Working Girl Wednesdays: "The Nymphomaniac Who Owns a Liquor Store"

Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!

This week’s chapter is entitled “Getting Into the Act—and Out,” covering the mechanics of starting an office affair and, inevitably, extricating oneself from it. If you aren’t a “child worker” (too young to be interested in co-workers) or an “abstainer” (self-explanatory), here are some of HGB’s tips for landing the dream guy in the corner office.

First, keep your expectations in check.

A grown woman should be womanly, warm and wooing, though with finesse. Prostitutes and call girls do get married (and for Pete’s sake nobody is suggesting you be one) while many child-women do not. Prostitutes are used to being with men, are comfortable with men and know how to make men happy. And they don’t demand that all men have exactly the right credentials.

Next, HGB suggests you be open to suitors who aren’t your type.

I’m not saying be nice to small men because it’s philanthropy day…I’m saying you might come across something good. Do pick out an especially nice five-foot-five or under man and say to yourself, “Him heap big man inside…me bring him coffee, him open doors for me, carry heavy files for me, drag chairs across floor for me. Pretty soon him feel nine feet tall. Me have nice man in my life.”

If dropping hankies in his office isn’t your style (remember, I’m not making this up), at least you can put yourself in the proper mindset to land a man:

Don’t fret that you are not the cool, practical beauty who can bring off these liaisons with more equanimity. Give a man a girl who enjoys sex for sex’s sake, without guilt feelings or possessive qualities, and who doesn’t care what he does between-times so long as he sees her every other Thursday, and she’ll quickly become a puzzle to him and a problem to herself. In our society that girl would have to be considered a kook. Her being a completely “sensible” biological creature would be no more desirable to him or “good” for her than her being that mythical ideal girl—the nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store. At least that’s how things stand with us twentieth century ladies right now.

I’ve never been so glad to live in the 21st century!

Next week: Twenty pages of instruction to launch your career as a call girl! Oh, this is going to be good.

Comments

[badgerbag]

Ooo,that one sounds great. I'll come right back at you with a quote or two from Sex and the Single Girl!

Those books are so insane.