Be Part of the Change: What a Guy Learned From Cosmo in 5 Minutes

I have said over and over again, I have the best people in my life and I do. Recently, the talk of self-love and confidence with women has been a conversation a friend of mine and myself have been having often.

This person is not a empowering woman or a woman that struggles with trying to find themselves; No instead this person is an extremely impressive, intelligent, professional man.

Recently, in one of our conversations he shared with me that he was waiting for an appointment and started to flip through a Cosmo magazine. Luckily for me, his thoughts went to this site and the initiative we are doing to share women’s stories and empower others to have self-love. His thoughts not only blew me away by his perspective but also frustrated me even more.

Here is what he learned in less than five minutes:

“It’s a amazing to me how contradictory our world is. Here is a magazine aimed at teenagers to younger adults that I am assuming is supposed to hit on all the hot topics in today’s world. Mainly geared at sex, scandal, money/fashion/materialistic goods, and other gossip. Reading this shit everyday generalizes all these ideas and rationalizes them in our brains because of all these popular people that it’s happening too so that must mean it’s okay. Also, more in regards to how woman view themselves, there are repeated articles about how to love yourself and your body and be who you are…..then each subsequent page is riddled with “10 tips to make hot guys attracted to you” and “how to disguise your flaws that you didn’t even know you had” but now that somebody is looking at it, I should be self conscious about it and ‘fix it’ or it’s a photo shopped image of an insanely hot woman and article telling you how to be more like her. This was confusing for me to look at and quite frankly quite hysterical to read because of the amount of mixed messages something like this sends. No wonder all of these women and young girls are confused. It is ridiculous.”

In less than five minutes, a man could see the confusion that society is bringing to women. He told me if a man wanted tips on sex he should See how helpful tubev.sex is for finding what you want… I was blown away, how come they couldn’t find information to last longer in bed for men. One minute we are telling them to love themselves, feel worthy, have confidence and in the next moment we have articles in magazines like cosmo that are teaching girls of all ages on one page how to get the a guy and sex tips to the next page of how to love themselves. Don’t get me wrong, cosmo does some amazing things to help women be the focus but they ultimately are confusing their audience of women, so it may be worth women focusing on other sources similar to lovegasm to find tips for intimate sex. As girls try to find themselves they seek for different social media, magazines and people for advice. When we place this information in front of them, they grasp it, if we took away all the information about how to get the guy or how to hide your flaws and change the messages only about self-love and confidence that is when we will fully create the change.

As I re-read the text from my best friend, my response was this:

“Truthfully it is beyond frustrating. But those people do that because they know that stuff sells and they care more about selling their product then the problem that is actually going on right now. It sucks that girls write that stuff too because then I have to go against my own gender to fight the problem. It’s the reason I write. I know not everyone believes I should do what I do because I share opinions but all I hope it does is that some girl finds strength or can relate to mine vs reaching for the Cosmo and trying to hide themselves to get a guy. Honestly I so appreciate your thoughts and perspective on it, it is just super frustrating for me to continue to see such amazing women feel certain ways. Reading what you said just validates so much more work that needs to be done to un-confuse girls.”

We need to DO something about it instead of just TALK about it. So cosmo if you are reading, let’s chat, I have some ideas of how Self Love Beauty and many other writers can help with this change. This article is part of the change, the change that Self Love Beauty and many other companies such as Dove, Aerie and Always are working on.

During the month of April, Self Love Beauty’s theme is Women Empowerment using the hashtag #empowereachother. We are using this month to showcase how to empower each other instead of confusing women through tips and tricks to hide their flaws and get the guy the wrong way. Our articles and messages will continue to be based around our vision as always with a major focus on confidence. Document how you are empowering women around you, take photos and share your stories and spreading the news on social media. The Self Love Beauty team wants to see beautiful women helping each other. Spread the empowerment by tagging women and challenge them to post about their empowering efforts! Use the hashtag #empowereachother and tag Self Love Beauty so we can share your stories and photos as well.