[debeguiled]

The editor of Cosmo during the 60's and on to 1997 is an interesting story. What she did during the sixties was, in its day, as degenerate as what is happening now to the magazine, so if you take that into account, what we are seeing here is continuity and not aberration.

Before she became editor of Cosmo, she wrote a book, in 1962 for god's sake, well before the sexual revolution was mainstream, called:

Wikipedia entry: Sex and the Single Girl

Quote:

Sex and the Single Girl is a 1962 non-fiction book by American writer Helen Gurley Brown, written as an advice book that encouraged women to become financially independent and experience sexual relationships before or without marriage. The book sold two million copies in three weeks,[1] was sold in 35 countries[2] and has made the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Time bestseller lists.

This is kind of chilling to read, and reminds me of patient zero of the AIDs epidemic, that gay flight attendant, fucking everything in sight, hopping on a plane, and then doing it all again on another continent.

Cosmo was the internet for young woman from the 60's well into the 90's. IT was where they went for information about how to transition from being a teen to an adult.

So then she goes on to become the editor of Cosmo, and how is this for an inception story:

Wikipedia Entry: Cosmopolitan Magazine

Starts as a family magazine:

Quote:

Cosmopolitan began as a family magazine, launched in 1886 by Schlicht & Field of New York as The Cosmopolitan.[4]

Paul Schlicht told his first-issue readers on the inside of the front cover that his publication was a "first-class family magazine", adding, "There will be a department devoted exclusively to the concerns of women, with articles on fashions, on household decoration, on cooking, and the care and management of children, etc. There was also a department for the younger members of the family."[5]

Later becomes a literary magazine:

Quote:

Other contributors during this period included O. Henry,[10] A. J. Cronin, Alfred Henry Lewis, Bruno Lessing, Sinclair Lewis, O. O. McIntyre, David Graham Phillips, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell. Jack London's novella, "The Red One", was published in the October 1918 issue[11] (two years after London's death[12]), and a constant presence from 1910–18 was Arthur B. Reeve, with 82 stories featuring Craig Kennedy, the "scientific detective". Magazine illustrators included Francis Attwood, Dean Cornwell, Harrison Fisher, and James Montgomery Flagg.[citation needed]

Quote:

With a circulation of 1,700,000 in the 1930s, Cosmopolitan had an advertising income of $5,000,000. Emphasizing fiction in the 1940s, it was subtitled The Four-Book Magazine since the first section had one novelette, six or eight short stories, two serials, six to eight articles and eight or nine special features, while the other three sections featured two novels and a digest of current non-fiction books. During World War II, sales peaked at 2,000,000.[citation needed]

Oh well, there is plenty more at that link.

A perfect example of how little by little degeneration pushes the limits just a bit at a time until you get a cover featuring a hog that Kona would be proud to roast at a Luau.

The only positive you can say about the editor Brown is that she can be used to counter all the glass ceiling people, because she just went and did it without whining, using her feminine strengths to get what she wanted.

I have read accounts that she had her office done up in a hyper feminine style, with frills and doilies and fragile looking furniture that made visiting businessmen uncomfortable, worried that they might break the chair they were sitting in, and willing to agree to deals quickly just to get the hell out of there.

If you are going to be a female business leader, that is how you do it, not demand quotas of female CEOs. Play to your own strengths instead of acting scared of offices with big desks and dark wood paneling.

Still, it is hard to chart the damage she has done to the world view of several generations of women.

I also heard Demi Moore on a talk show, many years later, describe a meeting with Brown who was by that time a desiccated birdlike crone, when she walked into Brown's office, Brown looked her up and down, and said, my, you look. . . .healthy.

The interviewer asked her if it intimidated her and she said no, but she had to give the old lady credit for coming up with a new way of calling someone fat.

Even in her old age, she was swinging for the bleachers, going after the one thing she had over Moore, skinniness.

Too bad all of that intelligence and energy was used to drag the girls down.