Say it ain’t so!

Various editors, fact-checkers, and writers of sex articles in women’s magazines say they’re full of lies.

The former Mademoiselle checker says of the sex articles, “When I first got there, I would try to check those first-time-I-had-sex quotes. You know, ‘It was Christmas Eve, we made a fire … .’ And I would get blank looks” from editors. “They’d say, ‘Um, you want to call these people?'”
A former Cosmopolitan editor, interviewed by cell phone during a manicure/pedicure, says that Cosmo nearly always changed the ages of people quoted, to hit the magazine’s mid-twenty-something target readership. Writers and editors often interview their friends, and “we didn’t know anyone of the correct age. Such a nuisance!”
[…] “I don’t think I ever made anything up wholesale,” the ex-Cosmo editor says. “But in a tight spot, we’d brainstorm.” The anecdotes, she says, “were always things that could have happened.”

What’s interesting was not just where things were made up or numbers inflated, usually in the interest of making sex sound like the panacea for all ills, physical and emotional, but where stories, quotes, and referenced activities were rewritten to tone things down to what the editors considered “normal” or “realistic.”

Geez. If you can’t trust magazines you can pick up at the grocery store check-in, who can you trust?

(Via the ShanMonster)