Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan and me

Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl seemed a relic from the past, but a Cosmo subscription changed this teenager for ever
Helen Gurley Brown, in 1965
Helen Gurley Brown, author of 'Sex and the Single Girl', in her New York apartment in 1965 – the year she began her 32-year tenure as editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Nothing dates so quickly as yesterday's feminism. Among the responses to the death, aged 90, of Helen Gurley Brown on Monday, was a nice tribute from Dr Ruth, a relative contemporary of the editor's, thanking her for giving women the confidence to own their sexuality; a piece criticising her for being a-political and contributing to the rise of single mothers on low incomes, and a good revisitation of Nora Ephron's 1970 Esquire piece, in which she blasted Cosmopolitan for a tonal stridency not backed up by its content. She blamed us all:

"Buy a padded bra, the article on bustlines tells me. Fake it, the orgasm says. And I should be furious. But I'm not. Not at all. How can you be angry at someone who's got your number?"

Gurley Brown started editing the magazine in 1965, and her name was still being brandished in my family's kitchen in the early 1990s. Whenever my mother mentioned her, which was not infrequently, I pictured a lady in a suede miniskirt, leaning against an executive desk tyrannically telling women to go out and have a good time. It was not a friendly image.

Sex and the Single Girl had been out for 30 years by then, and (if you're in your 30s) like that other staple of one's mother's youth – Mary McCarthy's The Group, published a year later, in 1963 – it sounded dusty, outdated, vaguely threatening in its dogged claim to relevance, raising long-gone taboos to remind us that our parents were young once and how hard they'd had it. Oh, please. We didn't need Gurley Brown; we had Madonna. If I wanted to go back in time, I'd read Betty Friedan, who had, at least, never tried to be fashionable. (I did read her. It gave me the martyred sense of having eaten a plate of kale.)

I didn't read Sex and the Single Girl because I didn't think I needed to: what other type of girl was there? Besides, coming up off the 1980s, it wasn't about sex; it was about money.

When I was 14 or so, someone got me a subscription to Cosmo – and all that flew out the window. In its original incarnation, the magazine had pitched to "real women": not Gurley Brown types running magazines in New York, but regular working women characterised broadly as "secretaries", concerned with how to get and keep a man without compromising what had become known as their "self-esteem", a mysterious quantity located somewhere between their girth and the contents of their handbag. By the 1990s, of course, there were lots of Cosmo pretenders, but it still had that pedigree, that air of glamour about it, which, coming through the door addressed to me each month, I took very personally.

It was famous for sex, but after taking a quick first pass through it for the naughty bits, it wasn't the sex advice that stuck. I don't remember a single article I read in Cosmo in those two years I read it faithfully, except the one about how you could never have too many black rollneck sweaters, something about sexual harassment in the work place and a lot of advice on how to comport yourself at the Christmas party – all of which seemed very exciting in its promise of grown-up agency to come.

What I do remember is that it wore its feminism very brightly on its sleeve and that, even in the 1990s, this still felt like a somewhat risky endeavour. Maybe there were too many exclamatory "Go, girl!" type exhortations. Maybe there were too many articles about how to rid yourself of problems you didn't know it was polite to have. And then you graduated up and out of it and on to other things.

But, for a while, it was an empowering thing for a 14 year-old to read each month. And to Gurley Brown, for that, I'm finally grateful.

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