Of mouseburgers...

Press, 26 October 1982, Page 20

Of mouseburgers...

SUZANNE LOWRY,

“Observer,” considers two Cosmo images

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live," wrote Joan Didion. Women's magazines have always done a roaring trade in story-telling — if too often resorting to fairy or old wives' tales, or some combination of the two. Usually when anyone, too audibly, between their roseate covers starts telling the truth unvarnished by romance, cosiness or cosmetics, it gets called "feminism” or something equally uncomfortable and, therefore, uncommercial and unfemiqine. One who has made a dazzling success of the highly varnished style is Helen Gurley Brown. Her personal Cinderella story is well known: way back in the mid-sixties about the time when the women’s movement in America was beginning to rouse women toget out there and be themselves, she hit on a great, if not entirely new, notion to help the young and aspirant pay for such independence. • Hard work was not enough: you had to sell your-

self, especially your sexuality. First she wrote "Sex and The Single Girl," then took over a failing fiction magazine called "Cosmopolitan." The rest is history. The latest yarn she would have us spin ourselves is the tale of the mouseburger. Mouse-trhat? After all that brittle, vampish, superthin upfrontishness the magazine has used so successfully to boost sales and confidence? Mice? All is explained in her new book just out in the United States. Title, “Having It All,” subtitles, “Sex, Love, Success, Money,” sub-subtitle, “Even If You’re Starting With Nothing." In the last is the clue to it: HGB, who once so astutely went for the single girls and told them how to get, and get the better of, men, is now after the next generation of mousebound Cinderellas. This time she has to convince them not only that men are gettable and beatable, but that girls don’t have

to be glittering Superwomen to do it. "Mouseburger” is not only a noun, it is a verb: you can, it seems, “mouseburger” your way to the top. You smile, and smile, and work, and work, and work, scrabble away in the wainscot until you have, almost unobserved, eaten your way to the boss’s desk, the chairman’s chair, even the chairman himself. Diet, exercise, acquire and aehiei'e are the imperatives. Sex? That’s only part of all this war effort and HGB’s technical advice in this area makes it sound like one of the least appetising. It is coy, ruthless and cold — too much like jottings from the best little whorehouse on Park Avenue for pleasure. The whole package reads like the Bible of the Puritan Work Ethic rewritten for the Me generation. But it may well stave off the fears (as yet it would seem from the still rising circulation of 2,850,000) that the Cosmo girl has run out of steam, or tricks, or ambition.