In an essay of epic and varied nastiness in the new Atlantic, Flanagan argues that Brown was no champion of working-class women — she was a champion for home-wreckers. Flanagan quotes Jennifer Scanlon, author of Brown bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere, saying,

As Scanlon aptly notes, Brown "appointed not predatory or non-committal men but married women as the sorry counterpoint to her sexy girls." For the reader with moral qualms? "I'm afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives," Brown announced from the outset of her public life. To Scanlon-whose besotted encomium may constitute Brown's final caress in this vale of tears-the attitude amounts to "she who keeps the man happy keeps the man," a point of view the biographer hails, several times, as being fundamentally "libertarian." By this, she means that when two women bid for a man, no advantage shall be given to the one who might have children with him, or an economic dependency built upon their marriage. There is only the marketplace of feminine wiles, in which a concubine's feigned interest in a man's workday trumps a wife's quiet plea for help around the house, in which young is better than old and new is more exciting than familiar.

Here Flanagan takes the worst kind of antifeminist rhetoric — the kind that speaks of women in terms of quasi-monetary sexual "value" — and makes it run both ways. Now women are "bidding" on men, using their riches — the "concubine" (!?) her youth and "wiles," the wife her children and "economic dependency." Both men and women are reduced here — men, for a change, are commodities, but women are merely sexual pocketbooks competing in an auction. And wiles win out, but not for long.

Flanagan jumps from Brown to John Edwards's paramour Rielle Hunter, a loose woman perhaps influenced by Brown's celebration of single sluttiness (because, of course, adultery was invented in 1962). Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about Hunter, including this:

Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, "Being Is Free," bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards's last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Flanagan (who, as the tabloids say, does not treat Rielle Hunter) knows exactly what Hunter wants, down to the intellectually lightweight cultural references. And she knows she's not going to get it:

Deep within Rielle-this little minx of pleasure and profit-guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman's but breaks just like a little girl's. [...] I don't imagine that Rielle's decision to have her baby (whoever the father) came from a strongly pro-life position, or from a plan to jack some cash out of the ambulance chaser. It came, surely, from the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all, and they might have a home and a child, and (please, God) a husband and father to go with that child.

So, to recap, Helen Gurley Brown made it sound like it was okay to steal someone else's man, but it really isn't, not only because marital commitment should override "wiles," but also because a married man will never leave his wife for you. The wages of sin are ... still being single, a prospect Flanagan seems to abhor. She writes of "the desperate, Blanche DuBois tinsel of [Brown's] new creation-the single girl" and "the possible pitfalls and sorrows of life as a sexually liberated, 'all the time in the world' unmarried woman" in such a way as to leave no doubt that she views Hunter as the ultimate loser in the affair — and to imply that unmarried women in general are really kind of sad.

But it's men who fare the worst in Flanagan's moral reckoning. Amy Benfer of Broadsheet offers a smart roundup of Flanagan's many insults (Brown was "pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash;" the "ladies of the steno pool" include "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin;" anyone who hasn't had a kid is "just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had"), but she doesn't mention Flanagan's implicit denial of male autonomy. Flanagan makes much of Rielle Hunter's pickup line to John Edwards: "you are so hot." She writes,

"You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign-with the personal losses and long separations that come with it-and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. "You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives.

Interestingly, these words were also the subject of an article in last month's Cosmo, about how to keep your man from cheating. Both Brown's former magazine and her modern-day critic act like Hunter made Edwards sleep with her using these simple words. But Rielle Hunter didn't break John Edwards's vows. She didn't cheat on his wife in her hour of need. He did.

Ultimately, Flanagan and Brown make the same mistake: assuming that women can control men. Sex and the Single Girl wasn't all that far off of the seduction manuals George Sodini read, in that both taught readers that fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex could be had through manipulation. Flanagan might not agree with the "fulfilling" part, but like Brown, she seems to see an adulterous affair not as a choice made by both a man and a woman, but as a competition between wife and "concubine." The man is just the prize.

Of course, they're both wrong. Rielle Hunter may not be a good role model, but ultimately the blame for Elizabeth Edwards's pain rests with her husband. Because women — single or married — can't actually control men. Luckily, it's not our responsibility — it's theirs.

Sex And The Married Man [The Atlantic]

Relate: Who You Calling White Trash? [Broadsheet]

Reviewers have been skeptical. Gina Bellafante in the Times pokes fun at "Brown's brand of sex-positive, everyone-in-a-miniskirt feminism" and slyly likens her to Sarah Palin. Judith Thurman in The New Yorker is slightly more charitable, writing, "what has changed since Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl is that women have more roles to play, on a greater stage. She helped-but only modestly-to expand the repertoire."

From a feminist perspective, Brown has a lot of strikes against her. She turned Cosmopolitan into what it is today — the Cosmopolitan Institute of Man-Pleasing, and many of her opinions over the years have been pretty obnoxious. Brown believed women should lie to men in order to flatter them. She once said, "There's enough trouble having a man in your life without saying, 'Look, I didn't have an orgasm last night.'" She thought women should use every possible method to remain attractive, including cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting ("I think you may have to have a tiny touch of anorexia nervosa to maintain an ideal weight"). And, at least when she was younger, she repeatedly and cheerfully suggested that women finance their lifestyles by getting men to give them money.

On the other hand, Brown always championed two things that remain controversial for women: working and being single. Scanlon points out that while Betty Friedan promoted work as an antidote to domestic stagnation for middle-class housewives, Brown spoke to women who had to work — but still believed they could enjoy it. Though her claim that "you can have almost anything, anything you want out of life if you work like a wharf-rat at everything you take on" may seem naive, Brown thought of her own life as proof that a working-class girl without exceptional beauty or a magnetic personality (she repeatedly called herself a "mouseburger") could work her way up to great success — and that this process was the most important process of her life. Work, she said, "can build more self-esteem than any psychiatrist, self-help book or lecture." Work was "a blessing," even for single parents, even for those forced into jobs by dire circumstances. In Cosmo and in her books, Brown repeated that a job, not a man or children, should be the center of a woman's life, and that even the lowliest job could turn into a fulfilling career.

Of course, Brown did think men were important for straight women (although she attempted to include discussions of homosexuality in her books and in Cosmo, her publishers usually quashed these attempts). She just didn't think they needed to marry them. In Sex and the Single Girl, she wrote that the single woman "is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world, and the sharpening looks good." Brown acknowledged that singlehood could produce anxiety — "many's the time I was sure I would die alone in my spinster's bed" — but she argued that it was worth it — "I could never bring myself to marry just to get married. I would have missed a great deal of misery along the way, no doubt, but also a great deal of fun." Most interestingly, Brown didn't think singlehood was exclusively for the young. "A girl of 35, 45 or older shouldn't worry about getting married," she wrote, and in her newspaper column she championed the decision of a sixty-two-year-old woman to "stay friends" with a man rather than marrying him.

Helen Gurley Brown could be intolerant (she told a reporter that married women were "dull and hypocritical") and tone-deaf (she thought that the unattainability of her cover models' beauty made women more comfortable with them), but in a world where women are still made to feel guilty for working and not getting married, some of her views are pretty refreshing. Reading Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a sobering reminder that things really haven't changed that much since Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962. Women still have to apologize for "delaying marriage," for letting their "market value" decline, for having the gall to think they can marry when and if they want, rather than when other people think they should.

In her review of Bad Girls Go Everywhere in this weekend's Washington Post, Naomi Wolf writes, "Brown is a genuinely important figure who pioneered a feminism that championed women as cheerful, self-empowered individualists," but she also says that Brown's "sexier, sassier" version of feminism has triumphed over Friedan's. While one brand of feminism may have triumphed over another, feminism as a whole still has a lot of work to do. Maybe even more now than at the height of second-wave feminism, women need advocates to remind the world that they have value outside of marriage, that far from being depreciating assets they are independent people who get better and stronger the more they struggle. Helen Gurley Brown was far from a perfect advocate, but she spoke for women's independence persistently for a very long time, and she doesn't deserve to be dismissed.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown [Amazon]

Related: Miniskirt Lib [New York Times]
Who Won Feminism? [Washington Post]
Helenism [New Yorker]

According to a new tell-all, Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Hearst bigwigs had long been eager to get the famously thin editor, who took Cosmo from a genteel ladies' mag to the Man-ual we know and love-hate, out of the head chair after her numbers slipped. When they finally forced the issue in '96, it was due to the following:

When asked if sexual harassment existed at Cosmo in the wake of Anita Hill's testimony that Supreme Court pick Clarence Thomas had harassed her for years, Brown cheekily responded: "I certainly hope so. The problem is that we don't have enough men to go around for harassing."

-She referred to Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood, accused by 10 women of making unwanted sexual advances, as "poor old Senator Packwood," and scolded one journo, "My darling, would you please remember that he was one of the congressmen who supported legal abortion. He was one of us, so we have to forgive him for being a jerk."

-She ran a piece titled "Reassuring News About AIDS" reporting that women whose lovers were neither homosexual, bisexual or intravenous drug users faced little risk. Brown said, "We spent such a long time getting sexual equality for women, and just when we're beginning to enjoy ourselves, somebody's got to come along and say sex kills."

Although the sting was lessened by a raft of cards, flowers and checks, it's still got to have been a humiliation for a woman who made her name on a sassiness that eventually spelled her end. Helen Gurley Brown revolutionized women's magazines with a frank, flirty attitude towards female sexuality; the kittenish bachelorette persona made her genuinely progressive positions much easier for the general public to swallow. Yet as the feminist movement progressed and evolved, Cosmopolitan stayed the same — an almost-quaint reminder of early-women's lib that celebrates a nominal "liberation" on very old-fashioned terms, and has become a feminist bete noire.

In today's HuffPo, however, Betsy Perry, a former Cosmo staffer, defends Brown as a strong, warm woman who may have been of an earlier generation but had the sense to know it:

There wasn't a staff member who didn't adore her and while we did question some of her stands on relevant issues, her take on them was always with a twist. Because of my television background, she knew enough to ask me to do some of the tougher talk shows, on subjects where her judgment might be questioned — date rape, AIDS, silicone implants. There was always her side to the story too and try as she would, she just didn't understand why a guy wouldn't take no for an answer....but we pitched in to help out in those sticky times...Helen loves men and she made me love and like them too; she taught us how to get one IF we wanted one. I learned to soften the tough side of me; the art of flirting, deflecting sexual harassment comments with humor, exercising - which she did every day with her little dumb bells, and learning to listen without passing judgment. Fun had come back into my life thanks to her.

"Fun" of course, is the operative word: is it enough? As Perry finishes, as breezily as her mentor might, "Who cares about the incidental boo boos along the way? You'll never find a Cosmo girl who hasn't learned to get what she wants using a few tricks learned between the pages of her bible." But, as a self-styles icon of female empowerment, albeit an early version thereof, did Brown have that luxury? Or, in the age she'd helped usher in, was this kind of irresponsibility unacceptable? And what, ultimately, is her legacy: an open attitude towards sexuality or a bunch of college girls putting rouge on their nipples — or are they the same thing? Helen Gurley Brown, to the end, has held to the gospels of "skinny is God" and while we don't see that Cosmo has changed much in the years since her ouster, it's easy to see why that level of evangelism would be problematic in an increasingly secular society.

HOW COSMO QUEEN GOT BOOTED [New York Post]
A Former Cosmo Girl Defends Her Beloved Mentor Helen Gurley Brown [Huffington Post]

Earlier: Helen Gurley Brown Still Alive & Kicking; Still Hates Her Muffin-Top

"To admit to others that I yearned for a long-term commitment or marriage… sounded regressive as soon as it emerged from my mouth," she writes. "It was atavistic in nature, a throwback to a time when women couldn't financially support themselves. It was a piece of treacherous anathema in the age of strong, independent working women." Ms. Jain came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with her: There was something wrong with the system.

"We are told that it's best to meet friends of friends," Ms. Jain writes. "We all think this is a brilliant idea, until we realize that we've already met all of our friends' friends ... two years ago." She lays the blame on Western culture, specifically the American pride in being the best:

For a decidedly unmystical society that seems to have the answer for everything else — the best medical care, cutting-edge technology, superhighways, and space shuttles — it seems odd that people are left to their own resources, casting around for another lonely soul, for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives.

And honestly? She has a point. In busting the retro ideas of what it means to be a wife, we don't seem to have focused much on love. On the easy, natural bliss that can come from two people connecting in a unique way. Not codependence, not socio-economic symbiosis. Love. Are some people just cut out to be in love? Jain writes:

Why do we have to be "perfectly sound" before we can meet someone? Why can't we be desperately alone and unhappy and become much more balanced or healthy after getting involved with someone? We've all seen this happen with friends — "God, Peter seems so much happier now that he's going out with Jessica. He's not drinking as much."

And so, Ms. Jain made a decision: She'd go to India, where men actually want to get married. "People commonly go to India to find themselves or to find god, but I went to India to find a husband," she writes.

I don't know about the other single gals out there, but I applaud Ms. Jain's conviction and I'm in awe of her unapologetic decision to pursue her dream. Guys who move halfway around the world for a woman are romantic, but some would probably brand Ms. Jain desperate. But we're talking about an important, life-changing decision that affects the very foundation of who you are as a person: How you want to live. And if you don't want to live alone, why not do something about it? While some women excel and being single and are fine with whistling the theme song to the Mary Tyler Moore show and focusing on career or friends, some women want to be in a long-lasting relationship. And if you've ever worked in an office for a few years or had a friendship turn into something more or seen the film Blue Lagoon, you know that just being near someone for a chunk of time can foster loving feelings. So why not go where there's a chance that the feeling is mutual?

Looking For The Perfect Stranger [Salon]