Cosmopolitan Yellow

Porn at Your Grocery Checkout Counter?

Anyone who has seen Citizen Kane (1941) will have learned a little bit about William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), on whom the movie is loosely based. He founded the Hearst Corporation, a media empire that now boasts 15 daily and 34 weekly newspapers, hundreds of magazines, and 29 television stations. Hearst aided the rise of yellow journalism, a term for exaggerated and often fraudulent reporting that seeks to lure readership with sensational headlines.

Hearst's granddaughter, Patricia Hearst, inspired sensational but true headlines in 1974 when she robbed a bank in San Francisco with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist radical group, after having been kidnapped, brainwashed, and raped by group members. She soon disavowed the SLA, but served 22 months in prison before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.

Patricia's sister, Victoria Hearst, 61, today hopes to gain media attention for a worthier cause: opposing Hearst Corporation's Cosmopolitan magazine, commonly nick-named Cosmo, through the Cosmo Harms Minors campaign, which claims that:

This staple of the supermarket checkout line . . . has steadily declined from a somewhat inspirational women's magazine to a verbally pornographic "how-to" sex guide. Cosmo is leading the way in further desensitizing young women and girls to accept and participate in the pornified and sexually violent culture around them. . . .

In recent years, Cosmo has started to blatantly target young girls to expand their audience and increase profits. Many of their covers feature teen idols, meant to entice young girls into buying the magazine.¹

A born-again Christian, Victoria, along with Dawn Hawkins of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), and Dr. Miriam Grossman, a board-certified psychiatrist and author, launched this campaign at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in April. The coalition wants Cosmo to "be sold to adults only and have the cover wrapped like all other porn magazines in retail shops." While Cosmo has not previously been called porn, it has changed:

Pornography desensitizes and entices the user to try harder and more deviant material. Cosmo, like Playboy, Hustler and other mainstream porn, is trying hard to keep up with this fact by writing even more provocative and explicit articles. Common themes of the last year include repeatedly inviting women to participate in anal, oral, public, and violent torture sex.²

And Cosmo does reach young girls: "A search of #MyCosmo or #CosmoGirl on social media yields pictures, tweets and comments from teen girls . . . gushing about trying Cosmo's tips and trying to be like women of Cosmo."³

In January the NCSE sent a letter to Cosmopolitan, in which they noted:

Our nation is now suffering an untreated pandemic of harm from the widespread distribution of pornography and Cosmopolitan bears great responsibility for that harm.

Adults, and even children, are developing life-long addictions to pornography. Sexual violence against women, including rape, and sexual harassment of women are directly tied to the consumption of pornography.⁴

It would seem that Grandfather Hearst's Cosmo is a toxic new form of yellow journalism, luring readers with sensational and fraudulent claims about sex. The Cosmo Harms Minors campaign seeks to counteract its influence.

Notes
1. Cosmo Harms Minors press kit: http://endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/CosmoHarmsMinors_PressKit_Excerpts-Removed.pdf.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. http://endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/Dirty
Dozen2015_CosmopolitanMagazine_NCSELetter.pdf