Now, after almost 20 years out of print, “Sex and the Single Girl” is back. More than a million people bought the book when it was first published, and Brown used its basic themes–sex, empowerment and sex–to revamp Cosmo, which became one of the five largest-selling magazines on U.S. newsstands. Feminists have belittled Brown’s message as simply “how to please your man.” But Brown also wanted women to please themselves, and the book’s reappearance should prompt a reconsideration. “Honey, in those days if you were a 28-year-old woman and you weren’t married you were supposed to move to another city–you were a disgrace,” says Brown, now 81, in her leopard-carpeted office at Cosmo, where she still goes to work every day monitoring the magazine’s 47 international editions. “And if you were not married and you were having sex, you wouldn’t bother to go to the other city. Just go put your head in the oven.” These days, Brown still dresses the way her acolytes did back then; she greets her visitor in fishnet stockings and a minidress. Yes, she watches “Sex and the City,” the title of which might owe something to her book–whose reissue, in turn, surely owes something to the popularity of the show–and the characters seem like her old crowd. “But we would not have talked about the size of people’s penises!” Does she still defend that how-to-please-a-man stuff? “The reason to please a man,” she says, “is because you might want to take one to bed with you.”
Brown seems to be holding up just fine, but how about the book? Well, it’s dated in spots–taking up archery may not be one of the best ways to meet men anymore–but “Single Girl” is still charming in its italic-intensive way. “Girdles are not sexy,” it decrees. “I know they are a necessary retaining wall against wavy buttocks but they are not magnetic.” And the young author is particularly inspiring–and, it seems now, uncannily prescient–on an unlikely topic: old age. “Everyone has a favorite octogenarian,” she writes, “who still has the zest for living. My pet is the eighty-one-year-old who sold us our house. I think she’s out of this world.” We couldn’t say it better.
