Cosmo

Aside from being the name of our current cat, the word "Cosmo" meant a good deal in the middle sixties. "Cosmo" of course was short for Cosmopolitan, the magazine, that once Helen Gurley Brown took over, unfailingly had a different, very attractive female on its cover, showing the same amount and shape of cleavage, edition-to-edition, along with some blurb, preceded by numbers.  In fact, the cleavage looked so similar cover-to-cover that you might have wondered did they just somehow fill in the rest of the image. But, I never complained to anyone.

Helen Gurley Brown has passed away at 90, and today's Times gives her a well-acknowledged existence at the hands of Margalit Fox. The lede alone shows what you can get away with these days. Very Cosmo. 

Helen is considered to have done a lot for women of that middle 60s, 70s era, as well as having created a slew of publishing imitators that still exist over 30 years later. But she did something for guys too.

As a teen-ager in the 60s a Cosmo cover was nearly as good as Playboy, It also was educational, especially to someone who liked math. Until Cosmo, numbers were never associated with sex and feelings of any kind. But now you were informed there were "6 ways...21 things...7 building blocks..." that you should be aware of.

To this teen-ager this was gratifying news. The world ahead held numbers, and an opposite sex that was being tutored in how to enjoy things.  I could hardly wait.

I never did read Cosmo, and I never even saw a Cosmo-type female anywhere. Of course they must have existed, they just didn't hang-out in the wholesale flower district where I'd find myself at six in the morning ordering flowers for the family shop.  Cosmo-type females never seemed to come into the shop, or get any flowers that I was asked to deliver to either. They must have all existed above 59th Street.

Ms. Fox, in her lively obituary, notes the absolute truth: that HBG and Cosmopolitan created a slew of imitators. "The look of women's magazines today--a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines..."

The other day at Hudson News in Penn Station I glanced down and had a view of any number of such magazines, with one that caught the still math-seeking-eye, proclaiming "352..." of something.  I thought, "jeez, the numbers are really getting higher as I get older."

I nearly bought the magazine.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com