Only a few days previously, I'd hooked up with my old BF from primary school and she'd reminded me about one of the chief bonuses to be gained from spending an afternoon Chez Kibber in the school holidays of the mid1970s. "Your sisters had copies of Cosmopolitan", she said wistfully, presumably drawing a retrospective contrast between the reading material at my house, and the crinkly copies of the Catholic Messenger, Hotspur, and the Irish Post that graced her own (devout parents and younger brothers; both quite useless as sources of the titillating read.).
My four grown-up sisters and their host of glamorous friends were a handy conduit into the mysteries of Adult Female Life for an insatiably curious pubescent with sebaceously-overactive chums such as me and my little gang. By listening at doors we could hear snatches of gossip that we could only guess the true meaning of ("a BLOW job? You mean you're supposed to BLOW down it??"), and which could be used by me in blackmail attempts later on ("let me try a Silk Cut or I'll tell Mum where you REALLY were last weekend"). And then my sisters would pass on their copies of Cosmo, after this Holy Grail of sophisticated naughtiness had been thoroughly plundered by them for ways to look more like Jerry Hall and tips on how to get any man to fall in love with you without compromising in the least or sacrificing your career.
We would snatch them and scamper off to my room, to pore over articles on how to arrive from your holiday flight looking cool as a breeze in a crisp white linen trouser suit (travel First Class, sip mineral water throughout the fight and spritz your face with same regularly, eat only a little fresh pineapple, elevate your fabulously long and coltish legs for the duration, and basically be Britt Ekland if at all possible.). Oh, and why not join the Mile High club, if the co-pilot's handsome enough? But you must demand at least one massive and unforgettable orgasm from him, and for that matter from any man who is fortunate enough to arouse your incredible female desire. Orgasms - shuddering, screaming, writhing, bucking, clawing, gasping, grinding orgasms - were Cosmo's raison d'etre, and we were all ENTITLED to as many as we wanted, whenever we wanted them. We would avidly answer quizzes like "Have You Unleashed Your Inner Sexual Goddess", ticking off options like "on top of the Arc de Triomphe", "In a gondola" or "On a moving rollercoaster" despite being a pair of spotty twelve-year old virgins. We could always store these ideas up for later, and then DEMAND them. Oh yes.
It was all so wonderfully at odds with the life that was actually going on around us, where "holidays" meant a week in an asbestos chalet in a Minehead holiday camp if you were 'normal', or a passage to third-degree sunburn and food that would be "swimming in grease" via a package to Lloret de Mar if your parents had ideas above their station (usually identifiable by one of those Spanish spouted wine flasks proudly on display on top of the new 26" colour TV.). And where sexual experimentation was the domain of certain few sluttish girls a few years above us, who would deliberately let us overhear their talk of carpet burns and 'fingering', while cracking gum on their back teeth and liberally spraying their 70s flicks with Harmony Hairspray (Firm Hold.). Some of them were so worldly they even knew all the words to 'Radar Love'.
We much preferred the world version presented to us by Cosmo, where we could be successful and smart and sexy, and go small-breastedly braless under our fabulous watered-silk wing-collared blouses in the knowledge that we'd still be taken seriously by the yearning, respectful admiring males around us. We learned to be cool with concepts like 'bisexuality' (I still remember being fascinated by an interview with Gore Vidal from about 1978), got to know names like Erin Pizzey and Sheila Kitzinger, and, finding a long piece about a disease called 'Anorexia Nervosa', wondered if we should tell someone about our friend Theresa who had spent the last month living on apples and frozen black coffee. For all the flash and trash, we did learn a bit.
Cosmo could be smug, strident and silly, and for me it always lacked a bit of humour (in my heart of hearts I preferred 'Honey', which had a softer edge and most importantly, featured the cartoons of my heroine Claire Bretécher), but like an old friendship I persevered with it for several year, until it began to give itself over to the banal hyper-sexualisation of the contemporary women's magazine market. Now I never read women's magazines at all, and rites of discovery for the average spotty 12-year old virgin seem far more brutal and unrefined than my own. My old friend and I, now heading towards the arse end of our forties, agreed that we definitely had the very best of it where that particular publication was concerned, and for that we will always remember it affectionately. Any men we've been involved with may, of course, beg to differ. Handsome co-pilots excepted, of course.
