Marnell. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

At last night’s Housing Works panel on the legacy of the late Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Vice columnist Cat Marnell stood out. Wearing a tight, translucent white dress and leather jacket, she snapped her gum, played with her hair and  alternately stared wide-eyed at the audience or down at her phone.

“I hate Gloria Steinem,” she announced at one point. “She’s boring and plain. My kind of feminism is that you want to be hot and awesome.”

Ms. Marnell was one of three panelists, along with Jezebel founding editor Moe Tkacik and Hairpin editor Edith Zimmerman, who gathered to discuss Gurley Brown and her efforts to help “mouseburgers” like herself have not only great sex, but all the money, recognition, authority and respect they deserved. At the panel, moderated by woman's magazine vet Alison Brower, Ms. Tkacik addressed her political leanings: “Before I was a Marxist, I was a slut.”

Ms. Zimmerman, seated between two voluble speakers, was more reserved, but she spoke with authority on the balancing act that comes with a career in gendered media, noting that while The Hairpin tried to escape the anti-feminist tropes of women’s magazines, its founders at The Awl network knew “There’s money to be made from advertising to females.”

Ms. Zimmerman, who wrote about the international Cosmo conference in Madrid for The New York Times, also noted how while, in the U.S., Cosmo “is sort of a punch line,” it has a stronger influence today in countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan where it’s still “the only source for female issues and relationship issues.”

Which is a well-taken point, but somehow this didn’t register quite as strongly on the Richter scale of provocation as the volley that followed between Ms. Tkacik and Ms. Marnell, with the former Jezebel blogger noting that women in the Middle East would not be liberated by Cosmopolitan, and the Vice blogger suggesting that at least the magazine would show them how to have "sex in a doghouse."

And while Ms. Zimmerman was ambivalent about the role that kowtowing to advertisers played in women’s media, Ms. Marnell saw a role for traditional beauty products, with a saucy twist: “I think that money’s awesome. That’s what drives things.” She had sabotaged a $250,000 deal with Proctor and Gamble for a piece on “lipstick that won’t come off on a dick.”

The spirit of Ms. Brown lives on in some form, it would seem, though Ms. Marnell is more interested in a male pioneer. “My publishing idol is Larry Flynt," she said only to be one-upped by Ms. Tkacik who jumped in with her own anecdote about the girly mag publisher.

"One time," she said, "Larry Flynt offered Gloria Steinem $1 million if she posed open pussy.”

She didn’t do it. For this generation, that makes her a mouseburger.

Update: This post has been updated from the original. Ms. Tkacik made the statement about Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt. Not Ms. Marnell.

Cindy Adams

If 1967 was the summer of love, 2012 might go down in the history books as the summer of snark. Just last week, Cindy Adams paid tribute to the departed Helen Gurley Brown by calling her chintzy and cheap, kvetching in The New York Post that the Cosmo editor and lipstick feminist once made her go all the way downtown to introduce her at a function, only to send a thank-you gift in a brown paper bag. (The gift, by the way, was a stuffed frog. If there was a coded message there, Ms. Adams clearly missed it while swiping at Ms. Brown’s old Chanel suits.)

Oh, but everyone is in a grumpy mood. (Too much shuttling back and forth on the Jitney, perhaps?) Todd English’s ex-fiancée Erica Wang threw a tantrum after she was caught stealing over a grand of makeup from Sephora—shortly getting fired from Ralph Lauren for her sticky fingers. Police had to drag Ms. Wang out of the cosmetics chain kicking and screaming; her wailing was a rare relief to all those mommies who schlep their bawling babies to department stores. (At least this time it’s not your kid!)

Then there’s the usual city-centric discontent. Overheard on Pier 11 while waiting for the ferry out to New Jersey’s Sandy Hook beach: “You mean I have to pay extra for my bike? Forget it, which one is the free boat to IKEA?” Hey, why bother with the beach and the sun when you can be locked in a windowless maze of cheap furniture and cheaper Swedish meatballs? Just a note: we’re pretty sure you can’t bring your bike into IKEA either, cheapskate.

And City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. aren’t too happy after finding out they were both victims of identity theft. The district attorney had to find out his card had been compromised the hard way—by discovering his name on a list of targets during a cyber-case his office was prosecuting. (Has there ever been a more appropriate occasion for the wah-wah of a sad trombone?)

Council Speaker Quinn had it worse: while Districy Attorney Vance only had minor charges to his account (he claims that the credit charges to Dunkin’ Donuts made on his card were falsified—he only pays for Dunkins in cash), the nefarious hackers used the card of Ms. Quinn’s wife Kim Catullo to buy one-way tickets to London and Dubai.

No wonder these two are petitioning for a new high-tech crime lab in Manhattan. We’re just petitioning for this long, hot summer to be over. It’s ruining our otherwise sunny disposition.

Helen Gurley Brown in 2001 (Getty).

As a single man, I live for the single girl.

With the passing of Helen Gurley Brown, the original Cosmo girl, the old debates about her retro-progressive, sex-positive brand of feminism will be rekindled. And even as she is lauded as a catalyst for a spectacular wave of newfound sexual empowerment among a gender that was often brow-beaten and moralized into frigid submission, she may well perpetually be reviled by the old-school feminist cadres whose humorlessness almost ruined feminism for the rest of us.

Of course, the cartoon image of feminism was never the whole picture, as HGB well knew. Feminists‚ a group to which I believe I firmly belong, have largely been distorted into monsters through the prism of dick-brained male priapism, especially the right-wing testosterone cases who seem to live in perpetual fear of being bested by a member of the fairer sex.

It’s a tricky business this feminism. But one thing you can be sure of is that HGB was not the emasculating type—far from it. In fact, while championing the remorseless sexuality and self-enlightened pleasure-seeking of the modern gal, she did a great service to the male of the species, and I stand before you now, naked and not ashamed, to tell you just how much we owe Ms. Brown.

The short answer, of course, would be a debt of gratitude for the approximately eight-quadzillion sex tips she published in Cosmo between the moment she landed there in 1965, on the cusp of an American social revolution, and her exit 32 years later—an avalanche of advice about, as James Brown might say, using what you got to get just what you want.

Even as a superannuated Brown headed for retirement, she was doing sit-ups during an exit interview, and I am betting she kept up with her kegels right up until her final moments, because Helen Gurley Brown knew this to be true: to be sexy, feel sexy.

HGB was no bombshell—she was a self-described “mouseburger”—but what she saw in herself was unlimited potential. She was an atom waiting to be smashed, and when she figured out how to unlock her power the ensuing blast was felt across generations. That 30 years later her vision of urban independence and guilt-free sex helped incubate the seeds for that toxic television show Sex and the City is unfortunate, but just as one can't blame Jesus for the awfulness of so many of his followers, so I don’t hold HGB personally responsible for the Sex and the City girls (the Observer bears some liability), whose nearly unerring bad taste in clothes and their slavery to fleeting metropolitan trends made dating in New York City a nightmare during the heyday of its run.

Hopefully, we can all agree that looks aren’t everything. HGB wasn’t necessarily a romantic—she was goal-oriented to the point of being cynical—but she was never shallow, and her ends made for some pretty nifty means.

She talked about getting oneself together. She put high value on a good job, self-reliance (she could go toe-to-toe with Emerson in that department), and personal style, and by proselytizing this to women, advocating these self-empowering values, by extension she gave guys like me half a chance.

Over at Screw we prided ourselves on our feminism, and no one more than our fearless eater, Al Goldstein, who like others in the porn racket, worshipped women. (Most everyone, that is, except the duplicitous Hugh Hefner, whose disdain for the double-x chromosome was always palpable, even now as he continues to promote the most negative stereotype-reinforcing mannequins money can rent.)

A lot of people were surprised, too, when we rallied behind Martha Stewart. We didn’t really like her per se, but we knew that she got fucked on that insider trading thing because she was a woman in man’s world. No one with a penis would have done five seconds of time for that nonsense.

And we loved HGB most of all for her unabashed approach to satisfaction. Of course we buried Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon and anyone else who didn’t laugh at our jokes. Dworkin, especially, who thought that all penetration was rape, was a bigot, plain and simple, and I feel for the great waves of passionate and sensible feminists who couldn’t escape her sizable shadow.

Brown wasn’t always right: she more or less advocated sleeping with married men and pilfering office supplies to make ends meet, and she so believed than any attention bestowed upon a woman by a man was benign at worst that she defended Clarence Thomas as the victim in his imbroglio with Anita Hill.

But thanks to HGB, millions of women know how to find their man’s secret G Spot, and do things with their mouths and with such alacrity and technique as would make Fanny Hill blush like a child. And, like Moses leading his people out of Egypt, it would have been enough.

But nothing could be more important than her prime directive: To be sexy, feel sexy.

What else do you need to know?

Mike Edison is the author of the memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go. He is the former publisher of High Times magazine, and was the editor-in-chief of Screw. His most recent book is Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! – Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder (Soft Skull Press).

The Browns at home.

When Helen Gurley Brown died this Monday, she left behind a legacy of sexual liberation, generations of bereaved Cosmopolitan fans and a four-floor penthouse in one of the Beresford's Southwest towers.

The fate of the tower apartment, which Brown and husband David Brown bought in the 1970s from director Mike Nichols, remains unknown. But its high place in Brown's affections was no secret—it ranked right up there with sex, ambition and her husband. When asked by Vanity Fair where she would most like to live, Brown replied:

"Exactly where I am living—the Beresford Apartments, on Central Park West and 81st Street. We have the top four floors of a tower apartment. I'm slightly prejudiced, but I think it's the best apartment in New York."

Don't change a thing: Brown's dining room is perfect. (UsaToday)

Brown's apartment was said to be both magnificent, with a huge, tower-top terrace overlooking Central Park, and magnificently groovy, with pumpkin shag carpeting in the living room and zebra-print wallpaper.

It may well come on the market given that Brown died without any immediate relatives who might take up residence for sentimental reasons: her husband, a film producer responsible for such blockbuster delights as Jaws, died in 2010 and the couple had no children. Brown's sister also died before the nonagenarian.

If it did, it would be the first of 211 Central Park West's quadruplexes to come on the market since July 2004, according to data provided by Donna Olshan of Olshan Realty. That 14-room Southwest-facing tower apartment, #21A, sold for $15.3 million. Of course, 2004 seems a distant epoch when it comes to real estate prices.  The most salient point of comparison is more likely the $29.5 million that Bob Weinstein has been asking for his 14-room Beresford penthouse (not in the tower) since he listed it in 2009. (The listing for the apartment, which was available until just a few weeks ago, has been pulled, suggesting that it may have been snatched up in the luxury buying craze sweeping the city). Another penthouse apartment, a three-bedroom with a total of 90-feet fronting Central Park (also not in the tower), was listed for $22 million, but appears to be off the market as well now.

But nothing could be quite like the mouseburger's apartment—a swinging pad for a small-town girl who clawed her way to a lofty perch with a set of perfectly-manicured nails. A USA Today reporter who toured the home in 2007 found that hardly anything had changed since the Browns had the place decorated in the 1970s. Also, that it was awesome: she found a leopard-print rug in the office (over the parquet), bubblegum shag carpeting in the master bedroom, a dining room with lacquer red walls and cushy banquettes. Ficus trees grew on the terrace. The famous clotheshorse had a dressing room lined with pink-painted closets, including "one devoted entirely to racks of black slingbacks and pumps," as well as the maid's room. She also confessed to overtaking half her husband's closet downstairs.

The couple moved to the Beresford from a chic Park Avenue pad. Brown told The USA Today reporter that "it was supposed to be sort of tacky over here."

kvelsey@observer.com

Helen and David. (Image via Hearst Corp.)

With the help of a $30 M. gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University's School of Engineering have established the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the two universities and the Hearst Corporation announced today.

The Institute is inspired by David Brown, Ms. Brown's late husband, a former journalist, publisher, film and theater producer who graduated from both Stanford and Columbia Journalism School.

The collaboration is intended to connect "the best in West Coast technology with East Coast content," according to a joint press release, giving each school $12 M. to endow a professorship. The remaining $6 M. will go toward the construction of a "highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom." It will also support graduate and post-graduate fellowships, as well as competitive "Magic Grants" to develop most promising ideas conceived of by Brown fellows. It is the largest gift in Columbia Journalism School's nearly 100-year history.

“David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content," Ms. Brown, who turns 90 next month, said in the announcement. "Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who is the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

In December, Stanford withdrew its bid for Mayor Bloomberg’s Roosevelt Island tech campus. The $100 million grant went to Cornell to a 50-50 partnership between Cornell and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; Cornell announced $350 M. gift to back its proposal hours after Stanford dropped out. Carnegie Mellon, one of the rejected proposals, is still working on building an entertainment-tech campus in partnership with Steiner Studios in Brooklyn's Navy Yards.

That the first biography of Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of gushing, glossy Cosmopolitan magazine, should be written by one Jennifer Scanlon, professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College, presents an irresistible, perhaps too-easy contraposition. There is Ms. Brown on the cover, well into her Geritol years: trussed in gold chains and wearing a miniskirt and leopard-printed blouse, back-combed hair and generous daubs of what they used to call rouge. And on the inside back flap: young Ms. Scanlon with a severe brunet bob, square collar and tight little choker necklace that matches her smile. Scholar meets Seductress—it’s a smack-down worthy of The Wrestler.

Alas, Ms. Brown declined to welcome Ms. Scanlon personally into her parlor, to paraphrase the title of her monthly Letter from the Editor (an old-fashioned word for a chamber we inevitably imagine with white shag rug, pink walls and two martinis chilling on a sideboard). And so there is a great authorial rifling through boxfuls of correspondence, and many surely blissful hours reading old periodicals. In these days of a pastel sex toy on every bedside table, Cosmopolitan has become a tired punch line in the sex wars. (A noted rake of my acquaintance speaks with disdain of the appreciative grunts made by his conquests as “so Cosmo.” They’re onto us! That’s what she said!) But Ms. Scanlon convincingly argues that under Ms. Brown’s 32-year reign, the magazine offered truly revolutionary advice for single women who feared they were freaks amid the postwar madness for matrimony. There was also the occasional bam-pow byline (her maiden issue, in 1965, had a short story by the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer and a priceless-sounding piece by Oscar Levant: “You Think You’re Neurotic”).

Denied Ms. Brown’s innermost circle, Ms. Scanlon dutifully reconstructs her subject’s miserable childhood (father died in elevator accident, sister contracted polio) and early career, from secretarial school to showbiz to writing advertising copy in Mad Men–esque work environments where men appear bent on chasing pencil-skirt-clad younger women around the filing cabinets 24-7. The attractive but not bombshell Ms. Brown dates “by the dozen” till she meets Hollywood big shot David Brown, with whom, at a wizened 37, she would form one of the glamour industries’ most enduring and enviable-seeming marriages; a business and creative partnership as well as a romantic one.

IT WAS HE who encouraged her to write the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl—a frank primer on living well alone that Ms. Scanlon clearly regards as one of the germinal feminist “texts” of the century. She doesn’t quite equate it to A Room of One’s Own, but nonetheless her heroine is firmly “situated,” as the academics like to say, in an feminist trajectory that includes Atomic Age contemporaries Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Julia Child. Only Ms. Brown was richer, skinnier and had a lot more fun.

Or so the reader is forced to surmise. For the lack of a crackling live connection between the two ladies, even on Princess phone, and perhaps compensatory addition of exhaustive cultural analysis, makes for a book about scandal perversely laden with virtue—a book drier than those martinis on the sideboard.

Alexandra Jacobs is editor-at-large of The Observer. She can be reached at ajacobs@observer.com.

Our summer interns have taken themselves (and probably our Nexis password) back to their fancy Ivy League colleges-not having done a lick of work all summer, by the way, and providing very little in the way of sloppy drunken sex-leaving us top ush papers for ourselves. (Rustle … rustle. ) Sooooo, let's see …. Demi Moore leaves Ashton with the sitter tonight and swings her glossy black hair at Saks for the "Key to the Cure" benefit. She joins Carolina Herrera's socialite daughter, Carolina Herrera Jr., and Harper's Bazaar editrix (is for kids!) Glenda Bailey . The evening's recession-proof guests have a shot at a $60,000 sparkly diamond from Saks and a Vespa . Use it to ziiiiiiip over the bridge for the Brooklyn Public Library's "Italian Authors" series with los scrittores , including Gay Talese . We called the natty scribe himself, who told us, "The 70th-anniversary issue of Esquire is on the stands right now and the editor included the best writing of the last 70 years , and he chose my piece on Frank Sinatra. Of all the writers- Hemingway, Fitzgerald , all of them-they chose yours truly! The author of the best writing of the last 70 years is on the phone with you, on your nickel!" Whatever. What's your new book, The Gay Talese Reader , about? "It's about a curious writer who gets lost in stories by entering the worlds of other people. I write about them, and I write about writing about them. It's nonfiction, not a memoir-I don't like memoirs anymore! People who are 30 years old are writing memoirs! I'm writing about a redneck sheriff from the racist South and journalism in the pre–Jayson Blair era. I write about this penis story I chased around -the John Wayne Bobbitt story, remember? I followed that penis story around." We know the feeling, sir-you should have seen us last weekend ….

[Key to the Cure, the Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, 8 p.m., 212-451-3932, by invitation only; the Italian Authors, Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, third-floor Trustees Room, Grand Army Plaza, 7 p.m., 718-320-2100.]

Thursday 18th

When we weren't looking, the guys from Queer Eye have swooped in and replaced The Sopranos ' cast as the ubiquitous New York party boys …. Who knows where they'll turn up tonight? Perhaps at the "Unlock the Cure" benefit, a worthy cancer-fighting bash sponsored by, among others, Hamptons magazine (cheesy, ass-kissing to celebs, almost to the point of advertorial) and Gotham magazine (cheesy, ass-kissing to celebs, almost to the point of advertorial) …. And on the Upper East Side, th e Rona Jaffee Foundation Writers' Awards cuts checksfor $10,000 each to six college co-ed writer types ….

[Unlock the Cure, lobby, 330 West 38th Street, 7 p.m., 212-369-0809, by invitation only; Rona Jaffee Foundation Writers' Awards, fancy club on the Upper East Side,

6 to 8 p.m., by invitation only.]

Friday 19th

The ladies of Vogue remember the little people: Vogue has installed Jumbotron-like screens outside Bryant Park broadcasting the events taking place inside the Fashion Week tents, in order to "bring Fashion Week to the people," according to the press release. We couldn't make this stuff up, folks …. Double-down on the Zoloft today, 'cause it's the last day of Fashion Week. On tap today: Ralph Lauren .

[Fashion Week, www.7thonsixth.com.]

Saturday 20th

"We tend to all go work out together at lunch," said Fitness magazine editor Emily Listfield. "If anyone walked in thelocker room, they'd see the entire staff in theirunderwear, comparing soreness levels." See how they run in Central Park at the mag's "Mind Body Spirit Games," which is serving up quite the dilemma this morning: a two-mile walk at 8:40 a.m. or a four-mile run at 9:40 a.m. Since the only thing we run is late , look for us at the spa stationhaving massages, manicures and reflexology . Look for Ms. Listfield to be (wo)manning the microphone: "I have to announce all the races, so I get an out. Hopefully, the weather will hold. Last year was a monsoon-I spent the day holding a mike, worrying I was about to be electrocuted!"

[Mind Body Spirit Games, Central Park by the 72nd Street bandshell, www.nyrrc.org.]

Sunday 21st

For Manhattan single women tired of trying to untangle men, knitting has become a satisfying form of auto-erotica , and today they burn their fingers at the 2003 Knit-Out and Crochet. Julia Roberts ( Hook ) and Justine Batemen ( Family Ties ) are both knitters of distinction. Knit yourself something "literary" (taupe, ecru, maybe some plum) to hang on the back of your chair at the New York Times -New York is Book Country brunch. Not sure if they'll be serving pancakes-surely The Times ' newly appointed "standards editor," Allan Siegel, has something to say about that? Panelists include novelist Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code , the most overhyped book since The Lovely Bones ) and Peggy Noonan , The Wall Street Journal 's answer to Maureen Dowd . If you're the sort of bloke who can't get enough of a good kazoo, you're in luck: Tykes will be kazoo-ing at the New York Is Book Country Street Fair as they parade alongside costumed characters like Amelia Bedelia (sounds dirty) and Daisy Duck (ask her why Donald doesn't wear any pants). Don't forget to kazoom over to the Mad Magazine table from 2:30 to 3:30, when The Observer 's own Drew Friedman will sign copies of the mag. Still feelin' the need for tweed? The never-ending New Yorker Festival -Fashion Week for people who read (i.e., who can't afford couture)-continues with readings from two funny guys (Woody Allen, Steve Martin) and lots more unfunny ones. If all this excitement is just blowing your mind, stay home and watch the cast of Friends pick up a bunch of Emmys they haven't deserved since 1999. Meanwhile, today is the final day of the San Gennaro Festival , which for the past two weeks has turned Nolita into a malodorous, tacky, beer-swilling all-night frat party. Whatever happened to the good old days, when the Mafia ran this thing?

[2003 Knit-Out and Crochet; Union Square Park, 17th Street, noon to 5 p.m., www.knit-out.com; brunch, Waldorf-Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., 888-NTT-1870; New York Is Book Country Street Fair, Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 55th streets,

11 a.m. to 5 p.m., www.nyisbookcountry.com; Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 3 p.m.,

877-391-0545; Emmys, 8 p.m., FOX.]

Monday 22nd

Maggie, Chloë and Hope- the Julia, Gwyneth and Halle of the indie set -show up at the Gotham Awards, hosted by Michael Ian Black (yeah, we dunno either). Presenters include Taye Diggs (helped Stella get her groove back), Naomi Watts (helped David Lynch steer straight on Mulholland Drive ) and Alec Baldwin (will help himself to the backstage buffet, thank you very much). Glenn Close and Steve Buscemi will receive awards for not selling out.

[Gotham Awards, Pier 60, Chelsea Piers, 7 p.m., 212-647-1828.]

Tuesday 23rd

Give us one good reason why anyone would ever attend a "breakfast anything ." It's simply not civilized. But if you're looking for an excuse to kick that annoying mutton-chopped hipster out of your bed this morning, arise at dawn , splash some cawfee in your eyes, drink a cup of Visine and get to Condé Nast mission control by 8 a.m. Join the unwashed reporters as they pilfer extra scones from the "Continental breakfast" (remember '99, when there were omelets?) and talk truth-in-advertising with Shelly Lazarus (C.E.O., Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide), Jamie Kellner (C.E.O.,WB) and The New Yorker 's Ken Auletta. "It's always a good time to talk! Anything to avoid work!" said Mr. Auletta, proud house-husband to lit'ryagent Binky Urban. "The subject is the future of advertising and how the industry will respond now that devices like TiVo allow people to skip ads at will." What's his least favorite commercial? "Ha! You think I don't use my TiVo and skip? No, actually I don't have one. I'm still working on the clock on my VCR!" Later, see all da fine ladies at the Top Dog Gala hosted by Barbara Walters , the she-ro of many an aspiring telejournalist.

["Advertising: Challenges Ahead," the Condé Nast Building, fourth floor, 4 Times Square, by invitation only; Top Dog Gala, Waldorf-Astoria, Grand Ballroom, 7 p.m., 212-874-5457.]

Wednesday 24th

Actor Ethan Hawke stops hiding from Uma's brothers and emerges to read from his sophomore effort, Ash Wednesday , to dewy 22-year-old editorial assistants …. On the West Side is Helen Gurley Brown and the inevitable, pseudo-empowered insecure single gals sporting the updated schoolgirl "f*ck me" look (pleated miniskirt, knee-high stilettos in place of knee socks … ). Miss Brown will read from her legendary tome, Sex and the Single Girl …. Speaking of, anyone else looking forward to Renée Zellweger packing it on for the second Bridget Jones installment?

[Ethan Hawke, Cooper Union, the Great Hall, 7 East Seventh Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-353-4000; Helen Gurley Brown, Coliseum Books Café, 11 West 42nd Street, 6 p.m., 212-803-5892.]

"Everyone has acted grown-up," she exulted. "Sex is not necessarily concomitant with love and marriage. Sex is happening very agreeably with a lot of people who are not married to one another, are married to someone else."

We've always known that Bill and Hillary have some sort of deal. What Hillary's brave stand suggests is that the deal is not cynical, but a mature and loving deal that she cut with a sense of her soul mate's limitations. When Gary Hart betrayed Lee Hart 10 years ago, his wife was so obviously distraught that it was easy to take her side and judge him as a bad husband. Hillary Clinton has given no one else that power. If the Lewinsky affair changes attitudes toward the media and sexual harassment-and finally exposes the black depths of President Clinton's abuse of power, as I hope-it could also have a bracing effect on American attitudes toward marriage.

"It's naïve to think there's only one kind of marriage," said Peter D. Kramer, psychiatrist and author of Should You Leave? "There are people who come to discover things they value about each other and the relationship, and some of the rules don't apply to them. They stay together based on a mature assessment of what's possible in life. Not from a tortured reason to stay married but because they want to stay married. A lot has been written about Franklin and Eleanor [and his infidelity]. But I don't sense that Eleanor was permanently pained or regretful."

The notion of a forthright deal in which married people countenance extramarital sex is the stuff of many a state marriage and abandoned social experiment. George and Nena O'Neill, the exponents of Open Marriage, are now divorced. Seventies key parties and Updikean entanglements seem quaintly ridiculous. Some feminists have cast the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf as judgments on bohemian social arrangements, while Simone de Beauvoir's famous pact with Jean-Paul Sartre to tell one another everything has been portrayed as hugely hurtful (the promiscuous Sartre badgered her with disgusting physical details of his liaisons, according to Deirdre Bair's 1991 biography of de Beauvoir).

But as Hillary Clinton has shown, who are we to judge someone else's marriage? Sartre and de Beauvoir's relationship yielded them full, interesting lives, and the logic of their deal still holds appeal. "'What we have,' [Sartre] said, 'is an essential love, but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs,'" de Beauvoir recalled in The Prime of Life . "We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did, but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people."

As the boomers wander out into middle age, there are plenty of signs of greater tolerance toward adultery. There's been an increase in the numbers of women who say they are unfaithful. Studies show that people who have had premarital sex are more open to the extramarital variety. And now and then therapists are quoted saying that adultery may enhance a marriage.

"I don't think anybody reading this should say, 'Let's get to it,'" Dr. Kramer said. "But I think there can be sense of security, safety-yes, emotional safety-even with infidelity, after long enough."

The discovery of disloyalty surely brings great pain to a marriage, but the great majority of adulterers say that they want to stay married, and if the marriage dies, who can say for sure that the infidelity is what killed it? As a mature marriage achieves a sense of partnership, with the shared belief that it is serving the partners' larger individual interests, infidelity may even approach so-what status for some.

There are intellectual trends to consider. Though psychologists have often been very judgmental about adultery-adulterers are "infidels," by one leading therapist's description-social scientists have lately grown more tolerant. Some treat adultery and lying as normal activities rather than as social pathologies. Meanwhile, evolutionary psychologists have pointed out that monogamy is unnatural.

"Have I seen couples remain erotically involved with each other all their lives? Yes, but it seems a little odd, doesn't it?" Dr. Kramer said. "There's an idea among evolutionary biologists that monogamy produces unsatisfying sex, that nature means to make such sex pedestrian. And if one gets very objective about the biology in this, absolute monogamy is an uphill battle." Dr. Kramer cited a study showing that among birds that mate for life, 20 percent of the female's offspring have an outside father, while 20 percent of the male's offspring are with outside mates.

Doing it only with each other may mean not doing it at all. Sexual apathy is prime fare at marriage clinics, and some people seem to reason that the price of staying sexually attractive to one's mate is remaining sexually attractive to others. According to the book Adultery in the United States: Close Encounters of the Sixth (or Seventh) Kind , by Philip E. Lampe, one scholar has argued that if the terms of a marriage are negotiated on a different basis from strict sexual loyalty, adultery may not even count as infidelity.

How do people strike such a deal? Tacitly. Even if the deal is complicit, it is rarely open. "The idea that we can tell each other and all be friends leads to hysteria and breakdown," said Susan Squire, who is writing a book about marriage. "People can't do that. Successful adultery depends on a deceptive temperament."

I called two French people to ask how they do it over there.

French source No. 1 (Sylvie Kauffmann, Le Monde 's New York correspondent, who has reported on the scandal): "I have friends who have strong marriages and who feel that as long as it's not a serious relationship, they may have something on the side from time to time. But it's not something they would brag about or recommend. From society's point of view, it's morally wrong. And it's a very tricky situation. It's very dangerous. Some of my friends have found that it's not as easy to handle as they thought."

French Source No. 2 (Anonymous): "There's no search for the truth on the part of either party. They know it happens, but they don't want to learn, and they'll forgive without knowing. They'll tolerate and they'll forgive. The only thing that can hold the tolerance aspect of the relationship is not investigating."

Of course those are the French, members of a traditional Catholic society, comfortable with hypocrisy. We're a younger, fairer, more idealistic society. The seemingly inherent sexism of infidelity-men screw around more than women-concerns us. And it's not just feminists who have politicized these matters. The Wall Street Journal , The New Republic and The McLaughlin Group have all lately offered shaming lectures about adultery as bad for the American family, and even the First Couple must feel the lash. Bill Clinton cheated himself of who knows how much pleasure for the sake of a dubious oral-sex doctrine. And even if Dick Morris is right and Mrs. Clinton has had love affairs, there's surely been a big downside for her, too.

"Is she in pain?" said Helen Gurley Brown. "I've heard that she was. Would she rather he not be that way? Of course, I can say, conjecturally. And I think it's humiliating. Is this the best you can do- Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and this new one? I wouldn't be able to stand it. But who needs anyone to talk subjectively. The world is willing to let Hillary keep her own counsel."

In spite of the best efforts of Cosmopolitan and half the married population, the shame in adultery won't disappear. It's "deviant" behavior, it goes against social norms. Mr. Lampe's book says this is one reason why so many novels and movies have adultery as a theme; fictional narratives offer comfort to people who feel themselves to be socially marginalized.

In the end the greatest power of the Clintons may be precisely in that realm: They've taken the fictional mythologies of my generation and given them life. That sounds grand, but it surely mirrors the grandness other boomers have about themselves as 70's rebels in big houses. The Clintons' transformation from idealists who named their child after a Joni Mitchell song to a power-greedy couple who got insider deals on cattle futures resonates in countless boomers' bosoms, and explains why the Clintons' private lives are so widely storied.

Now and then they have even shown flashes of nobility. Monica Lewinsky gave Hillary just such a turn. And who knows, she may be a liberator.