Sex and The Single Girl

A private memorial was held in New York last year.  It was by invitation only and mine must have gotten lost in the mail.  So consider this my R.S.V.P.  They were gathered to honor Cosmopolitan magazine editor extraordinaire- Helen Gurley Brown.  She died in August 2012 at the age of ninety and she changed my life- and yours.

She invented sex for my generation of women.  And for our daughter’s and our daughter’s daughter’s.

If Hugh Hefner brought sex out of the alley and from behind the barn, Helen Brown brought into the boudoir, spritzed it with sexy perfume, and with a sly wink, taught it some spicy “tricks.”

True, Hef started it all.

Before Playboy,  s- e- x was just a dirty word scrawled on the men’s room wall.  He put a smoking jacket on it, and taught it some manners.  His “Playboy Advisor” handed out “lifestyle advice” to guys who were badly in need of it. Hef gave out with the skinny of how, when and where to get laid.

But that sex talk was from a decidedly nineteen-fifty’s male chauvinist’s perspective.  And in Hef’s brave new world women were merely prey.  Helpless, brainless, airbrushed blondes- good only to be pursued, wooed, bedded and dumped.  For post-coital conviviality, Hef would always turn to his male cronies.  Guys like Jimmy Caan or Leroy Neiman.  Hef’s message- “Sex is healthy and nothing to be ashamed of,” was revolutionary but it was strictly stag.

And it had nothing of value to offer me.

(I did read Playboy for the articles, though.  I used to swipe my boyfriend’s older brothers’ copies.  I loved the interviews.  I can still remember a fantastic one with Woody Allen to this day.)

Helen Gurley Brown changed all that.  She made it okay for girls to have sex.  More than okay, she made it fun.

She turned the Playboy ethos on its head.  Women were no longer bubble-headed objects of teenage boy lust.  They were the wily huntresses now.  She made the battle of the sexes into a game show.  A game show where the women contestants always came out on top.

This was no easy task.  The magazine had been failing before Brown came aboard.  But in a fortuitous example of synchronicity, Hearst called her in to revive a dowdy, frumpy, housewife’s companion and her makeover turned it into a supermodel.

The fun started at the cover.

Her Cosmo covers were iconic and instantly identifiable.  Gorgeous women were given the Francesco Scavullo treatment.  You know.  Big, important hair, plunging necklines down to there, tons of blush on the apples of the cheeks, pouty, pouty mouths.  (Was any other photographer more identified with a single magazine than he?  And who helped make who a raging success?)

And then there were the famous cover lines.  “How to be the World’s Greatest Lover!” “10 Things He’ll Love about You!”  “Lose Five Pounds Now!”  Lots of steamy topics. Lots of exclamation marks- all written by her husband, movie mogul David Brown, by the way.

Inside the book was the famous/infamous “Cosmo Quiz.”  Topics ranged from “Are you and your mate suited sexually?” to “How do you know if your mate is cheating?”  Not exactly Mensa material but fun.  (And who doesn’t want to know if their spouse is cheating?  The Cosmo Quiz was probably just as accurate as a private investigator and cost a whole lot less.)

Inside, too, was her philosophy:  A. Sex is fun for girls, too. B. Sex is a skill you can learn. C. If you’re good at it, you can trap a great husband.

This was earth-shaking stuff for women back in those days.  The Pill had given women the means to have child-free sex.  Helen Brown let them enjoy it.

Most of this stuff seems dated and politically incorrect now.  But as a lifelong career woman, she proudly trumpeted the mantra “You can have it all.”  She stood at the vanguard of the first generation of working women who were proud of their jobs -no scratch that- careers.  Her Cosmo reader had a career and loved it.  She wasn’t working at some dreary desk job out of necessity.  She had goals and ambitions.  And she succeeded, more often than not.

A rich husband was her just reward.  Not necessarily the end of her life.

Brown, a self-proclaimed “mouseburger” from Arkansas, unashamedly mined her own hardscrabble life and taught us that a girl didn’t have to be born beautiful to succeed.  She taught us that “smart” was the ultimate sexy.

HGB promised that we could have it all.  After all, she did.  A legendary and hugely influential career, a later-in-life happy marriage, tons of money and lots of devoted children.

All girls.

Cosmo Girls.