During our free periods in high school, my friends and I would often hang out in the library, flipping through the glossy pages of Seventeen and Mademoiselle, Sassy and Cosmopolitan. All of these magazines modeled lifestyles far removed from our actual reality – hardly any of us wore makeup or cared about fashion designers – but it was that very otherness that so intrigued me, these glimpses into other possible lives. Lives that, of course – and especially according to Cosmo – included lots of sex; it was in those pages that I first learned the terms ‘cunnilingus’ and ‘fellatio.’

When I heard that Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan’s influential editor-in-chief, had passed away on August 13, I immediately thought back on all those hours spent paging through Cosmo and its counterparts. In the years since high school, I’ve learned a lot more about the magazine industry, and I can reel off the shortcomings of and criticisms levied at mainstream women’s magazines. Yet it’s impossible to understate just how much of an impact Brown’s work, both as an editor and a writer, had in both the publishing world and among women all over the country. [Read more...]