Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 1, 1990 TAG: 9005010108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NIKKI FINKE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Most annoying in their view, aside from those sexpots photographed by Francesco Scavullo, was that while they were fighting to get women a foot into the boardroom, all That Cosmo Girl cared about was luring her boss into the bedroom. Just as bad, in the feminists' view, was Cosmo's blueprint for inequality urging women to put on a girlish, almost geisha-like, act around men.
And when Cosmopolitan did discuss women's lib, feminists argued, it was usually to offer decidedly unliberated pointers, like "Hire a lover and install him in a cute little apartment around the corner from your office."
Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown still recalls with wonderment the time a clique of "very militant feminists" arrived on her doorstep in the early 1970s demanding that she give them space in the magazine every month. "I said we would be glad to publish articles they wrote, but I would have to assign them and they would have to be well-written. But I said I'm not giving them a section of the magazine because I don't own it."
Today, as Cosmopolitan marks its 25th anniversary, that feminist reviling has undergone some revisionist thinking. And while those busty ingenues on the cover still don't sit well with some (nor do many of the articles for that matter), the magazine is winning more kudos than condemnation these days for having served a valuable purpose in helping women to recognize, explore and enjoy their sexuality.
Betty Friedan, who once decried Cosmo as "quite obscene and quite horrible" because it embraced the idea that women are nothing but sex objects, today calls Brown "a very smart and gutsy lady" who may even have been a feminist pioneer.
"In general, I've found her to be all for the main agenda of the women's movement. Whether I actually approve of the ethos of the Cosmo girl, well, that's another matter," says Friedan, who has written occasionally for the magazine on the problems facing working women.
"But at a crucial moment when we still had some hope of getting the ERA passed, I asked Helen if the Cosmo girl could come out for the ERA. And she ran the most wonderful ad in which the Cosmo girl said that any man that wasn't for the ERA needn't bother messing around with her. And it had a profound effect at a time when the media was trying to dismiss the feminist movement as all a man-hating crackpot extreme fringe."
Asked about that change of heart, Brown can only shrug. It is her view that while feminists were busy fighting for equal pay and equal jobs, they were secretly pleased to leave the fight for sexual freedom to her.
"Feminists have just never been able to get a very good case going against me," she declares. "It's just unrealistic always to have thought you could separate feminism from being a woman. Because one part of your life is sex and men, and another part of your life is work and achieving. And where I sometimes get into trouble is saying that your work is just as important as your love life. But no feminist - not Gloria Steinem, not Betty Friedan - ever inculcated me with that idea. I came up with that myself, and it's on every page of Cosmo."
by CNB