Dear Cosmo

Dear Cosmopolitan magazine,

You have done it again. The only things that generally manage to keep me up at night (in the bad way) are illness, insomnia, and your magazine.

Normally, I don't even read your publication. Today, however, between eating lunch and doing a load of laundry, I flipped through the pages of your latest issue. I put it down soon after, knowing that the things I saw would come back to haunt me. Tonight, they have.

While talking online with my boyfriend, whom I love and who loves me, and whom I have absolutely no reason to doubt, and whom I have no reason whatsoever to feel insecure about, I became very insecure. I felt as though the insecurity morphed from one aspect to another - this made it even more unsettling, because I could never identify what the issue actually was inside my own mind. I did not feel like myself. While this was happening, I kept thinking about the things in your magazine. While talking with one of my female friends about our mutual insecurities, we concluded that these are insecurities felt much more by women as a whole than men (although they are not totally unique to women), and that perhaps we were not at fault for feeling this way.

You see, Cosmo, it seems as though something is telling us as women to doubt ourselves. While some self-doubt is normal and inherent, this much is not. It must have come from somewhere. I believe that the primary source is media and advertising. And for young women, I believe that one of many main sources is YOU.

It disturbs me greatly that some think your magazine is pro-feminism. Certainly you seem to express sexual liberty and consciousness of important women's issues. Don't get me wrong, I love shoes. But at the end of the day, shoes are not going to get me equal pay. My sultry new button-down isn't going to get me a good job with insurance - at least not a job I'd actually want to work at. My extra 10 pounds are not going to condemn me to social isolation while the women who look like your models, those you have successfully brainwashed, coated in makeup, barely dressed, and underfed are out living what you consider "the high life."

You cannot support feminism. You do not support women at all. How women can do this to other women makes little sense to me. The only way a woman could do this to another woman is if she were either completely evil or completely brainwashed. Perhaps you are a combination of both.

We have insecurities. As I said before, some amount of self-doubt is inherent. We are human. However, you are marketing to we women amplified versions of our insecurities, for the newsstand price of $3.95 an issue. We are buying and consuming our fears. You are all too happy to feed them to us. You make your living off of teaching us how to apply the inadequacies we percieve in ourselves. You market them to us throughout your 200+ pages like you market clothing and other merchandise. Our fears and insecurities about our bodies, our lifestyles, our wardrobes, and our relationships are marketed to us, and because of your constant proposed solutions, we (sadly) keep buying.

I have made peace with the fact that I will never look like one of the women you feature in your magazine. That no longer bothers me, personally. I have come to see your body image for what it really is - an unhealthy, unrealistic, unobtainable image. The clothes you support are clothes I cannot afford and do not suit me. The lifestyle you imply is not one most midwestern women can participate in (thankfully, in my case), and the types of relationships you support are shallow, whether they deal with women OR men. You spend 200+ pages telling us that we do not fit into your ideals, but these women do, and these women are what we have deemed the ideal. You should fit with them. You should do everything you can to become one of them, even if you don't truly want to. This is the only way you can get by. If you are not trying with everything you have to be this girl, you are a failure. You are inadequate. You are a sort of degenerate woman.

In conclusion, I sincerely think that Cosmopolitan is one of the stupidest and most unhealthy publications any woman could read. You have failed to cater to who we are instead of what you think we should be, and while the blame is shared because we buy into what you sell, we can change.

While I had very little to do with your magazine before, I promise myself that I will not touch, read, or support your publication in any way. You act as though I have failed in our culture. But the culture you have created is a shallow, two-dimensional illusion. The truth is that you have failed me. You have failed all of us.

Good riddance.

Maria