Jezebel writes about a recent issue of Cosmo Girl which asks seven teenage boys what they want from girls. Or so I understand the answers the boys give. They must have been asked something to come up with this:
OMG the Heidi Montag issue of Cosmo Girl! keeps giving, like a full heaving bosom full of saline and strawberry Quik. And like, where would a Heidi Montag-lionizing issue be without a story on breast implants? Specifically, how boys your age really feel about them. The magazine finds seven guys to dish. "I consider myself a boob guy over a butt guy, so obviously I'd prefer bigger boobs," says 22-year-old Jay of Syracuse. But Brad, 19, of Philadelphia, feels differently! "I'd definitely date a girl with fake breasts," he says, "as long as they weren't too big." Elaborates Joe, 20, of Hawthorne, N.J.: silicone knockers that are "proportional" are okay, but only if they "help her" to "hold herself with just the right amount of self-confidence." Which is to say, not too much. Because there are all sorts of little reasons he might dump you anyway: among them, "Period Talk."
Snooty little buggers, aren't they? But of course this is not a random sample of teenage boys. We don't really know what most of them would think about false tits and periods and so on. Only what the seven selected ones say.
What strikes me much sadder than the opinions of these boys is that a girls' magazine thinks it is important to ask those kinds of questions. A boys' magazine would not ask girls how they'd like their guy dates served. It is this imbalance which is telling and which makes me very sad.
I think all this has something to do with porn. It has "liberated" men to expect silicone breasts, perfectly symmetrical labia and bleached anuses, and it has "liberated" lots of women to think of sex as servicing a guy.