Mirror, mirror....

Hmm...I haven't updated in a while. Oh well, I'm pretty sure the world didn't stop revolving because I dropped off the face of the earth for a bit. Anyway, here's a little something I wrote when I was annoyed. Instead of eating ice cream or yelling at people, I went to the root of my ire. The media. I decided to analyze the poor, "innocent" Cosmo sitting docilely on the floor (yep, i'm a slob). Here is a shorted version of the conclusions that I came up with and the ideas that I entertained.




Every woman is different. We all have different hair colors, different eyes, different complexions, different bodies, and different views about life and the world as we know it. Due to all of these differences, we all represent different facets of beauty. Some women are willowy and tall, and represent a sort of elfin beauty. Others are dark and mysterious, while others are curvy and round, and represent a motherly beauty all their own. With all of these seemingly wonderful traits, women should be incredibly satisfied with themselves, and embrace who they are as human beings. However, due to societal influences, more women have found it necessary to think lowly of themselves and attempt to change their mannerisms and bodies.
Cosmopolitan magazine is often referred to as the “Woman’s Bible,” and is geared towards an audience of about 18-35. It includes everything a woman needs to survive, such as “40 Ways to Please Your Man,” “Hot Runway Trends,” and “How to Love Your Time Alone.” It also shows pictures of waiflike models wearing the most makeup and least clothing that you’ll ever be privy to. These women who are ridiculously tall yet still manage to remain ridiculously thin are thrown at us, the proverbial wolves. They are the images that we are supposed to make of ourselves. Women are supposed to be beautiful, tall, and thin. There are never any short or somewhat squat models in magazines. It is quite sad. Cosmopolitan’s spokeswoman is a Fun, Fearless, Female. She is surrounded by men, is glamorous, young, and incredibly beautiful. She is sipping a cocktail and laughing as two handsome men fawn over her. This magazine is supposed to be geared towards producing more women like her. Confident and poised. Sensual, yet elegant. One would think that there were more inspirational articles and stories about confident, self assured women. However, in a 242 page magazine, ads took up 147 pages of this, leaving only 95 pages left for our own reading pleasure. Of those 95 pages, the first article began on page 40, and it is an interview of Hilary Duff, the world’s newest pop princess. It is rather interesting that most of the pages in this magazine are devoted to ads. These articles are not just on any product either. They are geared towards women in order to help them become more like society’s ideal beauty. There are ads for foundation that makes your skin glow, creams that smooth, mascaras that plump lashes, and generally enhance your facial beauty. I also noticed something that struck me as quite entertaining. They would have ads that would show some kind of delectable food, or even a sex ad that included a beautiful woman wearing little clothing. Adjacent to those ads were ads for plastic surgery or breast enhancement. As if women needed another cosmetic vice! One thing that struck me as interesting was the fact that there were zero ads in the sections that included sex tidbits and love information. The marketing firm seemed to know that women would be more interested in reading the smut instead of the product, therefore they didn’t waste any ad space on those pages. Why waste ad space when you could tell a woman how to have sex and do it well?!
It seems that this magazine is made to bloat up a woman’s self esteem, yet simultaneously kill it at the same time in order to keep the consumer awash in a state of confusion. This confusion makes it easier for them to sell their magazines, for they promise to help the woman turn herself into the confident bombshell she always wanted to be. Personally, I do not find this magazine to have much of a purpose other than to sell products and make women with low self esteem feel worse about themselves. Granted, I do read this magazine, but it’s more for kicks. After all, reading National Geographic is certainly fun in its own right, but who wants to read about bears having sex when you can learn how to do it (and be AMAZING!) while looking incredible?


P.S...another thing about the "Fun, Fearless Female"...there was an ad for a random weight loss drug on the page opposite it. Way to optimize ad space, assholes.