Cosmo complaints: Reparative reading and the possibility of pleasure in Cosmopolitan magazine

Abstract

Cosmopolitan magazine has occupied a central position in feminist cultural criticism since Helen Gurley Brown acquired the US edition of the magazine in 1965. Consequently, the magazine endures much criticism for its normative and constantly recycled sex content. By now, many of Cosmo’s problems are familiar. This article practices a reparative mode of reading to ask how the discourses of pleasure in the magazine produce, simultaneously, a sexual public aimed at building intimate associations and emergent modes of social self-stylization. The article concludes that a reparative approach makes possible moments of rhetorical invention wherein women productively articulate themselves despite the powerful missteps historically forged in Cosmo’s pages.

Keywords

pleasure reparative reading sex women’s magazines

It seems to me the most specious idea that there is some standard of sexual conduct … some prima facie correct way for everybody to behave that we can all be turned into so many slices of white bread. (Helen Gurley Brown, in Scanlon, 2009: 184)

Cosmopolitan magazine, a familiar and well-known site of feminist discussion, carries with it a long and contested history since Helen Gurley Brown acquired its US editorship in 1965. The mid-1960s shift from literary to women’s magazine raised a number of questions regarding Cosmo’s relationship to the variant meanings of feminism and sex circulating at the time (Landers, 2010: 229; Scanlon, 2009). Was Cosmo transforming US women into sex-crazed sluts, devoid of traditional values? Was Cosmo finally liberating women from old and tired norms of sexual culture? Although these questions only contour the superficial outer-extremes of the discussions about women’s magazines from the mid-1960s through the present moment, these oppositional narratives about Cosmo’s place in sexual politics and popular feminism continue to occupy feminist thought.

As a young girl, I was always curious about the kind of sex tidbits I would find lurking in the pages of this very “adult” magazine—especially when those pages were off-limits. I’ve carried with me this vivid memory of my mother confiscating a Seventeen magazine at the age of 13 because “you aren’t 17,” she said. So the magazine went to the backyard firepit—Alicia Silverstone’s face crumpled in ashes. And now here I am, older—post-consumption of hundreds of issues. First as a casual reader and then as a curious sex researcher—interested again in the kind of sexual knowledge production I might find in Cosmo’s pages.

This article turns toward the contemporary pages of US Cosmo and its far-reaching circulation to analyze how sexual publics are built despite, or because of, dominant structural ideologies articulated to the magazine. I animate this “turning toward” not only to temper the outer-extremes of the debate surrounding Cosmo as a mediated text, but also to practice a mode of reparative criticism absent in assessments of contemporary Cosmo. Although my reading joins much of the previous scholarly literature in its distaste for Cosmo’s content, the article takes a reparative risk to ask how the discourses of pleasure in the magazine produce, simultaneously, a sexual public aimed at building intimate associations, and emergent modes of social self-stylization (Warner, 2002).

Inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) practice of reparative reading, this article resists the lure of paranoid assessments that often err on the side of stable, cultural truth-claims, which conclude only in the negative through a presumed necessary effect of structures like capitalism and patriarchy. This mode of criticism is “not the trading in of unhappy endings for happier ones or wishing away the contamination of practices with complex power relations” (West, 2014: 20). Instead, a reparative reading practice is one that attunes critics to how cultural products are articulated into complex relations of power—and when the critic attends to those complexities the possibility of recognizing human invention and agency, despite the disciplinary force of systems of power not always in our favor, emerges.

Entering into the critical act with preconceived notions about the stability of power, in and around the magazine, stymies the project of recognizing where the relations of power make possible convivial and communicative sexual vocabularies. As I approach the discursive fragments of sex and pleasure in and tethered to the pages of Cosmo, I engage in a reparative practice, which aims to gauge the horizon of possibility of these articulations. Beyond a self-interested and individualized understanding of pleasure (Frith, 2015), I query the variant meaning-making practices in Cosmo to draw upon the discrepant and contradictory voices that constitute a provisional sexual public open to variegated modes of sexual deliberation and discussion.

Cosmo’s positioning of sex as communicative, its multivocal contradictions, and its negotiation of the complexities of power each contribute to its part in making pleasure public. Because Cosmo is so widely circulated, I argue that these moments of pleasure-articulation intensify and multiply discourses of women’s sexuality, facilitating productive agential, public claims to pleasure. To animate this argument, the article first traces the itinerancy of feminist scholarship on women’s magazines to draw out both the limiting and capacious forms of worldmaking these inquiries envision within mediated texts. From there, the article moves to a brief interlude that lays claim to the methodological commitment of reparative modes of reading women’s magazines following an analysis of Cosmo’s text and circulation. I analyze moments in Cosmo’s circulation that gesture toward productive enactments of contradiction, multivocality, and pleasurable elaborations to query what it might mean, or do to us, if we envision Cosmo as producing multiple avenues of pleasure.

The itinerancy of feminist magazine scholarship

Cosmopolitan endures much scholarly criticism for its normative, disciplinary message dissemination and for its constantly recycled sex content. The critiques of Cosmo range from its blatant exclusion of women of color (Carr, 2002) to its part in cultivating harmful thin-ideal discourses (Harper and Tiggeman, 2008). Some scholars critique Cosmo for its definitive commitment to heterosexuality and its veiled exclusion of lesbian models and lesbian sex (Rand, 1994). Some critics take issue with how health discourses are dangerously mediated in these outlets (Hinnant, 2009; Newman, 2007). Many scholars criticize the magazine for extending the reach of patriarchy by disciplining and subjugating women. So, as critics continue to consider this widely circulated cultural product, there is no shortage of all the ways in which the outlet gets it wrong: Cosmo disciplines, Cosmo polices, Cosmo regulates. These bleak modes of inquiry occupy the center of the scholarly terrain. At stake for this review of literature is a careful discussion of both the narrow and the capacious forms of feminist critique that analyze Cosmopolitan in particular, and women’s magazines more generally. I draw upon these discussions not only to anchor my own analysis of Cosmo in conversations already underway, but to elucidate how the critical practice of making cultural observations falters when structures are invested with omnipresent force and definitive determinations.

In discerning the part Cosmo plays in feminism and the advancement of women more generally, some feminist scholars argue that its attachment to the late-capitalist lure of consumption and the acquisition of wealth denies its role as a productive and emancipatory force. These criticisms range from intense skepticism to more generous understandings of the magazine’s relationship with capitalism (Berebitsky, 2006; Douglas, 2010; Hasinoff, 2009; Hollows, 2013; Machin and Thornborrow, 2003; Ouellette, 1999; Valverde, 1986). In her study of Mademoiselle and Ms., Ellen McCracken (1993), for example, emphasizes how the desires and pleasures expressed in these outlets consistently, and firmly, articulate themselves to the ideology of consumerism. Although McCracken recognizes the variant meanings of the text and its circulation, she concludes that the overwhelming message inherent in women’s magazines is “consumerist competitiveness and reified individualism” (McCracken, 1993: 299). Here, pleasure is part and parcel of a “master narrative” that only fosters commercial goals and publisher dreams. The women’s magazine reader is only addressed because she is trapped in commercial culture; her purchasing power is the exclusive reason she is addressed at all, rendering any glimpse of productive possibilities impossible. Women’s magazines are, of course, consumer products wrapped firmly in the game of capitalism. But as the lessons of British Cultural Studies remind us, just because a product is capitalist does not necessarily mean the uses to which the product is put cannot serve resistive purposes.

Feminist scholarship often criticizes Cosmo for its part in stabilizing the male gaze and, more generally, for its production of the oppressive effects of patriarchy. Eva Illouz draws on Michel Foucault to suggest “that what can be said, thought and felt is regulated by the epistemic rules with which knowledge is produced, organized and validated in a given historical context” (Illouz, 1991: 233). She concludes that Cosmo and Woman magazine imbue romantic discourse with “the logic of instrumentality,” which “is liable to have negative consequences on the woman’s subjectivity” (Illouz, 1991: 246). Similarly, Gigi Durham locates women’s magazines as institutions of power that “have historically been predicated on prevailing, male-derived notions of femininity” (Durham, 1996: 21). She suggests that the sexual discourses present in these magazines espouse a kind of “spurious sexual liberation,” wherein women’s sexual agency is denigrated as sex unfolds “in the service of men” (Durham, 1996: 24). To understand Cosmo as articulating a spurious liberation definitively assesses the magazine as purporting something other than it claims to be; that is, as apparently liberating but not actually so. Kathryn McMahon (1990), for example, concludes that the only relations of power present in the text are those of domination and subordination, and that those relations reside in a zero-sum game. A more generous reading of ideology and power, however, elucidates that the relations of power are surely more complicated than dominated versus dominator. These assessments are easy bedfellows with claims of false consciousness and arguments that mark women as dupes of ideology. This definitive assessment leaves little room to digest the magazine’s varied voices and its temporal and contextual terrain.

Finally, some of the scholarship recognizes the contested and contradictory messages mediated in women’s magazines; even when recognizing those contradictions, however, these modes of inquiry conclude that the power of patriarchal ideologies overwhelms the worldmaking potential embedded in contradiction (Pattee, 2009). Amy Aronson puts it succinctly, noting that critiques highlighting the disparate and sometimes competing discourses circulating in women’s magazines “capture the inherent polyphony of the form, only to declare its relatively free play of voices an ambush rather than an opening or opportunity for agency, self-awareness or critique” (Aronson, 2010: 36). Rosalind Gill (2009), for example, highlights contradictory and contested discourses, but concludes that the mediation of intimacy is dangerously normative in women’s magazines. Of these mediated intimacies, Gill writes, “more powerfully than anything, [is] the perfect marriage (heteronormative metaphor intended!) of post feminism and neoliberalism” (Gill, 2009: 366). For her, women’s magazines force women to regulate “every aspect of their conduct” in the service of men and heterosexuality (Gill, 2009: 366). Likewise, Panteá Farvid and Virginia Braun suggest that although magazines like Cosmo purport visions of sexual agency and autonomy, “this could more accurately be identified as pseudo liberation and sexual empowerment” (Farvid and Braun, 2006: 306). These scholars envision a world in which women’s magazines would increase their “focus on more diverse forms of sexuality and pleasures, with a recognition and emphasis on ‘woman-centered’ pleasures and desires” (Farvid and Braun, 2006: 307). I offer a reading of contemporary Cosmo that takes into account how those pleasures and desires are already emergent in the text and its circulation presently.

Given this account of the itinerancy of feminist Cosmo scholarship, readers familiar with this literature might ask about the reach and impact of scholarly work emerging from British Cultural Studies and reader-response studies (see especially, Hermes, 1995; McRobbie, 2000; Radway, 1984). And, indeed, more culturally-inflected assessments of women’s magazines do attend to the variant and diffuse meanings of women’s magazines, and the resistive capacities embedded in structures of power (D’Enbeau, 2009). These studies, I suggest, conclude much more generously and gauge the productive potentials of contradiction and contest. Angela McRobbie (2000), for example, suggests that if some of the discourses disseminated by women’s magazines are, in fact, patriarchal, anti-feminist, or non-agential, “this does not mean that its readers swallow its axioms without question” (McRobbie, 2000: 114). Similarly, Janice Radway (1984) warns scholars “not to reproduce the reifying tendencies of late capitalism” and instead urges us to understand how women actually engage with texts. This vein of scholarship examines the uses to which women put their encounters with women’s magazines.

And although this legacy of feminist scholarship exists, its hold on current popular culture analysis is not as strong as the force behind these critical inflections. Current magazine scholarship continues to position the meanings made in these cultural products as either liberating or disciplinary. Hannah Frith (2015), for example, contends that Cosmopolitan enacts a “technology of sexiness” by adhering to dangerous neoliberal logics whereby sex/pleasure function as and through work/labor. I join Frith’s observation to ask: what if we understood this “technology” as an apparatus of knowledge that produces pleasure—sometimes alongside discipline, sometimes alongside resistance?

By highlighting the production of pleasure in Cosmo, my analysis nudges readers to consider a turn away from either/or ideological arguments about popular culture artifacts. Either/or scholarly assessments of pleasure and ideology in women’s magazines suggest either that “pleasure is connected with sexuality and disruption, opening a space for authenticity and freedom,” or that “such pleasures are simply further symptoms of false consciousness” (Ballaster et al., 1991: 161). Offering a rejoinder to this false choice, I suggest that popular culture artifacts communicate both pleasure and ideology and this “both/and” perspective “is neither surprising nor worrying” (Ballaster et al., 1991: 162). Cosmo readers and writers traffic in both ideology and pleasure. Much like Foucault (1978) reminds us, saying yes to sex does not mean saying no to power. Ideology and pleasure, much like sex and power, are articulated to one another in complex spirals. And as I illustrate below, those articulations are not definitively negatively valenced.

Reparative risks: Articulating methodological interventions

My reading of Cosmo neither uncritically celebrates the text nor definitively rejects its part in constituting a particular kind of sex in public. By ushering in a set of pre-determined political agendas, feminist critics often fervently attach themselves to the regulatory structures of sex and sexuality that make visible only one view in the field of critical vision. Instead I suggest, beginning with the assumption that women always already negotiate Cosmo’s codes and attune ourselves to the lack of coherent messages in its circulation, that this mode of critical practice culminates in a more capacious line of sight. My analysis draws out the concept of sexual publics which are “scenes of association and identity that transform the private lives they mediate” (Warner, 2002: 57). Through the complex articulations of pleasure communicated in and through Cosmo’s pages, readers and writers participate in the public deliberation of private affairs. These deliberations, I argue, crowd the space of the public in variegated ways—sometimes challenging dangerous ideologies and other times strategically negotiating them.

My analysis takes as its object of inquiry all online and offline issues from the beginning of Joanna Cole’s directorship (December 2012) through November 2013. I bracket these editions of Cosmo not only for the sake of managing a seemingly infinite archive but also to stake a larger argument about the ways in which shifting contexts influence the content of the magazine. I mark the addition of Coles as a contextual shift in the magazine’s direction, which conveniently offers a one-year time-span from the beginning of research to the end. Additionally, this recognition of context gestures toward the affirmation of Cosmo as an ever-changing vehicle for articulating pleasure in public, and resists the idea that the magazine is merely a receptacle of recycled sex content. To be sure, the vision of Cosmo during the 1980s and 1990s was different from that of the early 2000s, and with each passing year the contexts (technological, political, social, etc.) through which the magazine resonates also change. As Janice Winship notes, the ideological patterns of women’s magazines “are constantly being reworked to make sense and deal, as best they can, with the changing experience of women’s lives” (Winship, 1987: 23). Because my analysis centers on the provisionality of cultural production through reparative reading, I analyze the now of Cosmo—my now which will surely be differently inflected when my now is a year from now, or 20.

Cosmo’s circulation extends beyond the front and back cover of the material glossy product. Cosmo, as brand and industry, has expanded into social media, coffee-table and trade books, and clothing lines. How, then, to approach these ubiquitously circulated discourses of sex and pleasure? Each monthly magazine edition consists of eight cover stories (including the infamous sex article, top left-hand corner), sections on celebrity culture, fashion and beauty, work and careers, health and body, and (most central to my analysis) “love, lust & other stuff.” By considering roughly one year of issues, I attend to Cosmo’s sex Q&A, the cover story about sex, and active moments of dialogue between reader and Cosmo writer/editor. Approaching these moments of active communicative exchange in the text I analyze how this advice, these questions (and answers), and these contradictory and multivocal expressions negotiate the complex relations of power that both inform and challenge these articulations.

With these methodological and theoretical commitments in mind, I title this section “reparative risks” because it is, indeed, risky to situate Cosmo as a site potentially ripe for building sexual publics aimed at cultivating positive expressions of pleasure in public. Women’s magazines and Cosmo in particular are, after all, culturally marked as guilty pleasures. But whose guilt? On what grounds? And what might we make of the observation that a guilty pleasure is still a pleasure? Marking the text as a “guilty pleasure” rhetorically situates the magazine as forbidden fruit, that which should remain private, and out of public eye. But because Cosmo is the highest-selling and most widely circulated women’s magazine in the United States, overlooking the ubiquitous enjoyment-encounters of Cosmo fails to attend to its circulatory success. The analysis below elucidates how these pleasurable expressions might cultivate sites of productive engagement, wherein sexual possibilities can flourish despite or because of those “systems” that seem, only on first glance, so determinative.

Cosmo’s spirals of power: Inventing pleasure

Pleasure has often been the “bad” object of humanistic inquiry. Pleasure is frequently positioned as silly, unimportant, or as in a zero-sum relationship with ideology. To be sure, your pleasure is not necessarily my pleasure and this benign difference, as Gayle Rubin (1989) might call it, poses difficulties for the feminist critic who stakes a claim about women’s pleasure in toto. Pleasure travels as affect, emotion, cultural construction, innate, learned, that which feels good, and the binary opposite of displeasure. When I query the epistemic limits and possibilities of articulating pleasure, I ask where in Cosmopolitan magazine a sense of enjoyment, sensuous fulfillment (or the feelings derived in its anticipation), and satisfaction are communicated. I travel to moments in the text and beyond (through its circulation) to analyze where pleasure unfolds despite patriarchal norms that position women’s sexuality as coerced, dangerous, or non-agential.

Although Cosmo often focuses on expected modes of vanilla, heterosexual sex, the limits and possibilities of non-normative sexual pleasures are also negotiated within the circuitries of Cosmopolitan’s circulation. Much like Rubin’s (1989) “charmed circle,” I am reminded, here, of the contested negotiation of sex in public whereby some sexual practices are marked as appropriate and even celebrated, while others occupy the outer limits of cultural desirability. While vaginal penetrative sex within the context of a relationship continues to occupy the normative center, anal sex is often marked as taboo for public discussion. Cosmo, however, brings this discussion to its pages. In the August 2013 issue, a woman writes to the Sex Q&A editors, and asks, “I want to try anal sex, but I’m scared. Be honest… will it hurt?” (Cosmopolitan, 2013a). The response reads:

Sex educator Jamye Waxman says before you even think about trying it, make sure you have two things: a caring partner who listens and a good silicone lubricant … Now, as to the second part of your question, yeah, it may hurt a little. It should eventually feel better, even pleasurable. But if it doesn’t, don’t keep doing it! You may just have a back door that you prefer not to use for guests. (Cosmopolitan, 2013a)

This moment of dialogue in the magazine not only emphasizes the importance of communication (or sex as communicative), but also assures the reader that different bodies desire different stimuli. The response relies on the voice of a sex educator to suggest that the first time may be uncomfortable or even induce some pain but holds open the possibility of pleasure with some practice (trust? relaxation? loss of inhibition? communication?). Read from a limiting perspective, one could conclude that this kind of advice compels women to acquiesce to the desires of their male partners without attention to their own tastes. However, Cosmo advises the reader to remain attuned to her body and to recognize her own sexual limits. This moment in the text not only risks alienating more traditionally inclined readers (who gasp at the thought of anal penetration), but also takes the reader on her own terms.¹ The reader expresses a desire to try something new and the magazine, in turn, carefully crafts a horizon of pleasurable possibility for her and other Cosmo readers, assuaging the fears that accompany sexual practices that open oneself up to vulnerability, obligate partner trust, and aim for mutual pleasure.

Given my year-long archive, locating moments wherein the magazine strictly regulates women’s sexual desire and pleasure is difficult. Much of this difficulty hinges on the multivocality of the text. The July 2013 issue, for example, includes a story entitled “Upgrade your sex life this summer,” which comprises multiple voices narrating sex practices Cosmo readers find pleasurable and/or satisfying. Among the 12 women, one writes:

Now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve realized that being direct with guys is the key to better sex. I called my guy the other day and said verbatim, “I want to come over at 7 tonight and have sex with you.” When I got there, I marched in and took charge. He thought it was hot because I was being dominant, and I felt powerful, which turned me on. (Daly, 2013)

This moment not only resonates with the theme emergent in the October 2013 “sexy power issue,” but also articulates a version of mutual pleasure (Cosmopolitan, 2013b). This Cosmo reader conveys that her partner derives pleasure from her dominance, and that her expression of control also, simultaneously, brings her pleasure. And, of course, this is only one of 12 versions of sexual “upgrade.” The expression of pleasure in the text, through tips and “kinky ideas to recharge sex,” gestates the capacity for pleasurable discourses to move from the magazine pages to the bedrooms of those who encounter Cosmo either explicitly or through casual discussion with other readers.

Sex as communicative or communicating sex in Cosmo

One of the longest-running feature sections in Cosmopolitan magazine is the Sex Q&A column. There, readers ask questions regarding their sexual tastes, fantasies, future sexual possibilities, and erotic preferences. Some scholars have noted that this genre is a kind of “talking sex therapy” of which we should be highly suspicious (Winship, 1987). For Winship, the emphasis on sex in the Cosmo Q&A format breeds a “tendency to cut sexuality off from the rest of social activity” and champions a “belief that so long as a heterosexual couple communicate frankly their different sexualities can be mutually satisfied” (Winship, 1987: 112–113). This observation is underpinned by the assumption that the relations of power are always already tilted in favor of masculine sexuality and the force of patriarchy, and it fails to recognize communication as a process without necessarily correspondent guarantees. Cosmo readers and writers do, however, often acknowledge communication as a process and delink the meanings of sexual practice from “natural acts” that merely happen. Indeed, as many of the answers suggest in these Q&A features, communication figures as both a limit and a possibility of pleasure—for both Cosmo readers and writers. Rather than offer definitive or regulatory advice, Cosmo writers carefully hedge their answers and draft possibilizing discourses for the woman asking her question, and, more broadly, for readers who might encounter these columns. I mark these discourses as “possibilizing” not only because they account for sexual variation but also because they acknowledge the intrinsic linkages between sex and communication in context.

When communication gets positioned as a limit to sexual practice by both a reader and a writer of Cosmo, “talking sex therapy” begins to surface as a more complex process. One Cosmo reader asks, “My boyfriend always asks me if I like what he’s doing in bed… and wants me to describe why! It’s annoying. How do I tell him to cut it out?” (Cosmopolitan, 2013c). The Cosmo writer begins by commiserating (“Oh, that sounds grating as hell”) (Cosmopolitan, 2013c). Then the answer recommends carrying the conversation outside of the sexual act. The response suggests:

Start with the good: “I love when you [pull my hair, kiss my neck, flip me over], but I need some quiet so I can focus on how awesome it is.” If you’re up for a little talking during the deed, before he says anything, whisper something like “Damn, that feels so good.” You may find it gets you hot when you say it of your own accord, rather than as a response to one of his 20 billion questions. (Cosmopolitan, 2013c)

To be sure, this is only one example among many which illustrates the Q&A form of the magazine; this particular exchange is also indicative of the high level of negotiation and possibilizing discourse present in the column. While the reader expresses dissatisfaction and reaches out for communicative advice, the Cosmo writer pulls together a number of strategies and alternatives for her reader. The sexual actions in brackets gesture toward the fact that the writer does not definitely know what the reader’s erotic desires are. Further, the writer also emphasizes that while an overabundance of communication during sex may be “grating as hell,” vocalizing one’s own desires may, in fact, inspire pleasure on one’s own terms. Neither happy relational bliss nor total erotic satisfaction is guaranteed. This example, like many others, illustrates the flipside of strict desire regulation by invoking sex practices as communicative and process-oriented.

Cosmo readers are also attuned to how communication facilitates a more effective moment of pleasure. One reader asks, “My boyfriend and I broke up for a year, and in that time, I dated a guy who gave me curl-your-toes-and-scream oral sex. How can I get that from my boyfriend now?” (Cosmopolitan, 2013c). The Cosmo writer responds with a dose of humor and writes:

So that other guy is single now? Sorry, we’ll focus. “Be specific while he’s going down on you,” says Needle [a sex therapist]. “Lighter, faster, right there, etc.” If words aren’t enough, guide him by moving your hips against his mouth or nudging him closer, depending on what works. When it does, say “That’s amazing, right there.” Don’t focus on the past; focus on the toe-curling oral in your future. (Cosmopolitan, 2013c)

The Cosmo writer acknowledges the pleasures of receiving oral sex (a still oft-neglected discussion regarding women in some public venues). What is more, the writer emphasizes the importance of both verbal and embodied communication during sex. Like the response offered to the reader in the above example, communication figures as a moment wherein women can stake an agential claim to the articulation of pleasure. Similarly, another reader writes into the July 2013 issue asking how she can facilitate more simultaneous orgasms with her partner because she enjoys it (Cosmopolitan, 2013d). The Cosmo writer cites Arlene Goldman, a sex therapist, who recommends, “vocalizing where you are at” (Cosmopolitan, 2013d). Once more, Cosmopolitan emphasizes the productive potentials embedded in communication, especially in relation to one’s own pleasure. Perhaps more importantly, if a reader were to understand this fragment as a disciplinary “orgasmic imperative,” which “works to re-affirm a traditional mode of ‘masculine’ sexuality,” it would, indeed, be difficult to provide the textual evidence needed for this claim (Farvid and Braun, 2006: 304). So, whether Cosmo recommends making the disclosure of one’s lack of experience into an intimate communicative practice (Cosmopolitan, 2013e), or whether it laments that the overabundance of communication (as above) can, in fact, be grating, the limits and possibilities of communication are often central to the Q&A form.

Cosmo is so ripe with content-based contradictions that arguments which ominously portend the necessary correspondence of the magazine’s purely disciplinary message to its readership are tenuous at best. Although some feminist scholars point to moments in the text wherein the sex Q&A offered “bad” advice, these assessments are always, to some extent, personally adjudicated. What is more, as the instrumentality of communication sits at the center of much of Cosmo’s sex content, it is imperative that we recognize how those modes of communication are not necessarily of the correspondence model (Slack, 1996: 124).² The messages are neither coherent nor derive strictly from some kind of universal lesson in women’s discipline. In an effort to render some women’s magazine scholarship more capacious, I illustrate below how contradictions gestate productive ruptures for Cosmo’s active readership.

Cosmo contradictions: Non-correspondence and productive ruptures

An oft-emergent theme in the excoriation of Cosmo suggests that the magazine offers a vision of women’s pleasure strictly within a patriarchal frame—that is, sex on his terms and not on hers. Alternatively, some of the examples above serve as more generous examples elucidating the extents to which the magazine is committed to her pleasure in variant ways. Further, lest we forget, sometimes his pleasure is her pleasure—and Cosmo emphasizes these contradictory erotic avenues in both its online and textual form. In the September 2013 issue, a woman contributes to the “Ask him anything” column and writes:

My fiancé is sensitive to my needs and always makes sure I have an orgasm. But sometimes, I wish he would just push me down and have his way with me. He was like that once, after we went out and had a few drinks, and it was amazing. How do I get him to do that again? (Cosmopolitan, 2013f)

This question begins to articulate a version of pleasure derived from subordination-play, which often occupies an ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory, position in feminist discussions about sex and pleasure (shouldn’t she always be in control?). The writer responds with some advice, suggesting how she might tantalize him while they are together next, and in the end, he instructs that she should work the request into conversation (Cosmopolitan, 2013f).

These traces of domination/subordination-play importantly distinguish between those moments wherein women are coerced into non-consensual sex and those moments wherein women express a consensual desire to engage in power-play sex. Claiming a desire for a pleasure that seems, perhaps, on the surface anti-feminist may, indeed, pull a reader to assess the question (and answer) as an internal contradiction—was not last month’s issue all about sexy power? But, contradictions in the magazine create two unique conditions for articulating pleasure in public: both a variegated cross-section of readers is addressed through these ambivalences and the risk of perpetuating only one lesson in women’s discipline is lessened.

Similarly, the uses and abuses of pornography are often discussed in the pages of Cosmopolitan and its authors are careful to distinguish between the divergent tastes and pleasures of the magazine’s audience. In an article posted to the online edition of Cosmo, during the first year of Cole’s editorship, Anna Breslaw writes about the ways in which porn proves dangerous for teen boys (Breslaw, 2013a). The very first breath of the article recognizes Cosmo’s ambivalent position on the limitations and possibilities of pornography. Breslaw (2013a) writes, “We have discussed, time and time again, the effect that ubiquitous online porn has had on our sex lives—in positive ways as well as negative ones”. Asking how porn might affect teen boys, Breslaw cites Gail Dines, vocal anti-pornography feminist and author of Pornland, noting that “it conditions boys to think that rough, domineering sexual encounters—whether the woman asks for it or not—are the only kind of sex there is” (Breslaw, 2013a). The commentary crafted by readers in response to the digital article largely conveys a resistance to this sentiment and the piece spans barely a few lines. Here, a space for deliberation is opened and instead of offering a definitive position on porn’s place in culture and pleasure, the article inspires a productive conversation about consent, personal limitations, and erotic desires both on the digital platform and beyond.

Additionally, the deliberation over pornography in Cosmo mimics the feminist “porn wars” of the 1980s, and illustrates how these discussions persist in the present moment. Interestingly enough, the article about pornography’s effects on young boys is published just weeks after Breslaw interviews feminist activist, sexpert, and pornographer Tristan Taormino (Breslaw, 2013b). In the interview, Breslaw asks Taormino if women in the professional porn industry are transgressive agents or hapless victims. Taormino responds:

That’s an extremely broad question that’s tough to answer briefly; people have written dissertations about this topic. As with any other industry, women have choices, control, and agency in their work, and some have more and others have less, depending on lots of different factors. The notion that all women who work in porn are exploited and degraded is a stereotype, one that is often propagated by people who refuse to listen to sex workers talk about their own experiences and instead make assumptions about them. (Breslaw, 2013b)

As feminist pornography continues to gain ground in the normative center, outlets like Cosmo are also beginning to take note. Not only does Cosmo temper the feminist pornography debate by including both Taormino and Dines, but Breslaw and her editors also resist a definitive judgment on the meanings of pornography by dedicating page-space to these deliberations.

Cosmo also engages the contradictory dynamism of relations of power—in this case, the relationship between men and women within a patriarchal system. When Breslaw asks Taormino if women who enjoy pornography “that involves men dominating women” are anti-feminist, Taormino deftly responds:

I have no interest in policing or judging anyone’s desires, fantasies, and porn preferences … I think there is a stereotype that women want kinder, gentler, more romantic porn; some women do, but not all women. Feminist pornographers don’t want to do away with sexual power dynamics; many of us want to explore them in an explicitly consensual and more diverse, nuanced, non-stereotypical way. (Breslaw, 2013b)

In this response, Taormino resists cultural feminist ideas about the innate desires of women, which have created a dangerous and universalist shortcut for understanding women’s sexual pleasure in our popular imaginary. Additionally, her response takes into account that sex does not, indeed, unfold in a vacuum—relations of power are always present. For Taormino, and for the countless women who celebrated this interview under the auspices of the Cosmo brand, those relations of power need not portend a complete loss of agency, or a debilitating submission to power. Instead, for women who enjoy feminist pornography and get off to its visual pleasures, sexual power dynamics can create new avenues for the exploration of bodies, building vocabularies of affect and creating intimate bonds with sexual partners.

Given some of these erotic ambivalences, it is, indeed, difficult to make an argument about Cosmo’s final destination for pleasure. Pleasure is positioned as process. And it is not only this newly mediated digital platform that amounts to the magazine’s deep contradictions. The messages have never been univocal. Writing against some of the criticisms Cosmopolitan garnered during the 1970s, Beatrice Faust notes:

Cosmo says it is okay for women to shun motherhood and/or marriage, okay to get to the top in a man’s world, okay to use feminine wiles if you want to … It does not say that women must organize their lives around the little red book of Chairman Helen [Gurley Brown]. (Faust, 1980: 166)

This ambivalence extends beyond Gurley Brown’s tenure. For example, the online edition of Cosmopolitan ran an article in March 2013 entitled: “10 weird sexual fetishes that may or may not blow your mind” (Breslaw, 2013c). Its content contained 10 representational images and small caption descriptions of non-normative sexual desires ranging from animal-costume play to objectum-sexuality. The headline’s “may or may not” construction speaks for itself. To be sure, these ambivalences are neither radically revolutionary nor devastatingly disciplinary. As Faust (1980: 168) notes, “women’s magazines must follow the times, not trail-blaze”. But what if we recognized neither revolution nor total discipline as, itself, a kind of trail-blazing reflection and resonance of the everyday? As this archive demonstrates, Cosmo’s contradictions are an extension of the vibrant and multivocal contests and struggles that saturate the everyday negotiations of pleasure in public.

Cosmo’s provisional coda

There is no one meaning endemic to Cosmo. Perhaps a controversial claim, or perhaps an overtly apparent one, the axiom is informed not only by a strong theoretical tradition (British Cultural Studies), but by the text itself. The axiom is also one that has not been taken to its logical end within the context of pleasure-possibilities in Cosmo. That end, I posit, is one that reinvests Cosmo, its readership, its producers, and its circulation with the stuff of respect: an acknowledgment of women’s agency, the elaboration of public intimacies, and the invention of emergent pleasures. My analysis is after neither the Truth of the text nor what Cosmo actually conveys about sex and pleasure. By faithfully following my theoretical and methodological commitments, neither conclusion is possible anyway. Instead, the variant multivocality of the text’s discourses anchors the inquiry.

The ability of the text and its circulation to be bent into variant shapes suggests that the discourses to which the text articulates itself are never just one ideological force, one debilitating structure, or one dominant cultural norm. Etymologically this insight also comports: the word magazine comes from the French magasin which literally connotes a storehouse—that is, a place that collects things for future use. Likewise, the contemporary women’s magazine is a storehouse of contradictory, competing, and sometimes struggled-for bits of knowledge. Those things (advice, concerns, bodily knowledge)—kept for future use—lend themselves to an unpredictable, sometimes messy, and sometimes productive tomorrow.

Because the denigration of women’s magazines not only situates these sites as silly or oppressive, but also implicitly suggests the form is not worthy of repetition, we have been too quick to dismiss moments in Cosmo that further along pleasurable articulations in public. Even if Cosmo’s content seems familiar month after month, I recognize the magazine as enacting a repetition with a difference. While some may quip that today’s Cosmo is identical to last month’s issue and the 30 issues prior to that one, these criticisms of the magazine as a receptacle of recycled sex content ignore the changing contexts that also shift, bend, and meld the content of the magazine. To be sure, repetition does not guarantee an eternal recurrence of the same since the promise of repetition gestates the “possibility that one will repeat something with a difference” (Ahmed, 2004: 93). Cosmo, after all, is created by various men and women—voices from individuals enmeshed in culture. As clever and entertaining an image of Cosmo as a mechanistic machine might be, the magazine is driven by inventive people not in a cultural vacuum, but firmly wrapped in the signs of the times. By practicing a mode of reparative reading, we allow ourselves to tap into those moments of rhetorical invention wherein women productively and powerfully articulate themselves and their pleasures despite the powerful missteps historically forged in Cosmo’s pages.

Footnotes

Notes

Michaela Frischherz is an Assistant Professor at Towson University, MD, USA. She earned her PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. She also holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and a BA from Miami University. Her research examines how women express sexual pleasure in everyday life and popular culture. At Towson, she teaches Rhetorical Criticism, Gender and Communication, Sexual Communication, and Advocacy and Argument in the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies.

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