#WHY WOMEN WATCH GAY MEN VIDEO HOW TO#
It was like puberty all over again: struggling with how to talk to women I was interested in, or even just to other queer friends. So when I came out in my twenties, I had to relearn how to interact with my peers. If I didn’t look at anyone’s naked body, then I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I averted my eyes whenever I changed clothes in a locker room or in a bedroom crowded with friends at a sleepover. While closeted, I was also overly judicious about consent - so afraid that my cover might be blown, and so uninterested in dating men or even thinking about them sexually, that I was well aware of boundaries and how I needed to move through the world. “What am I willing to put up with just so I can be at a gay bar? What boundaries will I let women cross? Do safe queer spaces actually exist?” Indeed, Brown’s glossy version of womanhood - slender, straight, cisgender, white, and upwardly mobile - has always had its others: queer women, women of color, disabled women, poor women, and anyone who didn’t hew to the Cosmo girl archetype that dominated the late 20th century. Notably, the book scarcely acknowledges queer desire, mostly depicting gay men as a pitfall in straight women’s search for love.
Her sparkly prose was devoured by an audience who craved something other than domesticity.īut of course, Sex and the Single Girl - and Brown’s revamped, sexed-up Cosmopolitan magazine - didn’t speak to everyone.
In 1962, when Helen Gurley Brown published her bestselling advice book, women couldn’t open credit cards in their own name, and Cosmopolitan magazine - which Brown would soon oversee as editor-in-chief - was still running anodyne cover stories like “How to Protect Your Family.” Against this cultural backdrop, Brown urged young women to enter the workforce and sleep with men. In many ways, Sex and the Single Girl was groundbreaking.