The message here is not that we are each uniquely and wonderfully made but that our bodies are in desperate need of being “fixed.” It’s a poisonous lie to swallow.

Stephen Arterburn, author of Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time, says the magazines can also have the effect of pulling women into pornography.

“Flirtatious and enticing, these magazines are a gateway to deeper involvement with pornography; it causes many women and guys to want to see more,” says Arterburn, founder of New Life Clinics. “It’s becoming more and more addictive to women.” Zogby International reports that one out of every six women now struggle with an addiction to pornography.

While some articles merely desensitize readers to sexual content, others blatantly endorse pornography as a way of loosening up.

Elizabeth Leonard, associate professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Women’s Studies at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., points out two primary problems with articles devoted to sexual “techniques.”

“When you separate sex from relationship, you make sex too important, as though everything has to be about sex,” she says. “But oddly, you also make it trivial by creating scenarios of multiple partners, and our bodies are just not created for that.”

While sex was created to be a wonderful expression of intimacy between husband and wife, these magazines would have you believe they are an activity or sport to be had between any two partners who are game enough. Yet, there is a gaping hole in the magazine content where articles about the brokenness of such a lifestyle could be: the harmful addiction of perfecting one’s image, the emotional havoc of feigning intimacy through sex outside of marriage, the sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies.

Another falsity these magazines dish out is perhaps more subtle- the idea that we should even be spending this much energy on ourselves. When we invest so much time, energy and money into making ourselves look good and appear hip to others, we are in essence, becoming our own idols.

As Leonard says, “We become our own self-serving god. We become the center of our own universe.”

There are so many other causes in the world to be devoting our efforts to. While I have no problem with taking care of oneself and looking our best, I can only think that held up against the AIDS pandemic, modern-day slavery, world hunger, homelessness, poverty, the persecuted church, etc., perfecting one’s image must fall to the very bottom of the list.

Today I am married to a loving husband and have a daughter of my own. She is not yet even one year old, but soon enough I know she will be bombarded with thousands of voices telling her what it means to be a girl and a young woman. I am not naïve enough to think that she will never be fooled by Madison Avenue. I can only hope that she will develop a habit of thinking critically about the things she hears and sees through music, television, billboards and magazines, so she will be able to identify the lies that seek to undermine her self-worth and discard them as the rubbish that they are. This is a habit I am still working on myself.

Jocelyn Green lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with her husband Rob, daughter Elsa and a pug named Homer.