One of our heroes, Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, who brought frank conversations about sex to the forefront of the American consciousness, has died at age 90, Hearst Magazines has reported. Her book Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962, encouraged women to seek out their own pleasure.
The Albany Times-Union reports:
In July 1965, Gurley Brown, the woman who famously said, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere,” officially became editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and launched it into publishing history. She was Cosmo’s tireless editor-in-chief, growing the magazine in the 1980s to 300 pages, a third of which were highly lucrative advertisements. Since then, its sales and advertising have risen spectacularly. Today Cosmopolitan is the top-selling young women’s magazines in the world, with 64 international editions and is published in 35 languages and distributed in more than 100 countries. In 1997, Gurley Brown left the flagship magazine to be editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan’s growing international editions.
Here’s what she said about her groundbreaking book: “Before I wrote my book, the thought was that sex was for men and women only caved in to please men. But I wrote what I knew to be true—that sex is pleasurable for both women and men.”
Thank you, Helen, for encouraging women everywhere to indulge in and enjoy sex on their own terms.
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