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.