This is an actual double page spread from this month's Cosmopolitan magazine.
This week, Cosmo asks us
whether it’s OK to propose to your boyfriend, wear trousers, watch organised
sport, or work for money. Oh wait, sorry, the last three are future features.
Anyway, the enlightened Lucy Ball tells us a sob story about what happened when
she dared to subvert patriarchal expectations and how she reformed herself
afterwards. Some particularly enlightening caveats follow. [All quotations are
taken verbatim from Cosmopolitan magazine.]
Basic
story: Lucy proposed to her boyfriend. He said no. Then he proposed to her two
years later, leading her to write this story about how a woman’s place is on
the receiving end of a ring.
‘[My
boyfriend] had been brought up to to believe that the man proposes... If he
hadn’t had the chance, he would’ve felt he’d missed out./ Also, he asked my dad
first, which I realised was a big moment for them. I know Dad would have been
upset if it hadn’t happened that way.’
Nothing
makes me feel more like a grrl than
hearing about how the future plans for Lucy’s relationship were decided and
then sanctioned by a load of shitty patriarchal principles based upon
objectification and ownership. But we can all learn from Lucy’s mistake, kids.
As she shares with us: ‘If he hadn’t done it, I never would have experienced
that head-spinning feeling of being asked to marry the man I love.’ And all it
took was a humiliating rejection and two years of eroding bitterness before he
asked you your dad. Although I
don’t want to be seen as a crotchety old stick-in-the-mud. I do genuinely wish
a lifetime of happiness to the appropriately named Balls.
The
title of the article was what attracted me to Lucy’s sorry tale, anyway, and
that part was nothing to do with her. ‘Proposing - his job or yours?’ it
screamed out in terrifying resonating undertones. You know, like most stuff in
life that’s either his job or yours - preparing the dinner, ironing, getting a
degree, flying a plane, studying medicine, tearing up the pages of Cosmopolitan in a cold yet systematic
rage over a number of decades until you inhale tiny little pieces of paper that
cause you to suffer a hundred minuscule papercuts on your lungs and drown in
your own blood. His job or yours, yeah? Let’s draw those lines again, because I
am sick of all these damn breakdowns
of boundaries that we’ve been suffering over the past fifty years.
Elsewhere, Cosmo yaks on
about how much they have a ‘girl crush’ on their interviewee Christina
Hendricks (a ‘girl crush’ is a semi-ironic take on that hilarious species,
lesbians, who have like actual crushes on
girls, LOL.) Luckily Christina has amazing intellectual charm, as showcased by Cosmo in their pick-out quote: ‘There is
that fantasy of being bad and getting away with it... it’s very animal
behaviour.’ Every time you read that sentence, a science graduate dies.
The
interview ends with an inspiring Q and A, where Hendricks finishes the sentence
put forward by Cosmo (‘Heartbreak
is...’) with ‘Heartbreaking.’ Boundary-pushing stuff.
Next it’s ‘Inside Men’s Minds’, with the horror-movie-esque tagline:
‘What they really think about love,
sex... and YOU.’ Underneath is some shit about how going on holiday with your
girlfriend prompts nostalgic romantic memories of lads’ holidays, beer guts,
football, Fight Club, hunting and
gathering, raping and pillaging, etc. Yawnsome stuff. This is all closely
followed by ‘What goes through men’s mind when they’re looking for a
girlfriend’, where Ricky - who is MARRIED, as in actually conned someone to
commit the rest of their lives to his
welfare - suggests that what he looks for in a girlfriend is: ‘Someone who
reads. It means you can watch TV when you like!’
I’ve
compiled some other - again, absolute
verbatim - lines that might make you feel encouraged about humanity.
‘The
part of a woman I’d most like to see is her vagina.’
‘Basically,
we’re confused by women’s lowbrow interests.’
‘The
basics [of a relationship] are doggy-style, reverse cowgirl, and oral. The next
level is swallowing, doing it somewhere risky, and watching porn.’
‘I’m
not that bothered, so long as women don’t come to football. That’s Man Time.’
Now, it’s: ‘The Big Question: Why are men so bad at dumping you?’
I’m
not even going to summarise that, because I’m not going to read it. But just
tear out clumps of your own hair and you’ll feel
like you read it.
Hang on, hang on.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SEX ON THE FIRST DATE.
Basically this article has a stab at a softer version of ‘don’t be a
whore.’ Columnist Melissa tells us regretfully, weeks after having a single
meaningless shag, ‘I’d slept with an idea of a man. It took me months to get
over it.’
Well,
boo fucking hoo. It took me hours to
clear the vomit off my keyboard after I read that - partly because it just kept on coming - but I’m over it now,
Melissa. I’m over it even though I’m suffering from the bitter aftertaste of
half-cooked pizza and complete bullshit. An article ten pages later is
actually, genuinely called: ‘Move away from the penis!’ Which really should
have replaced ‘The truth about sex on the first date’ as a headline all those
pages earlier.
Nearing the end, we get to my favourite juxtaposition of my entire
life. You know, like my favourite kind of chocolate pudding is composed of
stinking dog turds. Right next to ‘BODY NEWS’ - which pretends to examine the
psychology of not loving your body enough - there is a huge advert for plastic
surgery, showing a woman holding up a placard that says: ‘I’ve just had my
breasts done, but the biggest change you’ll see is on my face.’
Unfortunately, I can’t finish my round-up of the magazine for you
now because Cosmopolitan is no more.
As soon as I set eyes on this side-by-side funfest, it spontaneously burst into
flames. Lucky for you, I got a picture of it beforehand.
Catch
me later for a round-up of Glamour, bitchez!
