At The Millions, Brooke Hauser compares Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl with Helen Gurley Brown’s seminal Sex and the Single Girl and finds, distressingly, that not much has changed when it comes to the critical reception of women writing about sex:
A lot has happened since 1962 when Sex and the Single Girl came out. Lena is able to write about subjects that Helen wasn’t, including what constitutes “rape” . . . And yet, as two women who wrote memoir-manuals more than a half a century apart, they have been treated very similarly in the press. They weren’t honest enough. They were too honest—narcissistic navel-gazers.
