Sexuality/Media
I Learned About Sex From Cosmopolitan Magazine
I certainly wasn’t reading it for the exercise tips.
I remember flipping through Cosmopolitan Magazine at age 11 — in the bathroom — where my mother kept them. It was my favorite not-so-secret thing to do.
It was 1989. Cindy Crawford was everywhere. Madonna was a brunette. Smoking cigarettes was still cool.
And there was Cosmopolitan Magazine, with its busty covers and aggressive headlines which mainly targeted female readers who were interested in men romantically, offering a barrage of tips every month on how to figure out how your man thinks, how to be more desirable for your man, how to have kinkier sex with your man, and how to keep your man interested in you forever.
That’s a lot for an 11-year-old girl who was painfully shy and was just discovering her own body.
This is why Cosmopolitan was so titillating. It was a smorgasbord of images and articles for a young girl with a budding curiosity about sexuality. I remember thinking, was this what an adult woman was supposed to be like? Busting out of a skintight dress while trying to determine if her man needs her to be sexier or more wild in bed?
And why was my mother buying these magazines? For the exercise tips?? Hmmm…
I wasn’t reading it for the exercise tips. I was reading the steamy articles about sex and the novel excerpts by Danielle Steele that the magazine would publish. I ate it all up voraciously.
Looking back, I wouldn’t say that this magazine was particularly healthy for any young woman or even an older woman for that matter. However, is Instagram really that different as far as beauty-pushing and relationship porn?
Different decades and different mediums, yet still the same kind of message. Look better and then you’ll feel better. Look better and then someone will desire you. Just be desirable— all the time — no matter what you’re doing. That’s the message. The same message women are still getting today in one media form or another.
If I hadn’t read all of the salacious sex scenes or detailed descriptions of how to please your man in bed in Cosmopolitan Magazine when I was 11, I’m sure I would have discovered it elsewhere. I don’t feel traumatized or angry about it now.
Cosmopolitan Magazine was never subtle in its messages to women. It was always clear — be sexy, act sexy, and figure out how to continually be sexy even as you age.
The messages for young girls and women on sites like Instagram that claim one can live their best life and ultimately be their best self by looking hot in a bikini or posing in front of the mansion in the background are no different. It’s just marketed differently.
Instead of advertising, 10 tips and tricks to look and feel gorgeous on the front of a magazine cover, modern-day Instagram or TikTok reels just try and sell you what you and your lifestyle should look like from inside your phone.
In the end, we’re all bombarded with media telling us how to be, what to look like, and how to be more desirable at some point in our lives, whether we’re 11, 25, or 45. The key is to have some perspective about real life versus what media content is trying to sell you in order to make you believe you need them to improve yourself in some way. Having that perspective is more difficult these days.
It’s much easier to walk by a magazine stand in the grocery store without buying the magazine than it is to escape the internet, our phones, and social media.
Despite the unhealthy influence that Cosmopolitan Magazine might have had on me as a young girl, I was eventually able to understand that it was just a trashy magazine trying to scream at you with racy headlines to get you to buy it.
Did Cosmopolitan teach me about sex? The act of sexual intercourse — YES it did. Did it teach me how to have relationships and navigate intimacy with another human being? Nope. Living life over decades past the 80s had to teach me that stuff.
The present-day version of Cosmopolitan Magazine is much tamer than the version I read growing up. The headlines are more centered around lifestyle, exercise, and career tips, these days.
The 80s and 90s were certainly flawed. So were the trashy magazines. But they had their place in my upbringing — just as social media will have for kids growing up today.
Did you read Cosmopolitan Magazine when you were growing up? What are your thoughts about its content? let me know in the comments!
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