual figures and how to apply lipstick without looking like a whore. There’s even a little erotic story at the end of each issue.
Reading Cosmo quickly transformed from a quirky excursion into the land of makeup and hair products into a necessary link between me and my femininity. Like many of the women who were born during the last three decades, I was reared in the school of brains before beauty. The classes for gifted children and awards and accolades I had received reinforced the idea that my intellectual potential was practically limitless. As a child it was assumed that, once I matured, I would employ my considerable talents to effect some sort of positive societal change. As all of my accomplishments and competitions were rooted in intellect or talent, I grew to champion those attributes of myself above all others. This, in combination with strong tendencies towards sports and tromping around the woods with boys, cemented a tomboy status that followed me well into adulthood. Eschewing all aspects of girliness, I grew to hate the color pink and was disgusted by the very notion of being someone's girlfriend. There was a certain shame in wearing skirts and dresses that my mother never understood.
Women's liberation and postmodern feminism have created a recondite conundrum for many parents of girls. Teach your daughter how to curl her hair without making it frizz and you risk sending the message that her only potential is that of a sex object. My mother, like many others, chose to remain silent except for the occasional reassurance that she would still love me even if I were, as she suspected, a lesbian. In some ways I was often spared the worst of motherly nagging about marriage and sloppy clothes, but in a very real way I lost some of the advice and lessons integral to becoming a woman.
Cosmo not only tied some of the loose ends of beauty and fashion recommendations together into a pretty pink bow, but also discussed topics that would make even the most enlightened mother blush. Cosmo was sexual liberation through quizzes and reader confessionals. Every aspect of the magazine is inextricably bound with sex: the cutest hairstyle is the one that looks sexiest; the confidence one gains by getting a big promotion at work serves to augment one's sexiness. Indeed, the fundamental goal of all decisions, as dictated by Cosmo, is to reach the pinnacle of sexy. While this had never been one of my primary ambitions, I loved Cosmo because it made wanting to be sexy acceptable.
My addiction escalated, as addictions are wont to do. I would drive all over town days before the first of the month, searching for the most recent issue. I needed Cosmo like I needed air, and I began to wonder why they only produced one issue a month. Why not twice a month or even weekly? When I moved to
Eventually, my closer friends either embraced the Cosmo revolution or attempted, very seriously, to dissuade me from buying and reading it. Any junkie or pack-a-day smoker will tell you that attacking the habit only leads the addict to defend it, thereby strengthening the bond. I had myriad justifications for my habit. I figured I was a discerning reader. I had taken all of the revolutionary media classes at my fancy liberal arts college. I could tell when I was being manipulated; I read enough to be able to intelligently separate the wheat from the chaff. Moreover, as a human rights major my studies in college revolved mostly around torture survivors and atrocities committed during wars. At the end of the day, I didn't want to read the newspaper, I just wanted my brain to stop for a second. “It's like watching TV,” I told my friends, “it just makes everything fade away for a while.” “Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker were obsessive about beauty and men, too,” I told myself. Candidly, all of these defenses were at best weak and at worst lies. The point was I picked up a Cosmo and everything fell into place. In Cosmoland, it was okay to shave my legs, even though deep down I knew that it was a construction of beauty I profoundly wished to shed. Reading Cosmo made me believe it was acceptable to want to be pretty and to want men to tell me that I am pretty.
Then one day, or rather one issue, it happened. All of the gainsayers were proven correct. Cosmo broke the unspoken commandment. This rule enables intelligent young women to justify to themselves reading magazines aimed at priming women for marriage with vacuous and shallow advice about makeup and sex. The decree can be paraphrased in the following way: never explicitly tell a reader to dumb herself down. While reading Cosmo, I tolerated a complete suspension of my intellect and talents to focus on sex and beauty, but I could not bear the idea of hiding those attributes for the purposes of attraction. It wasn't a featured article, it wasn't a cover story; it was hidden away, occupying a small, yellow square in the corner of the page. “How to make a good first impression...” contained a piece of advice for all readers, “Don't dumb yourself down, but don't discuss Crime and Punishment on the first date.” Crime and Punishment has always been one of my favorites. Like many girls who are labeled “gifted” as children, I have been endlessly made to feel as though my intellect was a blemish on my femininity. The purpose of reading Cosmo was to enhance the aspects of myself about which I felt uncomfortable, not to undermine the facets in which my confidence and dignity were rooted.
I thought about it for days and decided that Cosmo was not as attuned to my particular viewpoint and opinions as I had originally thought. I continued to read Cosmo, but with none of the aforementioned fervor. Much like the smoker who will withstand below freezing temperatures not for enjoyment, but to curb withdrawal symptoms, I simply couldn't stop myself. Reading Cosmo had become so ingrained in my personality the thought didn’t even occur to me to stop reading it. I wanted to be a Cosmo Girl, I wanted to be a fun, fearless female, and as Dostoevsky reminds us, “Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel.”
Three or four issues later the crushing blow landed. In a feature article about improving one's sack skills the word “hone” was replaced with the word “home.” “Maybe it's just a typo,” I told myself, “they have copyeditors. No printed journal would accept such an error.” Just when I had convinced myself thus, it appeared again. I put down Cosmo and thought, “maybe this is one of the huge holes in my vocabulary that I encounter frequently as a result of an arts school education.” I consulted all four dictionaries in my room. Neither the pocket dictionary nor the Oxford Universal Dictionary nor any of their moderately sized brethren could explain, by any stretch of the imagination, the replacement of that “m” for that “n.” It was, truly, too much to tolerate. I have difficulty respecting people with poor spoken and written grammar. I find it frustrating that most contemporary screenplays seem to have as an agenda obliterating what is left of the English language. I will not date anyone who doesn’t read at least as much as I do, and I will not support a magazine with blatant and neglectful errors in its articles. I stopped reading Cosmo that moment and have not bought another one since. I still longed to be able to understand the homogenized culture that is femininity in this country, I still wanted the hottest celeb gossip, I still wanted to be told it was okay to want men to desire me. I still do, but ultimately I can never betray my first and only true love: language.
Maybe I was getting too old for Cosmo and needed a dramatic catalyst to break my addiction. Maybe part of maturing into a woman for me was understanding that anyone else's construction of femininity except my own was fundamentally worthless. Maybe I finally gained the confidence in my own sexuality that reading Cosmo had been replacing. Whatever the reason, when I put down that issue I took a small step towards womanhood, a more complete vision of womanhood that includes both shaving my legs and reading Dostoevsky. I have since thrown away all of my copies of Cosmo and now I sleep with a copy of Crime and Punishment next to my bed. Well, that and a few issues of Elle.
—LP