Inventing The Cosmo Girl: How Are Gender Roles?

Growing up everyone plays games, whether it’s Monopoly, Mario Kart, or Simon Says. Regardless of whatever game you play, you have to follow certain rules. You go to jail if you land on “Go to Jail”; you drive one way in a race; and you do whatever Simon says. But what many don’t realize is that we are all playing a game, a gender game. Everyone follows certain rules and acts a certain way. Simon says your Princess Peach or Mario and you can only have the green property if you’re Mario. The question though is where do we learn these rules? Who tells us how to perform these gender roles? We learn about gender through many different sources, but most prominently is media. In American culture, media constructs gender roles through the submissive and objectifying portrayal of women in television, the rendering of masculinity as violent, and the gendered consumer image created by magazines. These aspects show us how to play the game; they set the board for us to traverse.

Many magazines like Cosmo encourage women to make themselves up, to change themselves for men. In "Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams", Laurie Oullette best describes this when she says how Cosmo encourages “readers to make themselves over and even construct multiple selves, often to meet the demands and opportunities of prolonged courtship” (Ouellette 120). The goal for girls being: to eventually marry higher up along the social hierarchy.

Meanwhile, masculinity is defined by stigmatizing femininity. They give masculinity a dominant appeal by painting women as gullible and vulnerable. As Breazeale puts it, a “simultaneous exploitation and denial of the feminine” (Breazeale 232) and so “one-dimensional representations of women have resulted from attempts to court men as consumers” (Breazeale