Cosmopolitan is a magazine aimed at women aged 20 to 40, however these days it is becoming much more popular for a younger audience of teenage girls age 16 plus. Cosmo advertises a lot of sexual products and contains lots of sexual refrences encouraging sexual relationships and sexual inuendos. The cover of cosmo always has beautiful women who look perfect, for example, Jessica Alba on the cover in a purple tight, short dress, showing a lot of cleavage. The background colour bight orange with purple writing, to match her dress. It draws attention to the finer detial and connects the dress and writing together so they relate. The first words that catch my eye are, "HIS #1 SEX FANTASY" written in bold, big, capital letters. They are the biggest words on the page and this is portraying the idea that women only care about satisfying their man. Due to the fact the writing of this is the biggest on the page and most attention catching and paired with the sexuality of the photo of Jessica Alba inncinuates that women are only present to please men. The image on the cover is unrealistic idea of how a woman should look, her figure is perfect with every part of her body being in proportion to each other. She also looks relatively natural so its hard for a teen girl to look at this image and think well, Jessica Alba looks quite natural in this.. but I should still look like her because even though its natural shes still perfect. And teen girls need to be taught and shown that every female is natural AND perfect. All female figures are different and its up to you to decide how you want to portray yourself.
The selection of material reinforces the stereotype of girls having to look perfect and only caring about their appearance and what people, mostly men, think of them. This isn't a fair representation as although some women and girls do care about these things, its not the only thing they care about and they basically only are concerned about those aspects because its how women and girls have been brought up, through media influence such as this magazine, to care about. If magazines like Cosmo, which are known for being mostly appearance, sex and men related started bringing more world issue stories and career stories into their magazine and advirtising these stories on the front of their magazine then it would begin a revolution of women and girls becoming more accustomed to finding themselves naturally attracted to these intellectual stories. The readers of these magazines would be seeking to find magazines with these types of stories in them and it may start to become more important to teen girls to have a high paying career and financial success than a perfect wardrobe and the best make up.
There are four out of eight front cover features that relate to sexuality. This very strongly gives the the impression that women are simply objects to men and a womans only goal is to please her boyfriend/husband etc. Another feature on the cover is "6 CONFIDENCE BOOSTERS" which to me implies that it is assumed women don't have adequate confidence, which seems rather contradictary as theres encouragement of sexual actions and then confidence boosters, so I personally find that confusing as its telling me to lower myself to be objectile to males but then saying how to be confident. Women are portrayed negatively through this magazine I believe, as it is so focussed on sex and making the men the main idea in a womans life rather than focus on career or world issues which would portray women more positively in a more intellectual.
The front cover photo of Jessica Alba looking very attractive and revealed with perfect make up and precise waves framing her face gives the impression of perfection and most girls would feel it impossible to look like her.
In contrast to Cosmopolitan we have Time magazine, a news and world issue magazine with current stories of the worlds issues. It contains no sexual content unless it is educational and useful. This is definitely more of what teen girls should be brought up to be reading and interested in.
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