Cosmo and the Twilight Zone

In ‘Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams’, Laurie Outlette examines how Cosmopolitan magazine constructed the identity of a “Cosmo girl”, the sexually-liberated and upwardly mobile woman in the workforce. In its early days, Helen Gurley Brown, the author of “Sex and the Single Girl”, a groundbreaking release in the early 1960’s, gave the magazine its distinctive point of view, focusing on techniques that women working in “pink collar” jobs could use to appear wealthier and more attractive to men of a higher class and economic standing. Articles focused on how women could improve their lives by crafting an entirely new identity for themselves, vilifying the “natural” look, encouraging women to seek “new looks” (121) through the use of cosmetics, plastic surgery and lingerie. This sent the message to their readers that in order to be “successful”, landing a man who could take care of them economically and allow them to live an “upper-class” lifestyle, required careful construction of an appearance, one that would make them more appealing to a man, generally a superior in their office. Cosmopolitan magazine created this need for women to constantly improve upon themselves and their appearance by constantly creating a “gap” between the actual and the ideal, “offering a temporary window to the future self” tempered by the male gaze, and cultural expectations of femininity.

This article reminded me of an episode of the Twilight Zone, ‘The Number 12 Looks Just Like You’. The episode, set in the distant future, shows a “utopian” vision of Earth where everyone must undergo a ‘Transformation’ in order to completely change their face and body to become “beautiful”. Everyone is forced to undergo this transformation, as ugliness was discovered sometime in the past to be the cause of all hate and inequality in the world. The main character of this story, Marilyn, doesn’t want to go through with the Transformation after reading her deceased father’s diaries. They allow Marilyn the realization that if everyone is beautiful, there can truly be no beauty. Despite her protests, Marilyn is forced by law to undergo the Transformation, and is shown happily (albeit vacantly) examining her “beauty” in the mirror at the end of the episode. This relates to the negativity surrounding the “natural” look in Cosmopolitan magazine. Women were strongly encouraged to craft a “new identity” that was more “beautiful” than how they appeared naturally, effectively destroying what might be truly unique about them.