Confession — when I'm down, I gravitate towards a certain magazine that's famous for sex tips that could make you a danger to yourself and others. My personal investigation shows that it’s impossible to stress while reading Cosmopolitan Magazine. If they sold it in academic advising waiting rooms, they’d be clean out in a week.
The magazine, as we know it, has only existed since 1965. Before that, it was a general interest publication that carried work by Upton Sinclair, HG Wells and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. Cosmo was founded in 1886 — the Victorian Era. Their idea of a provocative covergirl would be a woman in leggings and a turtleneck. Short stories? Sure. Sex tips? Not so much.
Cosmo’s transition to the bold and glossy publication we know today would have greater implications than anyone could have expected and you can credit it to one Helen Gurley Brown. This is the petite woman who dragged female sexuality — kicking, screaming and frequently sequined — into the 20th century.
In 1962, at the age of 40, she’d rocked the world with her book, Sex and the Single Girl: the Unmarried Woman’s Guide to Men. This book told women that they could enjoy sex, they could put themselves first, they could sleep whenever with whomever and feel no shame whatsoever.
The response was massive — it was published in 28 countries and stayed on bestseller lists for a year. Brown was flooded with thank-you notes and requests for advice. She figured that a magazine would help her reach all those women at once — and her ticket was Cosmo.
By 1965, TV had killed demand for short fiction and Cosmopolitan Magazine was hemorrhaging money. They took on Brown as the first-ever female editor at the magazine, despite the fact that she had no experience editing. As editor-in-chief, she completely turned Cosmo around. Those bright cover girls eyeing you in the grocery store? Her work.
Sex sells, readership exploded. Female sexuality was impossible to ignore when it was leering at you from the checkout aisle. The 196os sexual revolution igniting at the same time was no coincidence. The narrative until now had been that women’s sexuality was non-existent and sex meant performing for a man. Cosmo validated women’s sex drives, introducing a mainstream narrative about women taking charge of their bodies, work lives and sex.
That said, you probably wouldn’t expect to see her at any rallies. The 1970s saw demonstrations against Brown by radical feminists because while she identified as a feminist, a lot of her work capitalized on women’s insecurities. Single Girl was largely about how to please men and opens with Brown talking about her success despite not being pretty. Her play was to win the game of sexism and make it work for her, rather than dismantling sexism in the first place.
Cosmo is still a personal go-to comfort read. While “Celebrities doing things” isn’t exactly Pulitzer-worthy, Cosmo does boast some actual journalism that frequently gets overlooked because it’s a women’s magazine. Sure, some of their tips are ridiculous, but some of them just read that way because there’s something intimate and strange about reading about sex in the first place. Especially if you’re getting creative, one person’s grapefruit trick is another person’s vacuum cleaner sex.
Maybe Helen Gurley Brown said it best herself, “At any rate, you can still think sex and do business — I’ve been doing it for years!”