Wow. This is pretty lame.

"...but it’s not an industry-wide standard."

She's making this assumption after calling two magazines? One for men and one for teens? That doesn't really dictate the industry standard. Strikes me as lazy reporting.

Are you sure the "clean" version only went to advertisers, and not to subscribers as well?

It's reasonably common to have a newsstand cover that's different from a subscriber cover -- you're trying to achieve different things with those covers.

Also, Cosmo's advertisers most likely care about the deliverables: How many sets of eyes in the right demographic groups. If "Orgasm Virgins" gets more of those eyes, they aren't going to balk at it.

Does anyone find it surprising that a women's magazine with advice on how to have great orgasms feels that it needs to "hide its true content" so as to get advertising, while Maxim doesn't? I don't really think that's a shock at all.

Could have at least checked with the three other magazines that have had their covers obscured in Wal-Mart checkout lines since 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/business/media/07MAG.html

Note that this was specifically about obscuring the coverlines and not the central image when this decision was first made, and that magazines like Maxim were barred entirely.

Perhaps I'm being extremely naive about something related to the workings of advertising, but in general I'd tend to guess that, by now, companies know exactly what kind of content to expect from Cosmo. It hasn't exactly changed in the last couple decades.

I wonder if this is punishable under false advertising laws. The whole point of false advertising is consumer protection; in other words, the consumer won't put money into a product or service with the assumption that it will accomplish certain goals only to find out that the product couldn't deliver on what the marketers promised.

In this case, the product is advertising space in a certain type of magazine (Cosmo), the goals are to reach a certain target market (Cosmo's readers) and the consumer is the advertisers in the magazine. The consumer might take a look at the false cover, say "that's the kind of product I want to associate my brand with," purchase advertising space to reach a particular target market, and then find out that the magazine misrepresented themselves. It might mean that the client has now reached a readership that could be different from the one it was promised, and perhaps a less relevant target base for its own product. Is that false advertising on Cosmo's part?

My husband routinely notices a difference between the cover of his subscriber's issue of Men's Health compared to the cover of the same issue in stores. Like Cosmo, the cover for newsstand issues is "sexed up." I can't imagine what the justification of having a toned-down version sent to subscribers is supposed to be--less offensive to the wife at home??

Why would a magazine with sex tips automatically be inappropriate for my grandmother to read? I get that it was meant to be a lighthearted comment, but it doesn't make any sense. My grandma (and my great-grandma) would not be the least bit perturbed by that cover, and I don't really see why someone would assume that they _would_ be freaked out.

For a little while my local grocery covered up that Cosmo cover, but it might have been for the open shirt on the cover model rather than the article titles. But after a couple of days, the black cover was gone and the magazine was fully visible.

I wish there were local grocery stores that refused to market these kinds of magazines at the cash register. There isn't anywhere to shop where you aren't assaulted at checkout with a barrage of magazine covers telling you that you are too fat, sexually inept, and only as worthy as the closeness with which you match the "bikini bodies" that women celebrities have to maintain or face even more magazine covers with circles and arrows pointing out their flaws. It's demoralizing, depressing, and insulting but I think we're like the frog in the pot and the temperature turned up so slowly that now we think it's "normal."

Really interesting post. Thanks!

I actually think this is a good idea. A more conservative cover means I can buy it without being embarrassed and take it home without my parents getting mad (I'm one of those middle-schoolers she mentioned).

What about the 2nd image where under 74 it says "She'll blow his mind with both hands behind her back?" My interpretation of that statement is that it implies men enjoy women in a passive sexual role. I found that much more interesting than the two covers.

1) my first thought was that one version was the preliminary mock up, sent out to advertizers early, the other a later version when some editor thought they needed to turn up the heat. That's what editors do, afterall -- look at proposals from staff and change them. Advertizers might just get the earlier version.

Because fooling advertizers is just not credible. Are we seriously contending that no one at the advertizing firm ever walks into a drugstore past the magazine racks?

2) but the comments about different covers for subscribers convinces me that maybe there are two or more versions of the cover, and I guess it is only natural that the one at newstands has to 'shout' out to potential buyers more.

But I'm sorry, stupid non-news items like "orgasm virgins" worries me a lot less then the really really stupid celeb news. America's going to hell in a hand basket, and the best journalism you can come up with is "Star A having Star B's Baby!"? You're worried about publishers sexualizing everything -- okay, Cosmo is bad, but the real story here is that consumers are being fed a diet of meaningless rubbish, while economic and political reporting is essentially non-existant. Economic discourse in the US covers the spectrum from Goldman, all the way to Sachs, as one pundit put it. By all means let us critique Cosmo and the like, but the deeper issue is the trained incapacity to analyze the impending economic collapse or climate change or whatever -- the deflection of the public's attention away from fundamental structural issues to the trivial and personal.

Just saying.

I'm just left wondering who is reading these kind of magazines for tips on orgasms or info on birth control. You could find better quality and much more diverse material faster and for free by doing a few quick Google searches, and, with an adblocker program, even spare yourself the pain of being exposed to ads that tell you how awful you are if you don't own/use products X, Y, and Z. I think the acts of buying and reading this stuff demonstrate more masochism than does interest in the kinky-sex-tips articles, frankly.