The first time I laid eyes on Helen Gurley Brown, she was already a fairly wretched sight. She was a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. If memory serves, it was the mid-1980s.
As a teenager watching TV, Brown presented one of those instances of cultural disjuncture that we’ve all experienced. It was obvious that everyone knew who she was, that she had been really important at some point, but the reasons were not readily obvious to me. She wasn’t a politician, an entertainer, or a religious leader.
Who exactly was this woman, I thought to myself. They mentioned something about her editing Cosmopolitan, but that didn’t explain much. Since when did the editors of pop culture magazines make appearances on The Tonight Show?
Brown was, to my teenage sensibilities, quite old. In retrospect she had drifted from late-middle age into seniority, and was doing her damndest to hide it. She was quite flirtatious, and overly sassy. It seemed contrived. She wore an ungodly amount of makeup. She was far too skinny. Even then her conversation struck me as shallow. And yet Carson was according her serious respect.
She had been someone important once. Why, exactly, I could not say, but it seemed she was desperately trying to hold onto it, and it seemed that Johnny was trying to help her hold onto it, partially because he didn’t want to embarrass her, but also because the glint in his eyes said he liked that she’d once had it, whatever it was.
I’m forty-four years old. I now realize that what Helen Gurley Brown was trying to hold onto was her sexuality. I knew that back then, but it didn’t make any sense to my teenage mind. I figured there had to be more.
The recent New York Times obituary of Brown said:
Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles.
There’s really not much of a debate as far as I’m concerned. Helen Gurley Brown was not a feminist. Rather, she co-opted the word after it became fashionable, and wore it like protective armor against the criticism leveled at her as she used Cosmopolitan to advance her career, as well as 
But why the confusion? Why the debate?
I think it lies in the timing.
Nearly all of the obits on Brown have mentioned that the bestselling book that launched her career, Sex and the Single Girl, was published a year before an actual seminal, feminist book: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As if arriving a few months earlier put Brown at the cutting edge of feminism, or at least the coincidence of that timing granted her some feminist credentials.
But to understand the significance of that timing, one must look deeper.
Both books emerged near the end of the socially repressive post-WWII era. From roughly 1948-1963, popular American culture defined womanhood in highly restrictive terms. In the middle class ideal, women were banished to the domestic sphere as wives and mothers. They were also highly sexualized, while at the same time being told that they should only ever have sex with one person throughout their entire life: their husband.
Brown rebelled against the restrictive female sexual morés of this era. Friedan rebelled against the suffocating domestic cage.
Both were talented and skilled writers. However, there has never been any doubt about who was the more serious and important thinker.
Friedan, who had given up graduate studies at Berkeley to get married and bear and raise children, critiqued the social, cultural, and economic repression of women that kept them dependent an
Brown gave semi-satirical advice on how to conduct an affair with a married man.
Yet in 1962, when Sex and the Single Girl was published, Brown was indeed important. She was in fact rebelling against society’s repression of women. But whereas Friedan helped start an entire social movement that has dramatically changed society and removed many barriers from women’s paths, Brown merely clung to her sassiness, continuing to peddle her own and other women’s sexuality as long as she could.
Betty Friedan was a revolutionary. Helen Gurley Brown was a rebel. They’re not the same thing. Friedan started a revolution. Brown ended up holding it back.
Brown did not keep up with the times. Even after the pill, the sexual revolution, and yes, Friedan’s feminist movement had rendered Brown’s messages embarrassingly outdated, she kept on.
Lose weight to catch a man. Hold onto him by learning how to make him come harder.
That’s what I was bearing witness to on The Tonight Show some thirty years ago. An aging Helen Gurley Brown doing what she always did, and host Johnny Carson, who was of the same generation, according her the respect of playing along because he knew how important her message had once been.