Sex and the Single Girl (video)

Claudia Luther (LATimes.com); NPR (SCPR.org); Wisdom Quarterly

What could sell 2.5 million magazines a month mainly off stands? (elephantjournal.com)

   
Helen Gurley Brown, longtime Cosmopolitan editor, dies at 90

OBITUARY: Gurley Brown's bestselling 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, broke ground by discussing the sex life of single women and casting them as "the newest glamour girl of our times." 

  

Sex and the Single Girl dared to tell American women that they inherited their "proclivity" for sex, that it "isn't some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you're a bad, wicked girl."
  
The book led to her longtime role at Cosmopolitan magazine. 

  

Where would singles like DJ Nicole Alvarez be?

When her frank and exuberant mix of advice, exhortation and naughty girl talk became a publishing phenomenon, thousands of women wrote to seek her advice, and she would sit at home at night in Los Angeles, trying to answer them all.
   
One night, her husband, the movie producer David Brown, had an idea while he watched her type. "You know," he said, "if you had your own magazine, you could answer everybody at one time."
   
And, eventually, she did, taking over a money-losing literary publication called Cosmopolitan and turning it into a slyly risque bible for single women. ...

The Colbert Report

"Why do women read this sh*t?" asks The Elephant Journal. Stephen Colbert offers an explanation based on the strange workings of self-esteem.

   

Sex sells, and we have to sell mags!

Brown remained at the helm of Cosmopolitan for 32 years and would not have left in 1997 had she not been forced out. 

By then, Cosmo was selling 2.5 million copies a month -- much of it at the newsstand -- and collecting about $160 million a year in revenues. After leaving the editor's post, Brown oversaw the international editions of Cosmopolitan for many years.

Helen Gurley Brown was born Feb. 18, 1922, the daughter of schoolteachers in Green Forest, Arkansas... and moved with her mother and her sister, Mary, to Los Angeles. ...
  

But Brown always had ambition.

Helen Gurley and David Brown

"I never liked the looks of the life that was programmed for me -- ordinary, hillbilly and poor," Brown wrote of her early life. She described herself as a teenager this way: "Flat-chested, pale, acne-skinned, terrified."
  
She was determined not to stay a "mouseburger," what she called women who are "not prepossessing, not pretty, don't have a particularly high IQ, a decent education, good family background, or other noticeable assets."

Brown attended what is now Texas Woman's University and Woodbury, a business college then located in Los Angeles. Next came a series of 17 secretarial jobs. More

• ARCHIVE: Helen Gurley Brown gives Stanford, Columbia University $30 million 
• PHOTOS: Helen Gurley Brown, 1922-2012

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

  
Longtime Cosmo magazine editor dies
Jocelyn Noveck (AP/SCPR.org)

Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine who invited millions of women to join the sexual revolution, has died. She was 90.

Brown died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack, Jr. said in a statement.
  
Sex and the Single Girl, her grab-bag book of advice, opinion, and anecdote on why being single shouldn't mean being sexless, made a celebrity of the 40-year-old advertising copywriter in 1962.
  

Nov. 2, 1964 file photo Helen Gurley Brown (AP)

Three years later, she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan and it became her bully pulpit for the next 32 years.
  
She said at the outset that her aim was to tell a reader "how to get everything out of life -- the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity -- whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against." More