COMMENTARY: Should Morality in Media censor Cosmopolitan?

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _”Supermarket News”reports that Morality in Media, a national interfaith organization representing 5,000 religious and community groups, has written […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _”Supermarket News”reports that Morality in Media, a national interfaith organization representing 5,000 religious and community groups, has written to 350 supermarket chains urging them”to pull or shield the covers of magazines at checkout racks that contain articles that may offend customers.” The principal target is Cosmopolitan’s August”Sex”issue, symbolic in Morality in Media’s judgment of the women’s magazines”that contain sexually explicit headlines that children and their mothers see as they pass through checkout counters.” At least one New York-area chain has agreed, its president noting that”Cosmopolitan is … still on checkstand … with its name visible. But we’ve concealed the rest of the cover.”That, he said,”seemed a reasonable request,”despite the fact that there have been no customer complaints.


Is Morality in Media at last raising a voice in what some politicians describe as a”culture war”pitting those who have standards against what they perceive as a vast Left Wing Conspiracy to obliterate standards entirely?

Or is this distinguished organization acting like Bambi darting into Times Square traffic?

We wait for the thud and a scene so sad that we must look away. Is it possible for Morality in Media to be on the side of truth and virtue and yet, like Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, to be made a caricature of itself by the same kind of spinners who worked for the Clinton White House?

The latter possibility provides the first reason for Morality in Media to rethink its program. In our culture, Morality in Media is a first-class oxymoron.

Media are intrinsically amoral and can be bent to lower goals more easily than to higher ones. Any attempt to elevate the media by banning Cosmopolitan may be likened to cutting off the rise of Hitler in the ’20s by crusading against beer drinking in Munich. One is too much a part of a larger phenomenon to expect anything better out of it than the hoots of the crowd.

The second reason that this approach is doomed arises from its triggering a landslide of noble-sounding dispositions and arguments overwhelming everybody in its path.

The first is the sanctity of”personal choice.”An official for the distributors of the magazine, noting that half the 2 million copies of Cosmo sold each month are at supermarkets, claimed that”each of those purchases represents a consumer who is satisfied with the magazine’s content.” The second argument that is unassailable in America was expressed by a spokesman for a periodical association who declared the effort”is an infringement on free speech”and constitutes”intimidation of the retailer.”Where, he demanded in the righteous tones reserved for such moments, does imposing one’s personal goals and desires on others stop?

You can only lose if you end up arguing these secondary associated issues that, fallacious as they may be shown in a long philosophical discussion, are intensely powerful as sound bites against this crusade by Morality in Media.


The biggest argument against this effort to shield us from Cosmopolitan arises from looking hard at rather than away from the magazine itself. The best argument for a moral choice is not to hide the magazine but to let people get a good look at it.

Nothing would discourage a potential buyer more than a careful inspection of its cover.

It is, we might say, a lust buster, an advertisement for its inherent silliness rather than its faux sophistication. If there is any place where Cosmopolitan belongs, it is at supermarket checkouts where it blends perfectly with the Enquirer-types that are to serious reading what professional wrestling is to sports.

The August cover, of course, describes itself as”The Sex Issue.”It features articles on”Your Man Unzipped,”a”Lust Survey”of 3,000 men,”Sex on Movie Sets”and”Be the Babe Who Never Stops.”I am not making this up. Nor am I inventing the poignant inquiries”Weird Cramps? Wicked Itches?” This stuff could only generate bad thoughts if it were kept under cover and so incited the imagination. In a prominent place under bright lights, it delivers chuckles and disengages the imagination. Let everybody see how pre-adolescent this magazine is in its preying on the loneliness and longing of young people.

Jesus, we may recall, did not suggest that farmers root out the bad seed in their fields. Let it grow with the good, he said. As it grows, it will stand out starkly against the healthy grain.

Campaign against Cosmo and you endow with false moral gravity a magazine that survives only because it doesn’t have any. Put the energy into helping parents build morality in their children. Cosmo has less to do with sin than with the sadness and difficulties with human relationships that abound in America.

DEA END KENNEDY

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