Culture . 03/10/2008 12:22 PM . David Sessions

Maybe it is the sheepish it’s-for-my-girlfriend grin I feign as I slide a screaming-yellow issue of Cosmopolitan toward the grocery store cashier, but she doesn’t even look up. I say “feigned” because any embarrassment expressed in that little “oh wait, one more thing” was completely and utterly an act. Yes, I am a man purchasing, in broad daylight, a copy of the most-read women’s magazine on earth. No, I am not blushing. I’m just doing my job.

I have early, colorful memories of Cosmo. When I was eight, I would covertly sneak glances at its glowing naughtiness on the checkout-lane shelf while my mother thought she’d successfully herded me past it (on some occasions, she flipped the cover so I wouldn’t have a prolonged look at whoever-was-hot-in-1992’s boobs. Probably Michael Jackson). The mildly racy cover lines (one involving “sexplanations,” I distinctly recall) were about as titillating as anything I had ever seen at that age—and the exact sort of thing that sticks permanently in the 8-year-old male brain.

They were also about as titillating as anything America had seen in the early 1970s, when Helen Gurley Brown first transformed what had been a family magazine (filled with knitting and home design tips) into the early equivalent of Sex and the City—a “survival guide” for the single girl who wishes she were club-hopping and bed-hopping. Playboy and its famed centerfolds were already around, but something about the venerated, feminine Cosmopolitan baring Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug was just too much.

But keeping me from further reminiscing about Cosmo’s place in our cultural consciousness is an elegant cover shot of Rihanna, posing amidst the cluttered promos (summary: SEX) and looking slightly less icy than she did in that “Umbrella” video. She’s lovely, but let’s open this thing so I can stop being blinded by this sunshine-yellow cover. I suppose garish yellow is a little better—and certainly less creepy—than silver body paint.

I’m not quite sure how to tackle an entire, 300-page issue of a women’s magazine, so I decide to read this thing like a man: flip through, looking at the pictures until I find the sex article. But immediately there’s a problem. A brief perusal of the contents section wallops me with the reality that the INCREDIBLY! EXCITED! cover lines apparently failed to convey: they’re all sex articles. And, while most of them end up being feminized not-all-that-shocking rehashes well-worn sex advice, they are promoted as luridly as possible (“Naughty! Boundary-pushing! Shocking! Secret meaning!”)—as if the secret to growing entire orchards of forbidden fruit is about to be revealed. If that is a double entendre, I swear it was entirely an accident.

The main cover tease—I hesitate to refer to it as a “piece”—is on “bad girl sex tricks,” each bulleted with a red “DARE” label. Like most Cosmo articles, I will come to learn, it is loosely based on the work of “experts” who have authored books like How to Tell A Naked Man What To Do, rewritten in a fluffy, eighth-grade prose that’s part Oprah, part National Enquirer. There isn’t one clever turn of phrase to be found or, for that matter, anything approaching an original thought. Sentences range from agonizingly cliché (“These tips and tricks will forever crank up the heat in your sex life”) to agonizingly cliché and grammatically clunky (“After building up the erotic anticipation, it’ll be like setting off a wind-up sex toy on your body…and hearing him describe how hot you are will turbocharge the experience too”). Yes, they left out the comma.

But about the sex. Not to make this awkward, but this list of NAUGHTY! BOUNDARY-PUSHING! tricks are nothing that hasn’t been tossed between high school/college boys like a grimy football for decades. Which is supposedly the reason women are reading about them in Cosmo—if every guy knows this stuff, then the women who date and sleep with them deserve a cheat sheet, right? Or do they? The sexually liberated average Cosmo girl has presumably had quite a bit of sex, and the chances of her not having heard these basic spice-it-up ideas before are pretty slim. So why does her sex life need this supposed dose of verbal Viagra?

Welcome to women’s porn. It isn’t about gazing slack-jawed at a male flesh—in fact, scantily-clad women in Cosmo outnumber half-dressed men by about 8 to 1—it’s about imagining things that are not real. Just like men’s pornography, Cosmo porn piques the prurient interest by suggesting an imaginary scenario. It hardly takes a genius to deduce that a large percentage of Cosmo ’s readership is not actually bringing home a new Eden Gray (the ripped, shirtless jock on page 76) home every night.

But whether or not the girl reader is actually in a relationship, she can have fun imagining what she would do if she were a “bad in bed” girl, and bask in the ego boost of driving a real or imagined Fabio wild. Cosmopolitan was once known in for its quality fiction, but the “Red Hot Read” concluding the issue is simply a badly written sex scene from a woman’s perspective—another illustration of same/different way men and women get off. Guys ogle, girls read, giggle, and gasp. Both picture the experience that is at best improbable, at worst completely out of reach.

And the odd twist that Cosmo (perhaps inadvertently) throws on feminine arousal: turning Maxim frat-boy selfishness into girl power. The bible of the single career woman has become a parody of its former self, urging women to adopt a fratboy-style sexual appetite in order to appear more attractive to the frat boys Maxim keeps perpetually 21.

What begins to impress me as I dig deeper into the issue is the dizzying volume of content this magazine manages to include—from celebrity news to safety advice to fashion previews. Glancing over the pile of magazines at my auto repair shop recently, I noticed just how much competition Cosmopolitan has—Glamour, Redbook, Allure, Marie Claire. The young female demographic has dozens of cult magazines, but, as a look through revealed, Cosmopolitan crushes them all on sheer volume and diversity of content. None of it is great—for example, an unfunny page of Oscar fashion photos with lame zingers attached, a painful attempt to emulate Go Fug Yourself. I’m not qualified to comment on the makeup section, and the fashion pages look a bit like they carried a copy of Vogue to Target to try to find the best affordable imitations. But it’s got everything—no wonder women will pay $4.79 a month for their copy.

But what strikes me most of all is the overwhelming focus on “advice.” No matter the subject, advice. Sex advice, makeup advice, financial advice, marriage advice—you name it, they’ve got it, offered in a faintly maternal Debbie tone. Also, don’t forget the ever-present sidebar of quotes from REAL WOMEN who have done this before, and REAL MEN who are here to tell us what men really think. Half the time, this plays to the stereotype that girls love to talk with 25 friends before they make a decision. The other half, it reads as a confounding attempt to connect the fantastic with the actual—to make women feel that it is actually in their power to have hours of animalistic sex tonight and fly to Tahiti tomorrow.

You can do it because these real women have done it. Right. And those are real men on the cover of Men’s Health, but not even a whole book of EXCLUSIVE TIPS! is going to make me look like that. (Speaking of tips, I’ve always wondered where women’s magazines get those mysterious numbers scattered liberally on their covers—for example, “21 naughty sex tips.” I tried every way imaginable to come up with the number 21—including sidebars, excluding sidebars, including only the cover articles, including only the 21 SEX TIPS story. Not that anyone really cares, but that’s an entirely irrational number).

So there you have it. Cosmo has long managed to wallow unexamined in comfortable stereotypes. So why do so many women like it? Like I said before: Porn. It doesn’t matter so much if next month’s 35 SMOKING POSITIONS are essentially the same as this month’s, or if the guy confessions come from the same real life men over and over. Cosmo is only a little about information, and a lot about the sensual experience. How many women do you know that 1) are honestly, unironically searching for an animalistic sex how-to, and 2) wouldn’t look for it on Google?

Just like Cosmo’s fictional “bedroom blog”—it’s all about reading about other people having exciting dates and amazing sex. Not all that different, I suppose, from the self-pleasing heart of men’s pornography.

David Sessions is deputy editor of Kritik. He loves pushing boundaries.



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