28th
Working Girl Wednesdays: “Women Like Bruises, Even Non-Cuckoo Women”
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!
Today’s chapter, “Three Little Bedtime Stories,” lets three different acolytes of Sex and the Office tell their sordid tales—in their own words!
From a woman who had a four-year dalliance with a married coworker who lived on the opposite coast:
If a man in your company is single, of course, you find out everything you can about him if you have to hire Pinkerton. If he’s married, you don’t go quite so all out. Perhaps Steve decided to ask me out because I had made some improvements since we first met. My psychoanalysis was all finished, I dressed and looked better at thirty-six than I had in my twenties, and I had a good female body.
From a 24-year-old secretary who had an “arrangement” with her boss:
People to whom this sort of thing never happens are usually horrified by the idea. It just isn’t that horrible if you like the man. It’s sexy to try on lingerie knowing that someone you like very much is going to see you in it. Maybe it’s even a little sexier knowing that somebody is going to pay for the lingerie…I’m sure he liked the fact that I was his quiet, sweet, efficient, demure little secretary at work and the rest of the time an adored and expensive courtesan.
And from a woman who took up with her company’s efficiency consultant:
He beat me—only across the buttocks—with perhaps ten more strokes, not terribly hard. It wasn’t wildly painful, but it did hurt. Then he stopped and made love to me, and that was great…The welts on my backside healed—after turning blue-black, then purple, then green, then yellow-chartreuse. I used to look at them fascinated. They were pretty exotic. Women like bruises, I think, even non-cuckoo women. I’ve known two girls who came to the office with black eyes (I don’t know what from), and I always got the feeling they were a little proud. Maybe bruises make a woman feel feminine and helpless. [Emphasis mine, for reasons that should be obvious]
Next week: a chapter that, at first glance, seems totally inscrutable. So here’s an exemplar sentence chosen totally at random: “Suppose you do like men, you are not a child-woman.”
