NEW YORK – Walmart has decided to pull Cosmopolitan magazine from its checkout aisles at 5,000 stores across the United States after years of pressure from an activist group that accuses the publication of being “hyper-sexualized” and “degrading.”
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a Washington-based nonprofit formerly known as Morality in Media, said it had long singled out Cosmopolitan – as opposed to, say, the National Enquirer or other provocative content available in the checkout line – because the Hearst-owned magazine was “targeting young girls with its advertisements.”
“It’s on Snapchat. It has these brightly-colored pink covers,” Haley Halverson, the center’s vice president of advocacy and outreach, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. “There are Disney stars that appear on it and [articles about] the Jonas Brothers and One Direction ... but at the same time, it’s promoting that its young readership engage in sexting, group sex.”
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, founded in 1962 to combat pornography and sex trafficking, has also recently pushed back on commercials and media content it has deemed sexually explicit. For years, the group’s leaders tried to persuade Walmart and other retailers to remove Cosmopolitan from its checkout displays, where they say “customers should not be forced to be exposed to this content.”
The group credited the #MeToo movement for finally convincing Walmart officials to do so. “We would say that any magazine should not be using sexual objectification to sell its magazine, but Cosmo also really wraps itself in this faux-feminist mystique, claiming that it’s actually liberating women by talking about sex,” Halverson told The Post. “But we need to raise the dialogue a little bit. ... Just because we’re talking about sex in a magazine doesn’t mean we’re talking about it in an empowering way.”
When asked to provide examples of publications that were discussing sex in a manner the group felt was appropriate, Halverson declined. However, she compared Cosmopolitan’s messages about sexuality to that of Playboy “because it reduces women to objects for males’ sexual entitlement.”
Walmart confirmed the magazine would no longer be located in checkout aisles but would be available elsewhere in its stores. “As with all products in our store, we continue to evaluate our assortment and make changes,” Walmart spokeswoman Meggan Kring said in an email. “While this was primarily a business decision, the concerns raised [by NCOSE] were heard.”
