Glossed Over

The 20 Life-Changing Lessons in September's Cosmopolitan

Until I read this month’s issue, I thought Cosmopolitan was like the TSA: a mostly pointless institution that nonetheless will never go away.    

It takes a big person to admit they were wrong. So, I’m just going to come out and say it: I’m a big person. The September issue was full of top-notch journalistic insight and information that will undoubtedly change my life—and yours, too!

Here are the top twenty things I gleaned from those precious 262 pages:

1.    “Hoo-ha” an acceptable word to print on a magazine cover. But is it better than “va-jay-jay”?

2.    Cosmo’s reporters doggedly pursue their subjects in a quest for truth. For instance: After a showdown that must have rivaled the Frost-Nixon interviews in tension, actress Kristen Bell finally admitted that—ready?—she eats no salad dressing except Bob’s Big Boy bleu cheese. Scandalous!

3.    Interacting with a male in the wrong way can have disastrous consequences. That’s why “Grab His Butt Like This” so painstakingly described four different ways of, well, grabbing a man’s butt. The stakes are high!

4.    At last, there is a cure for the dreaded football addiction that strikes so many men. And about time, too, because there’s no way we would enjoy watching football with them! (“The Guy Report,” page 76)

5.    The Rolling Stones are relevant in 2009, because a $44 Stones logo tee is a must for fall. Guess my New Pornographers t-shirt needs to hang unworn in the closet until I’m eligible for Social Security. (“8 Must-Have Items,” page 83)

6.    It’s possible to be “ballsy” and have a hoo-ha, and the best way to demonstrate that is by pairing socks with high-heeled sandals! Could this be the fourth wave of feminism? (“Ballsy Looks to Try Now,” page 86)

7.    Someone at Cosmo thinks “brond” is a word meaning a mix of blond and brunette hair. And I’d pegged “shootie” as this year’s ubiquitous portmanteau!

8.    Camilla Belle is more well-known than I thought. Cosmo surveyed 100 men to find out which shade of lipstick they prefer on her, and none of the responses were “Who’s Camilla Belle?”

9.    Actress Anna Faris is “ballsy,” just like socks and sandals! Good for her! She even has a hoo-ha. (“Fun Fearless Female,” page 120)

10.    Cosmo girls aren’t concerned with a man’s looks. That’s why the magazine devised a “Stud Meter” to inform readers of famous men’s physical charms. Among the findings: Ryan Reynolds and Chace Crawford are more attractive than a cross-dressing Mariah Carey or Coolio. Yes, Coolio. If the Stones are relevant now, his time is coming!

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!

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!

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: "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!

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Don't Reach for the Check with Your Limp Little Arm"

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!

Whether you’re looking to steal from your employer for fun, profit, or revenge, Helen Gurley Brown has some advice for you! But first, some scolding:

If you don’t overreach a little bit, you are probably a silly and a sucker—yet stealing is stealing. If you say that the lunch cost ten-seventy-five when it actually cost five-fifty you are lying, and lying is bad for you. When you operate like a South American dictator, it hurts inside, and that takes some of the fun out of it. Yes it does!...(Never mind what the company can live with. They can live with just about anything, I’ve decided. They’re miserable paranoids about raises and indulgent sugar daddies about expenses.)

Speaking of expenses:

In taking a man to lunch, I suggest you not reach for the check with your limp little arm in his presence—unless you never had any intention of paying. Even if he’s deserving, there’s just hardly a man alive who feels comfortable while a lady hassles with money or even hassles the check.

Next week: The advice about paying for lunch might come in handy. HGB tackles “what happens when lightning strikes”—the office affair!

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Get Ready to Be Asked If You've Had Dinner"

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!

“The Wide, Wild, Wicked World” is waiting, and HGB is there to help with this chapter devoted to business travel. In 29 pages, she covers everything a working woman needs to know—from picking up a man on the plane to scamming your employer on the expense reports. In fact, about the only thing she doesn’t cover is the actual conducting of business. But who cares? It’s better to spend your energy sneaking past airline staff with wig boxes and other travel essentials.

I’ve got plenty on my conscience and not the least is having put everything heavy for years—pressing iron, camera, walking shoes—into a make-up case and then hiding the make-up case behind a post. After checking in, I would saunter to the post, pick up the case and tote it onto the plane unweighed. Last year I ran into a little trouble. Some ticket checker with eyes in the side of her head let me get all checked in, then said sweetly, “And now, Mrs. Brown, would you like to get your make-up bag and weigh it in?” I got the bag, of course, mumbling that I weighed only a hundred and nine pounds and felt perhaps I was entitled to a few pounds since most travelers started at about one-sixty…

Once you arrive at the hotel, she recommends approaching a handsome fellow traveler.

A dream walking lives two doors away on your floor. Wait until you know he is in his room, then put on your hat and coat, grab your purse, march right down to his room and ram your key in his door. He will come out irritated and sputtering “What’s going on here?” Compare his room number with the key in your hand and say, “Oh, good heavens, how stupid of me.” Then get ready to be asked if you’ve had dinner.

Next week: The dirt on employer-funded graft. Get set for a lecture, though; HGB warns that “[operating] like a South American dictator…hurts inside”!

Working Girl Wednesdays: "Stow a Pint of Vodka for Emergency Gimlets"

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!

Chapter 10, “The Office Party (and Other Pleasures),” suggests throwing elaborate teas and birthday celebrations during the workday. Just don’t allow such events to cut into your two-hour lunchtime assignation!

In this excerpt, Helen Gurley Brown weighs in on the wisdom of stocking up on party essentials.

Should you or shouldn’t you keep a bottle in your desk drawer? Oh come on, you’re a big girl! If you’re a secretary, you should not. As a minor executive I think you can. When I reached that level I stowed a pint of vodka and Rose’s lime juice for emergency gimlets. In the ad agencies where I worked there seemed to be about as much work from five to nine as there was from nine to five. (Many art directors are night people.) I wasn’t much of a drinker, but it just seemed friendly to have a small private stock.

Naturally a lady doesn’t hoist her bottle and guzzle away like one of the boys, but if one of the boys has run out of his own J&B, you produce yours. (Doesn’t a mother run for the snake-bite remedy or mustard poultices when her boy is bitten or ailing?)

Next week: How to “operate, prowl, chat with and check out the men” in a foreign city—all while on the clock!

Working Girl Wednesdays: "The Biggest and Best Reason to Stop a Midday Affair"

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, I swear, is the final chapter about lunch, except it’s not really about lunch. It’s about using your midday break to have illicit relations! Here is HGB’s advice on how to have time for a noontime romp and still grab a sandwich:

Possibly you have a job which allows you only an hour for lunch. This schedule makes THE MATINEE pretty difficult unless you live next door to the office. You might, if you have a nice boss and resort to this ruse infrequently enough, develop a chronic intestinal ailment and have to visit your doctor. Generally, bosses can be pretty nice about doctor’s appointments.

HGB explains that “matinees” are best for sleeping with men who are married and thus can’t be seen with you in public. Charming! Of course, these kinds of indiscretions can’t go on forever.

The biggest and best reason to stop a midday affair is to keep yourself or your friend from suffering. As soon as you find yourself thinking about him when you’re not with him—or dreaming about the state of being Mrs. Matinee instead of his luncheon pal—you’d probably better admit your Matinee is turning into the Big Affair. Run for the train! You can be honest. You won’t need to trump up any other excuse than that you’re falling. He’s a fair guy, and he’ll understand.

Aw, how sweet of a guy to understand why you no longer want to entertain him on your lunch hour.

Next week, HGB explains “what else you can do on a coffee break.” Three guesses.

Working Girl Wednesdays: “Cluck-Clucking with Strange Dreamboats”

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!

Educational! Apparently, in the sixties when this book was written, employers granted lunch breaks. I can only surmise that the midday meal was an important part of the work day, since there are three—yes, three—chapters devoted to lunch. Here’s a tip from “Lunchland I: Lunch with the Girls”:

On certain fiendish days you and your girl friends need to be soothed by icy martinis, of course, and waited on hand and foot for morale purposes. In that case go to the restaurant, but make it a good one while you’re at it—for man-reasons as well as moral reasons. And take one—not five—dashing girlfriends with you. You may find the foyer so crowded you’ll get to cluck-clucking with strange dreamboats about the service. You may get seated in an alcove next to some of them or one may drop his overcoat on you in passing. Anything can happen, but not with five other girls.

If you opt to dine at your desk, should you imbibe? Why, yes!

You may work in an office where consumption of an alcoholic beverage is strictly forbidden, at least on the premises. (No telling how many Manhattans and Gibsons are brought into the office in people containers after lunch.)…

Should any of your co-workers discover your fine, boozy secret and giggle it up, smile sweetly and say, “I like a glass of wine with my lunch. It is a very civilized custom.”

A younger girl might explain, “We’ve always had wine with meals at home. Daddy knew how good for us it is.”

Next week: how to have “sex at high noon”!