Monday, August 8, 2016

Helen Gurley Brown

Somehow In browsing through the copious reading material that lay on my reading table I uncovered more than the usual fare of atrocities.  There was the New Yorker story of tribes in the Amazon basin who are being decimated from their contact with Europeans, the LRB account of the Chilicot report summarized by Chilicot himself in an uncompromising speech in London in which he laid out Blair's extraordinary culpability for leading the UK into the Iraq war, and in the New York Times a special section devoted to a sampling of the new novel by Colson Whitehead detailing the sufferings of enslaved Africans trying to escape the antebellum South.  I can just barely get through Holocaust stories, and am completely paralyzed by the complicity of my ancestors, in general rather than particularly so, in the racial brutalities of this country that I started it and set it down for another day.  Then the Book Review described an account of the murderous rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, and I had had it, since of course the news sections of the paper had been filled with news reports of the ongoing trauma of the Middle East.  I set this down to turn to a biography of Helen Gurley Brown of which I had read a review.  Aggressive women, monstres sacrées. the Diana Vreelands of this world, have always fascinated me perhaps because I grew up in a household of a mother whose widowhood in prosperous circumstances made her more active than average in a middle western setting of the thirties, plus I had four sisters who were determined to strike out for independent lives, and then, of course, as any one would be quick to point out I am gay, and hence by definition in the opinion of the world attracted to powerful or seemingly powerful women.  The bio was rather tedious, being overwritten with too much detail, but by judicious skimming I managed to make my way through a great story.  Helen Gurley Brown came from hardscrabble poverty in the rural south to the Beresford on Central Park West. She stayed single into her late thirties, then married David Brown, producer of Jaws among other things, and most important edited for decades Cosmopolitan which she devoted to the protofeminist project of educating women into being aggressive in their pursuit of good sex. Before this women were supposed to stand like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, waiting for the gaze of an erotically transfixed male to take hold of them, and of course lead them to the altar after which lay bed, kitchen, and baby bottle.  Brown taught women to go out and find good sex and forget about marriage, and , very important, also to maintain good friendships with other women.  If marriage arrived, good, if not, then living as a single woman was just fine, so long as the woman in question got laid.  Dress up, have good hair, do your face over, be sexy, and most of all have a good time in bed, think orgasm.  I remember the polite middle class middle western society of the Eisenhower years, and then along came Helen Gurley Brown.  There was Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, others, but no one had the bead on personal feminine freedom which Brown endorsed.  She lived a long time, she was not beautiful, nor particularly glamorous, but she had incredible style, and a powerful message; in one of her books she even described detail by detail how to give the perfect blow job.  Reading the bio made my day.

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