. >> reporter: as a sexual revolutionary, brown's manifesto was "sex and the single girl," her 1962 best-seller. it was made into a film with natalief those things outside of marriage just as easily as you can. >> "sex and the single girl" was explosive in american culture. women were used to getting advice from ministers, they were used to getting advice from academics, but helen gurley brown was the first person to come along and give the kind of sister-to-sister, girl-to-girl, straight-forward talk about sex. >> reporter: that advice was scandalous to feminists, according to her biographer, bowdoin college professor jennifer scanlon. >> some feminists were horrified by helen gurley brown, because they basically, to put it in a nutshell, they wanted to change the system and helen gurley brown wanted to work the system. >> reporter: that's what she did, and her life seemed to prove her point. helen gurley brown was a huge success. at 37, she married david brown, the man of her dreams, and now, even feminists have come around, half a century after she uttered the word sex out loud. >> sex, of course, is not the determining force in