When I was living in France with the Orchestral Blonde, her boyfriend used to send us care packages with lovely things like Empire and Essential X-Men in for me, and books and Cosmo for her. It was while reading a particularly dreadful article about something possibly called the heart orgasm that I realised a) even in a country where English mags cost upwards of £6 a go I couldn't bring myself to read its ridiculous power bitch witterings anymore and b) I'd read the same article about 8 years previously. Now, I know that women's magazines make a living out of recycling ideas and pretending that they're new and inventive, simply because if they were new and inventive all the time their readers couldn't keep up, hence why you'll never get a woman's mag going "Fuck off you silly bitch, it WAS your fault because you're needy and desperate and have the self-esteem of a damp cupboard."

I flick through the women's mags when my friends get them simply to stay in touch with what's going on and it's pretty much always a chronic bore. New Woman's relaunch earlier this year was genuinely exciting and for a moment I felt a bit hopeful, but then it calmed down a bit and stopped. Glamour, my hitherto reliable source of gorgeous things to look at and fairly sensible articles has lost its head in a fluff of control, and that was pretty much it.

Anyway, while fruitlessly trawling the internet to find out stuff about trendy shagging for a mag pitch, I found Syd Allan's article on keeping up with trends in sex. If you have ever fallen into the trap of ignoring the person you're having sex with in favour of thinking that the people who write the sex columns in Cosmo/Glamour/B/More/etc Must Be Right (and god, it's so ingrained in my head that I still catch myself daydreaming about physically unlikely sex moves that require set squares and a very specific sort of silk scarf) then you need to read it because it's the most perfectly sharp evisceration of women's magazines I've ever read.

At one point he's going through a Cosmo list about 50 sexy surprises. It's all very dry and ridiculous, rather like the sex Cosmo readers probably end up having.

7. Sexy: You sense he's ready to climax from oral sex, so you let him release on your breasts.
Sex-traordinary: If you're monogamous, pull his butt toward you and let him climax in your mouth. "It's way more intense," says Peter*, 32.

*Names have been changed.

[Thank goodness they remembered to change Peter's name; that guy's a freak!]

17. Sexy: You trace your tongue along his lips, then slip it inside his mouth.
Sex-traordinary: Use your tongue to draw the tip of his tongue into your mouth so you can suck on it, suggests Iris Finz, coauthor of Secret Sex.

[I wish I had gotten that Secret Sex book about a month ago: a woman tried sucking on my tongue a few weeks ago and it freaked me out! "What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed. "Where did you learn such bizarre behavior?" If only someone had warned me that women have started doing this tongue-sucking thing. That's why I am going to get a subscription to Cosmopolitan: I want to be on the leading edge of every new technique.]

This is turning out to be a really good day for good articles which makes me very happy. Even if that one was written in 2003.