HGB

Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years. When she began at the magazine, Brown had no editing experience.

Gurley is her maiden name. Long before feminists began promoting the idea of a hyphenated last name, Southern Belles would swap their middle name for their maiden name.

People seem to think editors make sure there are no typos or missed punctuation. They are responsible for that but an editor-in-chief has a much more important function in terms of deciding what to leave in, what to leave out in terms of content.

Framing, branding, point of view, messaging -- the meat of the writing, the substance -- is the purview of the editor-in-chief. 

She was a published book author and I was born the same year she became editor-in-chief at Cosmo, three years after her bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl and the year after that book was made into a movie.

I'm incapable of assessing the enormous impact she had. I am incapable of imagining or understanding life as an American woman prior to those events, prior to my life. 

I used to read the magazine in my teens. I read one or more of her books as a young adult. 

She was married for decades to David Brown, a producer best known for being behind the movie Jaws. I think most people really didn't get the connection there.

She's not a classic beauty. She was 43 when she became editor-in-chief at Cosmo and 37 when she married David Brown. She never had children. She didn't want them.

Her books described herself as a mouseburger. She didn't feel beautiful, smart or impressive. She was born in a tiny town in Arkansas and her father died while she was still a child and her older sister was crippled by polio.

She was pro sex education and advocated for women to get their sexual needs met and pursue careers instead of being sex objects and homemakers.

Clothes were important to her. She said for some event in her small town during the Great Depression you got a new dress for attending that. 

My recollection: David Brown got divorced and a friend of hers introduced them a year afterwards and there was a conversation or explanation before that "He's not ready for you. He's in his dating starlets phase."

She was always impeccably put together but knew she couldn't really compete on looks per se. She said "You should dress pretty for the office."

I have enormous respect for this woman who gets too little recognition. She strongly shaped my views about "women's lib," careers for women, what it means to live well and be successful as a woman and helped instill in me the concept that a woman's sexuality should be for her private pleasure, not the way she pays her bills.

Her statement that you should dress pretty for the office strongly influences what I wish to do here.

Business casual should help you succeed on merit, not via the casting couch. Sexy really has no place in office wear.

Most American women seem incapable of making that distinction between pretty and sexy. It boils down to platonically socially attractive versus sexually attractive.

We don't know the difference because American culture has two role models:

1. Respectable sexually attractive AKA marriageable material.

2. Unrespectably sexually attractive AKA loose woman or sex worker.

America fundamentally lacks the concept that women can dress for a social purpose not involving her sexuality and actively trying to remove that from the equation. 

Our only real option other than the above is basically frigid manhating bitch spinster career woman. Feminists were critical of HGB for promoting the idea that women can want both sex and careers.

They felt that was an immature teenaged sexual fantasy. 

Which they said about a woman who married a Hollywood insider at age 37 after he got over his starlets phase, remained married until death did them part but never had kids.

Many people seem to believe women can have sex because they want children and can have sex to be respectable sex objects (AKA wives) or they can be whores. Helen Gurley Brown is a mind blowing category they can't wrap their brain around.

I'm not asking you to choose between your sexuality and your career. I'm asking you to do like men do and make your sexuality a private matter not for public consumption and not how you get your foot in the door.