A food chain is evident in the words of Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine who died at 90 in New York City. Her universal term of endearment was pussycat--warm, fuzzy, with all that's feral in the pet implicit. Then there is a word she coined, mouseburger, which came to be applied to a timid woman whom a pussycat could feed on and spit out--the opposite of the Cosmo girl.
One part of Brown's genius was that she recognized the consumer marketability of female libidinal instinct in the quest for romantic happiness. She became a household name in 1962 with her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, an instant blockbuster that offered witty tips on everything from decorating to dieting, encouraging young women to embrace their sexuality and financial independence instead of relying on a man. During her 32-year tenure, Brown reinvented Cosmopolitan with the slogan "fun, fearless, female" and unapologetically featured sex, skin and splash on its pages. The other part of her genius, though, was that she escaped the tyranny of her food chain. Mouseburger was originally her description of herself--a woman born neither beautiful nor powerful. She made herself a cultural and publishing icon, a big cat to be reckoned with in the concrete jungle.