"The magazine is a lot more than just a sex manual, though. The words 'radical', 'ground-breaking' and 'feminist' wouldn't necessarily spring to mind when you flick open an issue. Words like 'animal sex' and 'the orgasm oracle' might leap out at you instead. Cosmopolitan has always prided itself on talking frankly about sex. But it is, albeit quietly, almost as feminist now as it was when it launched in Britain in 1972, or perhaps more accurately, as pro-women. It created a new women's magazine market that still exists today. And it has changed our social culture too." (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2005648,00.html)

Newsagents are filled with these glossy magazines which are always about roughly the same frivolous topics. A favorite subject is celebrities and their private lives and clothes. Fashion features strongly, with the prices of the clothes often far beyond the reaches of the majority of the readership. And several of the top selling magazines are almost pornographic in their obsession with sexual technique, or stories about promiscuous behavior. Advice on cosmetics and diet are a mainstay. Usually there will be a section on recipes and home furnishings. There are sometimes sections about women's lifestyles - usually geared towards encouraging the starting of a business or other pro-career stories.

What is rare is for any article to be at all intellectually stimulating - the nearest to this is usually the occasional book review in a magazine aimed at the more mature reader. The rare sensible article can be considered a "poison pill", to lure the unsuspecting into the clutch of the magazine's cultural distortion.

The most striking thing of all is how the pages of the product are half filled with nothing but advertising for products, especially cosmetics.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that advertising revenue is very important to the magazine publishers and that, in reading the magazine, one is voluntarily taking in a barrage of manipulative imagery designed to make the observer feel the need to buy the products promoted therein.

The articles themselves are all aimed at colluding with the advertisers to make women feel that they should buy all the latest creams and makeup, and that this false and painted look is an essential part of being a woman. Feminism is supposed to oppose this supposition and liberate women from the need to concentrate on being alluring or being obsessed with what men want women to be or to do. Yet, while these magazines more or less undo these feminist intentions, they have created a new variation of feminism which they try to reconcile with the marketing of their wares.

Naomi Wolf, says in "The Beauty Myth:"

"The women's movement nearly succeeded in toppling the economics of the magazines' version of femininity...As women abandoned their role as consuming housewives and entered the work force, their engagement with the issues of the outer world could forseeably lead them to lose interest altogether in women's magazines' separate feminine reality."

She also makes another very good point:

"And, of course, the goal of all women's magazines was to be the sole source on how to be feminine. "Women's magazines needed to ensure that their readers would not liberate themselves out of their interest in women's magazines."

Let us consider the message that comes through to women from these magazines and from TV programs that also follow these airhead subjects - celebrities and fashion.

There is an emphasis on being, what is for most women, unhealthily slim - which causes eating disorders and similar neurosis about appearance. This helps in the promotion of diet products and diet advice. It is accompanied by the message that women should try to look like teenagers, and should plaster themselves with expensive anti-wrinkle creams, and so on to achieve this. The message about the importance of the mastery of sexual technique and advice on how to please men further compounds the impression that it is worth spending a fortune on appearance in order to succeed in life.

Let's face facts: these magazines are all about selling products and everything they say is supposed to achieve this - even while they claim to be feminist.

They have even redefined feminism in order to better assist in the materialistic promotion. The old feminism, being a reaction against the need for women to obsess about dressing fashionably, wearing make up and trying to base their behavior on what they were told (not even correctly) pleases men threatened to lead towards a rejection of materialism. But the new feminism, as promoted by the magazines is largely responsible for the new definition of how woman should behave to be unsubmissive and challenging to men, and sexually predatory at the same time. They promote the so-called "ladette culture" (a British term which really means women behaving like the kind of men who have regular casual sex, drink heavily, swear and brawl). There is a rejection of the role of women as mothers in favor of careerism.

However, women are encouraged, in keeping with the old-style feminism, to put careers before motherhood, and to be pro-abortion. Disposable income is maximized when women follow this example, and interest in the shallow and materialistic is maintained - something motherhood tends to interfere with, as the woman's reproductive urges are sated and she has someone else besides herself to focus upon.

All this social engineering just so that there would be an increased market for overpriced and superfluous products! Materialism controlling the direction of society. This is exactly what CORRUPT seeks to expose and wake people up to.

Having had this success, the next stage was to target teenaged girls with sexually explicit magazines corrupting them just as they target their mothers. The innocence of childhood is a barrier to getting school kids into the same neuroticism and need to buy products. The situation in the US is not yet as bad as it is in Britain where teen magazine's compete to have the smuttiest cover stories. Yet the message in them is confusing and contradictory, telling girls to make the most of their "hot" looks, or how to chat up a boy and kiss while also warning about the pitfalls of going too far sexually. There are stories about regretting waking up naked after a party, or how gossip can ruin lives. Girls are encouraged to believe that you cannot be popular unless you have a boyfriend, and the "agony aunt" section gives advice on oral sex techniques. Actors and singers are the role models.

Now men are also being bombarded with images that suggest they should also take an interest in fashion and make up. Men's magazines like "FHM" and "Men's Health" promote creams and colognes for men, and are fast moving into other cosmetics. The incidence of anorexia is rising in men and this is no coincidence.

The market is expanding, drawing men in and blurring the difference between the sexes by feminizing men. There is more money to be made from making both men and women adopt this kind of feminization than by encouraging women to become more like men by abandoning their interest in outward appearance - not that either extreme is helpful.

All this artifice, unsustainable consumerism and introspective neuroticism is destroying society. What is needed is a rejection of all this falseness and a return to reality.

by Victoria McMagnus

February 22, 2007