RiteAid and the Delhaize Group–which includes Food Lion–will begin putting the magazine Cosmopolitan behind blinders to protect your children from seeing “salacious images and headlines.” The decision is a response to a big push from the Cosmo Harms Minors campaign started by The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, and from customer complaints about the magazine.
NCSE’s response via townhall.com:
“Cosmopolitan magazine regularly features articles, and occasionally explicit pictures, encouraging girls to participate in group, anal, and violent torture sex, and it blatantly targets young girls by displaying teen idols on their covers. Recently, Cosmo even posted an article encouraging readers to visit hardcore porn sites, including one site that is particularly focused on the extremely violent torture of women,” says Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “We are thankful to RiteAid and Delhaize America for not allowing this harmful material to be in plain view of minors at their stores, and we encourage other chains to follow suit, and to refuse to sell this pornographic magazine to minors.”
Okay, my take. Yes, Cosmo has become pretty erotic over time, and I personally don’t take issue with the magazine not being easily accessible to minors or not being sold to minors. They have chosen to feature articles that are R- to X-rated. So kudos to NCSE for this win.
I’m also in favor of parents actually paying attention to what their children are looking at in stores, and where their children spend their money.
Now, for my opinion on The National Center on Sexual Exploitation:
This is a group that seeks to rid the world of porn under the guise of porn being sexual exploitation–hence the new name. One only needs to look at their website url, pornharms.com, to understand they hate porn and they want you to hate it, too. They have lots of projects attacking all sorts of businesses from Starbucks to actual porn sites. They want businesses who have wi-fi for public use to block your access to porn sites. The group says their reasoning for this is because the actresses who actively participate in the porn industry are victims who didn’t choose to perform in the raunchy movies but are forced to do so and are therefore exploited. If you watch or read porn, according to them, you are the voyeur who not only contributes to these exploited, choiceless adults, but you are also harming yourself!
The real reason that NCSE wants to ban all porn is because they hate porn and think they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t watch, so they want to take away your freedom to choose or not to choose porn.
H/t: Rob for the link to the Townhall article
