by Jocelyn Green

If you shop at all, I know you’ve seen them too. Prominently displayed among the candy bars in the checkout line are nuggets from top-selling magazines designed to whet a different appetite.

“The Sex He’ll Die For: Foreplay Ideas Almost Too Risqué to Share-Almost,” and “Turn Your Man into a You-Pleasing Sex Genius” are just a couple headlines splashed across this month’s Cosmopolitan cover. Glamour touts “50 Shortcuts to a Sexier Body” and Redbook promises to reveal inside “What Everyone Else is Really Doing in Bed.” A classic headline from a past issue of Cosmo teases, “SEX-RATED: How Sin-sational Are You? Learn the Secret Ways to Be a Bad, Bad Girl in Bed and We Guarantee He’ll Feel Sooo Good.”

As Dawn Eden says in her book The Thrill of the Chaste, magazines like these, along with shows like Sex and the City and the entire personal ads industry, encourage men and women to view one another as commodities rather than human beings. It’s a dangerous, destructive message which can completely sabotage relationships and self-worth.

I fell into believing that I was a mere commodity gradually, during a rocky dating relationship. My then-boyfriend suggested that I look more like the women on the covers of the magazines- maybe this haircut, that eye makeup, and by all means, get rid of that grey hooded sweatshirt from Wal-mart. Even worse than his crusade to modify my image was the one to modify my behavior to match the sexually permissive Cosmo girls.

In a nutshell, the relationship tanked, and so did my self-confidence, not surprisingly. Myrna Blyth writes in her book Spin Sisters, that a top beauty advertiser once told her, “We hold up the ideal to women, an ideal she can never achieve- but we want her to keep trying.” (Blyth is former editor of Ladies Home Journal and founding editor of More.)

For the average young woman, continual exposure to the media ideal produces a body dissatisfaction rate higher than 60 percent in high school and 80 percent in college. Research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that the more frequently girls read magazines, the more likely they were to diet, even though more than 70 percent of them were not overweight.

Not only do magazines show women how to look, they offer the avenue to achieve it. Lillian Calles Barger, president of the Damaris Project, noticed 45 advertisements in one magazine for cosmetic surgery or some other body-enhancing procedure. I counted several identical ads in the same magazine this month for a group of doctors which guarantee they will perform any plastic surgery a patient desires.