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"  When I first got a full-time gig writing at Cosmopolitan.com, I\u00A0 tried explaining\u00A0 to my father what the job entailed. &amp;quot;Yeah, dad. I&amp;#039;m going to write about sex for Cosmo. Yeah, I am going to go into an office and write a bunch of stuff about penises and vaginas. Yeah, I&amp;#039;m going to get paid. No, I am not drunk right now.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t blame my dad for thinking his eldest son was high on paint fumes and shouting nonsense into a phone. The Cosmo offices are unlike anywhere I&amp;#039;ve ever worked. You know those offices where on your first day, you get a tour from Carol the &amp;quot;zany&amp;quot; HR rep and she shows you the office printer, with a picture of Bob Marley&amp;#039;s face taped to it, and says, &amp;quot;We call the printer Bob Marley because it&amp;#039;s always jamming! We like to do things a little differently around here.&amp;quot; And then she laughs, and you pretend to laugh, but really you die a little inside because you know &amp;quot;different&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;the same as everywhere else but once every few months we order pizza for everyone and make a big deal about it.&amp;quot; Cosmo actually does things differently. My first week, the most insane/awesome/obscene refrains from R. Kelly&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Black Panties&amp;quot; were blasted throughout the office. I once spent a meeting listening to Andrew W.K. explain party tips while Lil&amp;#039; Bub fell asleep on the desk right in front of me. Because the editors draw a line with raunchy language, I have an email saved in my archive listing every word and phrase we are not allowed to say. The first phrase rhymes with &amp;quot;mitty bucking&amp;quot; and the last sentence is &amp;quot;&amp;#039;butt&amp;#039; is always ok.&amp;quot; This is a very serious email that I have to consult on occasion to make sure I don&amp;#039;t go over my allotted amount of &amp;quot;fucks&amp;quot; per article (it&amp;#039;s one by the way, and I just used it up). We have a group GChat called &amp;quot;Cosmo Web Girlz&amp;quot; where we can crowd source ideas and discuss trending topics. It is so NSFW it would make your grandmother&amp;#039;s eyeballs explode in her skull if she read 30 seconds of the transcript at any given time. But I am the only straight guy here in the office. I&amp;#039;m a rare breed. I&amp;#039;m like a unicorn, if unicorns get yelled at for never having seen a full episode of Sex and the City, or must engage in passionate debates after making a statement like, &amp;quot;I think Rashida Jones is funny.&amp;quot; \u00A0Then sometimes the unicorn is also asked questions about penises. Maybe the unicorn is consulted on what some guy meant when he sent this last text. If these are things that happen to unicorns, then I am totally a unicorn. Recently, the site&amp;#039;s editor-in-chief made a joke about &amp;quot;freakum dresses.&amp;quot; Everyone laughed while I frantically Googled &amp;quot;freakum.&amp;quot; An office-wide brainstorming session ensued for an article entitled &amp;quot;Annoying Things About Guys.&amp;quot; I sat at my desk while all of my coworkers enthusiastically shouted out potential list points. It was essentially 20 minutes of people yelling out things that I do every day, with the explicit understanding that they hated them. The worst part was they were all brutally true. If I hadn&amp;#039;t become desensitized, I probably would have cried at my desk. For whatever reason, when I tell someone I&amp;#039;m working in an office full of women, they assume I&amp;#039;m typing away at a desk, surrounded by women prancing around in bikinis and yelling &amp;quot;OMG!&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s not really the case. Yes, &amp;quot;OMG&amp;quot; gets thrown around, but it&amp;#039;s usually followed by a deep and thoughtful analysis of website metrics or social media tracking that is beyond most people&amp;#039;s comprehension (mine included). Before I started working here, I figured Cosmopolitan.com was full of articles like, &amp;quot;Top Sex Positions That Will Drive Him Wild&amp;quot; over and over. I&amp;#039;ve learned in the few months I&amp;#039;ve been here that while that stuff is buried in the archives, much weightier topics \u2014 like threats to abortion clinic buffer zone laws\u00A0or potentially hazardous methods of birth control \u2014 are routinely covered in ways that are legitimately eye-opening. And while I&amp;#039;ve written plenty about oral sex, I&amp;#039;ve also covered sex trafficking. One of the first things I learned here is that I&amp;#039;m an idiot, at least compared to the people I&amp;#039;m surrounded by. I can&amp;#039;t talk about stuff that categorically (and maybe unfairly) is qualified as &amp;quot;dude stuff.&amp;quot; I can&amp;#039;t feverishly geek out about last week&amp;#039;s episode of The Walking Dead with anyone (ed. note: very true). I do, however, know more about this season of The Bachelor strictly through osmosis than I ever thought possible. Every day I learn something new: Beyonc\u00E9 is perfect (also, I learned which way the accent on the &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; faces), Taylor Swift is less universally adored, Nutella is the best thing ever, and no matter what the topic is, there is a Sex and the City episode that relates to it. I learned a lot about which celebrities are dating and all their offspring&amp;#039;s names. I learned about leave-in conditioner. I have typed &amp;quot;Justin Bieber&amp;quot; into my browser&amp;#039;s search bar literally infinity more times than I ever did before I started here. Sometimes I forget who I am. And then, as I dig through Selena Gomez&amp;#039;s twitter feed, I glance at the bottom right of my screen to where my GChat is, and I remember that I&amp;#039;m a Cosmo Web Girl, deep within the cockles of my heart, and I write about sex all day. And I love it, even when someone yells at me for not knowing which one Miranda is. Photo Credit: Getty Want more from Frank? Follow him on Twitter. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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