Walmart boots Cosmopolitan

Walmart boots ‘sexually exploitative’ Cosmopolitan from its checkout shelves

Campaigners say the Hearst magazine’s racy covers are harmful to kids

Campaigners object to Cosmopolitan’s racy covers.

By KEITH J. KELLY

Walmart Inc., the biggest retail outlet for magazines in the country, is banning Cosmopolitan from its front checkout counters and moving it to more obscure store locations where its racy cover lines are obscured.


The magazine has long been the most profitable title for publisher Hearst. But it can ill afford to take a big hit on newsstand sales.

As recently as December 2014, it was selling 576,550 copies a month on newsstands and at checkout counters. By December of last year, its single-copy sales had tumbled a staggering 67 percent, to 190,487.

Part of it is due to the general falloff in single-copy sales from young women nationally. Single-copy circulation on young women’s magazines has been dropping at the rate of more than 20 percent a year since 2015.

But there is no doubt that a campaign to pressure retailers over the past several years has been hurting sales.

“Cosmo sends the same messages about female sexuality as Playboy.”

Dawn Dawkins, executive director, NCOSE

And surprisingly, one of the people leading the charge in getting Cosmo booted is Victoria Hearst, a scion of the Hearst Media empire. Years ago, she actually drew a paycheck from the magazine division’s Town & Country, but in recent decades, critics say she is taking dividend money from the Hearst empire and turning it against one of its crown jewels.


Lately, she has become a born-again Christian, and in 2002, founded the Praise Him Ministries.

This fall, perhaps inspired by the movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the controversial Hearst also erected three billboards, in Memphis, Nashville and Salt Lake City, proclaiming “Cosmopolitan Magazine Contains Porn Harmful to Kids” and launched Cosmohurtskids.com.

Interviewed by The Post in 2015 about her efforts to get the magazine that specializes in sexy covers booted from Walmart WMT, +0.12%  , she was quoted as saying, “I’m doing the ‘Cosmo Harms Minors’ campaign because Jesus Christ told me to get Cosmo out of the hands of minors. I love Him, and I’m being obedient to His will.”

Walmart is not banning the magazine entirely, but is removing it from the heavy-traffic checkout counters at 5,000 stores nationally, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation said Tuesday.

“Cosmo sends the same messages about female sexuality as Playboy,” said Dawn Dawkins, the executive director of the NCOSE. “It places women’s value primarily on their ability to sexually satisfy a man, and therefore plays into the same culture where men view and treat women as inanimate sex objects.”

“This is what real change looks like in our #MeToo culture, and NCOSE is proud to work with a major corporation like Walmart to combat sexually exploitative influences in our society,” Dawkins said.

Hearst officials declined to comment, and Walmart had not returned calls by press time.

This report originally appeared at NYPost.com.