And before I proceed, you need to read this.
Did I scare ya?!
No. I have not set up a webcam in front of which I will parade around in my cycling clothing.
Hey, contrary to popular opinion, some guys dig that.
Actually, according to Cosmopolitan magazine, I don’t think there are many guys who would dig that!
When I got my nails done a few weeks ago, someone at the nail salon had left an old copy of Cosmopolitan magazine lying around. Before I picked up Cosmopolitan, I picked up some celebrity rag and started to page through that.
Do you know how you know when you’re really old? No, it’s not when things start to sag or you forget the reason why you went downstairs 30 seconds after began said trip downstairs. It’s when your six-year-old daughter points to a picture in a celebrity rag and says, “Oooooooh, there’s Selena Gomez,” and then it turns out that you don’t even know who Selena Gomez is! Yeah, so it’s not that you break your hip first; it’s the ability to identify current popular celebrities that is the first thing to go!
After getting a tad bit depressed from not knowing who Selena Gomez was, for lack of anything better to read, I picked up the Cosmopolitan magazine. I hadn't read Cosmopolitan in years. In fact, the last time I read it was in college. I lived in the "Mods" my Senior year at Brandeis with Bitsy, Steve, and Steve. God, that sounds so like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," but it wasn't.
Bitsy and I used to do the grocery shopping, and whenever a new issue of Cosmo came out, we bought it when grocery shopping. We added the cost of it to the bill, and we made sure that Steve and Steve each paid one quarter of the cost of the Cosmo along with the food bill. The funny thing was that Bitsy's Steve (and she would later marry him) would fight us to be the first to read Cosmo after we arrived home from shopping!
So, that was then, but this is now.
Have any of you seen an issue of Cosmo lately? When did "sex" merit covering the page of a magazine cover when there are so many more important things in a relationship besides sex? I looked at the cover and in addition to the article from which I got tonight's blog title, there was "100 Sex Truths," “Guys Voted the Sex Position They Lust For,” and “"When Your Nipples Act Weird." I found my way to “100 Sex Truths,” because I wasn’t sure I even knew ten of them. And, after I read the following one, I thought there was no need to read this serious and insightful article any further.
Q: Is it possible for me to masturbate too much?
A: Only if you're more concerned about earning an orgasm than a paycheck.
If I wanted juvenile sexual humor, I could just watch reruns of “Three’s Company!”
I also happened upon the “Bedroom Blog.” The article announced that the blog was online.
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/bedroom-blog/
I read one of the “blog” postings in the article; oh, here it is!
Friday, 09.19.08
Pushed Back
Brandon has officially postponed our second date three times. If he asks me out again, I’m telling him to forget it. He’s ridiculous!
Question: After reading that, did you stick your finger down your throat like I did? And, does this sound like something an intelligent 20-something would write? It sounds like the words of a 20-something who has the mentality of a six-year-old.
Then I thought, God, I could write this crap! Okay, maybe that’s what bugged me more than how stupid and juvenile it all sounded. What really bothered me was that some person was getting published in a magazine by writing this garbage and getting PAID for it!
After that, I put the magazine down in disgust. I remember Cosmopolitan being much better than this was when I used to read it. Well, I do recall it had some sex-related articles in it, but it wasn’t “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask” by any means.
I began to wonder if I was becoming more conservative in my “old age,” was it the way I was brought up, or had Cosmopolitan just become a really crappy magazine for which you need to be drinking a Cosmopolitan in order to enjoy it! I was thinking it was the latter; however, I felt as a wanna-be-journalist (okay, well sometimes-wanna-be-journalist when I don’t wanna-be a dog walker or a Polish super model), I should investigate more. And perhaps, I was a tad in denial, too. I couldn’t believe a staple of my college food shopping trips with Bitsy had declined so. In some way, I almost felt that perhaps this was just a “bad” issue; and, if I bought a newer issue, it would definitely be better or so I hoped.
So, I purchased the October issue.
Just by looking at the cover I could tell that much hadn’t changed. Of the nine articles advertised, most had to do with sex or at least implied sex.
Bad Girl Sex, These 12 Moves will Show Him Your Really Naughty Side.
We Call Them the Dirty Dozen.
One Question No Guy Can Resist
The Sexy Ass Workout
“HUNG”, A real Guy’s Story. Yup, It’s That Big.What 81% of Men Expect on a First Date
Megan Fox, Juicy Stuff She Could Only Say in Cosmo
The #1 Secret of Confident ChicksSex Panic: An ER Doc Reveals the Freakiest Down-There Emergencies Ever
The 25 Best Beauty Products
True Crime, How She Outsmarted a Brutal Rapist
I opened the cover and found much the same inside, like Moves That Cross the Line, Shun, Shag, or Marry, and The Naughtiest Thing I’ve Ever Done. Even the “good” articles sounded stupid like A Death by Suntan at Age 26, She paid the ultimate price for her one guilty pleasure. God, talk about Drama Queen. I think a better title would have been Practice Safe Sunscreen!
I really looked hard to find the “good” articles, but most of them were buried by the “sex” articles. Like why weren’t “Your Body, Breast Lump” and “Shameless Money-Saving Tricks” on the cover? Yeah, yeah, apparently, “Sex Sells” more copies of Cosmopolitan magazine.
One Question No Guy Can Resist
What do you think this question is?
I think it's…
"Would you like another beer?"
“Do you want the TV remote?”
“Should I not talk to you for the whole day?”
The article is really about “What It Means When He Clams Up,” which I suppose is a “good” article, but it appears under “Love&Lust.” What’s wrong with “Communication,” and if it has to be “Love & Lust,” why can’t it just be “Love?!”
Moves That Cross the Line
72% of guys would not be turned on if their girl spanked them with a
paddle. [Like that’s so “Ouch!”]
62% of guys do not like lingerie with lots of zippers and laces.
[Yeah, cuz it's too hard to get all that stuff off!]
73% of guys would not be turned on if their girl dripped hot wax all
over their chest. [HOT WAX?!?!?! Eeeek!!! What happened to edible undies?! Satisfying yet painless?!]
78% of guys would be turned off if their girl asked them to call her ma'am during sex. [Ma’am?! What are these women thinking? Who wants to be reminded of your mother, especially in bed! I prefer “snookums” instead.]
Megan Fox, Juicy Stuff She Could Only Say in Cosmo
Who the hell is Megan Fox, and why do I care what she has to say? (Ouch! I think I just broke my hip!) If she's some 20-something TV star, then I don't think she has a helluva a lot to say at all, and it's doubtful she ever will in her lifetime.
Sex Panic -- An ER Doc Reveals the Freakiest Down-There Emergencies Ever
I didn’t even bother to read this. I feared a rehashing of that Richard Gere-gerbil story, and I felt it would be full of urban myths anyway.
I could see merit in how a woman outsmarted a rapist, and the article that intrigued me the most was “The #1 Secret of Confident Chicks,” well, again, why couldn’t it have been titled “The #1 Secret of Confident WOMEN.” Although I have been known to call myself a chick, I think they should have used the empowering and responsible new word math – “confident“ + “women” = Good Magazine.
What do you see when you flip to page 160 to see "The #1 Secret of Confident Chicks?” You see an article titled “8 Times It Pays to Be Cocky.” Cocky? To me, it’s never good to be “cocky.” So, what happened to “confident?” The article says, “Shamelessly strutting your stuff is the number one secret to being a confident chick.” It is? Since when has it been for anyone? Some of the points were good; however, I lost faith at number 3, which was “You’re on top in bed.” It went on to say, “This position of control is the primo vantage point for showcasing an ‘I get what I want, and I know I’m not’ allure.” Oh, puuuuhhhhhhhhhhleese.
By this point, I had lost hope. And, I thought it was especially ironic since Cosmopolitan touted nothing but sex and more sex, and after page 180, I found a four-page booklet about HPV prevention.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m so not a stick-in-the-mud nor a prude. I am the woman who wore a Peanuts toga to Jim’s party and allegedly barfed in his hamper, and both times I’ve been to NYC in the last year, I’ve stayed out ‘til 4:30 and 2:30 in the morning. (But, just remember, the evening doesn’t get started ‘til midnight in NYC!) All that being said, I do think I'm becoming more conservative in my old age while retaining a good sense of “footloose and fancy free” privately, well, at least in my dreams.
The thing that is sad about Cosmopolitan is that Helen Gurley Brown wrote “Sex and the Single Girl,” which “encouraged women to actively pursue a full single life, which included acquiring a career, gaining financial independence and accepting one's looks.” Today, the magazine does none of this in my opinion.
So, at the end of the day, it appeared that Cosmopolitan was a pretty crappy magazine in 2009 and not the magazine it had been in 1983 when Bity and I arm wrestled Steve over it!
And in light of the “rainbow” parties that I heard that kids in middle school were having, I had to ask myself, “Am I changing or has the world changed so much in the last 25 years that I have to change?” There was no doubt about it; I had to change, especially to be a good mother. <3
P.S. By the way, if you’re wondering about that October issue of Cosmo that I have lying around, I’ll only say, “I didn't inhale and never tried it again." Really, I didn’t. I only had to read "All Night Long -- Getting hot and heavy with your guy can sometimes leave you a little, um, messy. Cosmo comes to the rescue to keep you stunning and sexy between the sheets."
Women worried about how they look in bed? Gawd, what’s the world coming to? Okay, so you don’t want to look bad, but “You’re Sporting Serious Bedhead?” Hopefully, you’re with someone who loves YOU for you and doesn’t give a damn about your hair. And if you give a damn about your hair after a great night in bed no matter whether you're 22 or 52, then you really need a reality check!
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