“Never try to establish a successful flirtation when your hair is a mess.” – Cynthia Heimel
In the late 1980s I was at my favorite soulless corporate bookshop when I found a copy of Cynthia Heimel’s Sex Tips for Girls. The opening lines of the first essay, “Who Are We?”, made me laugh so hard you might think the ghost of Claudette Colbert had materialized.
Heimel writes, “These are the times that try a girl’s soul. We don’t know where to turn, what to think.”
“Exactly,” said my friend Janet . “My soul has been tried for years.”
“It didn’t turn out the way I thought it would for sure. Wait, does that sound mournful?” I asked.
“Yes, but aren’t you sick of perkiness?”
Janet and I were divorced, and stayed in touch with our exes. They kept us grounded: they taught us how to fix toilets and assemble DIY desks. We went reluctantly on dates with men who lacked the charm of our exes. They all had boats. Never go on a date in a boat. You are stuck for hours. You can’t get up and leave. And they will talk about trimming a mainsail until you actually know what it means.
Heimel, the wittiest humorist you’ve never heard of, saved us from melancholy. She wrote columns for The Village Voice, Playboy, and Vogue, and was the author of seven humor books. In her first book, Sex Tips for Girls, a collection of columns from the Voice, she obsesses about “the great boyfriend crunch,” gives beauty tips, instructions on fellatio, and encourages you to buy clothes that suit your personality rather than conform to the latest fashion (or fascism).
I flirted with fashion after reading Sex Tips for Girls. At a party I was a knock-out in a black knit dress with an emerald green scarf around my waist. The look: gypsy slut, as I wryly called it. But being glam for one night was more than enough. The boaters surrounded me. I was tired of boaters. Annoyed and cross because of temporary prettiness, I rode my bike home and reverted to jeans and a blouse.
Heimel, who is real life was smart, stylish, and had great hair, is always eloquent about fashion. In the chapter, “Outfits,” she characterizes fashion according to self-image. Styles range from the Little Girl to the Seductress to the Dominatrix to the Preppy, then on to Designer Label Girl, the Hippie, and the Corporate Woman. How do you break out of your rut? Daydream, play a record, and fantasize about what you really want to wear, Heimel says. After wearing tweedy suits to work all week, you may want “a great big red velour jumpsuit with a nipped-in waist.”
There is a lot of sex talk in Sex Tips for Girls, but Heimel thinks there can be too much sex.. In the essay, “Is There Such a Thing As a Jaded Sexual Palate?,” she says that the culture has become promiscuous in terms of where and when to discuss sex: the greatest culprits are cocktail parties, television talk shows, and long supermarket lines, In a long line at the supermarket, two women gross her out with tehcnical talk about masturbation.
When everyone had Herpes, Heimel thought the sex talk would finally wane. But then Herpes made the cover of Time magazine.
If Sex Talk for Girls sounds too graphic, I recommend her second book, But Enough about You: Avoiding Fabulousness. It’s actually funnier, and it doesn’t instruct you on fellatio, which may seem excessive to readers in 2025, Were the ’80s more permissive than the 2020s? I have no grasp on the character of the decade except for the made-up articles at the end of each year in newspapers and magazines.
Heimel died at age 70 in 2018.