duke,Horizontal

When I was in first grade, my mother sat me down in a laminate IHOP diner booth, looked at me from across the plastic rim of her iced tea as she watched me drizzle syrup over my chocolate-chip pancakes and matter-of-factly spelled out the basics of sex.

Amid the senior citizens shoveling down forkfuls of the early bird special, she presented me with some straightforward definitions, answered my mystified questions and promptly ended the discussion as soon as she left a tip for our perplexed waiter. This was the beginning and end of my formal sexual education. Add Cosmo, however, and the equation gets somewhat complicated.

Fast-forward to the future, and I'm trying to get a male friend to explain to me exactly what makes a woman good in bed. Never one to carefully exercise his analytical skills over sexual philosophy, he clumsily suggests, "I guess a girl is good when she seems fun and interested." I press him for a more tangible explanation and he elaborates: "Oh, and when she likes to give head." Sensing my frustration, he quips, "Isn't this what your girly magazines are for?"

It is true that Cosmopolitan attempts to provide an answer to the perplexing question of how a woman can improve her sexual skills when she is physiologically capable of producing a satisfactory experience by simply lying down. In trying to address this issue, the magazine seems to champion the philosophy that creativity is the most effective medium for sexual success. I use creativity as a euphemism, recognizing that the advice promoted by Cosmo is not only generally misguided but also bats- crazy.

For example, a recent article entitled "75 Crazy-Hot Sex Moves" (Cosmo loves numbered lists), suggests spicing up a bedroom encounter by holding a frozen grape between your teeth and rubbing it all over your partner's (obviously) smoldering body. As a finishing touch, you can use your tongue to slip the grape into your man's mouth for reasons that are not fully clear. In ridiculing this proposition, I'm not trying to take a conservative stance against imaginative sex or elicit hate mail from couples that think fruit is kinky. But there's an obvious sense of contrived promiscuity in such a suggestion, as well as a plain revulsion to having other people's food in your mouth. The same logic applies to Cosmo's copious descriptions of the interpretative uses of exercise balls, vibrating toothbrushes and Pop Rocks.

Sometimes the proposals I read lead me so far as to question whether anyone who works for Cosmo has actually had sex. Skimming the pages of a recent issue, my eyes were drawn to an enthusiastic interjection encouraging the reader to "use a little teeth." I presented this suggestion for fraternity-boy consideration and was met with a pleading, "Please don't ever tooth someone's balls."

In the same issue, Cosmo writers again seem to virtually discount male opinion (and logic) when they campaign for increased "back-door" attention, only to have the recommendation discounted a few pages later by a male guest writer. As for the term "back-door" itself, Cosmo has spent years littering its articles with a vocabulary dominated with euphemisms such as "v-zone" and "member," none of which have managed to permeate even the most un-vulgar vernacular.

Although Cosmo remains a female rite of passage for the preteen crowd, the advice it offers is really no more useful for future escapades than the blunt outline our parents gave us when sex was still just naked people kissing in a grown-up movie. We must grow comfortable with the fact that good sex can't really be forced. Creative ideas are only really effective when they bubble up naturally, so stop looking for them in the produce aisle.