Glossed Over

Cougars, Conrad, and Calories: Another Wince-Worthy Cosmopolitan Cover

Dear Cosmopolitan,

Congratulations! Just when I think I couldn’t possibly be more ashamed of spending my cash on your latest issue, you manage to prove me wrong! You know, I see the guy at my newsstand more often than I see most of my friends, so it would be awesome if you could turn down the blatant lechery just a notch so that I could preserve one minuscule shred of dignity.

I’m not going to protest the celeb on your November cover—this time. While I think Lauren Conrad gets way more credit than she merits (a book deal?), I can’t fault her for exploiting every opportunity that’s come her way. Plus she appears to have some life goals other than being photographed at Kitson every day, unlike the squirelly duo of her erstwhile best friend and the friend’s male counterpart, and I’ve already conceded to knowing way more about The Hills than I care to admit in public,  so I’m going to change subjects now.

On to the truly cringe-inducing elements of the November cover:

• “Bad Girl Sex”: Who are we kidding here? The suggestion to turn your body into a naked sushi buffet (that’s not a euphemism) isn’t “bad girl”—it’s just bad.

• “Lose Weight While You Eat”: Sure! I’m so desperate to drop pounds that I’ll believe anything!

•“The Surprising Touch That Whips a Guy on Date #1”: Oh, I get it. Controlling a man with threats of withholding sex is a real achievement. (That might be my age speaking, though. Unlike many of Cosmo’s readers, I’ve been out of high school for a while.)

• “Am I Normal Down There?”: Guess what? Yes! I am, and you are, and so is everyone else! I may not have any formal medical training, but I can say that with certainty, as can anyone who’s ever flipped through an issue of Seventeen.

• “A Cougar Stole My Man”: Because, you know, men are possessions that can just be snatched away! I actually flipped to this article—you know, morbid curiosity—and one of the alleged man-stealing “cougars” is 35. 35! Cosmo, can you get together with the other members of the women’s magazine cabal and get it straight? Am I supposed to think 30 is the new 20 or that 35-year-olds are so wizened they couldn’t possibly attract a man in his twenties?

Anyway, Cosmo, you’ll notice that I still forked over $4.29. You win this round, but I’m ready for a rematch next month.

Love,

Glossed Over

Working Girl Wednesdays: A Retrospective

At last, we’ve wrapped up our journey to the world of working women in 1964. Sure, Sex and the Office was rather ridiculous, but it was also delivered a healthy dose of perspective. Aren’t you glad to live in an era where sexual harassment laws exist and women don’t have to justify working outside the home?

Here’s a brief review of the many lessons Helen Gurley Brown imparted. Hey, you never know when you’ll have a chance to time travel!

• How to love a boss—even if that boss is (gasp!) female! (The advice on how to, ahem, love a boss comes later.)

• Why showing generous amounts of cleavage is a savvy negotiation strategy

• The best way to manage a 16-step makeup regimen—for work

• Why “a retarded beginning” is, in fact, a good thing

• Flattery will get you everywhere

• Guaranteed conversational techniques to land a job without ever discussing your career

• Lunch breaks are so complex they require three whole chapters encompassing food, sex, and even more sex

• Drinking alcohol at work is completely justifiable

• Bilking your company when you travel for business is easy!

• Advanced techniques for convincing men to pay your way

• There’s no excuse for rebuffing a co-worker’s advances

• Apparently, the women of the early 1960s enjoyed a beating

• Five words: “Him heap big man inside”

• How to launch a career as a real working girl

• Why women should thank their husbands for letting them hold a job

• How to pick Jewish people out of a crowd

Next week, Working Girl Wednesdays will morph into…Wintour Wednesdays. I’ll be dishing the juicy details of Anna Wintour’s life, courtesy of Jerry Oppenheimer’s biography Front Row—Anna Wintour: What Lies Beneath the Chic Exterior of Vogue’s Editor in Chief.

Not surprisingly, Wintour’s childhood concerns haven’t changed much. For instance, at age ten, Wintour was told she was a gifted runner who could eventually be an Olympic-level competitor. Her response: “How frightful! What on earth will happen to my legs?”

Next week: is it possible Anna Wintour has never eaten a full meal in the presence of another human being?

Working Girl Wednesdays: "An Abiding Love for Girls Who Work and All the Men Who Protect Them"

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!

Alas, we’ve reached the final chapter of Sex and the Office. Dubbed “The Perils of Little Helen,” it covers the personal experiences that allowed HGB to become an expert on all things work-related. For instance, she once received this bit of advice:

Mr. Paul Ziffren was also smart (he later became head of the Democratic Party in California), and he taught me several very smart things. If you want somebody to think you’re lying, for instance, just tell the truth, he said. They’ll say, “Where were you last night?” You answer, “I was so drunk I had to sleep in the back of my car.” They will then say, “Come on now, where were you really?”

Working as a secretary also taught her to deal with, er, difficult people:

Mr. Winston (which was almost his name) hated Communists, Catholics, ostentation, Roosevelt (even though the man had graciously obliged him by dying), noise of any kind before lunchtime, and Jews. He hated all these things pretty vehemently, but most of all he hated Jews. It was really kind of pathetic, because the poor darling had, incredibly, constructed a motion picture studio with many sound stages right in the heart of Hollywood, not realizing until it was built that the entertainment business was larded with his least favorite people.

…My one big problem in making good was in learning to hate Jews. I couldn’t tell who was Jewish. Mother never told me I was different. In Little Rock where I grew up everybody was too busy with lynchings and all that to get around to Jews… My roommate Barbara, who was half-Jewish, tried to help… “See my eyes,” Barbara would say. “Jewish eyes are sort of big and brown and terribly sad.”… We decided we needed outsiders to practice on, and wherever we went, Barbara would scout Jews and I would study them.

I explained to Mr. W… “My god,” he said. “My God! My own secretary in a hotbed of them! This is what comes from not having you investigated…I just never dreamed the agency would send me a…a…a Jew-lover!”

Because of my first-rate gossip perhaps, or maybe because I was mouse-quiet, Mr. W. decided to save me from the ovens.

The ovens! Ha! Because getting fired is totally comparable to the Holocaust!

Here’s yet another man you’d never want to work for:

Mr. Gross, as it turned out, didn’t put people in jars and snuff out their lights. He shell-shocked them. Though I hadn’t noticed a single gun around the place during my interview, whenever a group of us went to call on Mr. Gross we never knew whether we would be fired on by a short-barrel Luger or a Smith & Wesson revolver. “Got a new gun,” Mr. Gross would announce in the middle of a spring shade presentation. Then he would point it straight at the account executive’s head and fire. We just had to trust that he would continue to use blanks.

And finally, I reached the “About the Author” page, which includes this crucial autobiographical detail:

She is five feet four and a half inches tall, has brown hair and brown eyes, a sultry voice, a twenty-two-inch waist, an abiding love for and faith in single girls, girls who work and all the men who protect them.

Next week: a look back at the wisdom of Sex and the Office and an introduction to our next book. Is there a magazine-related book you’d like to see excerpted here? Let me know in the comments!

Cosmopolitan: The Magazine for Fun, Fearless, Female Food Shoppers

Turns out that magazines haven’t always existed solely for the purpose of selling designer fashions and high-end cosmetics. Just nine years ago, one magazine tried to use its clout to sell dairy products!

Really.

In 1999, Cosmopolitan launched a line of low-fat yogurt and cheese in the UK. Why attach the Cosmo name to food? According to a survey, 65 percent of Britons had used edibles in the bedroom. Cosmo is, obviously, associated with sex. Hence the totally logical conclusion that linking food and sex would be the best way to flog a new range of milk-based products. 

Perhaps the survey didn’t indicate what kinds of foods the Brits were including in their amorous activities. Forgive my naiveté, but is anyone taking a wedge of cheddar into the bedroom?

Apparently not! Within 18 months, the line was deemed a failure.

Cosmopolitan may no longer be pushing food, but one aspect remains consistent: they were pushing expensive stuff. The yogurts, intended to be “sophisticated and aspirational,” were priced higher than competing brands.

Hat tip to my brilliant sister-in-law for the story. Thanks, Caryn! Photo from BrandGym on Flickr.

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Being a Career Girl Kept Me From Visiting a Psychiatrist"

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!

In “Come Back Little Wives, Widows, Divorcees,” HGB finds two working mothers to tell their stories—in their own words, as she dutifully reminds readers more than once. This is Sally, an executive secretary, on whether men should do housework:

Not everybody agrees with me, but I don’t think the husband of a working wife should ever do domestic chores. They rob him of his manliness and diminish his role as master. Carl has never helped with dishes, errands, or marketing, and I’ve never encouraged him to. I’m so grateful he doesn’t object to my working that I feel one way I can repay him is by spoiling him at home—just as he’d be spoiled if I were there all day.

Newspaper editor Christine discusses a lesser-known benefit of working:

As to what the neighbors say about my working, I tell the catty ones who imply I’m neglecting my family that I don’t coffee-klatch, bowl, play bridge or golf. Most women I know spend more time doing those things than I do on the job. There are the “friends,” of course who wait for you to slip—when you say, “I wish I could get to cleaning out the linen closet,” they say, “Well, when mothers go to work in an office…” their voices trailing off as though they’d just mentioned an unmentionable disease. I’ve learned to recognize and discount the signs of jealousy because I have left the kitchen sink and it’s still headquarters for them. I stoically resist mentioning that my being a part-time career girl may just possibly have kept me from visiting their psychiatrists.

Finally, Helen Gurley Brown offers advice to wives looking to enter the workforce. One of her tips:

Don’t be apologetic about being out of your twenties. A man may tell the personnel office to send him a cutiepie with a thirty-eight bust measurement, but he usually settles for less. A woman over thirty-five (age, that is) who is chic and cute and prompt and quiet and energetic can become the love of a businessman’s life.

Next week: a peek at HGB’s “office life”—in her own words!

Lowest Common Denominator: Cosmopolitan, October

“Just enough”: According to the cover, the amount of bitchiness the magazine will instruct readers to deploy

Not a trace: Actual amount of bitchiness in the behavior Cosmo advises

Endless: My irritation that addressing situations in the direct but polite manner recommended would be labeled bitchiness—by a women’s magazine, no less

9: Paragraphs, of 14, in the Kate Hudson cover story “Charismatic Kate” mentioning men or relationships

3: Paragraphs in the same article that refer to her professional endeavors (acting and her new line of beauty products)

4: Pages allotted to “This is What It Means…When Guys Cry,” a guide to divining his true emotions through his body language

1: Number of times in that piece that flat-out asking him about his behavior is suggested

44, 34, 33, and 27: Ages of the “older men” in “We’ve Got a Thing for Older Men,” page 86

$4.29: Cover price of an issue of Cosmo, the amount one reader convinced her boyfriend to spend every month as an “investment that he would benefit from too” (“How I Got Him To…”)

107: Page on which Cosmo found it necessary to illustrate the precise dimensions of a “quarter-size drop” of shampoo with a brightly colored circle

3: Number of “bogus” excuses men use to opt out of sex, as enumerated in “If He Stops Wanting Sex, Something is Wrong”

Very, very small: Likelihood that any magazine would deride women’s reasons for declining sex as “bogus”

71: Items “A Brilliant Way to Save Bucks” suggests purchasing at the dollar store

Infinitesimal: Estimated IQ Cosmo attributes to its readers, since, in addition to the handy quarter graphic, they felt compelled to include the helpful tip that dollar stores are sometimes known as 99-cent stores

4: Pages allotted to an article about a woman who counsels sex offenders for a living

4: Pages allotted to “Be the Smartest, Sexiest Girl in Town,” Candace Bushnell’s tips on work, money, and men

Mere inches: Space devoted to advice from Arianna Huffington, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, and Maureen Dowd; their quotes are scattered throughout the politics-inspired clothing editorial “Winning Fashion”

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Girls Who Faint at the Thought of Being a Call Girl Never Had the Opportunity"

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 chapter is called “Some Girls Get Paid for It.” Indeed! The intrepid Helen Gurley Brown interviewed four such women to get the dirt. Sadly, this chapter is far less salacious than any of the previous chapters. Below, the zenith of the chapter’s raciness:

Sadistic acts—which Barbara, Norma, Colleen and Anita loathed—call for double, triple and quadruple rates. If two girls are engaged by one man, each girl receives her individual fee.

Good to know! Insight abounds in this chapter. For instance, a man explains why some women become call girls:

If I interpret Dr. Greenwald’s findings correctly, only a girl with an unhappy childhood or unfortunate early conditioning would be likely to accept a first paid assignment, let alone tolerate the kind of life a call girl leads…My other procurer said, “A lot of girls who nearly faint dead at the thought of somebody’s being a call girl never had the opportunity, you see. If they’d been real lookers and somebody kept offering them a hundred dollars to do what they’re already doing free, who knows how long they’d have held out?”

On the variety of women who choose such a profession:

As to the varieties of call girls, there are all kinds—peppermint, fudge ripple, butter pecan. Some call girls are gypsies—no more able to keep appointments and be a success at call-girling than they are at anything else. Some are shrewd and efficient business women. A friend in the public relations division of an ad agency told me he nearly keeled over the other day when a pro got in to see him by presenting a fake business card. Once inside his office door, she briskly announced that she was a call girl and would like to help him in any way she could with clients. If he was thinking in terms of banquets or large meetings, there were many more like her she could recruit, she said. Phil just listened and let her do most of the talking. It’s so rare that somebody comes in off the street and offers to lift burdens from a busy man’s shoulders that I think he was genuinely touched.

And why prostitutes are like macaroni:

This is a business situation in which a call girl might be introduced: One food-store chain in a city does most of the business. One man in the chain places most of the orders. How is he going to decide which macaroni to give extra shelf space to and possibly promote when all macaroni is good—and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all? If the chain-store buyer should say to a macaroni salesman, “Joe, you must know some swinging girls,” the salesman might not be inclined to spit in his eye. (Listen, I don’t mean to pick on macaroni. I’m just using it as an example. The salesman of any product that looks, acts, tastes, smells and feels a great deal like the competitor’s could find himself considering the “intrinsic” advantages of calling in a call girl.)

Next week, HGB offers words of wisdom for the wives and widows forced to work!

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.

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Women Like Bruises, Even Non-Cuckoo Women"

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!

Today’s chapter, “Three Little Bedtime Stories,” lets three different acolytes of Sex and the Office tell their sordid tales—in their own words!

From a woman who had a four-year dalliance with a married coworker who lived on the opposite coast:

If a man in your company is single, of course, you find out everything you can about him if you have to hire Pinkerton. If he’s married, you don’t go quite so all out. Perhaps Steve decided to ask me out because I had made some improvements since we first met. My psychoanalysis was all finished, I dressed and looked better at thirty-six than I had in my twenties, and I had a good female body.

From a 24-year-old secretary who had an “arrangement” with her boss:

People to whom this sort of thing never happens are usually horrified by the idea. It just isn’t that horrible if you like the man. It’s sexy to try on lingerie knowing that someone you like very much is going to see you in it. Maybe it’s even a little sexier knowing that somebody is going to pay for the lingerie…I’m sure he liked the fact that I was his quiet, sweet, efficient, demure little secretary at work and the rest of the time an adored and expensive courtesan.

And from a woman who took up with her company’s efficiency consultant:

He beat me—only across the buttocks—with perhaps ten more strokes, not terribly hard. It wasn’t wildly painful, but it did hurt. Then he stopped and made love to me, and that was great…The welts on my backside healed—after turning blue-black, then purple, then green, then yellow-chartreuse. I used to look at them fascinated. They were pretty exotic. Women like bruises, I think, even non-cuckoo women. I’ve known two girls who came to the office with black eyes (I don’t know what from), and I always got the feeling they were a little proud. Maybe bruises make a woman feel feminine and helpless. [Emphasis mine, for reasons that should be obvious]

Next week: a chapter that, at first glance, seems totally inscrutable. So here’s an exemplar sentence chosen totally at random: “Suppose you do like men, you are not a child-woman.”

Working Girl Wednesdays: "She's Not Really That Insulted by His Desire for Her"

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!

Ready to spend eight hours a day seducing your co-workers? In Chapter 13, “The Office Affair,” Helen Gurley Brown argues that interoffice romance is the natural order of things.

Would girls in offices stay more cold-cream pure if men didn’t tempt them? My friend Charlotte, a wow of a pretty working girl, says, “I don’t believe for one moment that girls in offices are poor little grasshoppers who are preyed on by those mean old praying mantises. A girl can say no. Just plain no.”

…Girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man’s physical interest in them seem to me a little phony too. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It’s there and God gave it to us. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants us “that way” is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.

Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it’s my opinion she’s not really that insulted by his desire for her. Unless he is a real monster with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead and long green hair all over his back, I think she will remember most propositions not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.

Well, not everybody gives in to these apparently genetic urges:

One girl I know stops short of having an affair—not until she’s married, no siree—but has a trusty office friend who every few weeks squeezes the daylights out of her. Old Mike covers over to her apartment, they have a chicken sandwich, they tussle, she fights like a Zulu and nothing happens. But the physical struggle “gets a lot of it out of my system,” she says. I haven’t talked to this girl in months but I do keep tabs on the strangulations and ax murders in her city. Old Mike could lose his temper.

Next week, three true tales of daring women who had dalliances with co-workers!