20th
Working Girl Wednesdays: “She’s Not Really That Insulted by His Desire for Her”
Welcome to Working Girl Wednesdays! Need advice on handling the complexities of the modern workplace? Well, fret no more! Whether it’s a senior partner making a move or a catty co-worker plotting for your plum position, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1964 book Sex and the Office has a solution. Every Wednesday on Glossed Over, I’ll present a new tip from the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan. Is her advice utterly ridiculous or startlingly prescient? You decide!
Ready to spend eight hours a day seducing your co-workers? In Chapter 13, “The Office Affair,” Helen Gurley Brown argues that interoffice romance is the natural order of things.
Would girls in offices stay more cold-cream pure if men didn’t tempt them? My friend Charlotte, a wow of a pretty working girl, says, “I don’t believe for one moment that girls in offices are poor little grasshoppers who are preyed on by those mean old praying mantises. A girl can say no. Just plain no.”
…Girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man’s physical interest in them seem to me a little phony too. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It’s there and God gave it to us. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants us “that way” is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.
Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it’s my opinion she’s not really that insulted by his desire for her. Unless he is a real monster with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead and long green hair all over his back, I think she will remember most propositions not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.
Well, not everybody gives in to these apparently genetic urges:
One girl I know stops short of having an affair—not until she’s married, no siree—but has a trusty office friend who every few weeks squeezes the daylights out of her. Old Mike covers over to her apartment, they have a chicken sandwich, they tussle, she fights like a Zulu and nothing happens. But the physical struggle “gets a lot of it out of my system,” she says. I haven’t talked to this girl in months but I do keep tabs on the strangulations and ax murders in her city. Old Mike could lose his temper.
Next week, three true tales of daring women who had dalliances with co-workers!
