Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (12 page)

If you sustain any of these hates, you need help, probably professional, to find out how much nicer it is to be a woman.

However, if you really like men but would just like to seem a little softer and less self-sufficient, go on a “helpless campaign.” Let a man push open every door. Stand pat. He’ll do it and love it. Sit on your side of the car until he comes around to open the door. He may be halfway down the block before he realizes you aren’t with him, but he’ll be back—complaining but content.

Have difficulty with packages. He’ll help carry.

Expect
to have your cigarette lighted.

Now we’re coming down the home stretch on how to be sexy.

Get it straight in your head that anyone who wants to kiss you or sleep with you isn’t handing you a mortal insult but paying you a compliment. Oh, I know some men proffer their kisses and propositions with all the finesse of an invading army. It’s hard to keep your temper. But cold heroines went out with cold showers. A girl who draws herself up to her full height to say, “Really, Bob Applegate, are you insane or something …
me
sleep with
you
… I never heard anything so funny in my whole life … ho ho ho ho ho,” is a little gauche, to say the least. What if somebody ho-ho-hoed
her
?

Carol told me an interesting experience she’d had in group therapy (where men and women meet to discuss problems of personal relationship, usually under the guidance of a psychiatrist). She had described to them a “horrifying” encounter with the janitor of her building. He had greeted her at the elevator and said, “My, but you’re a pretty little woman.” Carol had fled down the stairwell. The group made her act out the scene with various members playing the part of the janitor until she finally got to where she could give the correct answer comfortably, which was “Thank you!”

A kiss is most successfully turned away (if that’s what you really want) by remaining frappé cool. It’s fun to kiss a wildcat. Who wants to buss a tray of sherbet? The affair itself is better refused wistfully, regretfully if you want to preserve your reputation as a responsive woman. You’d love to but you can’t! You’re attracted but you won’t! This gentle withdrawal will take a little longer than a good swift kick (and if you’re pinned by a hammer lock or half nelson, by all means deliver the kick). When you
can
, that is. However, if a man is only intellectually persistent to the point of becoming tiresome, you can demur with womanly but honest charm. As he points out that refusal will ruin your health and bar you from paradise, to say nothing of your next date with
him
, answer his “Why
not
?” with a gentle but feminine belt below the belt. Say, “You’re
most
attractive. You’re really lovely, but do you honestly suppose I can sleep with every man who asks me? The answer for now is no.”

You’re saying in effect, “I’m not pretending to be a virgin, so don’t worry about
my
health! But since most men want to sleep with an attractive woman, don’t imply that you are making me a present of the Davis Cup. I am very choosy. You have to be good to make the grade. Don’t force it. If you want me, you might stick around awhile. I’m not promising … but at some future time … we’ll see.” (Paula has a Saint Christopher medal and bracelet charm, both engraved with “We’ll see,” from a man who I believe is still waiting.)

Sometimes a man will relinquish you with less fight if he thinks you sincerely want him but are taking your time, than if you’ve left no trace of doubt that you consider him a toad. (Then he has to keep on trying to prove that very night he isn’t!)

When it comes to not turning things off and not sending him away, I’d love to go into detail about the efficacy of murmuring sweet nothings
while
being kissed on the mouth as against going on a you-initiated light-kiss binge across his nose, cheeks, forehead, ears, etc., etc., but I’d like to get this book finished and on the display counters, not banned in Boston. Besides, if you like kissing as much as I think you do, you don’t need a guide.

N
OW WE’RE GOING TO
turn off men for a while and talk about your job. (Don’t worry, we’ll get back to them!) What you do from nine to five has everything to do with men anyhow. A job is one way of getting
to
them. It also provides the money with which to dress for them and dress up your apartment for them. (More on these later.) Most importantly, a job gives a single woman something to
be.

A married woman already
is
something. She is the banker’s wife, the gangster’s wife, the wrangler’s wife, the strangler’s wife, the conductor’s wife (streetcar or symphony). Whatever hardships she endures in marriage, one of them is
not
that she doesn’t have a place in life.

A single woman is known by what she does rather than by whom she belongs to.

Gaining and keeping identity through a husband is easier in one important respect than through a job. You can’t be summarily fired! A wife can be a lousy housekeeper, indifferent cook, lackluster bedmate, self-centered mother, dull-as-grime companion, and the law protects her! When she finally
is
dismissed, the man who served her papers often has to pay her half his salary.
Quelle
severance pay!

Nevertheless, while you’re waiting to marry, or if you never marry, a job can be your love, your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do, your play pen, your family, your entree to a good social life, men and money, the most reliable escape from loneliness (when one more romance goes pfft), and your means of participating, not having your nose pressed to the glass.

A job also gives you respectability. A single woman is still regarded in some suburban living rooms as not quite decent. Just try that charge on a lady broker at the New York Stock Exchange.

The better your job the better your standing as a single woman.

I have been thinking for several days now about how to tell someone to have a career. There is probably more phony literature on how to get ahead on the job than on how any girl can be beautiful! (Receding chins and squinty eyes are as ravishing as Grecian noses and saucer orbs if dredged in make-up. And girls making $57.50 a week are just a few positive thoughts away from five-figure incomes. I don’t know whether these myth-makers brew it over a Bunsen burner and pour it in their coffee or grow it in the back yard and sprinkle it on cornflakes. They are at the very
least
on pep pills.)

The truth is not all girls can be beautiful and not all girls can have careers. They
can
actually but they don’t. The careers are
there
, or a beefed-up job, which is the same thing. Yet in looking around my own office of about twenty-five girls, I
know
85 per cent are never going to be career women. The question is why aren’t they. Why aren’t
you
? There are several reasons.

1. You are under twenty-five and plan to marry and have children as soon as you can. Why start a career?
   
2. You are forty. Your good but uninspiring job gives you profit-sharing, retirement benefits, a pleasant, comfortable life. You’re in solid. Why risk this setup for something flashier?
   
3. You are a beachcomberess at heart and nurture no dreams of glory. You’d rather be more relaxed and less income-taxed!
   
4. You have only moderately good mental equipment.
   
5. No employer to date has indicated you are anything but a menace to the company. They have kept you on out of compassion. How can
   you
   have the gall to hope for a great future?
   
6. Between your present job and the one you covet as Mink-Trailing Magazine Editor, Serious Actress, Buyer Who Goes to Europe Twice a Year yawn such chasms that you can’t think how to begin to bridge them.
   
7. You are not going to risk one whit of your femininity by being a driving career woman.
   

I consider the first four reasons for not trying for the gold ring valid, sincere and reasonable. (The girl who is hell-bent for motherhood is missing another great creative experience which is to get paid for producing things in her head;
then
she could have babies, but I guess if you’ve gotta foal, you’ve gotta foal.)

The last three reasons for shunning a career are, in my opinion, worthless.

How Does it Work?

The biographies of large numbers of successful women “reveal that they have arrived at their careers by three methods:

(1) Vision; (2) Gravitation; and (3) Accident.

Many successful women heard Joan of Arc voices early in life. Never deviating from what the voices told them to do, they nurtured, babied, watered, fed and hatched their dream into an adult career. Most of them became architects, doctors, lawyers, astronomers, actresses, writers, bacteriologists, paleontologists, ballerinas—in short the “I’ve got a vision” group were attracted to the demanding arts and professions.

Madelyn Martin, co-author of the “I Love Lucy” television show, is a good example. From age ten, when her prize-winning poem “Sunset” was read aloud to the sixth-grade, Madelyn was determined to become a writer. She never faltered in the pursuit of her goal and she reached it.

The gravitators are equally ambitious but not so inner-directed to a specific goal. From pigtail time these determined lasses work hard. They make A’s, become student-body wheels, class valedictorians and the instant darlings of management. There is never much question they will arrive. It’s just a matter of their gravitating to the work they were meant to do. Thousands of top-flight women business executives arrived through gravitation.

Motion picture and TV producer Joan Harrison is one.

A graduate of St. Hughes College of Oxford University, she was brought from London to Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock to be his secretary. Though an eager beaver, Joan never dreamed she would one day produce the chills that run up America’s back every Tuesday when Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Half the country’s male tycoons didn’t know as office boys exactly what course
their
careers would take either. They did not so much plot their way to the summit as just arrange to their advantage whatever happened to them!

The third group—accidental successes—are no less impressive than the visionaries and gravitators. These are the girls on whom a career just sort of fell.

Swimsuit wizardess Rose Marie Reid made it somewhat by “accident.” As a young girl in love with a lifeguard, Rose Marie spent every possible moment at the beach. She hated the shapeless shifts that passed for swimsuits, wouldn’t wear them, designed and made her own suits instead. These svelte, form-fitting sheaths raised eyebrows as well as female spirits and male hopes. One day the owner of a department store asked Rose Marie if she would whip up a few of her designs for him. She was off and running at the success steeplechase.

Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who might never have had a chance to be a grande amoureuse if Robert Browning hadn’t happened to her, the nonplanning career whizzes never realized
they
had it either until some wise, wonderful or libidinous employer got it out of them. Then they seem to have one thing in common with the planners and gravitators … drive. Their drive is latent, but once liberated, it makes them the greatest stretch runners of all time.

We are not so concerned here with career women who planned ahead. Chances are they are already nearing the launching pad. We are more interested in making you accident-prone in the right way and getting you into orbit if you aren’t already.

These accidents are not quite so accidental as they seem. Rose Marie Reid did have the initiative to make swimsuits at home—and the imagination to make them beautiful.

The “accidental successes” usually help luck along by creating a favorable atmosphere around themselves. They are charming, pretty, fresh, alert, obedient and possessors of other Girl Scout virtues that attract opportunity.

I believe thousands more girls could be “accident-prone” and have careers if they were to give fate ever so small a boost. And I mean girls who started late and may not have any idea they have talent.

To spur you to action I ask you to project next Memorial Day. Could that be you at the washbasin with the Lux flakes doing your undies one more year because no one asked you to a picnic? Does the possibility lurk that next New Year’s Eve will find you sipping eggnogs with your landlady? The bottom has been known to drop out for perfectly charming and popular single women on these grisliest days of the year. Think how much easier to bear if you have a really intriguing job to return to next morning and enough money to buy yourself a Ferrari to race around in and forget.

I hereby set down Mother Brown’s Twelve Rules for Squirming, Worming, Inching, and Pinching Your Way to the Top. They apply specifically to girls who work in offices (the only places I’ve ever worked) and presuppose you have a boss. Hopefully you might adapt some of them to retailing, door-to-door selling or whatever you do for a living.

Just what are you putting up in return for the fascinating stream of callers, the luncheons at Twenty-One, your name on the masthead, trips to faraway places and tubs of money which you require in your first assignment after graduation?

Young hopefuls aren’t the only opium addicts. A friend told me of a thirty-four-year-old divorcee who was “willing to accept employment” with his company if the job were challenging and interesting and she didn’t have to work Saturdays or after four-thirty because of the children. This girl couldn’t even type!

Keep your shirt on! Give yourself time to get useful before you get difficult.

The important thing is to get
into
the coveted new firm.

An aircraft factory bookkeeper who wants a career in fashion may have to start as a department store salesgirl for
no
money, move into the gown shop, then to assistant buyer’s job, to buyer, and finally fashion coordinator for several departments. A legal secretary on the same mission may plummet from her $600-a-month salary to $325 to start as secretary to the fashion coordinator. (Secretaries have a wonderful entree into almost any business. Jumping from girl Friday to girl executive is the hurdle. Read rules 3 through 12.)