For many girls, and a smattering of guys, all they learned about sex and romance they learned in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine. Cosmo was the IT magazine for young girls, single young ladies and suburban housewives from the mid-1960s until recently.

Credit Cosmo's legendary editor, Helen Gurley Brown, who introduced into the magazine frank and titillating discussions about sex and sex appeal. Articles were always couched in feminist tones that put the woman in charge. If fashion magazines today seem more about sex than style, credit Brown who didn't understand why women should have to choose between the two.

“If you’re not a sex object, you’re in trouble," she famously said.

Gurley Brown died Monday at age 90, "although parts of her were considerably younger," - the New York Times pointed out in a cheeky reference to Gurley Brown's embrace of cosmetic enhancements.

If Mary Richards, the fictional television journalist played by actress Mary Tyler Moore empowered single women everywhere to aspire to career success rather than marriage, Brown used Cosmopolitan to argue that women could combine career success and romance - preferably with a wealthy lifestyle.
“Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort," Brown explained.

She could be Miss Manners with an edge.
"Never fail to know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring somebody,” she once advised women on the dating circuit.
I'll end on that note.