Helen Gurley Brown and American Sexual Culture

Extract from a review of new reappraisal of Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl), Bad Girls Go Everywhere by feminist scholar Jennifer Scanlon:

Brown also reshaped—enduringly, single-handedly—the way magazines and television shows for a female audience conceive of their mission and their scope, which encompasses the frankly titillating and the shockingly clinical, and presents them cheek by jowl. When you watch Oprah—or Dr. Phil or the Today show, or almost any successful work of daytime television for women—when you read any mass-market women’s magazine or listen to a call-in radio show for a female audience, you are experiencing the fruits of her innovations. These involved three distinct but related ideas: that American faith in the power of self-improvement as an animating force in individual lives is so complete that—provided the messenger has enough conviction—almost any bond of propriety can be broken in its name; that instruments of mass culture and entertainment are the most expedient means of conveying public-health information, and that they therefore have a moral imperative to do so; and that, where issues of women’s reproductive health and well-being are concerned, the line between a medical explanation and an essentially obscene exploitation can be reduced to nothing at all.

Sex and the Married Man

As an able and energetic manipulator of popular culture Brown probably did have more real influence in the shaping of American sexual culture than the leaders of the Womens Liberation Movement of the time. Mass influence is rarely for the good. But when dealing with the deeply compromised lives of urban American young women it may have been for the better.