Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men by Helen Gurley Brown

Middle East in our time a king seeking a new queen picked a girl our guys considered thirty pounds overweight. In French Equatorial Africa where bulbous bosoms earn few green stamps, the really desirable chicks have plates in their lips. This, like the ancient custom of foot-binding in China, makes the girl feminine and helpless, and she can’t run away. In the case of the dish-lipped lady, she can’t even feed herself.
    Although there is much wailing at the wall among us who do not fit the current masculine ideal of female pulchritude (Joan wishes she’d lived in Pericles’ time when big bulking girls were the rage), fortunately a man’s individual preselection will generally supersede the national favorite. Also, the girl he enjoys in his fantasies may not be the one he woos and weds or even beds. He prefers somebody he can be comfortable with and maybe even feel superior to. Men!
    The Better To Please Him
    Besides a more or less general agreement on the current national best-sellers in female form, certain trappings are often agreed on as girl-enhancing for a particular period. These too differ madly from place to place and time to time, but a smart woman in any culture packages herself to please her particular clientele. This is something you can do, sexy on the inside or not.
    Many of these personal adornments and attitudes are dictates of the haute couture. And oh, how men do scream about fashion! At this writing they’re in a snit over the relaxed waist and low-heeled squared-off shoes. I’m sure they were just as teed-off about powdered wigs, hobble skirts, bee-stung lips and padded shoulders. Or were they? It’s a funny thing. The guy who says, “Honey, I’m sure glad you don’t paint your fingernails or wear all that goo on your mouth or go around in those crazy-looking dresses,” is the guy who, at a party, deposits his wife at the first potted palm to chase the girl with the reddest lips, the shimmeriest fingertips and a crazy dress with no waist at all.
    Obviously these accessories haven’t anything to do with our intrinsic worth as women or our intrinsic sexiness. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times I guess. A sexy woman is sexy regardless of her last year’s permanent wave and round-toed shoes. A good woman, a dear woman, is that to the core.
    Maybe we can compare sex to food. Dover sole is Dover sole and just as nourishing fried in corn oil and served on cracked china. But how much more enticing slathered with toasted almonds and beckoning from Wedgwood.
    The sheer stocking, the twenty-four-inch waist, the smoldering look have nothing to do with successful mating or procreating, but they say to a man, “I’m with it. I have tried to make myself beautiful for you. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble because I think you’re worth it and I like myself. I want you to notice me and want me.”
    What if certain insecure men and women make almost too much of an effort toward sartorial splendor? Is that less attractive than if they said the hell with it and never brushed their teeth or combed their hair?
    Does all this attention to “sexy detail” pay off? I’ll say it does! Here is a true story:
    An ex-roommate of mine was nutty about an executive in her firm. She went absolutely ape the day he started to work there and she launched a campaign to get him. (We never knew why exactly. He had tiny little hands and a tiny little head, and many people thought a tiny little brain. But he was Madge’s sunshine and she wanted him to shine on her alone.) In four weeks she had husked seventeen pounds from her five-foot-two frame to make her large bust really amount to something. She made up her face—never a pretty face—with the infinite care of a Geisha. She plowed every sou into the silkiest, witchiest dresses. And from someplace she got the guts simply to “put on” all the sexy airs she had ever seen a sexy girl wear. She worked like a Trojan to learn and perfect her art. When some guy