Bonnie Fuller, editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com and former editor of Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Us Weekly, reflects on the life of Helen Gurley Brown, who passed away yesterday at age 90. Helen Gurley Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl and was the influential editor of Cosmopolitan before Fuller took the helm. She is credited with influencing the sexual revolution and creating the idea of the "Cosmo Girl."
Comments [12]
Encouraging single people to have sex has led to all kinds of social problems. Not a great legacy.
Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl" book was a great influence in my life. The book underlined how to be healthy and recommended the book by Adelle Davis's "Lets Get Well." I had followed its principles ever since.
Nobody seems to remember the context of HGB's time - 1962. You can't imagine this as liberation because you weren't around for earlier oppression.
something of a stylized fantasy. not to be dismissive,but come on, "cosmo"? and, don't blame skinny[anorexic] women,on hetero-men. that's nothing other, than a BS morbid, fashion-centric, gay male fantasy, of what women should look like,when they wear their ridiculous clothes. i see a lot of hefty broads,going out with fit men. how many fat guys, do you see with curvaceous women?
I saw her on the bus in midtown a few times.
I'm all for equal opportunities, women with careers, etc.
I find Cosmo objectifies women to sell magazines. A real disservice to women.
Well this is interesting. I thought the "Cosmo girl" embodied the objectification of women.
If it´s by choice, we should call it "childfree" and not "childless" :)
I first recall hearing HGB's name when she spoke out against condom use for women during the height of the AIDS epidemic, because (paraphrasing) "the push for condoms was designed to inhibit women's choices, freedom, pleasure," etc. As a health care worker of cancer and AIDS patients at the time, and having just received my first female patients, HGB seemed about as in touch as Ronald Reagan on the subject.
She was the first feminist I really knew and read. I bought and read "Having It All" which gave me some direction in the 1980s when society, and certainly my family, was uncertain about women who like their jobs and found their work important and fulfilling. I welcomed the encouragement to like my job at a local bank.
Chris Christie, Ayn Rand, LCWR, Cosmo.
Hard Right! Hard Left! Hard Right! Hard Left!
Beam us out of Kansas mister Scott!
Honestly, I thought that Cosmopolitan magazine was a put-on. You mean it wasn't?
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