The Cosmo Report

The largest-ever sexual survey of American women

Bigger by far than the Kinsey Report or any other sexual study of American women, the Cosmo Report is a landmark work about female behavior. The report is based on the responses of more than one hundred thousand readers of Cosmopolitan magazine to a questionnaire about their sexual habits and preferences. But what makes the book more than a mere set of statistics—however revealing—is that many of the respondents augmented their replies with highly personal letters detailing the sexual practices they engaged in, the ones they most enjoyed, the ones they abhorred, and how they felt about the sexual revolution that transformed the lives of women in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Linda Wolfe analyzes this cornucopia of experience in a tone that is neither judgmental nor voyeuristic, in admirable contrast to some of her predecessors.” —The New York Times Book Review

Linda Wolfe is the author of five true-crime books: The Professor and the Prostitute and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, Love Me to Death, Double Life, The Murder of Dr. Chapman, and Wasted: Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder, an Edgar Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of My Daughter, Myself, a memoir; The Literary Gourmet, a classic cookbook; and Private Practices, a novel. Wolfe’s articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, among them Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, and New York magazine, of which she was a contributing editor. She currently writes a column about books for the website www.FabOverFifty.com.