Sexy Time

I know the week is almost over and this item is practically four days too late—in blog time, that’s like slapping a “swing culture” cover on your magazine two years late—but I just got around to seeing the cover of this week’s TIME Magazine today. (I don’t read TIME and I haven’t been to my dentist’s to thumb through it in over a year—sue me.)
Anyway, what the hell happened to staid old TIME? Once a bastion of bland, sober news coverage and tepid lifestyle features about Too Much Homework! (insert your own “darn” in that sanitized headline), TIME has suddenly, inexplicably morphed into a porn magazine!
Don’t believe me? Check out this week’s cover package on Love, Sex & Health.
There are features on spicing up your love life (replete with references to Time inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstein‘s wife, Nancy Friday‘s book of erotic fantasies My Secret Garden—available in your mom’s sock drawer, or wherever paperbacks are sold); a piece on pornography (not written, as you might’ve expected, by Joel Stein); and, amazingly, an article on S/M. In the latter, writer John Cloud explains in the typically TIME-esque obvious/patronizing manner—but with a surprisingly decent pun that:

It turns out that you call it “S and M” only if you don’t do it or if you experiment only occasionally with those handcuffs you keep hidden at the back of the nightstand. If, on the other hand, you are seriously involved in the sadomasochistic subculture—if, say, you have attended one or more of the nation’s 90 annual sadomasochistic events (“Beat Me in St. Louis,” for instance) and own not only handcuffs but also a spanking bench, a flogger, some paraffin wax, an unbreakable Pyrex dildo and various other unmentionables—you call it, simply, SM.

Grandmas all over America take note: Only people who don’t do S/M pronounce it with the ‘and.’
Also asked by writer Michael D. Lemonick: Do Gay Couples Have An Edge? Well, not now that they’re in TIME, they don’t.
TIME hasn’t been this edgy since they scooped god’s death in 1966. Steal this magazine from your dentist’s waiting room and stash it under your mattress today.