Glossed Over

Self: A Gay Man Deceives His Wife, Redoes Household Decor

Sure, we expect bitterness from a woman whose husband married her in a desperate attempt to quash his gayness. But we were bewildered by Self’s “I Married a Gay Man” (February). Near the end of the essay, the anonymous author describes the situation now that she and her ex, Chris, have both settled into new relationships.

My relationship with Chris is as good as it can possibly be, given the circumstances. We do birthday parties and some holidays together, and he and his male partner live in—and have redecorated—our former house… [bolding ours]

Redecorated? Really? He redecorated? Did he give her a makeover, too?

For an article that is at least ostensibly about forgiveness and acceptance, we found that to be a strange detail to throw in. But then, we’ve never been married to a gay man, so what do we know? Apparently, we’ve dodged a bullet. Check out this statistic quoted in the article which, conveniently, the author managed to twist to illustrate that, OMG, gay men marrying straight women is an imminent plague upon our society.

...research done by University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, Ph.D., estimated that between 1.5 million and 2.9 million American women who have ever been married had a husband who had had sex with another man. That means there are a large number of women who have no idea what their husband does in secret.

Seriously, we’re finding the presentation of this statistic a bit dicey. Women who have ever been married? A husband who had had sex with another man? That doesn’t necessarily equate to a husband who’s sneaking around on his wife with other men; it applies equally to a married man who, say, had an experimental phase at some point, or a divorced woman whose ex was bisexual, or any number of permutations.

And anyway, there probably aren’t any statistics to back this up, but what husbands do in secret is more likely to involve online poker and reading their wives’ back issues of Cosmo than illicit gay sex. (Hi, honey!) Though, to be sure, Anonymous includes a damning admission of that, too, after she confronts him with her newly diagnosed case of chlamydia:

He had been having anonymous sex with men. “I don’t know how this could have happened,” he stammered. “It’s nobody that I knew...it was mostly oral sex...it just happened.... At gay bars, there are back rooms with holes in the walls....”

And when he did have relations with his unsuspecting wife, it was just like that scene in Brokeback Mountain between Ennis and Alma. It made her “very emotional,” watching that movie.

So what’s a girl to do? Is there any way our plucky heroine could have seen this coming? Or is being married to a gay man a fate that could befall most any woman?

Well:

Early in our relationship, Chris told me he’d had homosexual experiences as a teenager but assured me it was youthful curiosity.

And...

Two unusual things happened on our first date. After we watched the movie Romancing the Stone, Chris said, “I think I could marry you”...Then, after he kissed me good-night, he shocked me again, saying, “No matter what you hear, I’m not gay.” In fact, I had heard other students say that everyone in his fraternity was gay.

That answers that, at least. If this article is to be believed, foresight is more rare than a man who’ll redecorate the house.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: The Entire February Issue of Cosmopolitan

Okay, we’ve been away from the blog for a while. Now that we’re back, we feel a little penance is necessary—after all, you’re still here, aren’t you? So we read the ENTIRE ISSUE of Cosmopolitan this evening. Here are the highs, the lows, the points where we just couldn’t resist a smartass remark. Enjoy while we take a lengthy shower to decontaminate.

•    First, the cover, on which Katherine Heigl is wearing a truly appalling dusty pink Herve Leger bandage dress. Does anyone actually need horizontal lines encasing their entire body? Does this look good on anyone who doesn't weigh 110 pounds? Hell, it barely looks good on Heigl.  Anyway, our favorite cover lines:

10 Subliminal Tricks That Make People Adore You

Guess what? Reading Cosmo in public isn’t one of them!

John Mayer Shares Why All Guys Aren’t A**holes

Well, there’s an unlikely source for that story.

•    Best letter to the editor ever.

I want to give you a high five for featuring Beyonce on the cover of your December issue. Thank you so much for showing more diversity in your magazine and featuring our country as a whole!

Because, you know, Beyonce is really representative of “our country as a whole.”

•    Oh! What an honor! Katherine Heigl is Cosmo’s “Fun Fearless Female of the Year.” Apparently, she earned the title by going head-to-head with former costar Isaiah Washington:

Last year, after costar Isaiah Washington allegedly used an offensive word (faggot) to refer to T.R. Knight…Katherine spoke up against Isaiah at the Golden Globes. “You can’t give me too much credit for being brave,” she says now. “I was just a girl who had had a couple of drinks and was angry and got mouthy.”

But then she says this…

“As I was opening my mouth, I kept thinking, Shut up. But it’s an issue that I felt really passionately about.”

Well, which is it? Was she loose-lipped after drinking,l or did she feel strongly about defending Knight? Also, we LOVE how Cosmo put the f-word in italics, like it’s a foreign language or something.

Two other reasons Katherine’s so fun and fearless: She last cried watching an episode of Grey’s spin-off Private Practice, and she has her own line of hospital scrubs. Is that what passes for awesome at Cosmo HQ?

•    We’re skipping the confessions, because they make us feel old. Also because they’re completely fabricated. In any case, we can’t exactly relate to tales of women accidentally exposing themselves during a dormitory fire drill or puking in the boss’ potted plants, possibly because we’re at the advanced age of 31, or because the last time we were senselessly drunk, we cried about college football in the diner at the Palms hotel in Vegas at 4 in the morning. Hey, Cosmo, we’d be happy to write that up and submit it for an upcoming issue!

•    In “Man Manual,” Cosmo calls out mensfitness.com for proffering dumb advice that a woman wearing flats to a bar “certainly isn’t there to lure a mate.” And Cosmo certainly has the moral high ground here, since all of its advice is spot-on!

•    Here’s some ludicrous Hollywood trivia that’s supposed to be surprising insider information, from “Informer”:

In the movie Catch Me If You Can, Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo plays the hot stewardess who hooks up with Leo DiCaprio’s character. Jennifer Garner also appears in the flick as—get this—a high-class hooker!

Get this! It’s called acting! Also, her IMDB entry!

•    We are deeply amused by the anatomical euphemisms used in the lingerie feature “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Resolved: to start referring to our breasts as our “powerful pair,” just like Cosmo does.

•    John Mayer’s letter to us readers on page 101 gave us the creeps.

A guy who has to say he’s nothing like those other guys is usually exactly like those other guys. Also, “passion-filled endeavors”? Signing the note “I love you”? Think we’ll pass on that drink, John.

Here are Cosmo’s other “Fun Fearless Male” honorees:

Chris Brown, who has eight tattoos! Fun!

Dave Annable, who has “always been scared of sharks in a little-girl way.” Fearless!

Dane Cook, who tells a scintillating tale of eating bad shellfish on a date. “I went to the bathroom and knew it was going to be an all-night situation, so I told her we had to drive home…and that I’d have to stop a couple times on the way.” Suave!

James McAvoy, who…well…we have nothing bad to say about him.

Tony Romo, who says football is “not as glamorous as everyone thinks.” Revealing!

John Krasinski, who should have combed his hair and worn something other than an undershirt for the photo, but we lurve him anyway.

Dave Salmoni, who is apparently some kind of wild-animal daredevil. Uh, reckless?

Common, who enjoyed playing a police officer in the upcoming movie The Night Watchman because he “got to learn about the ghetto part of Los Angeles.” Seriously.

Peter Krause, who likes to speak in clichés! “There’s something very romantic about doing things that make you feel incredibly alive.” Original!

Tom Anderson, who we deleted from our Myspace friends.

And Zac Efron, who…God. Do we really have to explain why no grown woman should be interested in him?

•    Wait. Why are there twelve fun fearless males, but only one female?

•    “9 Big Secrets of Male Arousal”: One of those secrets is that a man’s nose is an erogenous zone. Well, they get credit for trotting out a sex tip we are absolutely certain we’ve never seen before.

•    “Get Him to Go There”: You know how Cosmo won’t use the word “hair” twice in the same article, instead subbing “tresses,” “locks,” “strands,” and “sun-catching silk”? Well, they do the same with female genitalia! In the one-page story “Get Him to Go There,” writer Elise Nersesian uses the following terms:

Ahem, bush

Down below

Between your legs

Privates

Southern regions

Below the belt

Your goods

•    Aah! There’s more! In “The Most Satisfying Sex Position,” Bethany Heitman uses the expression “hot button.” TWICE.

•    There may be only one fun fearless female, but there are stories of five women who were “Young and Murdered.” Ah, so that’s the other way young women can get media coverage!

•    Then there’s “I Suddenly Had Baby Panic,” which sums up the decision to be a single mother like this:

I’m a romantic. I wanted the partner, then the baby…before long, I was considering single motherhood. A baby was my priority, so I decided to make it happen despite the obstacles.

Single motherhood isn’t exactly a fresh topic for a women’s magazine, but they could have printed something slightly more thoughtful than this. Writer Louise Sloan talks about searching for a sperm donor and “shopping for eye color the way you select pumps in red or navy.” Oh, excellent comparison. We never would have understood otherwise. Either Cosmo thinks its readers are sexually precocious twelve-year-olds, or they think we’re stupid. We can’t decide which is a worse editorial philosophy.

•    “It’s A Wild, Wild Life,” a fashion spread with way too much khaki, uses the following caption:

She always wanted to use that line “I am woman, hear me roar.”

Using a feminist anthem to sell clothes? And we thought we were cynical.

•     “The Secrets of Being an ‘It Girl’”: Apparently it has something to do with being named Jessica, as both Alba and Biel are pictured in the opening spread. No need to read this one!

•    Oh no! Another way we could die! “Beware of This Scary Infection” tells us all about MRSA, which is one more disease whose transmission can be prevented by thorough hand-washing, but which we’re going to fret about anyway!

•    This is why we don’t normally spend any time on the “Red-Hot Read.”

He really does want to make me his own personal ice-cream sundae, she thought and gasped as the ice cream dripped from the spoon onto her belly, her hips, her thighs…

This “erotic” story really does want to trot out every tired cliché, she thought, and rolled her eyes as she realized it was possible to write graphically about sex and still be totally dull...

•    Ooh, our horoscope! “Uninhibited booty awaits!”

•    Finally, the last page of this issue, the “Cosmo Quiz.” Turns out we’re “flirt averse,” but we think that just translates to Cosmo-averse. Good night!

Cosmopolitan Proves Its Expertise with Bad Advice

From “Men This Minute” in the December issue of Cosmopolitan:

Dumb Advice He’s Getting

From the pages of GQ: “A ‘happy ending’ is considered outright cheating only if the guy plans on it.  ‘If you’re getting a massage, it could just end up happening…If she starts on you, you’re going to need a hell of a lot of willpower to turn that away.’”

Really?  What a charming lack of self-awareness Cosmo displays, calling out another magazine for dispensing terrible counsel!  (For the record,though, we do agree that GQ’s perspective on this issue is woefully skewed.)  Will GQ retaliate by printing, oh, 85% percent of Cosmo’s content in its next issue?   We humbly suggest they start with “The 22 Best Relationship Tips Ever,” an article which offers some real gems.  For instance:

Don't be BFFs. Being pals with your man is great in theory.  But that kind of connection actually can kill your sex life.

And:

If you want to maintain closeness with your man, get out of your head and into bed.  Guys feel more comfortable connecting with women on a physical level, not engaging in deep discussions.

Well, at least we learned something about men from this whole debacle.  A man on the massage table may require a preternatural amount of restraint, but  apparently, it would take a similar amount of temperance for Cosmo to avoid printing utter pap in every issue.  Good to know!

Cosmopolitan's Advice Fails the Test of Time

We figured out long ago that the love advice in Cosmopolitan sucks.  Seems the staffers at Cosmo finally figured that out, too.  In “7 Love Rules You Need to Break,” November, they single out four spectacularly misguided bits of counsel they doled out between 1966 and 1968. (“Tell your mom we’re sorry.”)  For instance:

Always be sure to invite some beautiful girls whom [your guy] will find amusing.  Don’t make the fatal mistake of including too many homosexuals.

Fatal?

We snickered at the outdated guidance, but much of the current advice isn’t too far removed from those suckers of yore—especially since much of it is contradicted by tips elsewhere in the same issue.    What advice will Cosmo be apologizing for in 2047?  Here are our nominees for the worst of the November issue.

1.  From “7 Love Rules You Need to Break”:

Let Him Be Your Superman

“Men are certainly attracted to independent women, but if you’re completely self-sufficient, they feel kind of useless,” says [psychologist Joseph] Rock…But give him the ego boost of letting him do the things he’s particularly good at, whether it’s making his killer mushroom risotto, lugging your groceries upstairs with that much-vaunted upper-body strength, or just driving in the snow.

Yep, wouldn’t want to be so good at, you know, living your own life that you make him feel marginalized!

2.  From “I Catch Cheaters for a Living”:

Participate in your guy’s personal passions (if he invites you to), and show him what makes you tick.  No real connection can exist if it’s a one-way street.

So a woman feigning interest in a man’s hobbies isn’t a one-way street?  They must have different traffic laws in Cosmo land!  Also, this is the polar opposite of the advice given in “7 Love Rules You Need to Break,” where women are advised to maintain their own hobbies and spend some time engaging in those hobbies solo.

3.  From “Cosmo Weekend”:

At a crowded party, grab a cute guy, tell him you can’t find your friend (no need to have one there with you), and ask if he has seen her.  When he says no, start chatting him up while you “wait” for her.

Always good to launch a relationship with a little deception!  Again, these Cosmo girls aren’t reading their own magazine.  In “100 Things You Need to Know About Guys,” we learn this:

Their favorite way for you to hit on them: just say hi or ask them a question about themselves.

Things really do move more quickly these days, don’t they?  Instead of forty years, Cosmo figured out it was peddling nonsense in the space of a few pages!

Marie Claire: Find Yourself...or Find a Man

Who says our time would be better spent reading books?  Magazines are a perfectly enriching way to spend our time.  In particular, the August edition of Marie Claire sent us on a journey of self-discovery.  See, the command on the cover—

Discover Your Inner Fembot!

—immediately piqued our interest, conjuring mental images of the fembots from the Austin Powers movies.  While dressing in feather-trimmed teddies and using our breasts as a lethal weapon does seem like a winning lifestyle choice, we weren’t sure we were ready to commit.  Fortunately, Marie Claire even included a handy quiz to determine whether we were perfectly suited to the fembot lifestyle!

Cosmopolitan's Creepy Guy Commentary

Continuing its unrelenting parade of sleaze, May’s issue of Cosmopolitan takes us on a rather disturbing journey:

Inside a Guy’s Naughty Mind

Of course, we really could have lived without such an uncensored record of the inner workings of Patrick, Cosmo Radio’s “hot evening host.”  (That’s his mug, below.)  We’re all for fostering better communication between the sexes, and it is train-wreck fascinating to read how even the most ordinary encounter can be stretched into something sex-related.  Still, Patrick’s “erotic musings” are, ultimately, nothing but a turn-off.  For instance:

10:05 A.M.

…I wonder if she’s looking to hook up again?...She was a freak and knew when to take control in bed.

So despite the fact that Cosmo promotes sexual confidence on, like, every other page of the magazine, men still reduce a forward woman to a “freak.”  Good to know!

11:40 A.M.

There’s this girl at the gym who always wears booty shorts and does an exercise where she works her legs while her butt is straight up in the air.  She’s in perfect doggie-style position, and in my dream world, I could totally hit that…

Oh, you sure know the way to a woman’s heart, Patrick.  Women love nothing more than to be objectified while going about their everyday activities!

1:17 P.M.

Okay, and now there’s some random dude in spandex blocking my view.  I think I’m going to be sick.

Sharp thinking, Patrick—by totally overreacting to the unavoidable situation of happening to glance at another man, you’ve sure sold us on the fact that you are 100% straight. This is a completely unsubstantiated guess on our part, but we’re guessing Patrick also loves football and red meat, and is just waiting for the right moment to tell you about the day he was elected social chair at Sig Ep.

5:10 P.M.

I love the elevator.  Me and my boys at work always stand in the back and check out the asses of the women getting on and off.  There’s a nice one!

The imminent sexual-harassment lawsuits ought to put a stop to this behavior rather quickly.

7:15 P.M.

On the show, we’re discussing whether you should have sex on a first date, and a girl just called in and said she’s done it and “loved it!”…Maybe she’s a dog in real life, but in my mind, she’s a hottie.

Oh, he’s sensitive, see, because he’s looking past the caller’s appearance...all the way to her propensity for removing her panties.  Deep.

11:50 P.M.

…But then I spot a girl coming out of the bar who’s a size 6, trying to squeeze into a size 2.  Nasty—that killed the mood.

Yeah, how dare that random woman wear ill-fitting clothes and therefore hamper his sex drive?  And she’s a size 6, too—the nerve!

11:55 P.M.

…What makes it even sexier is that I haven’t hooked up with her yet…

Yet?  Presumptuous much?

We haven’t heard Patrick’s radio show (despite the offer of a free trial), but we’re guessing it, too, is chock-full of off-base insights like the ones in this article.  But then, it just wouldn’t be true to the Cosmo spirit if it didn’t portray women as sex objects, would it?  The whole article sounds more like the journal of an eleventh-grader than the musings of a grown man.  Maybe he isn’t quite as lecherous in person as seems in print, but why run the risk?  If we worked with Patrick, we’d be taking the stairs from now on.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: The Boring Things Men Do When You're Not Around

In case yesterday’s glimpse into the “secret language of men” wasn’t revealing enough, March’s Glamour offers a look at “The Secret Lives of Men.”  Whoa—it’s not enough they speak a different language, but they have entire clandestine existences?  They’re, like, spies or secret agents or something.  Maybe men really are from Mars!

Alas, if guys were truly conducting operations straight out of a James Bond movie when left to their own devices, it would result in an article approximately a billion times more interesting than this one. So one dude eats Chinese food when he escapes his girlfriend’s health food fanaticism?  Who cares?  Even his girlfriend probably doesn’t care.

Here’s what else the men admit to:

1. Men watch porn, fantasize about inappropriate partners, go to strip clubs, and wonder if their wives will leave them.  Yes, and...?  Also, we may be old-fashioned in our preference for face-to-face communication, but we don’t think a magazine article is the way to reveal to your girlfriend that you’ve been thinking about her sister as something other than a future in-law. 

2. Men like Rachael Ray.  Boring.  Dreams about Paula Deen coating you in butter?  Spill it.  But since Rachael Ray is a cute woman who cooks, it’s not  a stretch that men would be fascinated by her.  Next!

3. Men do boneheaded, non-gender-dependent things like fritter away money and lie about their SAT scores.  On second thought, maybe that lie is gender-based—it’s the same sort of overcompensation that results in monster trucks with six-foot-tall tires tailgating in the fast lane during rush hour.  Come on, guys, we know you’re trying to make up for something other than your shamefully low score on the math section.  Ahem.

4. And…you know what, we can’t bring ourselves to read any more of this.

The only confession that veers anywhere near fascinating is Josh Robertson’s revelation that he forgot he has a child, if only because we were pretty sure such a thing wasn’t even possible.  Sure, he didn't actually carry the kid in his body for nine months or give birth or anything, but he forgot about the existence of his son?  Really?  Worse (for the story, not for his son) is that Robertson’s forgetfulness doesn't result in anything more dramatic than a whole lot of introspection (only a tiny fraction of which made it to Glamour’s pages, we’re guessing).  We aren’t suggesting he abandon the kid on the subway or anything, but at least that would have been worth reading about. 

Next time Glamour aims to reveal the “secret lives of men”, it first ought to be sure those secrets are actually worth reading about.

Cosmopolitan: How to Date Men From the Past

Ooh.  Cosmopolitan’s “Hot Sheet,” March, is letting us into the shadowy world of men.

Secret Language of Guys

Tramp stamp:  Male slang for a lower-back tattoo on a woman.  According to dude legend, it signifies an easy target for guys on the prowl.

And to us, this whole bit signifies that Cosmo is recycling material from 1998, though we’re guessing there must be one or two teenage readers out there who haven’t yet heard this term.  Anyway, we’re looking forward to next month, when Cosmo further lifts the veil on the male gender by finally explaining the mysterious phenomenon of beer goggles.