When the Kroger grocery chain decided to obscure Cosmopolitan magazine at checkout stands recently because of the racy cover headlines, some observers were baffled. Why just Cosmo? And why now?
It was cover lines like “20 Earth-Quaking Moves That Will Make Him Plead for Mercy–and Beg for More” that caused customers to complain and Kroger to respond by installing blinder racks that concealed everything but the magazine’s name at checkout counters, Kroger spokesman Gary Rhodes said. Kroger operates more than 2,200 grocery stores across the country, including King Soopers, Ralphs, Fred Meyer and Food 4 Less, and expected to have all the blinder racks up by this week.
“Here at headquarters alone we have received 1,000 e-mail messages, not to mention hundreds of calls and letters, overwhelmingly in favor of our decision,” Rhodes said last week. “Many of our customers were worried that their children were being exposed to these headlines at checkout counters.”
But if the decision pleased those customers, it peeved some magazine experts. Although Rhodes said Cosmopolitan had been the focus of most of the complaints, neighboring publications like Glamour hardly would earn G-ratings. Its February issue, recently displayed with (and barely distinguishable from) Cosmo’s January issue, featured headlines like “23 Erotic Ways to Make Sex with Him Sweeter” and “Sex and Size: Is He Too Big? Are You? How to Maximize Your Pleasure Match.”
Sex is being used in more flagrant ways on the covers of some women’s and men’s magazines today, and the reason is simple, if cliched: It sells. Although there have been protests over the tarting up and dumbing down of magazines splashed with skin, sin and celebrity, the circulation figures are what’s heard above the din. Cosmopolitan and Glamour have more than 2 million readers each, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, making them consistently among the top-selling women’s magazines. About 70 percent of Cosmopolitan’s sales come from the newsstand.
“It’s a sign of the ’90s and a sign of the 2000s,” said Steve Cohn, editor in chief of Media Industry Newsletter. “You have to get more and more provocative. Magazines need something to attract the eye–and other parts of the body too.”
Even men’s fashion magazines of late have bumped masculine cover models in favor of buxom and barely dressed sirens like Ashley Judd. GQ’s January issue featured a topless Tyra Banks with only her cascading mane to keep her legal, with the words “Tyra, Please Pull Your Hair Back!” printed alongside.
“The presentation is getting a lot more salacious. It’s really over the past year and a half that it’s been getting much more extreme,” said Lisa Miya-Jervis, editor of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. “The biggest change has been in magazines that have been perhaps more serious in the past, like Glamour. It’s a negative development. Anything that sensationalizes sex also oversimplifies it. Accurate sexual information is great for women, but overhyped, pressure-filled stuff is not.”
Women’s and men’s magazines have upped the dose gradually, said Samir Husni, head of the magazine program at the University of Mississippi.
“You could easily inscribe the word `Playboy’ over the cover of GQ and half the country wouldn’t put it on the newsstand. But we get immune to all these changes, and every time we expect a little bit more. If I read about 69 different ways to enhance my sex life in Jane or Redbook, next month I expect to see 73.”
The difference between men’s and women’s magazines, Cohn said, is that men’s get explicit with photography, while women’s get explicit with words. And the Cosmo case is one in which the pun might be mightier than the picture. These days kids may see cleavage even at 8th-grade dances (not to mention in teen-oriented publications–Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Naughty or Nice” holiday quarterly featured a porn star). But some magazine cover lines tell them how to use it.
“These come-on headlines crystallize it,” said Pat McGrath, director of media relations for the national not-for-profit group Morality in Media. The New York-based organization has been pushing supermarkets to shield “overly sexualized” magazine covers at checkout lines.
“We’re not saying, `Don’t sell these magazines,’ ” McGrath said. “And we have no illusions about changing the content. It’s just the `in-your-face’ factor. Everyone has to go through the checkout line. If you’re going to sell it, at least cover it up or put it in a separate magazine rack.”
McGrath hopes the Kroger decision will lead to greater discretion among other grocery stores that sell such magazines as Cosmo, Glamour, Mademoiselle and even Redbook, which are the main ones the group monitors.
The reason the group hasn’t targeted men’s magazines such as Maxim, with its beer-and-babes emphasis, is that they’re generally not displayed in the cashier lines, he said. They’re in the more avoidable newsstand aisles. Kroger stores will continue selling Cosmo, uncovered, in those aisles.
But there might be more to the fact that a women’s magazine like Cosmo is being singled out in a time when intimate details of sex scandals make the nightly news, said Carolyn Kitch, director of the magazine sequence at Temple University and a former senior editor at Good Housekeeping.
“There’s a double standard,” Kitch said. “The younger women’s magazines–Cosmopolitan and Glamour–are taking a cultural critical hit in a way that men’s magazines don’t. I think there’s a feeling among media critics–and probably broader than that–that boys will be boys and this is what men’s magazines do, whereas if you do it in a women’s magazine, there must be something wrong with women.”
A case in point, Kitch said, has been the criticism of Bonnie Fuller, former editor of Cosmopolitan who moved to Glamour as editor in chief in 1998. Soon after she took over, articles appeared in publications like the Columbia Journalism Review about her degrading the magazine, which had won two general-excellence National Magazine Awards under the leadership of Fuller’s predecessor, the late Ruth Whitney. Fuller’s decision to ax the “Women in Washington” feature and add horoscopes, for instance, was cited as evidence of her sullying the magazine’s character. (Fuller and Cosmopolitan’s spokeswoman declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Kitch said these sorts of changes have been blown out of proportion. Even Whitney, who herself was a critic of Fuller, acknowledged in the Columbia Journalism Review article last year that the “Women in Washington” feature had low readership.
“Among media critics as well as among people in general, there’s a real need to distinguish among women’s magazines as to which ones are good and which ones are bad,” Kitch said. “It mirrors the media portrayal of different types of women as good and bad–the `working-class tramp’ versus the `college girl.’ (Fuller) went from the `bad’ magazine to the `good’ one, which means all hope is lost.”
Very little, in fact, has been lost or changed in the content of magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan over the years, some experts agreed. The sex was always there, it just wasn’t promoted so openly on the cover. And while sex has always been marketed to men, it’s only starting to be used to reel in women, Miya-Jervis said. “I think people may have a little whiplash because of that,” she said.
The Internet has much to do with the raunchier tone and revealing photos on magazine covers these days, Husni said.
“The whole definition of what’s obscene belongs to communities, and we’ve lost those communities,” he said. “Everyone is looking at the Internet. Everyone is desensitized. We push the envelope in so many categories. That’s the major reason that sex magazines like Hustler have dropped to No. 5 (based on the number of titles launched in 1999), after being the leading category for years.”
Celebrity/personality magazines were No. 1 in terms of newly launched titles in 1999, Husni said, which highlights another tool magazines are increasingly using to attract wandering eyes at the newsstand: star power. Celebrities have displaced models on the covers of everything from Architectural Digest to YM (formerly Young Miss). That in part is a reaction to the success of magazines like In Style, which reached 1.4 million circulation after only five years of existence.
Some say the trend has turned many celebrity profiles into puffery, because some magazines kowtow to publicists who demand approval over everything from who writes the story to what photos are used. Or celebrities on the cover simply serve as bait, then readers open the magazine to find no profile at all.
“Magazines know which issues sell better than others and which celebrities sell better than others,” Kitch said.
The fact readers lap up celebrity content reveals something about our lives and times. This extended period of peace and prosperity may foster somewhat frivolous interests, Kitch said.
“I don’t buy that people don’t have friends and aren’t participating in communities,” Kitch said. “But people find individual and collective identity through celebrities who stand for certain kinds of identities.”
Other sorts of magazines also are tweaking their covers. “The cover lines of news weeklies are hardly ever about news anymore,” Kitch said. “They’re more about health, education–something that’s going to reach out to the reader and say, `You need to know this.’ It’s never about news because news doesn’t sell.”
But Husni said while the exteriors of magazines may be changing, he doesn’t think the interior substance is suffering. Sex isn’t all there is–February Glamour, for instance, includes an article on Karenna Gore Schiff’s role in her dad’s campaign. Marie Claire routinely does stories on oppressed women of the world.
“Cover lines sell a magazine once,” he said. “But unless the content inside teaches me something, or informs and entertains me, I’m not going to buy it again.”
What protesters forget, he and Kitch said, is that the magazine business is based on supply and demand. And if sex entices readers, then that’s what they’ll get.
“Glamour and Cosmo have always been the top two largest-selling magazines on college campuses. You have to follow your constituents,” Husni said. “How many women or men do you know on college campuses who are interested in politics these days? So how many were going to read the `Women in Washington’ thing in Glamour?”
Ultimately, there’s a magazine to satisfy just about any reader–from Today’s Christian Woman to Schwing! (an alternative golf magazine). What adults and kids do with the information they see should be a personal or family decision, not a supermarket chain’s, Kitch and Husni said.
“I hate to cast this as a free speech issue,” Kitch said, “but if this is a judgment call, what are the standards for what’s likely to be offensive? Are they still selling National Enquirer at checkout stands? Is there no standard for ludicrousness?”
WHAT WE’RE READING
So-called “women’s magazines” are often subdivided into such categories as fashion (e.g. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar), beauty (e.g. Cosmopolitan and Glamour), service (e.g. Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook), health/fitness (e.g. Self, Health) and home/shelter (e.g. Architectural Digest, Country Living). But if all are lumped under the general women’s label, the circulation rankings for the first half of 1999 are as follows. Figures are rounded:
1. Better Homes and Gardens: 7.6 million
2. Family Circle: 5 million
3. Good Housekeeping: 4.6 million
4. Ladies’ Home Journal: 4.5 million
5. McCall’s: 4.2 million
6. Woman’s Day: 4 million
7. Prevention: 3.1 million
8. Cosmopolitan: 2.9 million
9. Redbook: 2.8 million
10. Southern Living: 2.5 million
11. Martha Stewart Living: 2.25 million
12. Glamour: 2.2 million
Sources: Audit Bureau of Circulation and Steve Cohn/Media Industry Newsletter
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Do you think sex has gone too far in women’s magazines? E-mail us at ctc-woman@tribune.com.
