In 2006 I walked into a CVS drug store in downtown Chicago.  My high rise residence was just minutes from CVS.  I went there often.  On a Chicago winter day, I sought shelter from the wind by perusing the magazines section.  I saw the normal array of published monthlies on 4 tiered shelves.  One mag caught my eye.  A half naked women strategically posed on the front cover. Porn without brown paper?  I pulled the magazine, flipped through it, and confirmed this was porn.

I called for the manager.  A young man approached me.  I wasn’t going to be gentle.  I asked him if CVS was family owned. He said yes but I could tell he was trying to anticipate where this conversation was going.  I then asked if the store sold porn.  You should have seen his face!  I flipped open the magazine to a particularly exposed picture of a woman, pointed, and asked, is this porn?  He was uncomfortable and I was angry.  He apologized and promised to remove the magazines from the shelves.

Do you realize that you can make a difference?  You can stand up for yourself and your children today!

Difference Maker #1

Pay attention to the magazines in the grocery store checkout line.  Read the cover story of each magazine.  Cosmo will ALWAYS have sex articles on the cover.  They lure girls into wanting to know more about how to satisfy a man sexually.  Doesn’t this send one consistent message.  ”Good Sex = Good Relationships”  We are blurring the lines.  We are defining a good marriage or relationship by how good a woman can be in bed.

Click here to contact your local grocery store using a template used by Morality in Media.  Women Stand Up! and ask that Cosmo be removed from the checkout aisles!

Did you know that Cosmopolitan was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine?  Did you realize that a woman, Helen Gurley Brown, changed the magazine’s direction in 1964 into the sexually explicit publication that is today?

In 2000, Morality in Media, wanted large grocery chains to install magazine rack “blinders” to hide Cosmo’s sexually explicit headlines.  See Kroger Decides to Put ‘Cosmo’ Behind Blinder Racks, January 2000.  

It’s been ten years.  Have we forgotten to stand up for ourselves?