A new iPad app for Cosmopolitan magazine, expected to debut later this week, drops the pretense that women read it for the articles: it features an interactive sex quiz with men groaning and lots of pics of shirtless guys.
Fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily got their hands on the magazine app featuring hot hunks and steamy sex advice to find that the $2.99 new app, called “The Showcase Edition,” contained only two articles.
Instead, there’s an interactive feature, already a favorite with magazine staffers, called “Decode His Bedroom Sounds,” which promises to help women understand what a “load moaner” really means — and whether she’s got one — by emitting what was described as “unholy sounds.”
There were about two articles available on the iPad app, the rest of the content was shirtless men and signature Cosmo quizzes like “Are you a gutsy chick?”
Given the wholesome catalog iTunes wants to offer clients this app — like that shirtless belly-bouncing game — would seem to push that envelope. But Cosmo isn’t worried that Apple will have a problem with male nudity and the general raunchiness of the app.
“No, we don’t cross any line like that,” said editor in chief Kate White. “The guiding principle we had was: We’re a mainstream magazine.”
Cosmo is already present on the iTunes store with a number of apps, including one called Sex Position of the Day.
Via WWD
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco freelance writer who heads up Cult of Mac Magazine, our weekly publication available on iTunes. You can find her on Twitter and Google+. If you’re doing something new, cool and Apple-related, email her.
6 responses to “New Cosmo iPad app lean on articles, heavy on pics & sex”
I don’t know, Nichole. I like to think of myself as a woman more evolved than Cosmo. If it’s an even less intellectual version of the magazine, I don’t think it’s for me. Hot pics of shirtless guys is always nice, but I don’t really feel a need to go out of my way to get it.
Apple should be less controlling of the content of the apps. Let anyone publish anything in these magazine apps, whether it be porn to racist rantings.
Yeah, tend to agree with you. Helen Gurley Brown is frowning over her coffee, probably. Or maybe not?