LOWE: Straight woman’s guide to pleasing men: Brown’s malevolent influence lives on
Helen Gurley Brown is alive and well at the Glace Bay Superstore, needling women to have more and better sex, larger breasts, bigger hair and thinner thighs.
The former longtime editor of Cosmopolitan died Monday. A blessed 90 years. But she’ll be there in the checkout line long after her cold, dead body’s in the ground, her malevolent influence making straight women feel not quite up to the task of womanhood.
Brown deserves her journalistic props — she took over doldrums-wallowing Cosmopolitan in 1965, gutted it, and remade it into a circulation and advertising juggernaut.
In one issue, with zero editing experience, she created a new genre of magazine — one for single women who admitted enjoying sex — and cast a future fingerprint on every mainstream women’s magazine to follow.
She wrote books, embraced philanthropy and edited Cosmo into her 70s.
Brown’s other notable achievements?
Once pooh-poohing the sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas because, duh, all sexual attention from men is covetable, and famously hailing the face-care benefits of semen.
“Makes a fine mask — and he’ll be pleased,” she counselled in her memoir. (I’m picking the patent worst of it here, but truly, I can’t think of any positive editorializing from Brown.)
That straight women ought to please men was Brown’s philosophy and Cosmo gospel. To wit: Cosmo’s September issue includes advice on how to clear acne, plump hair, dispatch dark circles, banish cellulite and cook the ultimate “man burger.” There are revelations about what kinds of sex men crave and what men want when they employ “the silent treatment.” Avoid romantic dates that include a lobster dinner, women are advised, because men don’t think women who “smell like SeaWorld” are sexy.
You know I’m not making this up. You know because you’ve seen it. You’ve lived it and breathed it. Only rare breeds — hermits who scavenge for their food rather than hitting the grocery stores, and whoever can manage to never need prescriptions — have eluded Brown’s inimical reach.
I’m not absolving Self and Marie Claire and Glamour and the rest. I’m saying when it comes to the selling of women’s inadequacy, through the message of losing 10 pounds, finding the perfect lipstick and micro-managing male orgasm, Cosmo is the alpha and omega.
Magazine and book editors are lauding and fawning this week, proclaiming Brown’s editorial prowess and the power of her ground-shaking books, principally 1962’s Sex and the Single Girl.
But it’s among the common folk, betwixt the phone cards and Tic Tacs, where Brown’s real sway holds. Cosmo was her child and it spawned clones a-boatload.
So it’s in the checkout lane — not at magazine industry luncheons or bookstores — where Brown will persist far beyond her mortal body.
She managed the same in life, one might say, indulging in breast implants at the age of 73 and regaling the world with tales of her nose job, eye lifts, silicone injections and facelifts.
I don’t judge her procedures. I only make this point: it is hard and expensive work to keep up with being a Cosmo Girl — well beyond the stomach and pocketbooks of most, and a failing effort at the tail of things.
Brown looked, for at least the last 20 years, at once impossibly young and dreadfully old. Like a wonky wax figure of herself.
I’m not so crass or impolite as to dance on Brown’s grave, but maybe that’s because I know it’ll do no good anyway. She’s got us in her clutches, and like a hot man with a good job and big pockets (wink wink), she’s never letting go.
Lezlie Lowe is a freelance writer in Halifax. Follow her on Twitter at @lezlielowe.
Nasty
Submitted by Keith P. on August 17, 2012 - 7:06am.
There is only one word I can think of to describe Ms. Lowe's latest outburst.
Nasty.
Really, the Herald's readers deserve better.
"and he'll be pleased"?
Submitted by TIC on August 17, 2012 - 7:12am.
I don't know how beneficial a semen mask would be, but if that is what it takes to "please" a man then I would think there may be a lot of unhappy guys out there! I don't think it impolite to say that most of her ideas were bizarre. Breast implants at 73 is just stupid. I would hope most women do not feel they have to "please" a man. Men should, and usually are, be "pleased" when they "please" their women, and visa versa. It is all about equality.
too true
Submitted by woodchuck on August 17, 2012 - 7:48am.
excellent article Ms. Lowe
I'm one of the rare few then.
Submitted by Ardeliah on August 17, 2012 - 8:28am.
I'm one of the rare few then. I don't think I have ever read a Cosmo, I get in line at the grocery store and get depressed because every magazine there has covers that try to tell me I'm too fat, or that I could cook better, or all the latest gossip on who is having sex with who and who is getting divorced. I wish there were more 'real' magazines in check out lines. Ones with 'real' news, things that will affect my life and that of my family. But everytime I go, all I see is useless information about the private lives of celebrities I will never meet.
Wow. The Herald's publishing hit pieces now.
Submitted by shawnino on August 17, 2012 - 8:30am.
I get that HGB doesn't fit Lowe's left wing view of the world.
I get that Lowe might be envious of HGB's success.
I get that it irks Lowe that HGB's work will have a lasting impression in the world, whereas there's no guarantee Lowe's opinions will be remembered.
What I don't get is why the Herald would publish Lowe's vitriol. For a paper that fashions itself as the region's "newspaper of record", this is pathetic.
Poor Shawino
Submitted by Selina on August 17, 2012 - 9:55am.
Doesn't like Lezlie's pieces because they don't fit his narrow right-wing view of the world.
Envious that Lezlie gets paid to write and many like what she says
It irks Shawino that his views will have no lasting impression on the world.
Oddly, they publish your vitriol, how pathetic is that?
Keith P This article isn't
Submitted by black pearl on August 17, 2012 - 8:45am.
Keith P
This article isn't nasty. It's brilliant (and funny too).
This is pretty funny stuff, Ma'am.
Submitted by Alan on August 17, 2012 - 9:14am.
Stick to your strengths. Your column is a nice counterpoint to the lineup outside the lingerie store article.
American
Submitted by Tank on August 17, 2012 - 9:48am.
It is an American magazine for Americans, they have no idea there is a north of the border let alone what may exist north of the border. So as far as I am concerned, this magazine probably influenced very few people and the few they DID influence probably are easily led by anyone anyhow anyway. Read more about how to live in the National Enquirer.
Thank you Ms Lowe
Submitted by Shiftless on August 17, 2012 - 10:08am.
Thank you for not adding to the puff and fluff surrounding Helen Gurley Brown's demise. I remember as a young recently married guy, a copy of my wife's Cosmo that had a sex quiz in it, something along the lines of "What He Secretly Wants in the Sack" and thinking I might learn something about female perspectives on male sexuality. Boy was I wrong! Total BS. Plus about every second issue of Cosmo has some sort of sex quiz. They probably have enough back issues to recycle they'd never have to write anything new again, ever.
be grateful
Submitted by spunky1973 on August 17, 2012 - 10:17am.
If it weren't for trailblazing women like HGB, who used the hype of the 60s and women's sexual power to advance the causes of ALL WOMEN, we might very well be baking pies all day while we wait for hubby to come home from work so we can smack a rye & ginger in his hands while he rests up from his hard day at the office.
If it weren't for trailblazing women like HGB, we would be pumping out baby after baby, because we wouldn't have access to birth control options, or sexual health information. Life would feel a lot more like "Hysteria" than it does now.
Lezlie, you may not like the way HGB did it, but she certainly empowered women to be a heck of a lot more than domestic robots. After all, it was her who said: "Don't use men to get what you want in life. Get it for yourself."
But that's it, Spunky: HGB defied convention.
Submitted by shawnino on August 17, 2012 - 11:25am.
Today's writers see everything in black and white Anything that doesn't fit their model gets them angry.
HGB was the most significant feminist of the 20th century. Why? Because she was the first woman to posit that rather than rueing having two X chromosomes, women could have it all and be it all simply by empowering themselves. But girls born after "Sex and the Single Girl" was published in 1962 are conditioned to reject that: so-called-modernists think that to be a feminist you need to hate men, wear plaid, and grow body hair.
It's sad, but that's what it comes to. There's no room in today's world for HGB, who understood that real feminism comes from femininity.
Surprise, Surprise!
Submitted by Common Sense on August 17, 2012 - 11:30am.
I usually skim your opinions Leslie, but you nailed this one - hope this wasn't a fluke.
Such is the hypocrisy of feminism
Submitted by city mouse on August 17, 2012 - 11:22am.
Choice? Apparently, you can choose but only what the feminists tell you to choose. Is empowerment backfiring on the feminists?
pleasing men?
Submitted by LM128 on August 17, 2012 - 1:19pm.
For me the womens movement made it tough on females ,but this is 2012, You can't stop evalution. Like a Scientist wrote awhile ago, male/female discards sexual relations .Gurley Brown was way ahead of her time.