Sex And The Single Aquarian Girl

Now here is a cool Aquarius woman you may not have heard of. Or, if you know of Helen Gurley-Brown, the founding editor of U.S. Cosmopolitan, you’ve waved her away as insubstantial. But even if you loathe Cosmopolitan magazine on cultural grounds, it was revolutionary when it launched in July 1965.

Cosmo took the ‘career girl’ concept mainstream, making it socially acceptable for a female to value her work as a vocation, not just a way-station en route to marriage. It also reinvented the ‘spinster’ as cool instead of a pitiable creature unable to land a husband.

A Triple Aquarius, She Re-Branded The Single Woman Concept

The magazine sprung out of a best-selling book – Sex And The Single Girl – written by triple Aquarius Helen Gurley Brown in 1962. She was Sun, Mercury Retrograde, and Lilith in Aquarius, with an ebullient Saggo Rising and Moon-Mars in Scorpio.

Add in her third house Uranus trine Pluto and Jupiter in the 10th for the ultimate maverick, runaway publishing success. Her book came out with Jupiter in Aquarius crossing her Sun + Mercury btw.

Her voice was breezy and modern, but to American women who were working, single, or divorcees, it was more like a liberation wind.

“If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive, I believe half your single girl battle is over.”

Like so many books that achieve instant success because they resonate with the Zeitgeist, she wrote it for herself. Her background was self-described as humble, and she worked multiple jobs to support her ill sister and mother. Gurley-Brown was acutely conscious that she was smart but without “looks, brains or family background to trade-off.”

Good Girls Go To Heaven – Bad Girls Go Everywhere

In between diet, budget, beauty, and blowjob tips, her Cosmo magazine covered important stories such as the equal rights amendment infuriating the feminists of her era who wanted her to use her huge platform with more political consciousness.  Like the pages of her glossy magazine, she’d flip from gritty advice on financial independence – “nobody is coming to rescue you” – to suggesting women never – literally never – let a man see them without a full face of make-up.

She edited Cosmopolitan for three decades, making it the prototypal women’s magazine of the 20th Century.

Her chief skill was in copywriting, the job she held for most of her ‘single girl’ career before Sex & The Single Girl/Cosmo. You can see it in her genius cover lines and cute axioms like “good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

H.G.B. was the first female in the public eye to refer to bedding men as “notches on your bedpost,” the thrill of living on your own in a big city with a ‘going places’ career and the unsung peace of ‘going home to your cats.’  She’s an Aquarius woman. Of course she’s a contradiction, the answer (d) none of the above to any standard multi-choice questionnaire.