With a bit of airbrushing, some careful wording and even a little cheeky innuendo, Cosmopolitan is making more than modest impact in the Middle East. But a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do ... and since being appointed founding editor of Cosmo Middle East almost three years ago, 32-year-old Simon-Lawrence has honed the art of compromise. She's also developed a genius line in innuendo, dreaming up straplines such as "Bring him to his knees", or "Stand to attention", to replace the more familiar "58 ways to please your man". "You're up for a sleepless night" as opposed to "Get your rocks off". This is sounding like a fun game... "Worship at your altar?" I suggest. Simon-Lawrence looks appalled. "Oh no, altar would suggest Christianity, we can't do that." She has managed to keep on the right side of the line so far, "But I say a little prayer every time we go to press; 'Please don't let this be the month I get arrested.' " Which isn't quite the joke it sounds. Soft porn is illegal here, as is swearing and showing nudity. And who's to say what's good frisky Cosmo fun and what's indecent? "We could be removed from the shelves, we could lose our licence, which scares the life out of me," she says. She learns from the mistakes of others, such as the Indian-language magazine that ran a bachelor's special, construed in Dubai as a dating service. "They said you're setting people up and we don't do dating officially in this region. That's why online dating doesn't exist and there's no access to that sort of thing. They got reprimanded on that basis." So no hints on hook-ups, no questions about the ideal woman. So what can she say? "Well," says Simon-Lawrence, "we talk a lot about your wife, the qualities you're looking for in a wife, although we tend to say soul mate, that sounds a bit trendier. Or The One, there's lots of Ones. The assumption is always that the goal is marriage." Not that sex is the only danger area. When Simon-Lawrence was editing stablemate Grazie, before she got the Cosmo job, she ran a gift guide issue during the holy month of Ramadan. She found a vase, or what to her untrained eye looked like a vase with a flower in one end, and stuck it on the page along with some workmen-style boots for women.

Another Dubai Cosmo cover. "I got into work the next morning to this inbox full of complaints and an email from a cleric outlining his absolute disgust, asking how I'm going to be punished, essentially. Turned out that the vase actually spelled out Allah, which I didn't know. I mean, it was sold at a store, and I then put a boot, a shoe, above Allah, which is the biggest insult it's possible to give." On top of that, she'd accidentally cut Allah's name in half. "Stuck a dirty work boot above it and kind of went, 'Happy Ramadan!' Terrifying." Though based in the United Arab Emirates, the circulation zone for Cosmo Middle East takes in Qatar, Amman, Lebanon and Kuwait, where the censors don't muck around, simply tearing out pages they don't like. She knows this because "we get a lot of readers emailing to ask, what was on page 46?" The bulk of these readers are expats, but she hears from locals, too, including Saudis, active users of Cosmo's Facebook page (sending profile pictures of a shoe or a hat, never their face), even though the magazine itself isn't available. Cosmopolitan is a global juggernaut, with 64 international editions. It may have a large Muslim readership (Turkey, Azerbaijan), yet none are as sensitive on moral matters as in Simon-Lawrence's bailiwick. The Gulf is seriously conservative, as she was reminded when she started dating the man she later married. They were in a local sports store when she bought him some shoes and he gave her a kiss on the nose to say thanks. "A local man came barrelling up to us - I thought we were in his way, but it was only when he stopped ranting and raving and said 'You've offended me!' that I realised what it was." Public displays of affection are strictly forbidden.

When Simon-Lawrence, who has spent seven years in the UAE, comes home and sees Aussie girls shopping in their bikini tops and shorts, her instinctive fear is that security will round them up and send them home. But not all subjects deemed tricky by Gulf standards are no-go areas. When the mag committed to a breast cancer education campaign, the obvious problem being not the big C, but the saucy B, it went on the health pages, along with the argument: "We're not saying use your breasts to turn him on; we're saying this will save your life." Not so Cosmo, but laudable. And permitted. However, a recent reshuffle of the censorship board has had an impact. "It used to be a stack of local people who would go, 'What is this?', and we'd get a lot more through, a lot more between-the-line innuendo," Simon-Lawrence says. "But then they hired Brits." However, there have been things she thought they'd never get away with, and did. Like the story on what your vagina would say if it could talk. What? S-x, no, but a talking vagina gets through? And it's not as if men in Dubai are entirely spared from prurient interest. Asked her funniest - as in silliest - moment as magazine editor in the Middle East, Simon-Lawrence cites her time at Grazie, when she and her art director tag-teamed on the task of, um, flattening men's trouser fronts. What, dead flat? "Well, it can be a little, but not 'David Beckham sock down pants'. " They called it cock watch.

The upside of all this is the red-haired Australian is succeeding; Cosmo has become the region's biggest selling women's magazine. The downside is that Simon-Lawrence and her tiny staff of four and a half (she shares a picture editor) work like stink. They can't lift much from Cosmo's bank of shared articles - too raunchy - and so have to write about 90 per cent of the copy, and vet every image. The stable owner is publisher ITP; the Cosmo pod just a small section of a large room where people busy themselves on many titles. All white, most female, all Western - to my casual gaze, anyway. Simon-Lawrence confirms it is almost impossible to attract the interest of women outside the expat circle. You can understand why. For all the moderation to suit the censors, the Cosmo brand of go-girlfriend feminism is an awkward fit for women still barely past the suffragette stage. "I'm going to get married in a few weeks time, how do I know if I'm a virgin?" is a typical local letter, she says. And when Simon-Lawrence proposed using Cosmo's global slogan, "The magazine for fun fearless females", on banners to advertise Cosmo's on-campus awards last year, the ministry handling outdoor advertising advised it must be changed or the magazine would face the full force of the law. The problem word? "It was 'fearless'. I was mortified, jumping up and down and having a fit. If this gets out, that we have to take the word fearless out of the global strap line because we can't tell Arab women they can be fearless ... "

On this, Simon-Lawrence refused to compromise. She pulled the banners. After all, what's the opposite of fearless? Certainly not what any Cosmo editor would want her readers to be.