March 27 (UPI) — Walmart will remove Cosmopolitan magazine from its checkout lines, a move one national group is touting as “a stand against sexual exploitation.”
The Arkansas-based retail giant will take the women’s magazine out of checkout lines in its 5,000 U.S. stores, according to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-pornography organization that lobbied for the policy change and was previously known as Morality in Media.
“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,” Dawn Hawkins, the center’s executive director, said in a news release. “Women, men, and children are bombarded daily with sexually objectifying and explicit materials, not only online, but in the checkout line at the store.”
A statement on the group’s website said “Walmart is using its platform to take a stand against sexual exploitation, by instituting a broad sweep of all Walmart stores, removing Cosmopolitan Magazine from each and every checkout aisle.”
The center said it has worked with Walmart for months on the policy change.
Hawkins called it “an incremental but significant step toward creating a culture where women and girls are valued as whole persons, rather than as sexual objects.”
