Sex and the Single Girl

The book Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown was published in 1962, the year before the Dirty Dancing story takes place. The book stayed on the best-seller list through 1963, the year when the first paperback edition went on sale.

The cover of the 1962 hardback edition

Cover of the 1963 paperback edition

The back cover
(Click to enlarge)

Essentially, the book encouraged and advised single women to experience a variety of love affairs. One copy of the book would be passed around many times among young women. Even a girl who was too bashful to buy the book in a bookstore had opportunities to read it. Baby and Lisa Houseman and Penny Johnson probably had read it by August 1963.

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Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965. Previously, Cosmopolitan had been a typical women's magazine, focusing primarily on the interests of young mothers. Below are the covers of the August and September 1963 issues, which were on sale while the Houseman family was at Kellerman's Mountain House.

Cosmopolitan in August 1963

Cosmopolitan in September 1963

Baby Houseman, who was 17 years old, probably read Seventeen magazine. Below are three covers of issues published in 1963 (I could not find August or September).

Seventeen in May 1963

Seventeen in June 1963

Seventeen in July 1963

Within the 1963 culture of young women -- whose main interest was getting and staying married -- the book Sex and the Single Girl exploded like a nuclear bomb. No such book ever had been published before.

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At the end of 1964, the movie Sex and the Single Girl was released in movie theaters. The movie was a big hit, especially among young women. Its gross earnings ranked among the top 20 movies of 1965.

The movie was especially popular among young women. For sure Baby and all her fellow students at Mount Holyoke College -- all of whom had read the book -- went to their local movie theater to watch it. The same goes for Lisa and all her girlfriends.

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The movie recently was broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies television channel. I recorded it, and I watched it this morning. The plot is preposterous, but there were many laugh-out-loud moments. I would categorize the movie into the farce genre.

I enjoyed seeing the clothes, furniture, machines and other period pieces of the early 1960s.

The movie basically makes gentle fun of Helen Gurley Brown (played by Natalie Wood). The story revolves around a magazine writer, Bob Weston (played by Tony Curtis), who has written an article claiming that Brown is a 23-year-old virgin who lacks the experience to advise women about sex. The movie tells how Weston tries to prove that Brown indeed is a virgin, which he intends to write about in a follow-up article. The movie viewers gradually get the impression that his suspicion is correct -- that Brown indeed still is a virgin, because she fears sexual intercourse.

The following clip shows the negative reactions that Weston's initial article causes at the Institute for Premarital and Marital Studies, where Brown works.

In contrast to the secretly virginal Brown, the movie portrays two female characters who are quite promiscuous. One such character is Weston's secretary, Susan (played by Leslie Parrish).

The other such character is Weston's aspiring-actress girlfriend Gretchen (played by Fran Jeffries). (In the following video, the spoken dialogue is dubbed into Spanish.)

The song's lyrics:

Mention sex, and the single girl is cool and shy.
She objects to discussing sex with any guy.
You can bet she's as interested as he
If sex weren't fifty-fifty, where would everybody be?

Mention sex and the single girl will blush a lot,
Though she wrecks every single guy with what she's got.
Then a guy she can't ignore tells her what she's waited for,
And suddenly she's not single anymore.

Mention sex, and the single girl will slap your face.
That reflex is designed to keep you in your place.
She believes that virtue pays til she hears that magic phrase,
And suddenly she's not single anymore.

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One of the movie's laugh-out-loud moments happens at the end. Brown is trying to persuade Weston to make a decision in her favor. When he hesitates, she starts crying, so he immediately agrees to her request. As she hugs him and looks over his shoulder, the movie audience sees from her sly expression that she is crying on purpose in order to get her own way.

In 1964, such humor was allowed in movies, and I thought it was hilarious. I think that even the real-life Helen Gurley Brown laughed out loud when she saw that battle-of-the-sexes moment. She was a good-natured, humorous woman, as seen in the following video clip of a 1967 interview.

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The real-life Helen Gurley Brown laughed all the way to the bank, because she was paid $200,000 for allowing the movie's producers to use her book's title and to make such fun of her. Converted to 2017 dollars, Brown was paid almost $1.6 million. For comparison, the star actress Natalie Wood was paid $160,000 for acting in the movie.

Brown's earning so much money from the movie is explained in an essay titled Sexing the Single Girl: Adapting Helen Gurley Brown without reading her book. (The essay's author seems to be Imelda Whelehan.)
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After about 1963, there was a significant rise in the median age of women's marriage and of the divorce rate. More and more women were single for years during their twenties and thirties. Therefore sexual norms for young women changed gradually during the following decades.

The movie Dirty Dancing takes place in the year when those social changes were launching. The publication of the book Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 influenced many young women's attitudes about being happy and sexual while single .

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A voracious reader named Amy Rose maintains a YouTube page called The Dusty Bookshelf, where she posts videos of her reviews of the books she reads. She recently posted the following video of her review of Sex and the Single Girl, a book that she enjoyed reading.