The Fight to Decouple Sex From Marriage
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In 1991, as the Supreme Court hearings of Clarence Thomas were turning sexual-harassment allegations into television, Helen Gurley Brown, the editor and muse of Cosmopolitan magazine, was asked whether any of her staffers had been harassed. “I certainly hope so!” she replied.
The sentiment would not have come as a surprise to readers of the book that had, roughly three decades earlier, shot Brown to fame and infamy. Sex and the Single Girl, first published in 1962, is part memoir and part advice manual, offering tips about careers, fashion, beauty, diet, hobbies, self-care, travel, home decorating, and, yes, dating. The book—like its author, both ahead of its time and deeply of it—often reads as resolutely backward. But it is best remembered, today, for one of the arguments it put forward: Sex, as Brown summed it up in her introduction to the book’s 2003 reissue, “is enjoyed by single women who participate not to please a man as may have been the case in olden times but to please themselves.”
Sixty years ago, that was a radical proposition. That it remains an argument at all helps explain why Brown’s book, progress and backlash in one tidy text, continues to resonate. The Supreme Court, very soon, will likely strike down — following the thousand cuts made by state legislatures across the country. Some to criminalize contraception itself. These grim developments threaten to return sex to what it was for so long, for so many: a pleasure that becomes, all too easily, a punishment. They also bring gravity to a new anthology that reconsiders Brown’s complicated classic. , out this week, features 24 essays that take on, among many other timely topics, consent and polyamory and interracial dating and in vitro fertilization and sex as an activity and sex as an identity. The pieces are testaments to the hard-won freedoms of the sexual revolution that Brown both stirred and stymied. But they also read as elegies. They suggest all that is lost when sex is ceded to the state. They warn of what can happen when “the personal is political,” that elemental insight, is remade into a threat.
