The magazine also covers aspects of the female body beyond its sex appeal and orgasmic capacity. “We ran an article that pained me to run,” White told me, “but I felt it was important. It basically said the key time to try to get pregnant is between 25 and 35. There has been so much said about still waiting until you’re older, and I didn’t have my first kid until I was 37, but we’re taking a chance — you need to know it.”

I asked why it pained her. “I want every girl to feel that she can have her first kid at 50, if she wants,” White said emphatically. She has encouraged readers to look into freezing their eggs.

Cosmo happens to be fairly traditional about sex itself. Brown believed that it was O.K. to sleep with married men (it was their wives’ responsibility to keep them faithful, she argued), but White eliminated that from the formula. (“A total no-no,” she said.) The magazine also assumes that you’re having sex with a boyfriend or a husband (there’s not much in the way of same-sex relationships), and not with a one-night stand. “We certainly talk about sex mostly in terms of relationships,” White said, “and most of our readers have told us they’re in relationships, and they want the sexual information for their relationship.” White also sees the hookup culture boomeranging back to more traditional standards. “One thing I do think that women will evaluate in the coming years,” she said, “is casual sex. Is it really what you want to be doing, casual sex, a lot of casual sex? Is it what you feel good about?” But if it’s your thing, that’s fine too. “We don’t pass judgment,” she said.

White acknowledges that some people find Cosmo’s obsession with sex trashy, but she’s unabashedly proud of how it sets the magazine apart. “Every Cosmo reader expects to have herself and her pleasures taken care of, equally,” she said matter-of-factly. “We reinforce the idea all the time that, yes, we want you to be a fabulous lover, we want to give you those skills, but you better get it back, baby, because that’s what you deserve.” And if that makes for some repetitive stories, so be it. “There’s a frustration that it takes time to learn how to have an orgasm,” White said, “and have it consistently. So that’s terrain we cover a lot.”

These mores are upheld, to varying degrees of cultural sensitivity, throughout the Cosmo universe. Judging by searches on the Web site, Cosmo U.K. readers are most interested in hair and oral sex (“in that order,” says its publishing director, Ella Dolphin), but in India, where women traditionally live with their parents until marriage, the Cosmo reader “might not be comfortable openly discussing her sex life due to fear of being judged,” Bhalla says. She also notes that because sex toys are banned in India, “we’re careful not to talk about them in the magazine.” Leyla Orujova, the editor of Cosmo Azerbaijan, told me that her staff ensures that sex is generally discussed within the context of marriage. Cosmo Singapore comes with a yellow “Unsuitable for the Young” warning box on the cover and sometimes runs its sexiest content in a sealed section promising “phenomenal pleasure . . . waiting for you inside.”

Most international Cosmos are run by their countries’ natives, but Kerrie Simon-Lawrence, the beautiful, redheaded editor of Middle East Cosmo, is from Sydney. “Obviously because of the cultural sensitivities within the Middle East” — where dating and premarital sex are, in some countries, punishable by law — “we can’t lift so much from international editions.” Throughout the Cosmic Conference, she and the magazine’s publisher joked repeatedly about needing good lawyers and the possibility of going to jail.

Other editions feature more subtle deviations. Cosmo France has reliably more artsy and experimental covers. The South Korean edition is huge — physically huge; issues sometimes come as two separate magazines, because they would otherwise break — and focuses less on sex than marriage (“My Dreamy Wedding” and “Dreams Come True!” are two cover lines from the 400-page April edition). The editor of Cosmo Croatia, Marjana Filipovic-Grcic, told me that stories about women acting bravely on their own have been particularly popular in her country. The same is true for Cosmo Kazakhstan, which “focuses on career and travel more than the U.S. edition does,” writes Akisheva, because “Kazakhstan is a relatively newly independent, developing country, and women are excited about the career opportunities the market economy has to offer.”