I SWEAR this is going to be my last post about Sex and the Single Girl. It really is one of the greatest things I've read in a long time, but this blog is starting turn into the Cliffs Notes for it and that was not quite my intention. So, I'm going to close off SATSG week with a few quotes from Helen Gurley Brown that aren't batshit crazy. Contrary to what my two other posts might have you think, my love for her is not entirely ironic. By the end of the book I actually found her really endearing and kind of wanted to be her friend.
So maybe she has a teensy bit of an eating disorder and has a less than progressive attitude towards the gays. She's also funny, self-deprecating, and frequently offers advice which she admits she doesn't follow herself. It's also the only dating book I've encountered that doesn't spend 100 pages telling you what it means when a guy doesn't call you back in two days or whether it's okay for you to approach him or whatever. Sure all of her advice about decorating your apartment, developing a personal style, and even getting ahead in your career is ultimately in the service of meeting a man, but at least it's in there. It was refreshing to read a dating book that actually acknowledged the reader's life outside the nonsensical hell that is the dating world.
On that note, here are some of my favorite bits:
On sexual difficulties: One of the things a single woman can have is a good sex life, and the disturbed boy is doing you out of it. A married woman has every reason to help a semi-potent man get back to normal, but you have no more incentive than a short-term tenant has in rebuilding his apartment. Not all of your beaux need to be he-males . . . just the one you sleep with.
On married men: As the eligibles become fewer, it becomes increasingly tempting to take a married lover; but it is best to know what you're in for. A friend who had a long-term affair with a married man had this to say: "It's a real education in human suffering and makes all past and future relationships less painful by comparison."
On whether to tell a man you're a virgin: I can't imagine why, if you aren't. Is he? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four-year-old virgin?
On being productive: It's my opinion that people writing "onward and upward" books (like this one) get carried away because as long as they're giving advice they don't have to do anything. There are acres of days when you don't feel like doing a bloody thing, but sitting stolidly on your fanny. That's okay. You can also start lots of things you don't finish.
Brilliant, right? But for every nugget of Amen to that I want to be your best friend advice, we also get paragraphs like the next one which make me wonder if the two of us could ever truly have been.
Suppose You Like Girls: You've already worked out a way of life for yourself to which I could contribute no helpful advice. I'm sure your problems are many. I don't know about your pleasures. At any rate, it's your business and I think it's a shame you have to be so surreptitious about your choice of a way of life.
Surreptitious? Is that really the word she meant to use? Whatever HGB, even if you don't approve of all my choices, I still love you.
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