Big Sister

A girl can do almost anything she really wants to, don't you agree? She can tan instead of burn, look sexy but also look like a lady, have a job that PAYS because she's smart and still stay fascinating to men. I've done all these things, and thank goodness there's one magazine that seems to understand me--the girl who wants everything out of life. 1 guess you could say I'm That Cosmopolitan Girl.

So says the sleek, sexy career girl in the ads for Cosmopolitan magazine, which these days is aimed at readers who are just the opposite: single women, 18 to 34, who are not knockouts, who are unsure of themselves, who are searching for a man. It is a recipe concocted by Editor Helen Gurley Brown, 45, author of the bestselling Sex and the Single Girl, and it has turned a humdrum publication of women's features into a sort of female Playboy. Since the winsome Mrs. Brown took over three years ago, circulation has increased 16%, to more than 900,000, ad revenues have more than doubled, to $3,600,000. Mrs. Brown likes to think of her magazine as a "sophisticated older sister." It is edited, she says, "for the girl who doesn't have everything going for her, who has to inch along."

Conquering Sex. The magazine is mainly concerned with the inch-along's emotional (read sexual) needs. There is scarcely an anxiety that may torment her that has not been fully aired in the pages of Cosmopolitan, and she may even have picked up some new ones. Articles tell her how to get married, how to get divorced, how to be a successful mistress, how to make a man of her husband, how to avoid sexual entanglements with Daddy, how to make the most of "brief encounters." There is no sexual problem, apparently, that is not conquerable. "Shy girls can be the sexiest," announces the magazine; so can flat-chested girls: "They substitute their lack of inches with an aura of superfemininity. There is something very feline and terrifically exciting about the way a small-bosomed girl moves."

As Cosmopolitan sees it, there is almost no human activity into which sex cannot be introduced. Instructions on how to go skiing turn into advice on how to snag a skier. "You're standing on the left line next to a slim-hipped Nordic god. You produce a cigarette. He's got to be interested if he removes his gloves in arctic weather and delves through pockets to light you up." Even archaeological expeditions are happy hunting grounds. "One night, wild and high," reports a girl who joined a dig in Greece, "we danced Zorbalike steps to records and formed amorous twosomes that lasted until dawn."

It may all be frothy, but Mrs. Brown is in dead earnest. There is such a shortage of available males, she feels, that a girl has to use all her wiles to catch a man. "It is no longer a question of whether she does or doesn't," says Mrs. Brown. "She does. The question is, can she cope?" To help them cope, Mrs. Brown carefully scrutinizes the copy of Cosmopolitan, has even assembled a "manifesto" on good writing. It warns against the cliches of women's magazines such as "out of this world," "She weighed 102 Ibs. soaking wet," and "Most girls would give their eyeteeth."

Back in Scandinavia. Operating on a typically tight Hearst budget, Mrs. Brown has an editorial staff of 21. But they all throw themselves into her crusade. "I never have to compromise in my work," says Art Director Lene Bernbom, 24, a Danish blonde who joined the magazine in 1966. "Suddenly," she adds, "I'm like back in Scandinavia. Suddenly, I'm working for Mrs. Sex."

Cosmopolitan is frequently criticized for portraying as unreal a sex-charged world as Playboy, if a somewhat less affluent one. As in Playboy, children are not pictured; they interfere with the free, untrammeled sex life. "I'm a materialist," says Editor Brown, "and it's a materialistic world. Nobody is keeping a woman from doing everything she wants to do but herself." Certainly not Helen Gurley Brown.

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