“How to Make Him Love You”
“50 Tips to Blow His Mind in Bed”
“Make Him Yours”
“Man Melting Massage”
“100 Hottest Women”

These were the messages on Cosmo covers I read throughout my adolescence. Nobody told me it outright but the biggest take aways I got from this was how important the man’s pleasure was, how important his enjoyment was, and how important it was that I got, and kept a man. Everything was man focused and male centered in the women’s magazine. Naturally my mind started believing what these magazines were touting, that it was a women’s job to be sexual for a man. It was a woman’s job to “win” a man because the man was the prize. Women’s sexuality wasn’t really being spoken about in these magazines and what isn’t spoken about doesn’t exist. It was no wonder that after being fed with all of this info on a regular monthly basis through much of my adolescence I unconsciously fully accepted the huge lie that sexuality isn’t really for women or their pleasure but for men, because only they liked sex and it’s just a tool you use to win them. 

Now if you opened these magazines, inside you’d find even more info about men’s pleasure, what they liked, and how they liked it. I went into sexuality just like the magazine had taught me, I studied hard to know everything men liked, I wore the right clothes, had the right sexy hobbies, and when it came down to the physical acts before I was having penetrative sex, I dry humped those boys to their completion every time. My vulva would be chaffed but swollen from rubbing on dry clothing and I would be left unreleased, and I never even considered thinking about what I got out of it, let alone what I wanted out of it. I was keeping their attention and that’s what Cosmo told me to do. I was making sure that they had a great time, doing all the top tricks I’d studied and learned. I had the prize, I had the boys. And of course, just like the covers of those magazines my female experience was obsolete, I didn’t think about it because I was supposed to be happy with the prize of the man and for a while I could avoid and lie to myself that I was. So for a lot of my teen years things fit this empty narrative I was handed. I was just happy to be part of the act at all, glad to be something someone else enjoyed. 

It took a long time to build resentments but when they built, they stacked high. “You know, I don’t ever seen men wearing cute shit to bed”, “I don’t see men learning to dance just to impress their girl with a lap dance”, “I don’t see men wearing all the latest fashion all the time to catch girls eyes”, “I don’t see men reading books on how to get better in bed, shit I haven’t even seen titles on their magazines that imply that men could be doing better in bed”. After years of repressed sexuality, the anger I would feel was fully bodied. I had no way to channel that anger either and it transitioned into numbness. I started rejecting sex, despite the pleasure I was so tired of performing and mad that men didn’t feel the need to do the same. I didn’t believe it was ok to not want sex so I started to research why I didn’t want it. Of course, what I first fell into was the idea that women needed romancing but without sex. So I fought for years to separate sexuality and intimacy. I wanted to be touched with no arousal present, I wanted to be only complimented on my mind, I wanted just to caress and never end in sex. Unfortunately, this romantic ideology was also not what I wanted and I still came up short and angry. Nothing was working, I wasn’t happy with anything in the media geared towards women as “the answer”. 

“When have you ever done anything over the top in bed for me?” I screamed at my husband. I was so mad and so sure of myself pinning all of this lack and anger I felt inside of me, on him. He replied calmly, “When have you ever asked me to do something, like what’s something you would even want me to do?”. At the time I thought his response was ludacris, and fueled my anger even more and I wouldn’t know until years later it was because it was so true. It would still take years before I could actually sit with the soul shaking, devastating blow that I knew nothing about my own sexual wants, desires and interests. Eventually when I had no more avenues to run down, no one else to blame for my sexual frustrations, I sat with the truth that I knew nothing about my own self wants and desires. My heart ached so deeply knowing I’d unintentionally abandoned my sexual self my whole life. I was crushed that I focused on what men wanted my whole sexual existence, crushed that I never once considered what I liked or wanted because honestly, I had no clue, I wasn’t taught to consider or know what I liked, only what men did.

Not one of these covers talked about masturbation, how important, vital, and crucial it was for everyone, especially women, to learn about what they liked so that they could have the real prize, autonomous pleasure. I’ve realized that instead of a man’s approval and happiness, the real prize in life as a woman is pleasure whenever I want, for big reasons or no reason at all, but literally just because I want it. Autonomous pleasure means I don’t have to convince someone else I deserve their time by being nice enough or sexy enough to catch their eye in hopes I could prove my value to them and then maybe they would grant me sexual pleasure. When I decided I was the most deserving person of my time and attention things really started to shift for me. 

What I wish for my teen self was that I could have read direct quotes from Betty on those cosmo covers. These are the titles that would have changed my life as a woman “masturbation is the foundation of all human sexuality”, “masturbation is the first step towards sexual liberation”, “the clitoris is the powerhouse of orgasm”, “we are responsible for our own pleasure”, “women must own their orgasms”, “don’t wait for someone else to give you pleasure”, “every woman can be orgasmic”, “pleasure is power”. These titles go far beyond the bare minimum of speaking about female pleasure, they also give permission to self explore without shame. These quotes from Betty encourage women to focus on their own pleasure, be independently sexual, self aware, and in love with the experience they can create within their own bodies. Betty empowered women through self sexuality and self pleasure, and in my opinion all of womens media would benefit to take some notes from her for the sake of all women. 

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