By Steve “the Mailman” Breen Going Postal
MOST OF US ARE TRAPPED AT THE checkout counter at our local supermarket while the headlines from the magazine racks scream at us like an Edvard Munch collage of jealousy, greed, vanity, insanity, bulimia, fashion victim-hood and cellulite reduction. The Big Dog on this estrogen-soaked literary porch is, of course, Cosmopolitan.
When Cosmopolitan was founded in 1886, it published feature fiction from authors as diverse as Edith Wharton, Ambrose Bierce, Sinclair Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. By 1988, Cosmo had published a non-fiction piece that proclaimed, “…unprotected sex with an HIV positive man [did] NOT put a woman at risk for infection…”despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yup, you’ve come a long way, baby. I haven’t looked inside a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine since Burt Reynolds appeared buck-naked riding a polar bearskin rug in the infamous April 1972 edition. I’m still traumatized … way too much hair! Most of today’s folks, however, are only familiar with Burt’s role as the skeezy porn film director in the flick “Boogie Nights.” It is a fitting denouement to an estimably hirsute career.
A degree of decorum, however, is incumbent upon me to eschew a too strict of an accounting of the goriest details from Cosmo. It was akin to reading about a bad traffic accident on the 405 involving bowling balls, dishwashing liquid and hamsters … horrid, but you just couldn’t turn away.
The June issue of Cosmo covered, “The Hottest Things to Do to a Man” replete with instructions on how to use your cell phone as a sex toy! I had hoped it might have been a titular tutorial about how a gal might be enticed to pick up the dinner check or how to use a toilet plunger without coaching. You can bet, though, that I’ll never ask to use a woman’s cell phone again because you never know where that Crackberry has been last.
There was an article from a psychologist, a private eye and a Feng Shui practitioner entitled “How To Snoop on Your Man”providing detailed instructions on checking the junk in your man’s pockets, beachcombing through the post-consumer detritus in his car and smelling his dirty laundry for evidence of any foreign perfume should you suspect your man-scaped cabana boy is cheating on you.
Ladies, if you are pursuing these assumptive activities in extremis to determine whatever presumptive character we men may or may not possess only leads one to the conclusion that you are in serious need of a hobby. There are many suitable suggestions detailed in the evocative piece on page 183 entitled “67 Blow-His-Mind Moves.” One of them is doing an oil change on his car while attired in a mini-skirt. Don’t forget to bring beer.
Frankly, we men don’t really care what you think about us despite all of the bovine scatology you may have lowed about in Pilate’s class with your girlfriends. According to “O” magazine,“not caring”is a distinctly feminine complaint about men while “W” magazine reports that we men are not as smart as you … until you ask us, of course, to open a stubborn pickle jar. More importantly, why do these women’s magazines have only one letter in the title and lots of pictures of shoes? Oh, Edith Wharton, where art thou?
I’m having a difficult time squaring the circle of the overtly prurient propaganda propounded in the glossies that distinctly undermines the original critique of Friedanian mystique. Isn’t it a trace insincere to devote over 200 pages every month on how to walk, talk and act like a call girl and then indignantly protest that men won’t take you seriously? Of course we take you seriously. We seriously think you’re a call girl and that we’re “Client No. 9.”
Ladies, if you’re going to slither seductively like Kim Kardashian, don’t expect us to doofus about like Stedman Graham. If you’re quacking like a duck then prepare yourself to be slathered in a Szechuan orange glaze while adorning an airborne stripper pole as depicted in the movie “Ironman.”
However, ladies, before you pass judgment on the porcine proclivities of the XY gender, Cosmo’s current circulation is cumulate in 58 international editions, published in 36 languages and distributed in more than 100 countries. That’s a whole lot o’ quackin’ goin’ on.
And Cosmo also has a “tweens to teens” spin-off called CosmoGirl. Their motto is, “Math is hard … boys are cute.”
By the way, while I’m at the market, do you need me to pick up anything?
STEVE BREEN ain’t nuthin’ but a Hound Dog and is still the “best looking mailman at the U.S. Post Office.” He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 16, 2008. Read the original PDF.