When I found her book, I did not yet understand Helen Gurley Brown’s position in the canon, that she had been written about and reacted to by the women who would come to guide me, women like Gloria Steinem and Nora Ephron. I did not know that she was the bane of both the women’s movement and the smut-police, or that she was still alive and in her late eighties, still peddling her particular brand of chipper, oblivious help for the downtrodden. All I knew was that she painted a picture of a life made much richer by having once been, as she calls it, a Mouseburger: unpretty, unspecial, unformed. She believed that, ultimately, Mouseburgers are the women who will triumph, having lived to tell the tale of being overlooked and underloved. Hers is a self-serving perspective, but one I needed more than anything. Maybe, as Helen preached, a powerful, confident, and, yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born. Maybe.
There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.
But I want to tell my stories and, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane: stories about waking up to my adult female body and being disgusted and terrified. About getting my butt touched at an internship, having to prove myself in a meeting full of fifty-year-old men, and going to a black-tie event with the crustiest red nose you ever saw. About allowing myself to be treated by men in ways I knew were wrong. Stories about my mother, my grandmother, the first guy I loved who turned semi-gay, and the first girl I loved who turned into my enemy. And if I could take what I’ve learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile. I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth. No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a dietitian. I am not a mother of three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.
WHEN I WAS NINE, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it. I promised myself, in orange Magic Marker, that I would remain a virgin until I graduated from high school. This seemed important because I knew my mother had waited until the summer before college and also because Angela Chase seemed pretty messed up by her experience at that flophouse where high school kids went to copulate. If my relationship to liver paté was any indication—and I had recently eaten so much that I barfed—then my willpower left much to be desired. I would need something stronger than resolve to prevent me from having intercourse too early in life, so I wrote the vow up and asked my mother to sign the document. She refused. “You just don’t know what life will bring, and I don’t want you feeling guilty,” she said.
Ultimately, the contract was an unnecessary precaution. The opportunity never arose in high school, nor even during my first year of college at the New School, unless you count a near miss with a stocky, aspiring pilot named James. Though never consummated, that encounter went far enough that I had to fish a mint-colored, never-used condom out from behind my dormitory bunk bed the next day. Everything had been moving along nicely, and my shirt and pants were off, but when I revealed my virgin status, he became (perhaps rightfully) afraid I would form an unbreakable one-way bond with him and fled. Sophomore year, I transferred to a small liberal arts school in Ohio that was known for having been the first college to admit women and African Americans, as well as for its polyamorous, bi-curious student body. I was neither, but it did seem like a good, supportive environment in which to finally get the ball rolling.