I made up stories designed to soft-sell unmarried sex, sexual freedom, sex with married men, contraception, and abortion as the young single woman’s path to personal fulfillment. While I was at Cosmopolitan magazine, “I told a lot of lies in that magazine,” and “we were making up fantasies of women that were jumping into bed”. Supporting Articles – Articles.latimes.com – NationalCatholicregister.com – Thefederalist.com
Some women’s magazines change quotes, fabricate quotes, invent people and make wild extrapolations in stories about sex and relationships. (“massaging quotes,” as it is called in magazine parlance). The approach is to come up with words on a magazine cover that reader research shows will sell the magazines.
Well, the “Cosmo girl” is a persona. She was a deception from the beginning. In the beginning there was no “Cosmo girl”. It was just a fantasy that Helen Gurley Brown had made up as a marketing fantasy.
In (Subverted, How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement), Sue Ellen Browder documents for the first time how it all happened, in her own life and in the life of an entire country. Trained at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to be an investigative journalist, Browder unwittingly betrayed her true calling and became a propagandist for sexual liberation. As a long-time freelance writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, she wrote pieces meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception, and abortion as the single woman’s path to personal fulfillment. She did not realize until much later that propagandists higher and cleverer than herself were influencing her thinking and her personal choices as they subverted the women’s movement. Video interview with Sue Ellen Browder