Sex and The Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown

Get an apartment of your own and paint the walls cream (flattering for the complexion!). Work on your assets – body, charm, sexual skills and career. Her advice to women was simple yet subversive. Sex and the Single Girl (1962), Brown’s best-selling book, laid down the blueprint for the Cosmo philosophy.

In the mid-60s, before Women’s Liberation, before the sexual revolution, before Cosmo played out its inevitable second act as farce, Helen Gurley Brown was radical. So let me pay my respects before the jackals feed off her cadaver.

The second round of media coverage will, inevitably, bring critique. Long-reigning editor of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 till 1997, patron saint of do-me feminism and post-feminist girl power, Brown will no longer watch over the “fun, fearless female” circling the globe in 64 editions, and counting.Ĭosmopolitan and its editor have always been easy targets, from the religious right to radical feminists, and death won’t save them. The original Sex and the City girl died in New York on Monday, aged 90. Now, in these critical, wry, and expansive essays, twenty-four writers reconsider Helen’s advice and how it applies to their own paths, fielding topics that she couldn’t-or wouldn’t-conceive of in 1962: contraception and abortion (an omission demanded by her publisher), queer and trans womanhood, polyamory, celibacy, interracial dating, bodies of all kinds, consent, sex work, IVF, and the pop culture that both saves and fails us.Įliza Smith and Haley Swanson’s revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit while also validating our modern experiences of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.The opening round of respectful tributes have been flowing through the media after the death of Helen Gurley Brown. Helen’s message was radical for its time: marriage wasn’t essential for women to lead rich, fulfilling lives. Sixty years ago, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. A feminist anthology inspired by legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, featuring twenty-four new essays on the triumphs and heartbreaks of modern singlehood from acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Evette Dionne, and Melissa Febos.

Sex and The Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown