Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: Reflections on Helen Gurley Brown

May 29, 2009

Reflections on Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, which enabled her to rise to the editorship-in-chief of Cosmopolitan three years later. She transformed it into Playboy’s twin sister, a guidebook for fun-loving single women. Appropriately enough, the August 1972 centerfold (NSFW) in Playboy showed Linda Summers gazing at the Burt Reynolds centerfold in the April 1972 Cosmo. But Brown had already influenced Playboy’s contents in April 1963, when she became the first female subject of the Playboy Interview.

Brown’s attitude towards the opposite sex is aesthetic, sybaritic, opportunistic, and somewhat mercenary. Yet, as a man, I never feel threatened, belittled, or insulted by anything she says or writes about men. Her unerring candor and her integrity in supporting everyone’s right to pleasure earn my trust and affection.

In her role as the female Hugh Hefner, Brown vindicates evolutionary psychology, which shouldn’t be as controversial as it is among those who accept the epistemological premises of evolution in general. The key is to notice the differences as well as the similarities in the two hedonisms. Whereas Hefner effectively says, “I got laid and so can you,” Brown says, “I married well and so can you.” She fondly remembers the sexual adventures of her single years, but her claim to bragging rights is her happy 50-year marriage to film producer David Brown, her prize catch. It only figures that, as a general tendency, the child-bearing sex will have the stronger inclination to hunt for a good provider.

At The New Yorker, Judith Thurman agrees with Brown biographer Jennifer Scanlon that she deserves acknowledgement as a true feminist. My appreciation of Brown leads me to conclude that “gold digger” is generally an unfair label for a woman in search of a materially generous mate. In such a woman I recognize a kindred spirit, another soul in pursuit of honest pleasure. I’m in no position to judge.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:26 PM

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