eff you, Cosmo

This past semester, I ended up taking some surprisingly awesome classes, as well as some surprisingly awful classes. In my Race, Class and Gender class (surprisingly awesome!) we talked a lot about gender inequality across many different levels and someone brought up an interesting theory: In our society there is an ideal type of person (A) and everyone else (not-A). The not-A tries (or is expected to try) to be like A and generally A is a white male. This is true for women; for example, it is now acceptable for women to wear pants (traditionally male garb) but it is not acceptable for men to wear skirts.

Anyways, over the past few years, I have noticed how sexist Cosmopolitan really is. The magazine's motto is "Fun, Fearless Female" but in reality it is "Sexy, subservient female." The whole point of the magazine is to teach women how to nab a suitable man. They even espouse the above A/not-A theory in respect to dating and relationships. In order to win over and keep a man's affection, women should hide unsexy, female-specific things: pads, tampons, nude underwear, hair removing implements, eyelash curlers (?!), etc. In fact, Cosmo advises you to hide your emotions and "act like one of the guys" to make your man see how awesome you really are. The same magazine tells you to throw back some beers and junk food with your guy and his friends to show how un-girly you are and also that 49% of men surveyed would dump their girlfriend for gaining too much weight.

In reality, this magazine is geared towards high school girls, not adult women. Is this really what we want to teach our young women? Should we hide our undesirable feminine attributes in relationships like we do in society? We're expected to hide our tampons from the world, but if we have to hide them from the people we consider to be our partners, our soul mates, our spouses, how intimate can our relationships really be?