How Cosmo Conquered the World
A few months ago, at the Tablao Villa Rosa, a tourist-friendly restaurant in Madrid, dozens of beautifully dressed women from all over the world were gathered around a stage taking cellphone pictures of a male flamenco dancer in tight pants. The women, whooping and clapping against the sides of their wine glasses, were editors, publishers and executives from the far-flung corners of the Cosmopolitan magazine universe — missionaries from the more established international Cosmos (Australia, France, Britain) and the newer, upstart Cosmos (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Vietnam and dozens of other countries). They gathered there at the biennial Cosmic Conference to soak up the Cosmo ethos (“Fun, fearless, female!”) and then went home to radiate it outward.
One Cosmo staff member would tell me — in complete seriousness, having chosen her words carefully — that Cosmic was going to change my life.
“Did you see those pants?” asked Kate White as she sat down with a glass of red wine at the wine-barrel table where I was writing down my impressions of, among other things, the flamenco pants. White, 61, is the laser-blue-eyed editor of Cosmo U.S., the mother ship, or Big Cosmo, as it’s called by other editors. During White’s 14-year tenure, the magazine has increased its U.S. circulation to 3 million readers, from 2.3 million, and introduced 22 international editions for a total of 64, including spinoffs. (By comparison, Marie Claire has 35 international editions, and Glamour has 16). She’s dazzling but relaxed, with a full, frequent laugh. She is the Bill Clinton of Cosmic, the charming and influential American, the unofficial boss of bosses, toward whom her international counterparts gravitate. Her book, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know,” is due out in September.
White also wastes no time. Within minutes she was asking me whether and when I want to marry, whether and when I want to have kids, whether I’d want to marry but not have kids and whether I’d consider freezing my eggs. I was surprised by my answers, not knowing I had them until I heard myself telling her, with no hesitation, that I did want to marry and have kids but that I thought I’d be O.K. if neither happened and that work was more important to me at the moment (perhaps to the detriment of those things) and a number of other personal details. Another Cosmo editor swooped in before I could ask her for specific advice, but I would have.
White’s likable directness is one of her magazine’s defining characteristics. Cosmo has a cheerful, girlfriendy tone (“When Your Period Makes You Cra-a-zy”) and a much racier reputation than its newsstand competitors (“Eeek! You’ll Die When You Read What These ‘Normal’ Guys Wanted Once Their Pants Hit the Floor”). Its covers rarely fail to feature at least one bold, all-caps rendering of the word “sex.” The August issue, for instance, offered “52 Sex Tips” and “When Your Vagina Acts Weird After Sex.” A sampling of 2012 headlines includes “50 Sex Tips,” “50 Kinky Sex Moves,” “99 Sex Questions” and “His Best Sex Ever.”
The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor ofCosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.
The magazine recently tried to cement its mythology through a two-minute Web video called “The Cosmo Effect.” Onscreen text asks viewers if they take for granted that they can have it all (“dream job, independence, dreamy guy, fun fearless attitude, baby”) or, if they prefer, a modified version of “it all” (“sexy single life” and “a great pair of heels”). Because not so long ago, the video explains, women’s choices were limited. Until “one woman’s vision changed the world.”
Helen Gurley Brown, or H.G.B. as she’s known in the Cosmo universe, is the patron saint of Cosmopolitan’s sex-centric brand of female empowerment. The author of the then-scandalous self-help book “Sex and the Single Girl” — which advised women on how to better enjoy their jobs, relationships and bodies — Brown re-branded the magazine with her frank, sexy tone in 1965, when most women’s magazines were focused on family and home economics. She remained editor until 1997 and is still listed as editor in chief for Cosmopolitan International on all mastheads.
At 90, Brown maintains a delightfully incongruous pink corner office in the gleaming Hearst Tower on 57th Street in Manhattan. And although somewhat retired, she remains something of a spiritual godmother for the dozens of international editors trying to implement her ideas in their own countries. “ ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ is still the G.P.S. to being W.O.W. — a well-turned-out woman!” explained the editor of Cosmo South Africa, Sbu Mpungose. As has been the case with other newer Cosmos, the first issue of Cosmo Azerbaijan, in 2011, included a feature on Brown: “It was absolutely necessary for girls in our country to know who she is,” the magazine’s editor, Leyla Orujova, explained.
Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. “Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,” she said, “but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.”
But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce “the most incredible combinations of orgasms”), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (“backdoor booty” as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. “Only at Cosmo,” said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, “will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.”
Cosmo is an easy magazine to hate. When I asked my female friends — including many single women in their late 20s, like me — what they thought of it, most of them were unkind. “Cosmo is complete trash,” one explained. “Mindless,” another said. “I would not be caught reading it outside of an airplane,” said a third. “It assumes and expects the worst of women,” said another. I never had a particularly positive opinion of it, either, and my ambivalence was reinforced by headlines like this one, from a recent edition of Cosmo South Korea: “Oops! My V Zone Is Strange!”
But to hear the Cosmo missionaries tell it, they’re promoting feminism with every issue. “Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world,” Fira Basuki Baskoro, the editor of Cosmo Indonesia, said over a lunch of salad and paella. “When Cosmo came to Indonesia, it changed the way the Indonesian woman thinks. Before Cosmo, it was taboo for women to talk about sex openly.”
White told me that during a 2010 trip to New Delhi, the editor of Cosmo India correlated a rise in love marriages over arranged marriages to Cosmo’s influence. “I don’t know if this is true statistically,” White said, but “Cosmo has been very, very popular there. And I’d like to think that one of the messages we’re delivering to women is: You don’t have to marry the guy your parents told you to marry. You should marry who you want to marry. You can have a job if you’d like. You can have a career if you want. These choices are open to you today.”
When asked via e-mail if there were statistics to back up this correlation, the editor of Cosmo India, Nandini Bhalla, politely evaded the question but provided more interesting anecdotes. “When we launched in 1996, we were flooded with letters — women wanted to know if kissing could cause pregnancy. They were clueless about the basics of having sex, and they had a million questions about what was right and wrong. The Cosmo team actually tackled these questions personally — writing back to readers with answers or carrying stories that tackled their concerns. Indian parents are usually conservative about sexual matters, and friends were often equally ignorant, so Cosmo was the only one with reliable information.”
“50 Kinky Sex Moves” notwithstanding, Cosmo does adhere to a set of surprisingly wholesome values. The magazine discourages plastic surgery, for instance, and has run articles opposing breast implants. In its coverage of food and fitness, White notes, “we don’t do any diets, no crash dieting.” The U.S. edition also has a section called Body Love, in which it tries “to encourage women to feel good about their bodies,” no matter their size. A recent issue featured a spread of a curvy woman in a variety of gorgeous bathing suits on some fabulous remote beach. It didn’t feel like a token shoot of a larger model; she was beautiful, and the bathing suits were reasonably priced. (While trying to find the picture again on Google, I fell down the Cosmo rabbit hole, scrolling through a gallery of swimwear, then through “How to Be Sexier — Instantly” and then through all 23 slides of “Sexy Ideas for Long Hair.” Texturizer now plays a role in my morning routine.)
The magazine also covers aspects of the female body beyond its sex appeal and orgasmic capacity. “We ran an article that pained me to run,” White told me, “but I felt it was important. It basically said the key time to try to get pregnant is between 25 and 35. There has been so much said about still waiting until you’re older, and I didn’t have my first kid until I was 37, but we’re taking a chance — you need to know it.”
I asked why it pained her. “I want every girl to feel that she can have her first kid at 50, if she wants,” White said emphatically. She has encouraged readers to look into freezing their eggs.
Cosmo happens to be fairly traditional about sex itself. Brown believed that it was O.K. to sleep with married men (it was their wives’ responsibility to keep them faithful, she argued), but White eliminated that from the formula. (“A total no-no,” she said.) The magazine also assumes that you’re having sex with a boyfriend or a husband (there’s not much in the way of same-sex relationships), and not with a one-night stand. “We certainly talk about sex mostly in terms of relationships,” White said, “and most of our readers have told us they’re in relationships, and they want the sexual information for their relationship.” White also sees the hookup culture boomeranging back to more traditional standards. “One thing I do think that women will evaluate in the coming years,” she said, “is casual sex. Is it really what you want to be doing, casual sex, a lot of casual sex? Is it what you feel good about?” But if it’s your thing, that’s fine too. “We don’t pass judgment,” she said.
White acknowledges that some people find Cosmo’s obsession with sex trashy, but she’s unabashedly proud of how it sets the magazine apart. “Every Cosmo reader expects to have herself and her pleasures taken care of, equally,” she said matter-of-factly. “We reinforce the idea all the time that, yes, we want you to be a fabulous lover, we want to give you those skills, but you better get it back, baby, because that’s what you deserve.” And if that makes for some repetitive stories, so be it. “There’s a frustration that it takes time to learn how to have an orgasm,” White said, “and have it consistently. So that’s terrain we cover a lot.”
These mores are upheld, to varying degrees of cultural sensitivity, throughout the Cosmo universe. Judging by searches on the Web site, Cosmo U.K. readers are most interested in hair and oral sex (“in that order,” says its publishing director, Ella Dolphin), but in India, where women traditionally live with their parents until marriage, the Cosmo reader “might not be comfortable openly discussing her sex life due to fear of being judged,” Bhalla says. She also notes that because sex toys are banned in India, “we’re careful not to talk about them in the magazine.” Leyla Orujova, the editor of Cosmo Azerbaijan, told me that her staff ensures that sex is generally discussed within the context of marriage. Cosmo Singapore comes with a yellow “Unsuitable for the Young” warning box on the cover and sometimes runs its sexiest content in a sealed section promising “phenomenal pleasure . . . waiting for you inside.”
Most international Cosmos are run by their countries’ natives, but Kerrie Simon-Lawrence, the beautiful, redheaded editor of Middle East Cosmo, is from Sydney. “Obviously because of the cultural sensitivities within the Middle East” — where dating and premarital sex are, in some countries, punishable by law — “we can’t lift so much from international editions.” Throughout the Cosmic Conference, she and the magazine’s publisher joked repeatedly about needing good lawyers and the possibility of going to jail.
Other editions feature more subtle deviations. Cosmo France has reliably more artsy and experimental covers. The South Korean edition is huge — physically huge; issues sometimes come as two separate magazines, because they would otherwise break — and focuses less on sex than marriage (“My Dreamy Wedding” and “Dreams Come True!” are two cover lines from the 400-page April edition). The editor of Cosmo Croatia, Marjana Filipovic-Grcic, told me that stories about women acting bravely on their own have been particularly popular in her country. The same is true for Cosmo Kazakhstan, which “focuses on career and travel more than the U.S. edition does,” writes Akisheva, because “Kazakhstan is a relatively newly independent, developing country, and women are excited about the career opportunities the market economy has to offer.”
Cosmo Germany is more business-oriented. Cosmo Russia (which has the highest circulation of any women’s glossy magazine in that country) publishes longer articles. Cosmo Finland has been running multipage, centerfold-type spreads of topless Finnish guys in order to dispel the notion that Finnish guys aren’t hot. (Not overly convincing!)
But for all of the magazines’ differences, Cosmo is still pushing “the same standards of beauty” around the world, Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, said one afternoon after I returned from the conference. “I don’t know that that’s a global export that we want to be proud of.” Kimmich agreed that editorial content “can sometimes be what you might even call feminist,” because “at the most basic level, the articles do promote women’s advancement and equality through good advice about career issues and women’s health and sexuality.” But, she said, there is plenty of content that sends “contrary” messages. “The export of Cosmo is like the export of any other global American brand,” she said. “Coca-Cola, Hollywood films. It’s a part of what’s happening to our economy, and like all globalization, there’s good with the bad.”
At the office of Peter Yates, the creative director of Hearst Magazines International, a wall is covered in postcard-size versions of international Cosmo covers tacked up in layers of 12 — a year’s worth of cover art, viewable as flipbooks. There’s a lot of Megan Fox, Kate Hudson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde and Jessica Alba, who was once on 20 international covers at the same time. Unlike other women’s magazines, which often go for make-up-centric close-ups (Allure), stylish playfulness (Glamour), professional elegance (Marie Claire) or high-fashion photography (Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue), Cosmo keeps it consistently, overtly sexual. The women look young and fertile, and the cover star is generally Beautiful Young Woman With Lots of Cleavage, Standing, Hand on Hip, Almost but Not Quite Smiling — or the look a woman might give herself in the mirror before going out hoping to get hit on.
The brand saves money by repurposing its covers across various editions, and it shaves costs in other ways, too. For the most part, articles are created by a small team of staff members at Big Cosmo and then ripple outward through the Cosmo network. The magazine has a database for international editors to see what features Cosmo U.S. has planned approximately three months before they run; once the images and layout are uploaded, they can then tweak the content they like to their own country’s needs. Writers do not receive royalties when their work is repurposed. Huffy freelancers are virtually nonexistent.
So what appeared as “Fascinating Breast Facts” in the July 2011 edition of Cosmo U.S., featuring a close-up of a woman tugging her shirt open, became “15 Facts You Need to Know About Your Breasts” in the October 2011 edition of Cosmo Middle East, where it ran with a photo of a model demurely dangling a bra over her shoulder. “What His Sleep Habits Can Tell You” ran in Cosmo U.S. in March 2012 and, months later, appeared in China (same photography but with text translated into Chinese) and in Armenia (different photography). And what ran as the fashion spread “Motorcycle Diaries” in August 2009 in Cosmo U.S. — featuring an abandoned gas station, denim, plaids, a hot guy and the open road — ran two years later in Cosmo Mongolia with the same blend of denim, plaid, gas station and open road, except the whole thing had been reshot with guys who looked Mongolian.
One byline that regularly appears in editions around the world is that of Jessica Knoll, a pretty, friendly and immaculately put-together 28-year-old senior editor. Over drinks at a quiet wine bar near the Big Cosmo office, Knoll explained that it’s not only cheaper to produce features from within but also easier for maintaining the Cosmo voice. And anyway, there’s less of it to write these days: “We did a redesign in January and slashed word count,” she said. “Part of that is because we live in a Twitter generation. We’re not going to be indulgent writers who ramble on for a couple thousand words — we need to find a way a to say things quickly but also have some personality.”
“I learned a lot from your recent, um, article,” I said to her, about eight minutes into our meeting. “About the wishbone-shaped . . . uh . . .”
“Oh, about the internal clitoris?” she said. “See, I don’t get bashful. It becomes completely normal to talk to your boss and have the word ‘penis’ appear 15 times in your conversation.”
The article in question — “Have Easier, Stronger Orgasms” — was on “surprising new findings” about the clitoris based on research done in the 1990s (not exactly new) but features an interview with a woman whose sex book came out this year (new). It ran in the May edition of Cosmo U.S. and will likely appear in Cosmos around the world for months to come. “It’s always our goal to make something feel timely and fresh,” Knoll said. “Nothing can be evergreen. Even if it’s an age-old idea, we have to somehow find a way to put a fresh spin on it.”
For example, in a passage from “Sex and the Single Girl,” from 1962, Helen Gurley Brown advises readers on how to catch someone’s attention from across a bar: “Look straight into his eyes, deep and searchingly, then lower your gaze,” she wrote. “Go back to your companions or magazine. Now look at him again the same way . . . steadfastly, questioningly. Then drop your eyes. Do it three times and you’re a flirt! (P.S., You will have made him very happy.)” And then from an article in the May 2012 issue of Cosmo titled, “The Smile That Makes Men Hit on You”: “A classic study found that you need to make eye contact with a dude and subtly smile at him twice in a row for him to get that you’re interested. . . . Look at him, smile and hold your gaze for a couple of seconds. Then look away for a few seconds, look back and do the same thing again.” A classic study.
Not that Cosmo and its patron saint haven’t tried to evolve with the times. In the introduction to the 2003 reissue of “Sex and the Single Girl,” about what had changed in the four decades since the book was originally published, Brown wrote: “Brains have become almost as treasured as beauty . . . almost! . . . If you had to or could choose one or the other, I would almost choose smart!”
This reminded me of a surprising moment from the Cosmic Convention. During a PowerPoint presentation about reader polls, one slide asked the audience to guess which of the following things young women wanted most: a) beauty; b) an amazing career; c) fame; or d) lots of money. There was a slight pause as audience members made their own guesses. Then the answer: Fame. A faint murmur of confusion. Fame? Really? I conducted a copycat poll among my own friends: 15 picked an amazing career, 6 picked money, 3 picked beauty and only 1 picked fame.
The presenter cited the rise of reality TV and made an effort to spin the findings into something positive. It’s not that young women necessarily want to be the next Kim Kardashian, the presenter riffed, but that everyone wants to be famous within her social group or on her own Facebook feed.
So add famemongering to the list of less-than-empowering — or “contrary,” as Kimmich would say — messages that Cosmo sends to its audience worldwide. But what this hand-wringing neglects is that young women are smart and can sift for what they want. Worrying that Cosmo readers will unblinkingly follow orders about kinky sex moves or imbibe some latent sense of Kardashianism seems unfounded and unnecessary and even a little insulting. Maybe the magazine is benefiting from a rise in love marriages in India more than it is facilitating them, but it’s definitely not pushing any woman who isn’t interested into backdoor booty.
“I know a lot of people have issues about these very sexual cover lines being on display,” Knoll said. She told me she could remember reading Cosmo from a very young age and never feeling like she had to go out and have sex with someone. Then she paused for a moment. “When I would read Cosmo, all it made me want to do was grow up, wear a pretty dress, nice heels, move to the city and have an awesome life. And I just don’t think that’s a bad thing to want, you know?”
Edith Zimmerman is the founder and editor of the Web site The Hairpin. She last wrote for the magazine about Kreayshawn.
Editor: Jon Kelly
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 3, 2012
An earlier version misstated the division of the Hearst Corporation of which Peter Yates is creative director. It is Hearst Magazines International, not Hearst International.
One Cosmo staff member would tell me — in complete seriousness, having chosen her words carefully — that Cosmic was going to change my life.
“Did you see those pants?” asked Kate White as she sat down with a glass of red wine at the wine-barrel table where I was writing down my impressions of, among other things, the flamenco pants. White, 61, is the laser-blue-eyed editor of Cosmo U.S., the mother ship, or Big Cosmo, as it’s called by other editors. During White’s 14-year tenure, the magazine has increased its U.S. circulation to 3 million readers, from 2.3 million, and introduced 22 international editions for a total of 64, including spinoffs. (By comparison, Marie Claire has 35 international editions, and Glamour has 16). She’s dazzling but relaxed, with a full, frequent laugh. She is the Bill Clinton of Cosmic, the charming and influential American, the unofficial boss of bosses, toward whom her international counterparts gravitate. Her book, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know,” is due out in September.
White also wastes no time. Within minutes she was asking me whether and when I want to marry, whether and when I want to have kids, whether I’d want to marry but not have kids and whether I’d consider freezing my eggs. I was surprised by my answers, not knowing I had them until I heard myself telling her, with no hesitation, that I did want to marry and have kids but that I thought I’d be O.K. if neither happened and that work was more important to me at the moment (perhaps to the detriment of those things) and a number of other personal details. Another Cosmo editor swooped in before I could ask her for specific advice, but I would have.
White’s likable directness is one of her magazine’s defining characteristics. Cosmo has a cheerful, girlfriendy tone (“When Your Period Makes You Cra-a-zy”) and a much racier reputation than its newsstand competitors (“Eeek! You’ll Die When You Read What These ‘Normal’ Guys Wanted Once Their Pants Hit the Floor”). Its covers rarely fail to feature at least one bold, all-caps rendering of the word “sex.” The August issue, for instance, offered “52 Sex Tips” and “When Your Vagina Acts Weird After Sex.” A sampling of 2012 headlines includes “50 Sex Tips,” “50 Kinky Sex Moves,” “99 Sex Questions” and “His Best Sex Ever.”
The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor ofCosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.
The magazine recently tried to cement its mythology through a two-minute Web video called “The Cosmo Effect.” Onscreen text asks viewers if they take for granted that they can have it all (“dream job, independence, dreamy guy, fun fearless attitude, baby”) or, if they prefer, a modified version of “it all” (“sexy single life” and “a great pair of heels”). Because not so long ago, the video explains, women’s choices were limited. Until “one woman’s vision changed the world.”
Helen Gurley Brown, or H.G.B. as she’s known in the Cosmo universe, is the patron saint of Cosmopolitan’s sex-centric brand of female empowerment. The author of the then-scandalous self-help book “Sex and the Single Girl” — which advised women on how to better enjoy their jobs, relationships and bodies — Brown re-branded the magazine with her frank, sexy tone in 1965, when most women’s magazines were focused on family and home economics. She remained editor until 1997 and is still listed as editor in chief for Cosmopolitan International on all mastheads.
At 90, Brown maintains a delightfully incongruous pink corner office in the gleaming Hearst Tower on 57th Street in Manhattan. And although somewhat retired, she remains something of a spiritual godmother for the dozens of international editors trying to implement her ideas in their own countries. “ ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ is still the G.P.S. to being W.O.W. — a well-turned-out woman!” explained the editor of Cosmo South Africa, Sbu Mpungose. As has been the case with other newer Cosmos, the first issue of Cosmo Azerbaijan, in 2011, included a feature on Brown: “It was absolutely necessary for girls in our country to know who she is,” the magazine’s editor, Leyla Orujova, explained.
Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. “Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,” she said, “but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.”
But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce “the most incredible combinations of orgasms”), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (“backdoor booty” as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. “Only at Cosmo,” said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, “will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.”
Cosmo is an easy magazine to hate. When I asked my female friends — including many single women in their late 20s, like me — what they thought of it, most of them were unkind. “Cosmo is complete trash,” one explained. “Mindless,” another said. “I would not be caught reading it outside of an airplane,” said a third. “It assumes and expects the worst of women,” said another. I never had a particularly positive opinion of it, either, and my ambivalence was reinforced by headlines like this one, from a recent edition of Cosmo South Korea: “Oops! My V Zone Is Strange!”
But to hear the Cosmo missionaries tell it, they’re promoting feminism with every issue. “Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world,” Fira Basuki Baskoro, the editor of Cosmo Indonesia, said over a lunch of salad and paella. “When Cosmo came to Indonesia, it changed the way the Indonesian woman thinks. Before Cosmo, it was taboo for women to talk about sex openly.”
White told me that during a 2010 trip to New Delhi, the editor of Cosmo India correlated a rise in love marriages over arranged marriages to Cosmo’s influence. “I don’t know if this is true statistically,” White said, but “Cosmo has been very, very popular there. And I’d like to think that one of the messages we’re delivering to women is: You don’t have to marry the guy your parents told you to marry. You should marry who you want to marry. You can have a job if you’d like. You can have a career if you want. These choices are open to you today.”
When asked via e-mail if there were statistics to back up this correlation, the editor of Cosmo India, Nandini Bhalla, politely evaded the question but provided more interesting anecdotes. “When we launched in 1996, we were flooded with letters — women wanted to know if kissing could cause pregnancy. They were clueless about the basics of having sex, and they had a million questions about what was right and wrong. The Cosmo team actually tackled these questions personally — writing back to readers with answers or carrying stories that tackled their concerns. Indian parents are usually conservative about sexual matters, and friends were often equally ignorant, so Cosmo was the only one with reliable information.”
“50 Kinky Sex Moves” notwithstanding, Cosmo does adhere to a set of surprisingly wholesome values. The magazine discourages plastic surgery, for instance, and has run articles opposing breast implants. In its coverage of food and fitness, White notes, “we don’t do any diets, no crash dieting.” The U.S. edition also has a section called Body Love, in which it tries “to encourage women to feel good about their bodies,” no matter their size. A recent issue featured a spread of a curvy woman in a variety of gorgeous bathing suits on some fabulous remote beach. It didn’t feel like a token shoot of a larger model; she was beautiful, and the bathing suits were reasonably priced. (While trying to find the picture again on Google, I fell down the Cosmo rabbit hole, scrolling through a gallery of swimwear, then through “How to Be Sexier — Instantly” and then through all 23 slides of “Sexy Ideas for Long Hair.” Texturizer now plays a role in my morning routine.)
The magazine also covers aspects of the female body beyond its sex appeal and orgasmic capacity. “We ran an article that pained me to run,” White told me, “but I felt it was important. It basically said the key time to try to get pregnant is between 25 and 35. There has been so much said about still waiting until you’re older, and I didn’t have my first kid until I was 37, but we’re taking a chance — you need to know it.”
I asked why it pained her. “I want every girl to feel that she can have her first kid at 50, if she wants,” White said emphatically. She has encouraged readers to look into freezing their eggs.
Cosmo happens to be fairly traditional about sex itself. Brown believed that it was O.K. to sleep with married men (it was their wives’ responsibility to keep them faithful, she argued), but White eliminated that from the formula. (“A total no-no,” she said.) The magazine also assumes that you’re having sex with a boyfriend or a husband (there’s not much in the way of same-sex relationships), and not with a one-night stand. “We certainly talk about sex mostly in terms of relationships,” White said, “and most of our readers have told us they’re in relationships, and they want the sexual information for their relationship.” White also sees the hookup culture boomeranging back to more traditional standards. “One thing I do think that women will evaluate in the coming years,” she said, “is casual sex. Is it really what you want to be doing, casual sex, a lot of casual sex? Is it what you feel good about?” But if it’s your thing, that’s fine too. “We don’t pass judgment,” she said.
White acknowledges that some people find Cosmo’s obsession with sex trashy, but she’s unabashedly proud of how it sets the magazine apart. “Every Cosmo reader expects to have herself and her pleasures taken care of, equally,” she said matter-of-factly. “We reinforce the idea all the time that, yes, we want you to be a fabulous lover, we want to give you those skills, but you better get it back, baby, because that’s what you deserve.” And if that makes for some repetitive stories, so be it. “There’s a frustration that it takes time to learn how to have an orgasm,” White said, “and have it consistently. So that’s terrain we cover a lot.”
These mores are upheld, to varying degrees of cultural sensitivity, throughout the Cosmo universe. Judging by searches on the Web site, Cosmo U.K. readers are most interested in hair and oral sex (“in that order,” says its publishing director, Ella Dolphin), but in India, where women traditionally live with their parents until marriage, the Cosmo reader “might not be comfortable openly discussing her sex life due to fear of being judged,” Bhalla says. She also notes that because sex toys are banned in India, “we’re careful not to talk about them in the magazine.” Leyla Orujova, the editor of Cosmo Azerbaijan, told me that her staff ensures that sex is generally discussed within the context of marriage. Cosmo Singapore comes with a yellow “Unsuitable for the Young” warning box on the cover and sometimes runs its sexiest content in a sealed section promising “phenomenal pleasure . . . waiting for you inside.”
Most international Cosmos are run by their countries’ natives, but Kerrie Simon-Lawrence, the beautiful, redheaded editor of Middle East Cosmo, is from Sydney. “Obviously because of the cultural sensitivities within the Middle East” — where dating and premarital sex are, in some countries, punishable by law — “we can’t lift so much from international editions.” Throughout the Cosmic Conference, she and the magazine’s publisher joked repeatedly about needing good lawyers and the possibility of going to jail.
Other editions feature more subtle deviations. Cosmo France has reliably more artsy and experimental covers. The South Korean edition is huge — physically huge; issues sometimes come as two separate magazines, because they would otherwise break — and focuses less on sex than marriage (“My Dreamy Wedding” and “Dreams Come True!” are two cover lines from the 400-page April edition). The editor of Cosmo Croatia, Marjana Filipovic-Grcic, told me that stories about women acting bravely on their own have been particularly popular in her country. The same is true for Cosmo Kazakhstan, which “focuses on career and travel more than the U.S. edition does,” writes Akisheva, because “Kazakhstan is a relatively newly independent, developing country, and women are excited about the career opportunities the market economy has to offer.”
Cosmo Germany is more business-oriented. Cosmo Russia (which has the highest circulation of any women’s glossy magazine in that country) publishes longer articles. Cosmo Finland has been running multipage, centerfold-type spreads of topless Finnish guys in order to dispel the notion that Finnish guys aren’t hot. (Not overly convincing!)
But for all of the magazines’ differences, Cosmo is still pushing “the same standards of beauty” around the world, Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, said one afternoon after I returned from the conference. “I don’t know that that’s a global export that we want to be proud of.” Kimmich agreed that editorial content “can sometimes be what you might even call feminist,” because “at the most basic level, the articles do promote women’s advancement and equality through good advice about career issues and women’s health and sexuality.” But, she said, there is plenty of content that sends “contrary” messages. “The export of Cosmo is like the export of any other global American brand,” she said. “Coca-Cola, Hollywood films. It’s a part of what’s happening to our economy, and like all globalization, there’s good with the bad.”
At the office of Peter Yates, the creative director of Hearst Magazines International, a wall is covered in postcard-size versions of international Cosmo covers tacked up in layers of 12 — a year’s worth of cover art, viewable as flipbooks. There’s a lot of Megan Fox, Kate Hudson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde and Jessica Alba, who was once on 20 international covers at the same time. Unlike other women’s magazines, which often go for make-up-centric close-ups (Allure), stylish playfulness (Glamour), professional elegance (Marie Claire) or high-fashion photography (Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue), Cosmo keeps it consistently, overtly sexual. The women look young and fertile, and the cover star is generally Beautiful Young Woman With Lots of Cleavage, Standing, Hand on Hip, Almost but Not Quite Smiling — or the look a woman might give herself in the mirror before going out hoping to get hit on.
The brand saves money by repurposing its covers across various editions, and it shaves costs in other ways, too. For the most part, articles are created by a small team of staff members at Big Cosmo and then ripple outward through the Cosmo network. The magazine has a database for international editors to see what features Cosmo U.S. has planned approximately three months before they run; once the images and layout are uploaded, they can then tweak the content they like to their own country’s needs. Writers do not receive royalties when their work is repurposed. Huffy freelancers are virtually nonexistent.
So what appeared as “Fascinating Breast Facts” in the July 2011 edition of Cosmo U.S., featuring a close-up of a woman tugging her shirt open, became “15 Facts You Need to Know About Your Breasts” in the October 2011 edition of Cosmo Middle East, where it ran with a photo of a model demurely dangling a bra over her shoulder. “What His Sleep Habits Can Tell You” ran in Cosmo U.S. in March 2012 and, months later, appeared in China (same photography but with text translated into Chinese) and in Armenia (different photography). And what ran as the fashion spread “Motorcycle Diaries” in August 2009 in Cosmo U.S. — featuring an abandoned gas station, denim, plaids, a hot guy and the open road — ran two years later in Cosmo Mongolia with the same blend of denim, plaid, gas station and open road, except the whole thing had been reshot with guys who looked Mongolian.
One byline that regularly appears in editions around the world is that of Jessica Knoll, a pretty, friendly and immaculately put-together 28-year-old senior editor. Over drinks at a quiet wine bar near the Big Cosmo office, Knoll explained that it’s not only cheaper to produce features from within but also easier for maintaining the Cosmo voice. And anyway, there’s less of it to write these days: “We did a redesign in January and slashed word count,” she said. “Part of that is because we live in a Twitter generation. We’re not going to be indulgent writers who ramble on for a couple thousand words — we need to find a way a to say things quickly but also have some personality.”
“I learned a lot from your recent, um, article,” I said to her, about eight minutes into our meeting. “About the wishbone-shaped . . . uh . . .”
“Oh, about the internal clitoris?” she said. “See, I don’t get bashful. It becomes completely normal to talk to your boss and have the word ‘penis’ appear 15 times in your conversation.”
The article in question — “Have Easier, Stronger Orgasms” — was on “surprising new findings” about the clitoris based on research done in the 1990s (not exactly new) but features an interview with a woman whose sex book came out this year (new). It ran in the May edition of Cosmo U.S. and will likely appear in Cosmos around the world for months to come. “It’s always our goal to make something feel timely and fresh,” Knoll said. “Nothing can be evergreen. Even if it’s an age-old idea, we have to somehow find a way to put a fresh spin on it.”
For example, in a passage from “Sex and the Single Girl,” from 1962, Helen Gurley Brown advises readers on how to catch someone’s attention from across a bar: “Look straight into his eyes, deep and searchingly, then lower your gaze,” she wrote. “Go back to your companions or magazine. Now look at him again the same way . . . steadfastly, questioningly. Then drop your eyes. Do it three times and you’re a flirt! (P.S., You will have made him very happy.)” And then from an article in the May 2012 issue of Cosmo titled, “The Smile That Makes Men Hit on You”: “A classic study found that you need to make eye contact with a dude and subtly smile at him twice in a row for him to get that you’re interested. . . . Look at him, smile and hold your gaze for a couple of seconds. Then look away for a few seconds, look back and do the same thing again.” A classic study.
Not that Cosmo and its patron saint haven’t tried to evolve with the times. In the introduction to the 2003 reissue of “Sex and the Single Girl,” about what had changed in the four decades since the book was originally published, Brown wrote: “Brains have become almost as treasured as beauty . . . almost! . . . If you had to or could choose one or the other, I would almost choose smart!”
This reminded me of a surprising moment from the Cosmic Convention. During a PowerPoint presentation about reader polls, one slide asked the audience to guess which of the following things young women wanted most: a) beauty; b) an amazing career; c) fame; or d) lots of money. There was a slight pause as audience members made their own guesses. Then the answer: Fame. A faint murmur of confusion. Fame? Really? I conducted a copycat poll among my own friends: 15 picked an amazing career, 6 picked money, 3 picked beauty and only 1 picked fame.
The presenter cited the rise of reality TV and made an effort to spin the findings into something positive. It’s not that young women necessarily want to be the next Kim Kardashian, the presenter riffed, but that everyone wants to be famous within her social group or on her own Facebook feed.
So add famemongering to the list of less-than-empowering — or “contrary,” as Kimmich would say — messages that Cosmo sends to its audience worldwide. But what this hand-wringing neglects is that young women are smart and can sift for what they want. Worrying that Cosmo readers will unblinkingly follow orders about kinky sex moves or imbibe some latent sense of Kardashianism seems unfounded and unnecessary and even a little insulting. Maybe the magazine is benefiting from a rise in love marriages in India more than it is facilitating them, but it’s definitely not pushing any woman who isn’t interested into backdoor booty.
“I know a lot of people have issues about these very sexual cover lines being on display,” Knoll said. She told me she could remember reading Cosmo from a very young age and never feeling like she had to go out and have sex with someone. Then she paused for a moment. “When I would read Cosmo, all it made me want to do was grow up, wear a pretty dress, nice heels, move to the city and have an awesome life. And I just don’t think that’s a bad thing to want, you know?”
Edith Zimmerman is the founder and editor of the Web site The Hairpin. She last wrote for the magazine about Kreayshawn.
Editor: Jon Kelly
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 3, 2012
An earlier version misstated the division of the Hearst Corporation of which Peter Yates is creative director. It is Hearst Magazines International, not Hearst International.
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