Amanda Hess traces the amusing history of Cosmo‘s “most infamous sex tip,” which first appeared in the magazine in 2003, along with 98 other “Fresh, Frisky Tips [That] Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy”:
The pastry made its appearance in tip No. 30, spoken from the mouth of an apocryphal anonymous boyfriend: “My girlfriend gets a glazed donut and sticks my penis
through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me every once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip.” Soon, tip No. 30 ascended in the public consciousness to become known as the most infamous Cosmo sex advice of all time—even stupider than the one where you take a sip of hot water into your mouth, introduce a penis, and gargle. Tom Wolfe skewered the doughnut line in his 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Maureen Dowd used it as evidence that feminism is stalling in her book Are Men Necessary?. If a real person actually admitted to executing the move, it was performance art in the service of mocking the magazine. In “I Tried Cosmo’s Weirdest Sex Tips So You Don’t Have To,” Anna Pulley advises against choosing a chocolate glaze: “It looks like shit. Actual, literal shit.”
Hess puts the donut advice in the context of an info-deprived audience:
When [former editor Kate] White took the reins at Cosmo in 1998, young women had few outlets for reading about sex outside of the Starr Report.
Crowding around a Cosmopolitan beat sneaking to the family desktop that moved at dial-up speed. Helen Gurley Brown, who ran Cosmo from 1965 to 1997, had made a “bold, gusty, irreverent magazine,” White says. But only when White took over did the magazine actually get “very candid” about just what a fun, fearless female does when she hops into bed. “This was a time when young people were clamoring for information, and they couldn’t get it from their friends,” White says. “We gave them permission to enjoy having sex.” For all its ludicrousness, Cosmopolitan presented a vision of limitless sexual experimentation, no shame. Cosmo wasn’t just a magazine that would tell you to put a doughnut on a penis—it would also put it on the cover, then reprint it in three books. And women bought the magazine, even if they didn’t really buy the tip: When White left Cosmo in 2012, she’d grown its audience by 700,000 to rival Helen Gurley Brown’s peak circulation of 3 million.
Update from a reader, who points to a video where “Amy Schumer plays a Cosmo-type editor brainstorming sex tips with her colleagues – mandatory viewing on the subject”:
(Photo by Rob Boudon)
The Dish 