All Quiet On the Masculine Front

Rover swings though town during one of his whistle-stop round-the-world trips and, over mussels and chips at The Grand, I pump him for any tales of bad behaviour I can wheedle out of him. His rogueish carousing often provides content for this letter, and I need content!
‘Don’t let me down, Dawg,’ I say to him. ‘It’s been kind of tame round here.’
‘It hasn’t been tame,’ he says, ‘it’s just that no-one’s been talking to you.’
He’s not wrong. Good gossip has been thin on the ground and now ... disaster! Now even he, usually my best source, is not about to help me. He tucks into his lobster salad and engages The Guru in a long and dull conversation about the environment and some product he has developed to stop evaporation in Chinese reservoirs. He has nothing that I would call interesting to share with me.
It seems that, though it’s taken a while, he has finally figured out that it’s perhaps more politic just to keep schtum around me – and keep out of print. Perhaps he’s got a new girl he wants to impress, and is trying to reduce damage to what’s left of his good reputation. Or maybe I have just drunk too much of the Glen Carlou Chardonnay, leaving him in the unfamiliar situation of being less drunk and able to make a reasoned and sensible call on how much of his private life to share.
This leaves me in a tricky situation because I’ve got male behaviour on my mind and, as I have said before, The Guru’s guy pals aren’t generally great sharers. In fact, they are the soul of discretion and good manners... or perhaps just preoccupied with what actually does interest them: sport. Now, with the British soccer season and the Currie Cup in full swing, the last thing any of them feels like doing is coming down to Lazari and telling me who has been sleeping, cheating and flirting with whom.
But I’m nothing if not resourceful. I can even make no content content! At the features meeting the next Monday I ask the team whether any of them have better luck getting men to really open up about the what, why, where, how and who of what makes them tick. Because there are some questions that we (veterans to a woman of years on COSMO) would still like answered. For instance, what makes a man notice a woman (in a good way)? What do men really think about women taking the lead? What totally turns them off? And that’s just for starters.
It turns out that assistant editor Cathy Lund has plenty of male writers who are willing to help. And six of them – honest to the point of madness – have come clean about their girl-related behaviour in ‘The dating mandate’ on page 73. Also in this jam-packed issue are nine pages of naked celebrities (just for fun, guys, just for fun) and there’s ZEST – with all you need to know to get your body in shape for summer. There is only one COSMOPOLITAN, guys. Enjoy it!

Author: Vanessa Raphaely