When You Start Betraying the Truth
Below is an excerpt from a May 26, 2020 article by Kelsey Bolar interviewing Sue Ellen Browder, a journalist for Cosmopolitan magazine, now a Catholic convert who turns to the Church for aid in healing from her abortion.
The story restores hope in human nature. It was published in 2020 on the Daily Signal. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
The words below are theirs.
She Wrote Fake News for Cosmopolitan and Now Regrets Misleading Women on Feminism
LANDER, Wyo.— Sue Ellen Browder wrote fake news before “fake news” was ever a thing. Except she prefers not to call it that—not because she’s embarrassed to admit she wrote fake news (although she’s certainly not proud), but because she thinks the term “fake news” is too vague to understand.
Browder, a Cosmopolitan magazine writer for 20 years, describes what she wrote as “propaganda.”
The goal? To sell women on the idea that sexual liberation is the path to the single woman’s personal fulfillment.
“Propaganda is very sophisticated,” Browder tells The Daily Signal. “It’s half-truth, selected truth, and truth out of context.”
“Propaganda is used not to sell just products,” she adds. “It’s also used to sell ideas.”
Prior to writing for Cosmopolitan, Browder worked at a small daily newspaper, the South Bay Daily Breeze, just outside Los Angeles. When she unexpectedly got pregnant, they were far more excited about it than her bosses at the newspaper were.
“They told me I could only work five months into my pregnancy and then I had to quit,” Browder recalls.
That experience turned Browder, who was born and raised in small-town Iowa, into a feminist.
The year was 1969, and getting fired for being pregnant was a wake-up call.
[…]
Beginning in 1971, Browder worked under the legendary Helen Gurley Brown, who was Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief for more than 30 years and author of the bestselling 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl.”
Taking cues from Playboy magazine, Brown turned the struggling magazine into an international empire. She gave her writers a printed list of rules to follow, which included instructions about how to make up parts of their stories to sound more convincing.
Browder still owns her original copy of the rules today. Flipping through the pages, she reads two examples out loud:
Unless you are a recognized authority on the subject, profound statements must be attributed to somebody appropriate, even if the writer has to invent the authority. …
Try to locate some of the buildings, restaurants, nightclubs, parks, streets, as well as entire case histories … in cities other than New York, even if you deliberately have to plant them elsewhere. Most writers live in New York, 92% of our readers do not.
By planting salacious stories about women having extravagant affairs in places such as Cleveland and Des Moines, Browder says, “the magazine spread its mores throughout the country and throughout the culture by pretending that they were much more widespread than they actually were.”
One of those Cosmo mores was the idea that abortion was a woman’s “right,” years before the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutionally protected right.
Browder details the story of how a small group of feminists inserted abortion into the agenda of the women’s movement in her 2015 book “Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.” She documents the disgust of many pro-life feminists.
But from that point on, the narrative was set.
“Essentially, ‘All women want this.’ And that is how propaganda works,” Browder says.
While Browder was married and living a traditional lifestyle quite different from what she was espousing in Cosmopolitan, she, too, was corrupted by its influence. At one point, the ideas in those pages seeped into the most personal decision she and her husband could ever make.
At 27 years old, Browder was happily married with two children at home. When she became pregnant with a third, she and her husband decided to get an abortion. It was 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade.
Browder, who lived in the Los Angeles area and later in two parts of Connecticut for most of her time writing for Cosmo, says she had the abortion in the same hospital where she previously gave birth.
“I did not realize what a traumatic experience that would be later in my life, how much that would haunt me.”
About 20 years later, in 1994, Browder’s last piece appeared in Cosmopolitan. About 10 years after that, she converted to Catholicism and sought the help of the church to heal her from the abortion.
“When you start betraying the truth, it will come back to haunt you,” she says. “It will get you in the end. And that’s why even though I knew we were making up stories, I still got sucked in and thought abortion would be OK.”
Browder’s abortion isn’t the only thing she has sought forgiveness for. In her book, she comes clean about the propaganda she wrote for Cosmopolitan, despite its casting an embarrassing shadow over her career as a journalist.
“I don’t want to take more credit than I deserve for all this evil, but I think that I — I was certainly part of the evil empire, if you will.”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
