I was in the grocery store when I saw this cover:

SEX

SUN

FUN

Then a slug: new erotica.

What? What’s this? I’m-a checking it out right now.  (Oh! And here’s a link to my blog about another even BETTER story by Charlotte Stein.)

Why’d I ever stop reading fashion/women’s mags in the first place? They were a balm against the limited imagination of high school fashion.  The perfume inserts never bothered me a bit.  They added a whiff of luxury to my life.

What would I have done if I hadn’t been able to live through the fantasy sets and editorial homo-erotic fashion spreads in Vogue?  Okay, but then my life went online around 1999.   No more mags.

So here’s what I dragged home my own personal copy of COSMO for–a little ditty called “51 Shades of Blonde”.  Apparently this is a installment of a story by Jessica Knoll.  Who’s she?  A senior editor at Cosmo.  Maybe.

And here’s what I thought of the story: meh.  The sex scene (which took up half the room of the story) started off a little, um, unromantically, but what can I say? It got the job done.  Will I read the next installment? If you made me, sure.

As a would-be erotic romance author however, I celebrate Cosmo as the PERFECT forum for erotic romance/erotica. Or it used to be. Do you realize how much Cosmo’s changed in the last 10+ years?

It used to be like this: picture a woman on the front of cosmo–the power vamp in a sexy low cut dress eating her boss’s heart on a spoon.  On the inside the features would have some whip-cord maven choking a bare-chested hottie by his knotted tie, while fondling his man titty.  Did you know the word cosmopolitan is derived from the same Greek root of the word for cougar? (I’m kidding of course.)

But now Cosmo’s got articles on boyfriends.  Boyfriends? The Softer Side of Mastering His Penis.  It’s not so fierce as it once was.

Here’s an article slug: Arghhhh! What to Do When He Gives You the Silent Treatment.  Nail biter! Sounds like something from a more girly-insecurity mag.  Cosmo used to be about throwing a guy on the floor, taking your orgasm, and not worrying if you stomp him with your stiletto on your way out the door.  What happened?

I still love the perfume inserts – Guicci guilty, (the fragrance for her). It smells nice.

They also had this SEALED SECTION: The sealed section was a bit confounding – all about penises of course, but then the page AFTER the sealed section had sex Q&A.  This caught my eye: “Lately, I’ve been seeing different kinds of lube like the types that heat up or tingle.  Are they worth trying?”  Not quite sure why basic penis info goes in the sealed section and this doesn’t…..hmmmmm.  These other questions brought home to me again the difference in what Cosmo used to be and what it’s like now.

Funny old Cosmo of yore would’ve been more like this: “He’s giving you the silent treatment? Good.  Tell him you like your men tall, dark, and silent.”

Cosmo was the one who let all of America’s dirty little sex secrets out of the bag.  That 25% of men had some kind of man-on-man sexual experimentation in their past.  That women liked the power of feeling sexy apart from pleasing a man.  She just liked feeling good, is all.  That the notion of being a “lady” was curling up and dying a rapid death, along with the idea that only sluts went out and had sex with multiple partners.  You know Pam from True Blood? She would’ve read Cosmo in the 80’s and 90’s, for sure.

I’m not saying it was bad-ass perfection back then.  No doubt, Cosmo is where women probably first heard about botox and all other sorts of medical whack-ness that brought the nip-tuck revolution to our shores.  At any rate, this new mix suits me.  Meanwhile, when will the 50 Shades influence end?  I HOPE IT NEVER DOES.