Insomnia's Invisible Casualties

I find things on the 'net. I mean, sure, we all do. But I find stuff that makes people go "How the hell did you find that?" Weird combinations of words, mostly, or very specific combinations of words. But most people who I have any call to share my surfing habits with end up with links that they never would have expected to find.

I should make a career out it. "Links for those suffering from Internet ennui."

Anyway, the last few nights I've had trouble sleeping. My numbers aren't good and that means I'm supposed to rest, but if I'm doing a lot of resting, I end up unable to sleep. (I plan to remedy this, but it's too late to handle this particular night.) And, hell, Thursday is the Halloween Haunt! So the late night awakeness isn't so bad and it'll wear me out so that I can sleep.

Tonight I stumbled upon a Cosmopolitan link. You remember Cosmo: It's what women read in the '70s to be "liberated". It's 80% sex on the cover, and 80% ads on the inside, if memory serves. They have a website. And the thing I stumbled upon is the description of a sexual position.

It's not NSFW (SFW?), and I'll leave it to the less delicate of you to discuss the merits of the sexual position discussed (link), but what caught my eye was this one line of copy: "Raise your legs to an eye-popping 90-degree angle..."

Now, my first thought was, "How the hell can a 90-degree angle be eye-popping? A 90-degree angle is a 90-degree angle!" I realize that these things are supposed to sound exciting, but do we really need to try to dress up basic geometry?

Maybe it's eye-popping, I thought, because it's exotic? But, really, there's nothing very exotic about an "L" shape. It's half a square, for crying out loud! It's hard to imagine a less daring (and more non-committal) angle. Neither acute nor obtuse, neither this way nor that. Two line segments in search of a hypotenuse.

And then I wondered if it was eye-popping because it required limberness. I could imagine an extreme stretch causing my eyes to pop-out. Though usually it's the muscles that start popping first.

But once again, 90 degrees is about as unchallenging an angle possible, stretch-wise. That's basically called "sitting up straight". If you can't do it, consult your physician. Hardly seems very sexy for a sexy magazine that's obsessed with sex.

Other things observed: They have a whole mess of these sex positions. By my calculations, given that each print issue of Cosmo offers 101 new positions, and they've been in print for about 40 years, they should be able to come up with about a billion positions in toto.

My favorite part about this feature, besides the bombast (which perhaps explains why some women are dissatisfied in the first place) is a little blurb after each description called "Why You'll Love It". They have that in the guy-version of Cosmo, too, and it says the same thing after every position: "Because it's sex." The girl version is way more complicated, including things like, "You can freely imagine George Clooney" or "You can balance your checkbook without being harassed."

Sometimes I wonder if their heart's really in it.

I poked around a bit more, feeling somewhat like I'd snuck in the ladies' lavatory. There was an article about what "cuddling body language reveals". I was surprised that there was only four options. And, it had not occurred to me until reading that one was supposed to pick one of the four forms of cuddling and stick with it, so as to be readable by body language experts. What I really didn't get, looking at the slideshow, was why they used gay men to demonstrate things.

Then there was another article on the sex scenes they wanted to see in the new television season. Ten shows. I haven't seen any of them.

Maybe I'm not the target demo?

This is the sort of rambling that occurs when one should be sleeping, but isn't. My blog is one of insomnia's invisible casualties. And if you've read this far, so are you.