Is This An Issue Of Cosmopolitan I See Before Me?

Let's misbehave!

If you’re reading this and you’re a girl, that’s awesome! There are girls reading my blog besides my Mom! Do any of you want to be my girlfriend? I’m uber-sensitive.

Ahem.

If you’re reading this and you’re a girl, you no doubt have also read the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan. Being the child of socially conservative, politically liberal parents, Cosmo was something of a myth around the Capps household until I got to college, where it is almost, but not quite, as prevalent as marijuana. Before college, the only times I’d see issues of Cosmo were when a girl would bring a copy to school, and the experience was usually rather overwhelming for me. Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Cook’s Magazine, Technology Review, PC Magazine* - these are the periodicals you’ll find lying on varnished coffee tables or leather armrests in my house. By and large they aren’t colorful or incredibly eye catching unless you’re drawn to witty pen and ink cartoons or poigniant sidebar poetry (and lord knows I am – only one of the many things making me so damn sensitive). So of course, for me to see a magazine cover that consists of a voluptuous woman against a bright background with gigantic titles in multiple fonts is a bit of a culture shock. There are words on the cover of this magazine that I didn’t know were legal to say in the checkout line of a supermarket.

*True story: As I was putting down the names of these magazines, I was at a loss for the name of this one. All I knew was that its name started with PC. In an attempt to find the exact name, I went to Google and typed in “PC Magazine” to try and get a list of all PC related publications in hopes that one of them would be what I was thinking of, and it was then that I realized that the magazine was in fact called “PC Magazine”. Are you not entertained?

In the upper right hand corner of the cover is a red highlight that deems this issue “The SEXY Issue”, and that just doesn’t make any kind of sense. Calling an issue of Cosmopolitan (a magazine that this 19 year old male thinks has a decidedly unhealthy fascination with human procreation) “The Sexy Issue” is like calling an entry in my blog “The Entry Where Truman Overanalyzes A Trivial Subject”. That’s the problem when your magazine is completely devoted to one of the most mysterious and confounding acts that two or more people can engage in without a Dungeon Master’s guide: After awhile, you run out of ways to one-up yourself. And so at that point you resort to referring to every sex Q&A as “our naughtiest”, regardless of whether that’s actually the case or not. Of course, what’s to make one thing naughtier than another? In my opinion, sex that involves any sort of leather – even a leather purse in the closet, honestly – is by far naughtier than non leather/pleather oriented forms of intercourse. But to someone else, someone more accustomed to leather, someone perhaps bored with leather, maybe the naughtiness only really kicks up when costumes are involved. Or food. Or the neighbors.

Once I located the table of contents (which I almost mistook for one of the 19 pages of advertisements between it and the cover), I proceeded to page 138 to discover the 67 new sex secrets. Now, for one thing, I don’t know how many secrets there can be about sex, but no matter how many, we’ve probably run through all of them at least four or five times by now, what with Cosmo releasing between 50 and 100 of them every month. Furthermore, reading some of the secrets, I honestly can’t imagine human beings doing these things to one another.

“It felt taboo when her tongue ventured close to my butt. – Daniel, 30” As well it should have, Daniel. As well it should have. There are places a tongue should never go, and your butt is one of them. Also, don’t use “ventured” to describe your girlfriend’s tongue. I don’t care where she’s putting it, that doesn’t make it Meriwether freaking Lewis.

“My girlfriend showed up at my door in a trashy outfit and introduced herself as my chick’s naughty pretend twin sister, Candy. She pushed me against the wall, we had mad sex, and then she left. The next day, she acted like nothing happened. – JR, 27” How do you know that wasn’t her naughty twin sister? It’s all fun and games until your girlfriend tearfully tells you that her rather promiscuous twin sister who she’d always been too ashamed to mention just died of AIDS.

“My woman e-mailed me erotic Website links throughout the day. The first was for lingerie she had bought online; then I got a sex toy link, followed by a site describing a position I figured she wanted to try. It was like eight hours of foreplay!” – Shawn, 26” Girlfriend telling you what to do = Bad. Looking at porn at work = Bad. Girlfriend telling you what kind of porn to look at at work = …Good?

“Ask what songs he listened to in high school, and play them back during a hookup. It will take him back to that time when he was in an almost permanent state of horniness, triggering his primal urges.” Future sexual partners: Please download Chicago: Greatest Hits, Rock Lobster, and the Skyview High School Marching Band’s 2004 rendition of Malaguena.

“Mints have been found to arouse men. So if you crave more action, try reviving him with mint ice cream.” This is a load of crap – mint chocolate chip is my Dad’s favorite flavor of ice cream and I’m an only child.

After awhile, one starts to wonder how humans ever got this far without a glossy manual to advise them in the finer points of swapping tartar sauce. But what I really wonder is if Cosmo is a sex manual or more of a sex zoo. Most of the girls I know who read it balk at the dirty sex tips, but still hopelessly devour the material. Hell, I’m guilty too – I read all 67 sex tips and gave them a lot more thought than I do most of the required reading in my classes. Still, I get the idea that my friends and I are not alone. I don’t think 43 year old Minnesota housewives with Cosmo subscriptions are going to start surprising their husbands with dirty twin sister alter egos. Likewise, after going to the penguin house at the zoo I don’t slide around on my stomach and eat raw fish. This is because I don’t go to the penguin house to learn how to be a penguin, I go to the penguin house because penguins live a life decidedly different from my own and I want to look at it and laugh when they push their friends in the water to test for sharks. Maybe Cosmo is our tawdry penguin house.

Yes, that’s right, I just equated dirty sex to penguins. My ability to construct flimsy metaphors is just one of the many reasons I’m so sensitive.

Truman Capps borrowed the issue of Cosmopolitan from a friend, much in the same way you borrowed your mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalogue when you were 13 and “forgot” to give it back. Don’t say you didn’t, liar.