Sexy magazines that are almost scandalous
Cosmo editrix Joanna Coles made it clear with this line last week to Media Ink’s Keith J. Kelly — “I am too busy putting out a magazine and encouraging women to have more and better orgasms” than to debate with Victoria Hearst over whether her magazine is more porn than palatable. As for the better orgasms, let The Post decide which title is best in that department.
Cosmopoliatan
Cosmopolitan is Times Square in the form of a magazine — more ads than anyone could process, strange smells nobody asked for, and no matter what happens you can’t look away. And it gets raunchy. One anonymous tale, “I Hired a Hooker With My Husband,” spares few details and brags that “linguine wasn’t the only thing that got eaten that night.” On the darker side, the mag gets the gritty details from Hanna Bouveng, the Swedish Wall Street intern who won $18 million after her boss, Benjamin Wey, pressured her to have sex with him. Singer Demi Lovato, who’s the covergirl, does a workout that readers will find exhausting.
Nylon
Zoe Kravitz, whose rocker dad’s instrument recently made an unexpected appearance on the interweb, dons the cover of Nylon to talk the “naked truth.” In it, she tells a tale of woe growing up, like being forced to do chores even though there was a cook and a maid. Famous friends, like Will Smith spawn Jaden, insist the younger Kravitz, who’s a singer in the band Lolawolf, is really very talented and that he’s even heard one of her songs. There’s a cheesy-yet-satisfying look at the “cultural phenomena that is pizza,” that tracks down a “museum of pizza culture” in Philadelphia.
Glamour
Glamour goes for the funny bone and puts comedy’s most famous “Trainwreck,” Amy Schumer, on the cover. In the hilarious interview with her sister Kim Caramele, Schumer insists on what she’s “entitled” to in the bedroom and talks about how “everyone I’ve had sex with has been a real step in the wrong direction.” Elsewhere, reporter Liz Brody tracks down the harrowing story of Ashley Reynolds, a “sextortion” victim who fell prey to an Internet scammer when she was 14 years old, and tells the story of her predator’s capture.
Marie Claire
American hero Kristen Stewart shows up on the cover of Marie Claire to talk about how bravely cutting her hair set her free. She “isn’t looking back,” the mag protests. In general, MC is for the reader whose idea of a “summer fling” is a book (“Barbara the Slut and Other People” by Lauren Holmes seems lively enough) and frets about the trouble Cosmo readers might be getting into. A well-reported piece by Alexandra Robbins, author of “Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities,” suggests Stockholm syndrome is endemic to women in Greek life.
New York
New York’s fall fashion issue is, as usual, fluffy stuff: the hardest nugget we could find was that Net-a-Porter founder Natalie Massenet looks headed for the exit after selling the online clothier to Yoox. Elsewhere, we get the requisite profile of a blond, blue-eyed, Mormon male model, juxtaposed with the requisite profile of Serena Williams, which genteelly touches upon her father’s less-genteel views on the blond, blue-eyed set before moving on to the far less-interesting subject of Serena’s fashion tastes. The issue takes a weird turn with a fairy-tale fashion spread by socialite Rachel Feinstein that depicts a 12-year-old girl selling her infant sister to a strange old lady. The latter wears a Chanel coat, a Lanvin hat and Blahnik shoes, while Vogue’s creative director Grace Coddington stars as the infant’s mother in a Marc Jacobs skirt.
The Atlantic
The Atlantic’s excellent cover story on the latest brand of political correctness to hit college campuses has the remarkable effect of making us thank our lucky stars that we’re not in college anymore. So-called “trigger warnings” — in which, for example, students get warned that “Huckleberry Finn” contains racist language instead of taking the opportunity to grapple with said language — are not merely a threat to students getting a decent education. It also encourages them to be emotional and intellectual babies who, constantly on the lookout for “micro-aggressions” to be offended by, are not only annoying but ill-prepared for the workplace. This creates patterns of thought “long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety,” the authors note.
Time
Time gets access to an Aug. 3 donor summit hosted by the Koch brothers, and leads it with a photo of Charles Koch sitting in a chair next to Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund. To most liberals, that’s an eyebrow-raising juxtaposition. Sadly, the bland story accompanying the photo does little with it, apart from mentioning that the Kochs are big donors to the UNCF. A cover story on virtual reality perpetuates the misinformation that the screen on a pair of VR goggles “fills your field of vision — the first frameless visual medium.” Anybody who has worn a pair of these can tell you — there is most certainly a prominent, black, rectangular frame encasing everything you see. This isn’t like swallowing the red pill in “The Matrix.” So why do journalists insist on hyping over the facts?
