They're out to clean up the porn on the magazine racks, they are. The American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Morality in Media, and the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families are manning the parapets together, aiming to get those sleazy porn rags off the magazine racks once and for all. You know the ones: Cosmopolitan and Glamour, with their lurid titles, stories and sexually explicit covers.
You didn't read it wrong, ladies and gentlemen.
"(We're) criticizing…Cosmopolitan and Glamour for competing in a smut fest where children are a captive audience - the grocery store checkout lane," said AFA special projects director Randy Sharp of the joint campaign.
With each new issue of those two journals, Sharp said, they "grow closer to being the counterpart of Playboy and Penthouse." Sharp accused Cosmopolitan of already letting women perform virtual boytoy stripteases on its website, including step-by-step instructions. "The problem is that our children are forcibly exposed to lustful headlines and salacious pictures of sensualized women," he said.
The groups particularly attacked a Cosmopolitan cover which bannered articles on Tantric sex principles, and a Glamour cover which "prompts children to ponder, 'What Men Think About Your Orgasm Face.'"
Sharp said retailers have the right to sell magazines in checkout lanes and anywhere else, but the groups want companies to take up guidelines addressing "the growing customer concern" about the racy covers. He said two major food chains, Kroger and Genuardi, have started putting placards over some of the magazine covers in question, exposing only the title - just like stores which carry true adult magazines.
