Walmart is saying goodbye to Cosmopolitan.
The retail giant will remove the women’s fashion magazine from checkout lines at 5,000 stores across the country, according to a press release from National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) Tuesday, an organization that helped instigate the policy change.
“You can go through and buy your groceries with your family knowing you don’t have to be exposed to this graphic and often degrading and offensive material,” NCOSE Vice President of Advocacy and Outreach Haley Halverson said in a Facebook live session Tuesday. “Instead, all of these magazines will be moved, in isolation, to the magazine racks.”
The decision comes amid the Me Too movement and a national reckoning on sexual harassment.
“This is one less drop of hyper-sexualized media that is going to be bombarding people in their everyday lives, which does make a difference, especially in this Me Too culture that we’re living in, where we really want a culture that will respect women and ensure their dignity is understood,” Halverson continued.
The Me Too movement gained momentum in October as bombshell reports from The New York Times and The New Yorker detailed decades of alleged sexual harassment and assault by producer Harvey Weinstein. Allegations against dozens of men in positions of power emerged in following weeks, and celebrities and non-celebrities alike flooded social media platforms with the hashtag #MeToo with their own stories of harassment, highlighting the depth of the problem.
