Romance Battles Sex For Attention in Women's Magazines

Payton Hoegh

Correspondent

(CNSNews.com) - Articles about sex outnumbered those about love and romance by two-to-one in a survey of the top-selling monthly women's magazines' February editions.

In a report released for Valentine's Day, the Culture and Media Institute (CMI) examined 11 women's magazines with a combined circulation of more than 30 million, to see how they were handling the love/sex issue this month.

The magazines selected by CMI - a division of the Media Research Center, the parent organization of the Cybercast News Service - were Cosmopolitan, O, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Glamour, Shape, In Style, Women's Day, Family Circle, Seventeen, and Cosmo Girl.

All but two of the magazines showcased sex teaser headlines on their cover, it found.

Woman's Day and Family Circle, which have circulations exceeding four million readers each, focused on losing weight and cooking, rather than the more risqu_ articles featured in other magazines.

Looking at the percent of content that was sex-related, Cosmopolitan showed the highest - 55 percent - while Family Circle offered the least sex-related material, at nine percent.

Other titles that gave considerable space to sex-related subjects included Redbook (33 percent), Glamour (30 percent) and Cosmo Girl (30 percent).

The CMI report also noted that in a reader poll published by Woman's Day, a majority of respondents (56 percent) said what they wanted most for Valentine's Day was a love letter.

"Women say - in one of the polls from a magazine that we cited - that for Valentine's Day they are most interested in romance, but the magazines are selling them sex," Kristen Fyfe of CMI told Cybercast News Service.

"I think it's a reflection of our culture and a reflection that in America sex is the thing that sells," she said.

"These magazines replace love with promiscuous sex, intimacy with technique, commitment with consumerism, and they sell women on the utterly false notion that self-absorption is the road to happiness," said CMI Director Robert Knight.

"Some of these [magazines] - whose readers number in the millions - aid and reflect America's porn-saturated culture, which is destroying the country's soul and creating a generation of men with alley cat ethics." he said.

"When are women going to tire of being codependents to men who won't grow up?" Knight asked.

Glamour magazine Deputy Health Editor Wendy Naugle defended women's magazines' handling of sex.

"National surveys show that women, on average, have sex beginning at age 17 - most of them outside of marriage," she told Cybercast News Service.

"We strive to give our readers useful information that helps them take control of their sexual health and empowers them in all their relationships," Naugle said.

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