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Trixie’s Whine with Wine, Reading-Optional, Book Club & Social Hour

Tuesday, July 28 @ 7pm   (Right here in the salon)

This month’s book? Bad Girls Go Everywhere by Jennifer Scanlon, a stellar biography of Helen Gurley Brown, the original Cosmo Girl & author of Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 (the foremother of Sex and the City). Like Mad Men? Read this book to get the real story of the times… See you there.

Helen Gurley Brown é uma autora e editora americana.

“Boas meninas vão para o céu. As más vão pra qualquer lugar.” Helen Gurley Brown.

Photo: wikimedia.org

Helen Gurley Brown, the founder of Cosmopolitan magazine, once said “Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.” This, one of her most famous quotes, can be interpreted in different ways -both confirming her beliefs to fans and proving her depravity to critics. 

Brown’s legacy has been analyzed by feminists in the media recently because of the 30-year anniversary of her legendary magazine and a wave of new biographies about the now-octogenerian.  The consensus on her as a feminist icon seem to be split: she encouraged women to be independent, financially and sexually but ushered in a new set of Sex and the City type ideals for women: snagging a rich man, wearing expensive clothes, and dieting dangerously. 

I’ve been trying to find an original copy of Brown’s manifesto, “Sex and the Single Girl” to no avail.  Jezebel and a recent article in The New Yorker have given me a peek into Brown’s mind: she suggesting trolling for a husband in AA meetings in wealthy neighborhoods, keeping the money men give you for cab rides and walking home, and insisting men replace the liquor they drank in your apartment. 

I appreciate Brown giving advice to working-class girls like she once was, young women who were too busy working menial jobs to support their family to march for equal rights.  And she did advise women to work using their mind and not quit once they had a man.  But her constant emphasis on looks, money, and material objects paved the way for the superficial, gold digging stereotype women suffer from today.  Not to mention Cosmopolitan in its current form is mysoginistic and offensive to women of all backgrounds. 

Instead of idolizing Brown as some do, for fueling the sexual revolution, I admire her for her entrepreunial spirit, her endless energy, and marching to the beat of her own drummer (in high heels, of course).

Matt’s in love.

This may seem pretty mundane given that it’s Spring and a young man’s fancy is supposed to turn that way.  But Matt is a first class Explorer.  Traveling man for a lot of his professional life.  Not exactly a bon vivant – too hardworking for that – but not a cocooner by nature.

When the economy was rocking, Matt was an executive in the human capital industry, hitting the bright lights in the big cities with pretty young things and being surprised when nothing evolved into the long term.  He’d lament, and I’d laugh and say, you need a Watchdog.  An Explorer needs the one who’ll make a home base for him (or her), even if those travels are just on the web or in the cerebral cortex.  But Watchdogs don’t go for flashdancing.  They’re more the ‘comfort food’ of the relationship world.

So I asked Matt if he was familiar with the theory of one of the world’s great economic experts who said something like this: when the economy is up, it’s easy to find a great job but harder to find love; when the economy’s down, good jobs are hard to find but love is easy.  He guessed Galbraith.  I laughed.  It’s Helen Gurley Brown, former Cosmopolitan editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl.  (I never actually referred to her as an economist but really, her pronouncement is more accurate than the predictions of the average pedigreed academic.)

Matt put it together pretty quickly and realized how distracting his success was to his goal of finding love.  He also admitted how right I was about who he’d really fit with.  But of course I had all the theory behind Role-Based Assessment at my disposal.

So here’s the moral of the story.  The economy is off and is likely to stay that way for a while.  You might as well look for love.  And don’t restrict yourself to the personal kind either.  (Caveat: Do not confuse love and sex!)

Find people you love.  You’ll know when you’re there because you can work easily with them and feel great about it.

Figure out how to create an organization with them and do something.  It doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something you enjoy doing together.  When the economic smoke clears, you might find yourself with everything you ever wanted – a great job and great love.

Slate’s Laura Shapiro employs some journalistic rope-a-dope and provides the first great “wait for it … wait for it” line of my day:

[Helen Gurley] Brown is 87 now but looks ageless. Or, rather, she looks determined to look ageless. Or, rather—oh, never mind, the truth is she looks like Geriatric Barbie, and somebody should have told her so.

“Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.” –Helen Gurley Brown

Dwight Garner’s review of Jennifer’s Scanlon’s new biography of Helen Gurley Brown got me thinking about the tensions that have always been so prevalent in the feminist movement.  He describes the animosity between Brown and major feminist figures, such as Steinam and Friedan, who saw publications, like Cosmo where Brown was the editor for 32 years, as vehicles for sexist messaging.

While I agree that Cosmo is very often problematic and does represent a great deal of the social norms and expectations that feminists seek to undo, it also strikes me that this woman from a working class background, a woman who had built a successful career with her wits and intellectual ability (and with only a high school diploma!), in many ways represents what feminists are working towards.  Brown was, in fact, working for feminist causes (maybe not all of them, I grant you) in the belly of the beast.  She was making change from within.  

Over the weekend I was talking with my mom about the expectations that women now have about family and career, but also the expectations that society has of women.  She was saying that in her generation, there was no question about whether or not you had kids- you just did- and if someone was going to sacrifice their career for the family, it was always going to be the woman.  As we all know, now it seems that the expectation is that you will have kids and a career and sacrifice nothing, while successfully accomplishing everything.  Obviously, neither of these sets of expectations is fair or right.  So feminist mothers in our generation have responded in three different ways: some opt-in and work full-time while missing time with their kids, other opt-out and decide to stay home, and then others try to play both sides.  In the end, though, very few are completely happy with the decision they made, despite the “choice” they made and often there is tension among the different camps.

But maybe we need to look at it differently.  Maybe the success of the feminist movement thus far is that there have been women like Brown as well as women like Steinam and Friedan.  That we need feminists in all of the different roles, pushing the feminist agenda in different ways.  We may not always agree on our approaches and choices, but in the end we are all pushing the cause forward.

Helen Gurley Brown in 1964.

Helen Gurley Brown was the editor of Cosmo magazine for 32 years. During her tenure she revived the ailing magazine into the “love, sex and money” guide it remains today. Brown injected humor and sex into the pub, most notably proclaiming a woman’s right to good sex.

At the time, her stance was revolutionary, and its effects are far-reaching, even the women’s movement.

Brown’s living legacy (she is still alive) has faltered as women’s equal rights has become more of an assumption than a daily struggle.

Salon has a great piece on Brown’s complicated history – via a review of a new biography on Brown, “Bad Girls Go Everywhere” by Jennifer Scanlon – as to how Brown has gone from being a pioneer to an out-of-touch relic.

Here are some snippets:

As [the author sees it] any young woman claiming entitlement to career opportunities and a satisfying sex life, financial independence and sensational lipstick, abortion rights and a darling apartment, owes a lot to Helen Gurley Brown. The face of feminism today — at least in the hedonistic, individualistic version embraced by many young single women, including some who wouldn’t necessarily call it “feminism” — is more her creation than Friedan’s or Steinem’s.
…
Able to attend no more than a semester of college, she supported her mother and sister in a series of 17 secretarial jobs in the 1940s and ’50s. Finally, she landed a copywriter’s gig at an advertising agency in Los Angeles, a break that partially inspired the story of Peggy Olson on “Mad Men.” By the end of the ’50s, although she became the highest-paid female copywriter on the West Coast, she’d hit what would become known as the glass ceiling. At 35, after having thoroughly enjoyed her single years (albeit, often in the company of other women’s husbands), she decided to marry. At 37, she landed David Brown, a magazine editor turned studio executive. It was only then that she turned to the work that would make her famous: playing guru to America’s unmarried women.
…
[Brown urged her readers] to find gratification and financial independence in work rather than relationships, but she insisted that women had carnal appetites commensurate with men’s and were perfectly entitled to fulfill them, whether or not they were married.
…
Underlying all of the tension between Brown and other feminist leaders was, Scanlon believes, a drumbeat of unacknowledged class prejudice. Friedan and Steinem were graduates of Smith, a Seven Sisters college, and their constituencies, at least initially, were middle-class housewives and college graduates looking for more meaningful lives and work. Brown’s designated readers were secretaries, receptionists and file clerks working to survive and hopeful of getting ahead so they could sample the very luxuries — pretty clothes, cosmetics, sex (and possibly marriage) with generous, professional men — from which Friedan and Steinem had become alienated.
…
“My relevance is that I deal with reality,” Brown said.

The author of this piece, Laura Miller, puts it best when she says, “One of the occupational hazards of the reformer’s life is that when you really succeed at it, eventually people will forget the problem was there to begin with.”

Full article here.

I have just put in my picks for the 2009-2010 Rollo Lawson Not-Quite-Memorial Dead Pool.

OK, I know there are two takes on dead pools. The first, is when one is thoroughly mortified and disgusted that a group of otherwise moral and upstanding people would be morbid enough to pick 10 people they believe will die in the next 12 months.

The other take on dead pools is: “Cool, can I play?”

There are various rules for dead pools. These are ours:

• Pick 10 people, young or old, as points are calculated based on their age at the time of death subtracted from 100.
• On Oscar Night 2010, the DeadPooler with the most points wins.
• All picks should be people of some notoriety and are subject to review.
• Death Row inmates are not eligible for the death pool.

This is all played in jest, as you may be able to pick up on the jocularity by the pool’s official name: “Rollo Lawson Not-Quite-Memorial Dead Pool.” Rollo Lawson, as you will recall, is the character who is Lamont’s best friend on Sanford and Son. The actor who played Rollo – Nathaniel Taylor – showed up one year on a list as “that guy who played Rollo on Sanford and Son.” The pick was so far out of left field that the pool was forever named after him. And since Rollo, a.k.a. Mr. Taylor, is still alive and kicking, it can’t be a true memorial.

Anyway, all of that is neither here nor there. As I am being hounded by the Angel of Death – the pool’s administrator – to get my picks in, I will share with you my picks for the season. And I’ll have you know that RCR is a past champion, having won the inaugural dead pool back in 1998-1999 by scoring a “hit” with Boxcar Willie, the only pick to pass on that year.

The Red Clay Report’s Dead Pool
Picks for 2009-2010 – The Killer B’s

Baker	Bardot	Barker	Barris	Billingsly
Borgnine	Bradbury	Brown	Brubeck	Burgess

Ginger Baker – Cream drummer dies while choking on someone else’s vomit
Brigitte Bardot – Annoying French actress and animal-rights activist will be killed by feral cats
Bob Barker – Annoying American former game show host and animal-rights activist will be killed by feral game show contestants
Chuck Barris – Non-annoying American former game show host killed by an unknown comic
Barbara Billingsley – June on “Leave It to Beaver” finally joins Ward in that great ’50s suburbia in the sky
Ernest Borgnine – Will make an ugly, ugly corpse
Ray Bradbury – Will immediately come back to life
Helen Gurley Brown – Will then write “Death and the Single Girl”
Dave Brubeck – Takes an Extended Five
Bobby Burgess – Having had it up to here with that damn mouse, takes rat poison

So if you are interested, I’m sure the Angel of Death can find a couple of open slots in the game… leave a comment w/an e-mail address and I’ll forward it on…

The old understanding of facial aging was that the skin and muscles of face become stretched and lax so the treatment of choice was to tighten them up. The ideal way to tighten the skin and muscles was to cut out the excess and pull the remainder tighter, in other words, to do a facelift.

We have a much better understanding of facial aging now. We know that the support structures of the face, the bone, muscle and deep fat layers, are shrinking as we age. If you pull the skin tighter over a shrinking framework, you get a smaller and more gaunt-looking face. I always get a picture in my mind of Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, whose face got smaller as she aged.

This article from the Style blog of The Plain Dealer does a really good job of explaining how restoring volume to face does a much better job of making look younger but still look like yourself.

“You don’t want to change your looks,” says Dr. Anthony Griffin, director of the Beverly Hills Cosmetic Surgery Institute. “And actresses and celebrities really don’t want to do that, though some inadvertently have.

“Face-lifts make the face tighter, and when you pull on the skin, it gets flatter. You don’t look like yourself anymore. Some actresses we’ve seen pictures of have had disastrous results.” …

“Face-lifts change the whole ratio and proportions of the facial features, which is why some actresses are hardly recognizable,” Griffin says, who predicts that in 10 or 15 years, face-lifts will be passe and rarely done. 

Using dermal fillers, like Teosyal and Juvederm, and volumizers, like Sculptra, creates a very natural look. My clients tell me they look in the mirror and remember when they used to look like this.

Here is an example of how Sculptra builds up volume around the mouth:

These photos show how restoring volume in the midface (the cheeks below the eyes and above the base of the nose) really restores a younger appearance to the face:

You can look like a more youthful version of yourself without resorting to the knife. Each treatment has advantages and disadvantages but they are both a lot less risky than having surgery.

Neither Teosyal nor Sculptra is permanent but a facelift isn’t permanent either. You generally need to have another facelift about every 10 years.

I’m really excited about the natural results I can achieve with Teosyal and Sculptra, and the longevity of these products. The injection techniques that I use can last for several years.

Dr. Rose Jeans
Advanced Rejuvenation Medical Spa

I saw a very depressing commercial the other day.  A mama polar bear and her baby bear were boogie boarding on a small ice sheet the size of…well a boogie board.  Damn global warming.  It sucked the air out of me to watch the poor bears on pathetically small ice floes and so I figure, hell, I gave money to save the honeybees, I should give some money to save the bears as well.  My cousin is dealing with global warming anxiety in a much different way.  He’s being sent to a therapist, firstly.  Seeing as he’s still a little kid, the therapist told his parents to let it play out.  And so he’s decided to build a boat so he can float on once the waters rise.  It would be just big enough for him and his fancy long-haired dog.  Which might be telling since he obviously has no plans for mami y papi.

My friend walked by a car of two dead guys the other day while eating some bacon from the cafeteria.  She looked at the car and thought to herself now, that looks like a car of dead guys and she was right.  The police took a long time moving these dead guys and even left them in the car and towed them in the car back to the crime lab.  I wonder if they covered them.  The SF Chron online featured a pic of one of the dead guys.  He was just looking right at the camera.  Not creepy at all.

Speaking of creepy, my co-worker handed me a list of creepy women (see my last post).  I don’t think he understood the assignment fully.  Here is the list:

1.  Woman who had 10 abortions.
2.  Woman who had her breasts removed and male genitals surgically attached.
3.  Queen who bathed in the blood of young virgins for youthful skin (Eastern Europe, middle ages)
4.  Gertrude Stein
5.  My ex-girlfriend when she had PMS, a bad day at work, no pot and ran out of Prozac.
6.  The older girl who hit me in the head with a muddy club with nails in it when I was 5 or 6 (no warning – I had several stitches in my ear) – my first encounter with a feminist.
7.  Punk girl, singer in the Mutants (late 1970’s) who put raw liver in her coochi and went to work.
8.  Joan Crawford (“Mommie Dearest“); Anne Sexton (drunk and masturbating in front of her young daughter); Lydia Lunch (used to be with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks)
9.  Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno with respect to suicide of Vincent Foster and the Waco massacre (authorized by Reno).
10.  Lorena Bobbit
11.  Helen Gurley Brown – editor of Cosmopolitan, a “social x-ray”, refers to young womenas mouseburgers.
12. Woman with Munchhausen syndrome (makes her kid sick because she likes the attention and the drama at the hospital)
13.  Big Nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; head prison guard in a woman’s prison in a film I saw (1950’s).
14.  Emily Dickinson – lived alone, liked to go to funerals, called a “lesbian vampire” by Camille Paglia.

It is a very valiant effort demonstrating how well-read he is.  I was asking for creepy qualities, but I suppose some concrete examples can be helpful.  Most of these women aren’t really creepy according to my own highly complex and private definition of creepy.  They sound distressed.  Misunderstood.  Except for maybe that queen who bathed in the blood of virgins. 

My newest hero is that crazy chick who had her beloved pit bull cloned.  Okay, that alone might make you crazy.  I think she sold her house for the money to have this procedure done in Korea.  I half-read a lot of news stories, so this might be all off.  Well, it so happens that this is a lady with a past.  A shady lady.  A lady who, along with some male accomplice, kidnapped some young Mormon missionary in London in the 60s, ties him to a bed, bound his hands with fur-lined handcuffs and forced him to be her dirty little love slave.  Hats off.  Well, you know…she’s also wanted in Tennessee of all places.  She got some 15-year-old kid to break into a house to get money for a fake leg for her beloved horse.  Could you make this story up?  Does she qualify as creepy?  Because if that’s what it takes, count me in. 

Oh yeah…for your viewing pleasure (those who haven’t experienced visual and rhythmic greatness)…I give you…

Scary Victorian Death Pics

Dame Darcy

Crazy Expensive Repro Victorian Ornaments

Playlist

HGB 1
Alleee 1
Pierre Raymonde * The Lover’s Lunge
HGB 2
Ennio Morricone * A Nove Code
Bill Wray * Private School
HGB 3
P. Prilly * Pizzicato Polka
Vic Damone * Wives and Lovers
HGB 4
Luis E. Bacalov * La Supertestimone
Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee * What is this Thing Called Love
HGB 5
Jean Breuzet * Sex Girl
Red Kross * Yesterday Once More
HGB 6
Alan Hawkshaw * Holiday Commercial
The Beverly Hillbillies * Lady Lessons
HGB 7
Janko Nilovic & Dave Sucky * Love on the Moon
Patience & Prudence * Golly Oh Gee
HGB 8
M. Wayne * In a Little Spanish Town
Ennio Morricone * Verushka
HGB 9
Michel Gonet * Moon to Light
Mel Torme * Midnight Swinger
HGB 10
Yann Tregger * The Finch
Le Professeur Choron * La Testiculance
Alleee 2

Download, but with lace and dried flowers.

Weird. Odd. Bizarre.
I read this book because of how “liberating” and “progressive” and “forward-thinking” it allegedly was. Turns out, it wasn’t.

GRANTED, this book was written in 1962, but it was also written by the woman behind Cosmo….

And instead of using a diamond ring and a picket fence as the finish line, Gurley Brown advises women that everything they do should have passed the test “Will this impress/attract/otherwise entrance Men?” She encourages women to work, (sort of) economically support themselves, and become as fiscally responsible and self-reliant as possible…HUZZAH-time right? That’s where the catch comes: in her world, women do not do these things to find self-satisfaction or personal fulfillment– no, women do these things to ensnare more and more men. She encourages women to collect men, to manipulate men, to expect and encourage gift-giving (from men, to women)…. Marriage is a vague background idea, but it’s still there; she’s encouraging a single life for now, but still expects that women will one day be married, and this is just good practice. Have fun, be young, learn the tricks of the trade, and then settle down. There’s still the “and then” that annoys me.
This was like reading something out of a time capsule. It was frustrating, illuminating, and ridiculous, but at least it gave me an opposing viewpoint to consider for awhile

Has anyone else read this one?

“A-ti permite sa te intalnesti cu un barbat nepotrivit seamana foarte tare cu a trai peste posibilitati – ca atunci cand platesti o chirie prea mare, circuli prea des cu taxiul, iei masa in restaurante scumpe sau bei cate 3 pahare de martini.“

(Helen Gurley Brown – Sex and the Single Girl)

I had a conversation with a friend recently when I let slip my secret obsession with Cosmo Magazine. Over the next 30 minutes she berated me for buying the “trashy” magazine and wasting my money on nothing but useless information (mostly advice about the body, sex, and relationships for the career woman). On looking back at the conversation I can’t help but feel bothered by such harsh criticism of a magazine I feel deserves much more credit than it currently receives…. Started over 100 years ago as a family magazine, the publishers revamped the image in the 1960’s, under new editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown, and began to exclusively focus on women. I see the mere existence of the magazine as a flagship of the impact the woman’s movement has had of women in popular culture. At the time of its restructuring, there was nothing more upfront about womanhood and pride in our sex than Cosmo.
So what if the magazine focuses on sex? Men’s magazines have been around for much longer, and yet the same criticisms made about Cosmo are not made about Maxim. I would expect men to complain about the explicit nature of the magazine, but to hear the patronizing comments come from women is really confusing. I was wondering how other people felt about the magazine. I know it has its problems (it may be too “fluffy” at times) but I think overall it is a good read. Thoughts?