Topic > Inventing the Cosmo Girl: What are gender roles like?

Many magazines like Cosmo encourage women to wear makeup, to change for men. In “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams,” Laurie Oullette describes it best when she says how Cosmo encourages “readers to renew themselves and even construct multiple selves, often to meet the demands and opportunities of a prolonged courtship". " (Ouellette 120). The goal for girls is: to eventually marry higher in the social hierarchy. Meanwhile, masculinity is defined by stigmatizing femininity. They give masculinity a dominant appeal by portraying women as naive and vulnerable. As he says Breazeale, a “simultaneous exploitation and denial of the feminine” (Breazeale 232) and therefore “one-dimensional representations of women are the result of attempts to woo men as consumers” (Breazeale