Then and Now

Today at work while rummaging through some random boxes, I came across a treasure chest of hidden goodies, vintage Cosmopolitan magazines from the 1980s and early 1990s. I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to do a little side-by-side comparison of our most current issue and one I found from January 1985.

Nice hair gurl.

Might as well start with the cover. The January 1985 cover features the lovely Elle Macpherson, I’m not too sure if this was before or during her supermodel prime, but interestingly enough there is no mention of her on the cover. Splashed all over the current issues are headlines like “Selena Gomez, Secrets behind her megastar success” and “Megan Fox, naughty or nice? You decide.” In the most recent decades, we have developed an obsession with celebrities and their lives. My explanation to this is because we see them as living in a parallel universe to ours- we fail to remember they are real people because of the money, power, and fame they have, and our lives just look dull and booorrrring in comparison. Sucks to suck. But we gotta deal with it.

March 2012 Cover

 Also different to note is the cover headlines. We have this little joke where we talk about whether a girl or guy is “Cosmo worthy” or whether they are “Cosmo material” when questioning if we should place them in the magazine. There is a definite shift in the kinds of celebrities that were placed in the magazine back in the day to the celebrities that are placed in the magazine today.  In 1985, when this issue had a full length story about Jane Fonda, she was 48 (I did the math). Today, there is no way in hell that anyone over the age of 35 would ever be placed in Cosmopolitan. Have you seen the January and February 2012 covers? Teen central … Dakota Fanning and Selena Gomez… they are both barely 18.  I remember the first time I read Cosmopolitan magazine at the ripe age of 15, and to be honest I had no idea what half of the stuff they were talking about was.  There has been a definite shift in the target audience for the magazine, they claim we target ages 18-34, but I know for a fact we have little 13 year old tweens running around reading the “2012 Sex Survey.” That’s an issue. In a previous post, I mentioned that girls as young as 9 and 10 are in fact reading these magazines. Not okay.

Whilst entertaining myself on the internet during a terribly boring physics lecture a while ago, I found a photo that captures, in a satirical manner, what women’s magazines are impressing upon us. The focus of today’s women’s magazines is on how to have better sex, please “your man”, and lose weight, all while supposedly “empowering” us to be fun, fearless females. Personally, I think we need to find a new way to be empowered because this crap ain’t cutting it.