Victoria Hearst, the granddaughter of the Hearst Corporation’s founder, William Randolph Hearst, has succeeded in a bizarre mission. Claiming that the racy taglines on the covers of Cosmopolitan magazine are “pornography,” she has convinced three major drugstore chains to put paper blinders on their copies of the magazine in order to censor the sexually explicit writing running rampant all over their newsstands. Only problem is: The blinders divert the eyes to something sexier.
On the Today show this week, Dylan Dreyer asked viewers if they thought that Cosmo covers should be censored with blinders so that impressionable children didn’t have to wonder how women were bringing their guys to orgasm in 50 different ways. But what isn’t directly established is what the impressionable children will be seeing instead: clavicles, boobs, and hefty slices of cleavage. The blinder design is a U-shape that leaves room for the magazine title and the cover model only, but given the magazine’s tendency to feature mostly unsheathed breasts, the covers transform into easy boob target practice.
The Hearst Corporation is in charge of publishing Cosmopolitan and its allegedly “racy” covers, though Victoria swears that she’s not trying to get back at her family in her mission to censor the shit out of it. Want to see boobs and only boobs? Rite Aid, Food Lion, and Hannaford will tote the word-free covers in the name of American wholesomeness.
