My hat's off to the Kroger Co.

Last week, Kroger decided to put Cosmopolitan magazine behind blinder racks in its 2,200 stores nationwide. (There are 89 Kroger stores in Indiana, according to the Kroger Web site.)

The magazine's nameplate will be visible, but not the headlines.

Kroger had to be prodded a bit but they did the right thing nonetheless, and I give them credit for it.

The decision came about six months after Morality in Media President Robert Peters started asking Kroger and some 350 other supermarket operators to either remove Cosmo and other like magazines from their checkout aisles or put them behind blinders.

Peters called the decision "gratifying" and expressed hope that other stores will follow Kroger's example. Several regional supermarket companies have taken similar action.

Many readers at this point might be wondering what all the fuss was about.

I was too, frankly, until I took time to peruse the raunchy headlines on these magazines.

Here are a few examples from recent editions of Cosmo:

Sex Tricks He's Never Seen Before.

Introducing Cosmo's Hot New Sex Position - You've Got To Try The Butterfly.

10 Make-Him-Throb Moves So Hot You'll Need a Fire Hose To Cool Down The Bed!

And it's not just Cosmo. Here are a few gems from Woman's Own:

Sexual Favors? 12 Sex Acts Men "Appreciate" Most (In Order Of Preference)

Sex: 3 Days, 30 Ways - Some Of The Sexiest Moves He'll Ever See.

"The Best Sex I Ever Had Was During Lunch" - Naughty Nooners' Sneaky Secrets.

"I Love My Husband But His Best Friend Turns Me On."

Or how about Complete Woman? It offered the following in a recent edition:

His Sexual Hot Spots: Touch These And Listen To The Moans Of Joy.

Explosive Orgasms: Secrets To Toe-Clenching, Bed-Rocking Climaxes With Or Without Him.

You get the picture.

Of course inside the magazines things get far more explicit.

I was considering publishing a few excerpts, but I didn't want to deal with all the phone calls and canceled subscriptions.

I can hear the readers now: "How could you put something like that in the newspaper? Children could get ahold of that."

Believe me. I'd get the calls. I get calls when we run lingerie ads. A picture of a woman in a bra is always worth a couple complaints.

I am no prude, but some of the stuff in these magazines is really out there. It reads more like something you'd expect from Penthouse or Hustler. No stone is left unturned.

I would be willing to bet that 99.9 percent of parents who looked at this material would deem it inappropriate for kids.

In fact, in September, Wirthlin Worldwide did a survey for Morality in Media.

The survey showed that 73 percent of Americans think lurid and sexually provocative headlines are inappropriate and 60 percent favor covering the headlines or removing the magazines from checkout counters.

Among women, the target of most of the magazines, 81 percent believe the headlines are inappropriate and 64 percent favor covering the headlines or removing the magazines.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away. The editors have to sell the magazines. If your magazine has boring headlines and stories, it won't sell as well as the one with the sleazy headlines and stories.

So if you're the editor, you have to keep making your magazine more sleazy than the other editor's magazine.

So what happens?

All the magazines get sleazier. We just keep ratcheting up the sleaze. It's a vicious cycle.

Please understand. This is not a call for censorship. The publishers of those magazines have an absolute right to publish that stuff and I have no problem with them doing so. I also have no problem with adults buying and reading it.

But I think we all can agree that this month's offering of hot sex tips is not appropriate for kids and that the grocery store is a pretty kid-accessible place.

So what to do?

The Kroger story is a perfect example.

We don't need to involve the legislature. We just need to politely ask them to put blinders on that stuff.

You don't have to be Morality in Media to do that, either.

You can do it yourself. Ask the store manager if he reads those headlines. Ask him if he would want his kid reading those headlines. Then ask him if he wouldn't mind using blinders in his magazine racks and checkout counters for that kind of material.

I don't shield my kids (age 13 and 15) from the real world. I don't forbid them from seeing R-rated movies, shelter them or cloister them. But I really don't think they need to be reading about the joys of anal sex in a grocery checkout line, either.

Kroger Group Vice President for Corporate Affairs is Lynn Marmer. She wrote a letter to Morality in Media.

Here is an excerpt.

"After discussing the matter with the magazine's distributor, The Kroger Co. has decided to install 'blinder' racks at checkout counters so that the Cosmo (nameplate) is visible, but the headlines are not. We plan to begin installing these new racks shortly and they should be in place at all of the company's approximately 2,200 stores by Feb. 1, 2000. We believe this approach responds to the concerns raised by your organization, which we respect and understand."

Isn't that nice?

I hope other supermarket owners will follow Kroger's lead and take a stand on this issue in the interests of children and public decency. [[In-content Ad]]