IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN by KAREN KARBO : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW / HELEN GURLEY BROWN

 Subtitled Life Lessons From 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules.

 Mistress Manifesto Book Review:

The 29 Women given attention in this book are the favorites of author Karen Karbo so the list might not be what you'd come up with. What I found interesting was that a couple of the women she calls "Difficult" have been featured here at Mistress Manifesto. Personality wise I don't think all the women she lists and profiles were Difficult, for some of them surely must have been Charming, rather most of these women persevered through difficult times because perhaps in some cases they were trail blazers, doing what used to be called "man's work," or managing to make it in life despite starting out with disadvantages, or noteworthy because they stood for something. Others are simply fascinating or original or gained fame: Josephine Baker, the Black American exotic danger who became all the rage in Paris in the 1920's or Edie Sedgwick, artist Andy Warhol's muse for a year who made 18 films with him, and was an "It" girl, but also a drug addled eccentric who went through a fortune and died of an overdose. I find both Josephine and Edie interesting.

The women who were elected to both author Karne Karbo's panthenon as well as mine, are

CoCo Chanel and Helen Gurley Brown.  I'm also interested in Diana Vreeland and Martha Gellhorn but Martha is one woman I have yet to cover, though her relationship with writer Earnest Hemingway would qualify her as a Mistress of the the Month.

The profiles admit the foibles.  

I've done a lot on CoCo Channel here but not much on Helen Gurley Brown. So to retell her story :

At around forty, Helen was newly married for the first time, had just recently spent a fortune after scrimping and saving for years, on a used luxury car, and was the highest paid woman copy writer in the business.  Her husband, David Brown, who had been in the literary world and became a film producer, suggested she write Sex and the Single Girl. In 1962 it sold two million copies in three weeks and was considered controversial.  (Even if stats said otherwise, people were supposed to wait until married to have sex.)  In it, she suggested the book was supposed to be for women who, like her, did not come from having advantage. It was full of advice.

Helen Gurley Brown's book did get some bad reviews.

She was one of the first authors to go on a book tour and visited 28 cities in 13 weeks. Radio - Television - she got hate as well as fame and the movie rights were purchased by Warner Brothers.

However, besides working hard for years, it was her husband's connections that got her attention when it came to taking over the editorship of Cosmopolitan magazine.

"Helen was 43 when she took over as editor in chief. Her magazine experience was limited to reading them.  She might as well have been entering an operating theater to perform an appendectomy.  Every person on her staff had more experience than she did, including her own secretary.  She had no idea how to manage people, oversee editorial budgets, and translate her vision into magazine-ese. " (Page 145)

"To whatever degree she felt truly terrified or insecure, Helen never abandoned the central organizing principles of her life; to trust her gut and work harder than everyone else. Her gut said, If I care deeply about men, sex, love, money, and looking hot at all times, other women will too. Her premise was simple and answered the hoary old Freudian question" What do women want?" (page 145-146)

So, I do think this is a good book, and because each chapter features a mini bio of a woman, you can always skip the ones you are not drawn to read.  You might, however, discover there is someone you want to know a whole lot more about!

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Book Review  All Rights reserved including Internet and International Rights

You can bring up past posts that mention Helen Gurley Brown using the search feature embedded in this blog.  She wrote more than one book, beginning with Sex And The Single Girl, which at the time it was published in the 1960s was considered outrageous. 

THE COSMOPOLITAN ARTICLE THAT QUOTES ANNA BEY

Cosmopolitan: The Secret Lives of Instagram "It Girls" by Jennifer Savin  

Quoting Anna Bey in 2018; "The men of this world are obsessed with status in the way that the women all want to be with the richest man. The men want to be seen with the most desirable, hard to get women..."

Go to the article to read what else Anna had to say about the her set lifestyle.

NOT PRETTY ENOUGH - HELEN GURLY BROWN - MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

Readers of COSMOPOLITAN magazine, those who remember Helen Gurley Brown as the ultimate career-woman who was editor for many years and those who don't, will be interested in this biography which isn't the one Helen herself would have written.  Helen Gurley Brown (married to David Brown, a film producer), came up the hard way, had a sister and mother to support, and made it to Los Angeles at a time when most women were not career oriented.  Most women of her generation who worked quit when they got married, or when they were married with children.
HGB wrote more than one book in her lifetime.  "Sex and the Single Girl," came before her editorship, and was almost an expose on the fact that yes single women had sex.  It was full of girl-friendly advice. Because of it she was linked with Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Magazine empire in pop culture and overall was not considered a feminist.  (There was but one nude male centerfold in her years at Cosmo and that was of actor Burt Reynolds with his belly button near the staples airbrushed.)  HGB also wrote a couple of fun memoirs of sorts with confessionals such as that she bit her toenails.  No one could accuse this extremely hard working woman, who did marry "late" and never had children, of not having a sense of fun or humor.


According to author Hirshy, HGB often used real life examples in her own books, taking the experiences she had with one man and turning him into a variety of characters for instance, and what makes reading her books and then the "reality," more difficult is that HGB often had many simultaneous sexual relationships going on.  Some of her best women friends found that concerning.


HGB publically acknowledged in interviews that married men have affairs, how dumb could you be to not know that!  She was pro-Choice.  She had been hired and fired or quit dozens of secretarial jobs that included sex before she finally got that editorship when she was near forty years old and her husband helped her get it.


But why the title "Not Pretty Enough?"  On the cover of the book we see a photo of a happy HGB who is wearing fashionable clothing and cosmetics and has big hair to be envied.  Perhaps it's because HGB often referred to herself and women like her as "Mouseburgers."
She /they were not handed any advantages.  They had to self-improve.  This she did. She self improved not only with cosmetics and fashion, but exercise and diet.  She improved her apartment locations and her interiors.  She also improved on her friendships.  Never one to forget poverty or prioritizing her mother and sister, Helen could pinch a penny and was seen taking public buses.  She saved for years to buy her own auto.
What my readers here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot will find most interesting about this book is Helen's affairs.  I'm not going to ruin all that by telling it all.
So get yourself comfortable and crack open the book!


C 2018 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

HELEN GURLEY BROWN PASSED AWAY RECENTLY

HELEN GURLEY BROWN, famous for being the editor of COSMOPOLITAN magazine for many years, passed away recently. The editorial decisions she made for over 30 years informed women that they could be sexual before they married, if they married at all, that they could have not just jobs but careers, and that it was great to be independent and self-supporting.

Helen was famous also for writing SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL, a book that was considered to be a part of the sexual revolution years ago (think early 1960's) when society began to change the expectation that a woman would wait until she was married to have sex.

Our lifestyles have changed a whole lot since then.

Contraception and Abortion are available like they never were in the days when becoming pregnant without marriage could ruin your life. (Unwed women were sent away to maternity homes to have babies and were often forced to give them up for adoption. Abortion was illegal and often unsafe enough to kill a woman. You had to be rich and connected to get the name and address of a doctor who knew what he was doing. Contraception choices were more limited and just for married women, so young unmarried women would fake an engagement when they went to the gynecologist. Most women did not have careers. Even if they went to college, their employment usually ended with their motherhood. Men usually made enough money so that their wives could be stay at home moms. Being a wife and mother were thought to be the great aspiration for any woman.

I wonder, but will never know for sure, if mistresses were more prevalent then than they are now. Helen tried it, with a man she did not love, for a short period of time, and hated it.


(Click on title to get to link!)

DAVID BROWN PASSES AWAY and REALLY I DID PLAN ON MAKING HELEN the MISTRESS OF THE MONTH before we heard

To my readers!

I really did decide early this year that in March 2010 would I honor HELEN GURLEY who married DAVID BROWN and is the renown International Editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Then today, looking to post the book I read all about Helen what did I find? But an article (link above) from March 3, 2010 in which I learned that DAVID BROWN had passed away. Since I believe they had a great marriage, and also one free of cheating on both their parts, they became a famous couple.

I've decided that Helen still gets to be honored.

MISTRESS OF THE MONTH : HELEN GURLEY

Helen Gurley (who was single till she was in her early 40's and long married to David Brown since) self confesses to have chosen mistresshood in her early Hollywood secretary years, and not to her liking. Always she thought of her mother and sister in middle America, who she provided support as her need for more money than she could earn, even with her notoriously penny pinching ways. Helen also confesses to having slept with about as many bosses as she had jobs and changing jobs rapidly till she got a decent one, as a copyeditor.

Mistresshood isn't for everyone, and it's not even for a good mistress forever, in some cases. But we appreciate Helen's honesty about her experience.

Frankly, it's easier to get a woman to admit to an abortion than it is that she was actually KEPT by a man she was unmarried to.

PROCRASTURBATION A New Word

Page 90 of Cosmopolitan Magazine, January 2010

PROCRASTURBATION : The latest sex term to hit the street is slang for deciding to masturbate instead of doing your work.

BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE : HELEN GURLEY BROWN by JENNIFER SCANLON

The book in C 2009 and an Oxford University Press publication... on CAPITALIST BARTER OF SEX FOR MONEY page 170-171

"Browns loyalty to the free market extended beyond the workplace and into the far more intimate arena of sexuality. She viewed women's sexuality in the context of Capitalist exchanges, where those with the money had certain degrees of power and those without tried to negotiate as best they could. For Brown, feminism could improve women's bargaining position, but it would not ultimately take sexuality, any more than it would take 2work, outside of Capitalism's reaches. With Cosmopolitan, Brown would create, market, and further a female sexual marketplace in which both the inequities and the pleasures of a liberated sexuality within Capitalism system would become apparent and open to negotiation. She offered readers articles such as "Never Be Faithful To A Married Man," and "What If?" a piece about what sexual relationships would be like if there was no bartering system in place, "with women trying to get to the highest possible price for their wares (marriage, a continuing annuity) and men working for bargains." The acquisition of sexual freedom for women was, as far as Brown was concerned, tied to the marketplace for better or worse.

"Many critics of Cosmopolitan concluded that Brown's cavalier attitude about women trading sexual favors for dinners or nights out promoted the prostitution of women. Brown herself then fell into line with the most radical of feminists, who were considering the ways in which marriage itself mirrored prostitution. "Many a woman who is married is in a sense a prostitute," she claimed," in that she accepts presents, money, automobiles, country-club memberships, trips to Europe and the good life from a man she can barely tolerate in bed." As for women who accepted things from men they were not married to, Brown wrote, "I feel she's less of a prostitute than the married woman who hates the bed relationship." Brown refused to call her "girl" a prostitute. Her lover was simply, "making her life better," than it was. As Brown saw it, "In a way, we're all prostitute." Helen Gurley Brown's politics was steeped in political and economic understanding of sexuality. steeped in personal observations and experience, and it made many people, including many feminists, uneasy."

Missy here: MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER !

SALON ON HELEN GURLEY BROWN, MISTRESSES, and BOOKS

Link here to the Salon article about the book called BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE which is a biography of Helen Gurley Brown, the author of SEX and THE SINGLE GIRL, and long time (our favorite) editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine. (Yes we've ordered it and will report in) Missy

IT'S (RARELY) ALL ABOUT SEX!

These days, any teenager who can get her hands on a Cosmopolitan Magazine can learn about sex - having and giving pleasure - countless interesting positions. There is so much emphasis on outside appearance and expertise in the bedroom - and so much pressure on young women. But while these things count, when it comes to having and holding any INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP, neither great beauty or great sex (or both great beauty and great sex) can hold a man who is not in love and feels no responsibility towards you.

As a mistress (or mantress - we'll use this term until we can find a better one!) you may remain unmarried (or become his only woman) to your mister because he feels responsibility to his wife and/or children. He may or may not love her or them, or love them in a different way than he loves you. This is why some men only make the break when the children are grown and doing well on their own, which can be a long wait. It's not true that only selfish or irresponsible men turn to other women or that he is "escaping" duty by being with you.

That's why it's a good idea to take a critical look at any relationship you are in. If you are sure that you can make the break when you need to, AND YOU REALLY ARE NOT WAITING for someone to make up their mind to be with you, you may make a great mistress. A great mistress doesn't wait around for a man to commit to her if what she really wants is a marriage. She makes the best of TODAY while keeping an eye to her future...