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

called her on the phone, her other roommate and I used to shut ourselves up in the kitchen where the syrup at least had passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. You wouldn’t believe a man could absorb so much sugar!
    It was the most amazing metamorphosis I have ever seen. And her other roommate, now living in New York, would swear to this too. She went sexy to the last detail. When we sent her off to work in the morning, cleavage cleaving, perfume wafting therefrom, we feared for the sanity of the men in the office, to say nothing of the work load.
    And did Madge get her man? No. Not ever. She just wasn’t for him, I guess. But she had other guys dropping like yellow-fever victims. Perhaps because she thought she was only interested in one particular man, to others her sexiness had a kind of maddening insouciance about it. Anyhow it felled them.
    Madge married within the year. It was inevitable. And I’m sure she forgot old pinhead. But this was a case of a mouse (big bosoms to the contrary notwithstanding) wanting to be sexy … willing it. She never had it but she got it … by adopting sexy attitudes and trappings.
    How To Be Sexy
    Outside of some mildly eccentric fellows who are sexually aroused only by girls who wear hobnail boots and paperclip necklaces (old pinhead may have been one of them), or union suits plastered with chicken feathers, I think we can nearly all agree on what attitudes and accessories are sexy—and what aren’t—in our time. Bear in mind you are sure to know a girl who does all the don’ts and none of the do’s and has more beaux than a Greyhound bus can load, as well as other girls who do the do’s and don’t the don’ts and whose loneliness is heart-rending!
    Clean hair is sexy. Lots of hair is sexy too.
    Skimpy little hair styles and hair under your arms, on your legs and around your nipples, isn’t.
    Lovely lingerie is sexy. Carol’s beautiful half slips (she has them in ten colors) always peek-a-boo a bit beneath her short sheath skirts when she sits down. Paula wears creamy beige silk shirts, not thin enough to see her bra straps or elastic through, but thin enough to show the tracery of lace bra cups. Both girls are perfect ladies with a sexth sense about clothes!
    Girdles are not sexy. I know they are a necessary retaining wall against wavy buttocks but they are not magnetic.
    Not sexy either are: food particles between your teeth, baggy stockings, bitten fingernails, borrowing money (very unsexy), flesh not secured firmly to the bone, and jitters (the dart-around, jerk-about kind that makes people feel sandpapered !)
    Being able to sit very still is sexy.
    Smiles are sexy.
    It is unsexy to talk about members of your family and how cute or how awful they are. Or about your boss a lot—he’s another man … a rival.
    Talking all the time about anything is unsexy. Sphinxes and Mona Lisas knew what they were doing!
    Gossip—surprise, surprise—is not unsexy! How can you not discuss your friends when they are the most fascinating creatures on earth? Try not to say anything you promised you wouldn’t; and gossip, don’t lampoon. Be just a teensy bit careful too about saying anything derogatory of a girl your guy has been dating.
    Being seen without your make-up by somebody who always sees you in it can be sexy provided it isn’t in public and your hair is shiny bright. A friend of mine who visited Marlene Dietrich in her Hollywood Chateau Marmont apartment on business said he couldn’t remember what he was there for. Marlene was the absolute end in a black hostess thing and schoolgirl-scrubbed face.
    Being seen in bed is sexy—I mean times when you have no intention of letting anybody get in with you. A man once told me his secretary, a rather nondescript little creature, had stayed overnight at his house after they worked late. His wife was present all evening. The next morning when he went to her room to wake her (his wife slept late), he also awakened an almost uncontrollable