Column:

A few reasons to hate Cosmo

By Dan Friesen

Published March 14, 2006

I'm not a fan of any magazines, with the exception of National Geographic. (I love the hot nude tree people.) Come to think of it, I don't really care much for newspapers or other written media either. I guess I like books.

Magazines suffer from the same affliction that haunts cable news. They have to sell their product, and they know their product is shit. As such, they have to resort to scandalous tactics to move their crap. Men's magazines predictably use pictures of half-naked women. Curiously, women's magazines offer promises of a better sex life with headlines like "120 Ways to Please Your Man." Hell, the word "sex" has been on every cover of Cosmopolitan in huge bold font since 1963.

I saw a headline a while back: "How to Surprise Your Man in Bed." How titillating. It turns out licking a nipple or knuckling a taint is shocking bedroom behavior. Now, I'm no wild man, but neither of those things would catch me off guard. I think for a woman to genuinely surprise me in the sack, she would need to carve a pentagram into her stomach, chant passages from "The Song of Roland" in a demonic voice, jump out of bed and fall forward on a sharpened stick.

I was relieving my bladder at my girlfriend's dorm when I spied an issue of Cosmo on the toilet tank. Shock of shocks, the word "sex" was on the cover in big bold letters. I have been really sick this week, and quite frankly, I am really just phoning this one in. It's hard to be coherently funny with cold sweats. Long story short, I am just going to insult some of the features in the mag in a disjointed manner. Enjoy.

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