Major supermarket and drugstore chains will start putting blinders over Cosmopolitan magazines that they sell in their stores.
RiteAid and Delhaize America, which owns Hannaford Stores and Food Lion, made the decision to cover up the magazines in an effort to protect minors from exposure to the covers, which the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) says glorifies and desensitizes porn and sexual violence, the group said in a statement.
Both the NCSE and Victoria Hearst, granddaughter of the William Randolph Hearst, who was the founder of Hearst Corp., which publishes the magazine, praised the decision.
"Cosmopolitan magazine regularly features articles, and occasionally explicit pictures, encouraging girls to participate in group, anal, and violent torture sex, and it blatantly targets young girls by displaying teen idols on their covers," Dawn Hawkins, executive director of NCSE, said in a statement.
"Recently, Cosmo even posted an article encouraging readers to visit hard-core porn sites, including one site that is particularly focused on the extremely violent torture of women," Hawkins said.
"We are thankful to RiteAid and Delhaize America for not allowing this harmful material to be in plain view of minors at their stores, and we encourage other chains to follow suit, and to refuse to sell this pornographic magazine to minors," she added.
Hearst congratulated the move by the stores, saying that "it will protect underage children from being exposed to the magazine's sexually explicit covers showing scantily clad female celebrities and article titles with the words 'sex' and 'orgasm.'"
She added that she hopes that the stores will also prevent the magazines from being sold to teenagers who are under 18 years old.