Cosmopolitan deserves credit for a lot of awesome content (their excellent coverage of women’s health issues, for example) — but let’s be honest: The magazine's sex tips in year's past do have a reputation for being occasionally silly. That’s exactly what the new @CosmoSexTips Instagram pokes fun at, though, because hey, at least they make excellent fodder for comedy social media accounts, right? By pairing a bunch of nutty-sounding Cosmo-style sex tips with stock photos of happy, professionally pretty couples frolicking in bed (or on a beach, or while hiking, or wherever), it drives home exactly how unrealistic magazine sex tips for women can be. Who actually uses these kinds of tips? The kinds of people who star in stock photos — that is, people who don’t actually exist. (I’m sure even the stock photo models didn’t #wakeuplikethis.)
Thankfully, the “tips” aren’t actually from Cosmo — they’re so bizarre that the parody is easy to suss out. I’ll admit that sometimes I wonder how sex tip purveyors come up with their actual tips, though; does the staff all just gather in a room together and toss around the most nonsensical ideas they can think of? Have these women's magazines just been masterfully trolling us all these years? We may never know. But whatever the case, even the weirdest tips the magazine has put out over the years don’t hold a candle to the things the mad genius behind @CosmoSexTips has dreamed up. I guarantee you will look just like this while reading them:
And they're not just weird for weird's sake, either. As Mic's Ellie Krupnick put it, "they also cleverly pick apart the 'empowering' nature of women's sex advice, taking the 'women in charge' motif to preposterous conclusions." Krupnick also had it spot on when she wrote, "So what's actually empowering, if not 'you go, girl' sex tips? Women taking control and having the sex lives they want, not necessarily the kind a magazine tells them to, or the kind 59 percent of men have reported fantasizing about — or the kind that prevails in mainstream porn." Just do you and your partner — as long as everyone's having fun, that's all that matters.
Here are a few of my favorites (well, insofar as any of them can be considered "favorites"); head on over to @CosmoSexTips for more. Be warned, though; some of them are… shall we say, a little graphic. Ready to cringe?
1. Date Night Delight
And by "delight," I mean "not at all delightful — not in the slightest."
2. The Yum Yum
Uh... not so much.
3. The True Love Test
No one should ever have to "test" whether someone truly loves them... especially not like this. Just ask, for Pete's sake. It's an uncomfortable conversation, but it's way better than playing mind games.
4. What Rhymes With "Truck?"
Or, how not to carry off a romantic road trip.
5. The Houdini
Also known as "The Gone Girl." Just, y'know... minus the whole murder thing.
6. The Slinky
NO. DO NOT DO THIS. NO ONE WINS WITH SEX INJURIES.
7. Black Friday
Thanks goodness Black Friday was last week, right?
8. The Name Game
Facepalm.
Images: mrtopp/Flickr; Giphy; @CosmoSexTips/Instagram (8)
