You could call it a great social experiment. You could call it a noble enterprise. You could call it the most distinguished endeavor ever performed by man. I wouldn’t call it any of those things. No, I’m far too modest. You, however, may call it what you wish. That’s the power of free speech.

I spent the past few weeks undercover; a shell of a man. Everywhere I went, I could feel people’s eyes on me, burning into me. I was being judged.

With each step I took, my burden weighed more heavily upon me. The more I knew, the less I wanted to know.

My nostrils tingled with the acrid scent of ladies’ perfume-scents so sweet on a woman but so foul within the pages of my beloved and hated enemy.

My assignment: To read Cosmopolitan magazine. In public. In the dining hall.

It all seemed so simple at first. The makeup tips, the sex tips, the steak tips. The perfume samples, the lotion samples, the appetizer samplers. Patrick Dempsey, Christina Aguilera, Rong the Towers’ stir-fry guy. But all things start out simple. And then you get too deep.

I had decided to read the entire magazine, cover-to-cover. I would read the ads, the makeup suggestions, and even the pages upon pages of ways to please a man. It couldn’t be that bad, I figured. And who knew, maybe something I read might come in handy someday.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

First off, there were 15 pages of ads before the table of contents, a foreshadowing of my forbidding fortune. I stopped short when I came upon a car ad. But alas, it was a girly car. I pressed on.

The next 254 pages — I worked with the October issue — contained all the stereotypical Cosmo beauty and sex advice, celebrity gossip and embarrassing moments. But there were also things like advice on the abortion pill and how to avoid date rape.

I began to think maybe Cosmo wasn’t so bad after all when I came upon two pages of blatant pornography known as the “Red Hot Read,” an interesting piece considering the magazine’s origins.

Cosmo was founded in 1886 as a family read, and was once one of the nation’s foremost publishers of serialized fiction. In 1905, it was purchased by yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst who, surprisingly, was not the one to screw it up. The shift was made by Editor-in-Chief Helen Gurley Brown in 1965, who wanted to show single women across the country that sex was okay. Even — and I shudder to think about it — the pre-marital variety.

Well, today’s Cosmo has certainly stuck to that goal. Its current incarnation is a veritable bible for women by women on how to get men. How to look pretty for men, how to “trick” a man to notice you, and then, once you have him, how to please him in bed.

I guess that’s empowering. Right? Well, a little self-subjugation never hurt anybody.

But there’s only one real problem I have with these articles. They’re written by women. Ladies, how do you expect to understand what men want if you’re asking other women? If you want to know what men want, you should ask a man.

I, therefore, propose a new magazine: Screwdriver. I chose this name because it implies the use of tools, it’s slightly suggestive and it’s more masculine than Appletini, my original choice.

And frankly, my magazine, Screwd, would be very short. Probably only one page. Picture the word “this” written in crayon with an arrow pointing to a girl stick figure, the kind with one long curly hair and a triangle on the bottom denoting a skirt. To be cute, the S in “this” would be backwards.

Where’s the magazine out there that tells a woman she should be herself to get a guy or risk losing him the first time she burps? Where’s the magazine that tells a woman if a man doesn’t appreciate her natural beauty now he never will, and he’s no good for her anyway? And where’s the magazine that tells a woman she doesn’t need to act like a porn star to please her man?

Of course, we men aren’t going to complain if you do want to learn porn star tricks. But a loving, caring relationship is more important.

In the end, I think my experiment was a success. I learned a lot of great ways to accentuate my curves and deemphasize my eyebrows. And I learned what it is I, a man, really want in a relationship (mostly untrue). Unfortunately, I didn’t get a single raised eyebrow or confused expression from a stranger the entire time I was reading the magazine. Where’s the fun in that?

Ethan Rosenberg, a sophomore in the College of Fine Arts, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].