Non-fiction: Sex and the New Single Girl

Overview

Helen Gurley Brown returns to the territory she made famous with a revised, more contemporary manifesto aimed at single women navigating the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book updates earlier prescriptions about sex, style, and ambition for a moment when more women were entering the workforce, divorce was more common, and sexual mores were shifting. Brown blends blunt practical advice with cultural commentary, urging readers to treat sensuality, career, and self-presentation as tools for creating the life they want.
The narrative voice is conversational, punchy, and unapologetically prescriptive. Anecdotes, examples, and direct admonitions frame guidance on relationships, money, and personal grooming, while the editor's eye for what will appeal to a mass audience keeps the pacing brisk and the tone confidently directive.

Main Themes

Sexual autonomy and pleasure are central, treated as components of a woman's power rather than as sources of shame. Advice about finding satisfying sexual relationships is paired with tactics for negotiating desire and maintaining standards, emphasizing agency and self-respect alongside frankness about physical attraction and chemistry.
Ambition and financial independence are presented as essential complements to romantic life. Practical guidance on careers, saving, and using style to signal competence and desirability underscores the book's ethos: independence strengthens choice. Brown argues that cultivating a marketable persona, through clothing, conversation, and composure, can open opportunities both professionally and personally.

Practical Advice and Examples

Chapters move between tactical how-tos and broader social observations. Suggestions range from wardrobe choices and grooming rituals to conversational strategies for first dates, approaches to marriage and cohabitation, and tips for maintaining allure over time. Examples are concrete: how to plan an evening, how to manage money without losing social options, how to read a partner's signals and set boundaries.
The book mixes prescriptive checklists with storytelling, using celebrity anecdotes, newsroom vignettes, and reader-inspired scenarios to illustrate points. The emphasis on presentation, makeup, posture, timing of revelations, reflects Brown's background in magazine culture and her belief that image is a tangible asset.

Style and Tone

Witty, blunt, and unabashedly commercial, the voice treats sexuality and consumer savvy as compatible forms of empowerment. Humor and ironic detachment cushion some of the more commanding recommendations, making blunt prescriptions feel like confident coaching rather than moralizing.
At times the tone reads like a pep talk from a savvy mentor: high-energy, slightly theatrical, and keen to reassure readers that choice and pleasure can coexist with ambition. The prose foregrounds immediacy and accessibility, favoring memorable aphorisms over theoretical nuance.

Reception and Legacy

Reception was mixed; many appreciated the frank celebration of female desire and practical counsel for balancing career and romance, while critics decried a perceived emphasis on appearance and male approval. Feminist responses were divided, some welcomed the insistence on sexual autonomy, others saw contradictions between empowerment rhetoric and an overriding focus on attracting men.
Culturally, the book reinforced the "single woman" archetype as a marketable identity and helped normalize open conversations about sex and desire among mainstream audiences. Its influence is visible in later pop-cultural treatments of single life that blend career ambition with dating strategies, and it remains a reference point in debates about the relationship between female autonomy, self-presentation, and sexuality.