Helen Gurley Brown

2,333 words

Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012), longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, was one of the most influential American women of the late twentieth century, although virtually all of this influence was harmful. A native of Arkansas, she graduated from Woodbury Business College in California. Her first professional success came in the advertising business, a fact significant for a proper understanding of her later career. In 1959 she married David Brown, who later became a Hollywood film producer; the marriage lasted until his death more than fifty years later. Ironically, one principal effect of Mrs. Brown’s life’s work was to make it more difficult for the young women who read her magazine and her books to achieve a lasting marriage of their own.

In 1962, already married and nearly forty years old, Helen Gurley Brown published the scandalously-titled advice book Sex and the Single Girl, which remained on the bestseller list for over a year. She is said to have tried to get it banned somewhere as a marketing gimmick, but was unsuccessful. Three years later she was hired to “sex up” a financially struggling literary magazine called Cosmopolitan. She succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, essentially creating the “Cosmo” with which Americans and much of the world are now familiar. She would go on to edit the publication for more than thirty years.

How does a clever woman with a background in advertising go about getting young women to shell out money for a magazine? By promising them it will help them get something they want. Among the most important things every normal young woman wants, of course, is a man. Should we perhaps add a good man? Only if we are clear what we mean by good. Of course, every young woman claims to want a good husband. Her mother and father say the same thing. But the good husband she wants is quite distinct from the one her parents want for her.

The good man the inexperienced young woman imagines is above all exciting. He awakens all sorts of feelings within her by being tall, handsome, rich, successful, and of high status. These feelings of excitement constitute female sexual attraction. They are the product of millennia of evolutionary history during which women who preferred men with these traits were more successful than others at passing on their genes. In the mind of a naïve young woman, therefore, a “good” man is simply equivalent to a sexually attractive man. In a society characterized by socially enforced monogamy, such men tend to be snapped up quickly, usually by exceptionally attractive women, resulting in the eternal female complaint that “all the good men have been taken.”

When such a girl’s parents hope that she will find a “good” man to marry, they mean something else entirely. Older and more experienced, they know that success in marriage does not correlate very well with sexual attractiveness. They know that the quick disappearance of highly attractive men from the marriage market does not mean their daughter cannot achieve success in her marriage and family life. They know that “good” men in the more meaningful sense—men of good character capable of making their wives happy over the long term and of acting as responsible fathers to their children—have not all been taken already, since most such men are not outstandingly attractive. They try to make this clear to their daughter, but have a hard time getting through to her, influenced as she is by hormones and the raw power of sexual attraction.

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The parents have a powerful ally, however, in sheer force of circumstance: the most attractive young men are quickly removed from the marriage market, and eventually even the daughter herself realizes she must resign herself to this reality. She ultimately settles for a boy of about her own level of attractiveness and discovers that he can be lived with after all, provided that both of them do their part to make the marriage work. Soon she becomes a mother and is less concerned about how attractive or unattractive her husband is. Eventually, when her own daughter comes of age, she offers her the same advice that her mother once gave her: “good” men are not the same thing as attractive men. And she experiences the same difficulty communicating this to her daughter that her mother had with her.

All of this seems to have taken us far from the story of Helen Gurley Brown, but it really hasn’t, because Cosmopolitan magazine under her editorship was filled primarily with advice about men. For over thirty years under Brown’s direction, Cosmopolitan advised its hordes of impressionable young readers on how to attract a man, how to keep him interested, how to have sex with him, and sometimes even how to trade him in once a girl grew tired of him.

One traditionally important aspect of this general subject area, however, went almost completely unmentioned: motherhood. And this ought to surprise us, since intimate relations with men have a strong natural tendency to turn young women into mothers. Why didn’t the magazine have any advice for its readers concerning the bearing and raising of children?

One possible clue may be found in the failure of David and Helen Gurley Brown to have children themselves. That, of course, might simply have been an accident. Some unfortunate couples are simply unable to do so, but this does not appear to have been the case with the Browns. Everyone who ever knew the editor of Cosmo agrees that she was actively hostile to motherhood. She did not desire any children of her own, and did not recommend motherhood to other women. The ideal “Cosmo girl” was successful in her professional career and successful with men, but remained unencumbered by children. So any young woman to whom motherhood was an important life goal simply had to look for a different publication.

Furthermore, the first oral contraceptive pill came on the market in 1960, the year after David and Helen tied the knot. While I am unfamiliar with Brown’s intimate medical history, it seems highly probable that her failure to have children was at least in part the result of personal choice. In any case, it is an incontrovertible fact that, while Cosmopolitan under her editorship contained an abundance of material on sexual intimacy with men, it contained virtually nothing about motherhood or the children which are the natural product of such intimacy.

So what did Helen Gurley Brown teach her young readers about men? One approach she might have adopted would have been to give them the same advice loving parents typically offer their daughters. She could have explained to them that good men do not necessarily look like movie stars, while the few men who are outstandingly attractive are not necessarily of good character or able to make a woman happy over the long term. This might have been a real public service on Cosmo’s part, leading a few of its female readers to make better personal choices.

The difficulty is that this is not what young, inexperienced women wish to hear. What they want to be told is that they can get an outstandingly attractive young man and live out all their fantasies. So this is exactly what Brown told them: there is a highly attractive man out there for every young woman who wants one. She was especially keen to emphasize that her advice was not meant only for beauties, but for all young women—a point she supported by frank admission that she herself had never been much of a beauty. Even a mousy little thing no man ever looked at twice, like the young Helen Gurley herself, could beat the odds, overcome all obstacles, and enjoy an exciting love life filled with attractive men. She merely had to do the direct opposite of what all loving mothers tell their daughters: she must ignore every man who is not exceptionally attractive in favor of throwing herself at the most dashing, rich, or successful fellow she could find, deploying all the sexual allure she can muster for him alone.

Mrs. Brown was quite explicit that readers were not to consider such a man’s married status any obstacle, nor spare a thought for his wife: “if she can’t keep him, that’s her problem.” A healthy society would have tarred, feathered, and whipped this woman through the streets, with mothers bringing their daughters out to watch the spectacle as an object lesson. Instead, America made her rich, famous, and a fount of authority for the millions of foolish young women whose minds she corrupted.

With Brown at the helm, Cosmo hammered away at its message of female shamelessness and the direct pursuit of sexual pleasure for its own sake. But as practical advice this cannot work for a simple and obvious arithmetical reason: only a few outstandingly attractive men exist, and a lot of women would like to have them. Accordingly, most women will either fail to get such a man at all or else lose him quickly to some other husband-poaching Cosmo girl. The inevitable result of women following Brown’s advice is a cruel Darwinian mating system in which a few outstandingly attractive men either acquire harems or go from woman to woman in rapid succession. Other men cannot get wives, while women fail to obtain the “commitment” they are after.

So Cosmo’s advice, no matter how assiduously read and put into practice by the magazine’s female readership, will inevitably amount to an exercise in futility for most of them. The particular form of unhappiness it will lead to depends on the individual reader’s circumstances. Some Cosmo girls will simply price themselves out of the market, holding out for a movie star who mysteriously either fails to appear or fails to “commit.” Others may actually succeed in getting hold of a decent man only to grow bored with him—and no Cosmo girl will tolerate boredom in her sex life. Some of this second group will turn to adultery, while others divorce in order to begin the search for another, more exciting man. (According to the strict, traditional understanding of marriage, this too is adultery.) By the time a divorcée returns to the dating and marriage market, however, her sexual allure has usually diminished somewhat, and she may even have a child or two in tow. So if she succeeds in finding a second man at all, he is likely to be less attractive than her first. One of the reasons for lifelong monogamy is precisely to insure women against the inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness which comes with age, but fickle wives fail to perceive this until it is too late.

A few Cosmo readers may actually snag a highly attractive man and learn the hard way that doing so does not necessarily lead to happiness. Only the smallest fraction will actually get an attractive man and live happily ever after, and they probably would have done so without the help of Cosmo’s worthless advice. How, after all, do a few women luck into such a marriage? By having been born physically attractive themselves, stumbling upon an attractive man who just happens to be of good character as well, being free of unrealistic expectations about the marriage relation, and doing their sincere best to carry out the duties it involves. But Cosmo’s advice does nothing to make any of these outcomes more likely. It can neither make its readers more beautiful nor increase the number of unusually attractive men in the world; it promotes exaggerated hopes relating to sex and “relationships,” while teaching its readers nothing about the duties or sacrifice a successful marriage requires. And, as already mentioned, it completely ignores children and motherhood, one of the most important aspects of most marriages. In short, the magazine offers its readers a mere fantasy of wish fulfillment.

At this point, I am going to borrow an argument from the American journalist and man of letters Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945), who formulated it for a very different context. He once reasoned that if you see a thing supposedly devoted to bringing about a certain result X, but which in fact is extremely bad at bringing about that result, instead reliably producing the very different result Y, you might reasonably conclude that Y is its actual purpose.

The purpose of all the advice offered by Cosmo would appear to be to help readers achieve their goals in life. But, as we have just explained, Cosmo’s advice rarely or never accomplishes this purpose. So perhaps this is not, after all, its real purpose.

Yet Cosmo and its endless avalanche of advice for young women has regularly—indeed, spectacularly—achieved another goal quite unrelated to the happiness of its readers. That other goal is selling magazines. As a business enterprise, Cosmo is one of the greatest success stories in the history of American publishing. So it might be reasonable for us to conclude that selling magazines is the real purpose of the advice it offers its readership. This also explains Brown’s repeated insistence that her advice was meant for plain Janes as much as for the beauties—plain Jane’s dollar is as good as Helen of Troy’s, and there are more plain Janes than there are Helens.

In short, Helen Gurley Brown was the farthest thing possible from a loving parent offering sincere advice to a daughter; she had more in common with P. T. Barnum, and operated on his principle that there’s a sucker born every minute. Two generations of young women who attempted to do as she advised them have already ended up lonely and bitter, working often meagerly-paid jobs they find unsatisfying or subsisting on court-ordered child support payments—in either case facing old age alone. And the end is not yet in sight. But these gullible readers succeeded splendidly at making Helen Gurley Brown and the magazine’s publishers rich.