With a population of barely three million, if official numbers can be trusted, half of which lives in poverty, is Cosmo really relevant? Women can not find work, a lot of the men leave their wives, sisters, mothers, and move to foreign lands to earn for the families’ daily bread. Yup, I am glad those women can read all about the 78 sex facts. Great progress. Wining.

US version is full of asinine garbage (especially their sex related articles, and articles related to men).

I would have been happier to see Women’s Health type of mag there then this plastic, shiny, publication.

Excerpt:

Cosmo is an easy magazine to hate. When I asked my female friends — including many single women in their late 20s, like me — what they thought of it, most of them were unkind. “Cosmo is complete trash,” one explained. “Mindless,” another said. “I would not be caught reading it outside of an airplane,” said a third. “It assumes and expects the worst of women,” said another. I never had a particularly positive opinion of it, either, and my ambivalence was reinforced by headlines like this one, from a recent edition of Cosmo South Korea: “Oops! My V Zone Is Strange!”

But to hear the Cosmo missionaries tell it, they’re promoting feminism with every issue. “Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world,” Fira Basuki Baskoro, the editor of Cosmo Indonesia, said over a lunch of salad and paella. “When Cosmo came to Indonesia, it changed the way the Indonesian woman thinks. Before Cosmo, it was taboo for women to talk about sex openly.”

White told me that during a 2010 trip to New Delhi, the editor of Cosmo India correlated a rise in love marriages over arranged marriages to Cosmo’s influence. “I don’t know if this is true statistically,” White said, but “Cosmo has been very, very popular there. And I’d like to think that one of the messages we’re delivering to women is: You don’t have to marry the guy your parents told you to marry. You should marry who you want to marry. You can have a job if you’d like. You can have a career if you want. These choices are open to you today.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/magazine/how-cosmo-conquered-the-world.html?pagewanted=all