Honestly I think the issue with Cosmo is that it's written for the "everywoman", the lowest common denominator which makes up most of society. What seems like common sense, or common knowlege, to us really isn't so common when you look at normal people.
The typical target for articles like this are fairly sheltered women who were probably at best "average" looking and are remaining sexually interested at around the time their husbands are losing interest in sex. Most of the readers being women we'd probably derrogotarily call hambeasts, due to the way they further let themselves go once they were married. It's not nessicarly right, or nice to be insulting, but it's a point of consideration. These articles keep being written because they sell to people who think they help, which in turn generally tells you something about them, and their likely situation to have this problem to begin with. I could say more about it, but I don't want to start an arguement. The basic point here being that if your laughing at an article like that it's because your not the intended audience. Cosmo also carries articles on a lot of things, while that's a common one, it takes a shotgun approach to women's issues, not everyone who reads Cosmo is doing so for that paticular type of advice (an important point to make).
In the end things directed at the "everyman" seem quaint and even stupid to someone who isn't in that demographic. On a site like The Escapist, which is dedicated to mental escapism for a fringe that is outside of the mainstream, your pretty much by definition not the everyman, and truthfully even if your a 40 year old virgin ironically probably know more about sex and other subjects this is covering than most people do, even if you don't practice it yourself (as odd as that sounds). Consider for example that people here are talking about things like cosplay, jokes about rule 34, etc... many people are surprisingly fairly uncomfortable with porn and similar material, and are taught to stay away from it which is a problem in of itself for a lot of reasons I won't go into. If you mention cosplay or rule 34 to most people on the street they will have no idea what your talking about. Dressing up in a costume for sex is something many who haven't seen a lot of porn of adult material might not know much about.