Cynthia Heimel: American feminist columnist whose wit won her comparisons with Dorothy Parker

Heimel wrote about bad boys, bad dates, bad sex and bad birth control, with the occasional reminiscence of blissed-out pleasure thrown in

The self-confessed ‘card-carrying hippie’ in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1973. In her twenties, she supported herself and her son on child welfare payments as well as occasional cheques from freelance writing and secretarial jobs (Michael Longacre)

Cynthia Heimel was the humour columnist whose ribald, biting commentary on sex, romance and womanhood appeared in the Village Voice, Vogue and Playboy.

She was the author of 1983’s Sex Tips for Girls, and Get Your Tongue out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye, published 10 years earlier.

In her books and columns, Heimel wrote about bad boys, bad dates, bad sex and bad birth control, with the occasional reminiscence of blissed-out pleasure thrown in. “God protects drunks, infants and feisty girls,” she once observed, and in a tumultuous, three-decade writing career, she was feistier than most.

“Everyone in the world seems to think that they are co-dependent and that they come from dysfunctional families,” she wrote in one 1989 column for Playboy. “They call it co-dependency, I call it the human condition.”

Comparing her to Dorothy Parker, the New York Times culture critic Stephen Holden once wrote that Heimel was “an urban romantic with a scathing X-ray vision that penetrates her most deeply cherished fantasies”.

Heimel’s 1983 book ‘Sex Tips for Girls’ made her a literary celebrity

For her part, Heimel described herself as a “card-carrying hippie”, absent the snotty self-righteousness she saw in other ageing members of her generation.

In her twenties, she supported herself and her son on child welfare payments as well as occasional cheques from freelance writing and secretarial jobs. She was working as an assistant in the advertising department at the now-defunct SoHo Weekly News in the 1970s when she published her first major story – an article about an anarchists’ conference in New York. The activists, she noted, seemed to miss the irony of their organised gathering.

Heimel soon turned to sex, focusing on what she described as a lack of self-esteem among young women and a society that had, she wrote, “taught women to hate themselves”.

For readers of Vogue, the Village Voice, Playboy and New York magazine, she became a conduit to the women’s issues of the day, a sexual ambassador for men and an inspiration for women.

“You must just acknowledge deep in your heart of hearts that people are supposed to f**k,” Heimel wrote in her best-selling first book, Sex Tips for Girls (1983). “It is our main purpose in life, and all those other activities – playing the trumpet, vacuuming carpets, reading mystery novels, eating chocolate mousse – are just ways of passing the time until you can [have sex] again. Well, maybe not eating chocolate mousse. If it is made with good Swiss chocolate and topped off with Devon cream, eating chocolate mousse is almost as good as f**king.”

Heimel “taught so many of us women who came up after her to talk about sex without shame,” said Anna March, publisher of the online feminist magazine Roar. “We don’t always stop to think about how revolutionary that was, but 30 years ago when I was 18, it sure was.”

Born Cynthia Joan Glick in Philadelphia in the late Forties, her father worked in pharmaceutical sales, and her mother – sometimes described in Heimel’s columns as “my enemy”, the upbraiding parental force who insisted she lose weight, find a man and fix her hair – was an administrative assistant at a university.

She attended Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, where her classmates included future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and ran away from home at 17 to immerse herself in painting and the arts. She also dabbled in journalism, working for several years as a contributor to the Distant Drummer newspaper in Philadelphia.

‘Get Your Tongue...’ came out on a wave of feminism in 1973

After having a son in 1970 with her first husband, radio broadcaster Steven Heimel, she kicked around in communes in London before settling in New York and becoming art director at the SoHo Weekly News. She also had a short-lived stint as a columnist at the New York Daily News, where she said an editor once summoned her to his office and scolded her: “Our readers are slobs. You have to write slobbistic.”

Heimel, who soon quit to write her first book, discussed sex on late-night television with Jay Leno and David Letterman, adapted her first book into a play, A Girl’s Guide to Chaos, and published the collections But Enough About You (1986), If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? (1992) and If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? (1995).

She also wrote for the television sitcoms Dear John and Kate & Allie, which Heimel said nearly drove her to become an alcoholic, and in 2003 published a sequel to her first book, Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It’s Personal.

Her marriages to Heimel and journalist Abe Opincar ended in divorce. Besides her son, survivors include a sister and four grandchildren.

Heimel said she struggled with depression, and for years her columns were filled with self-deprecating barbs and acknowledgements that the confidence and poise she urged upon other women was not something she always possessed. Even the art of loving another person, which formed the backbone of her work, was something she said she “figured out” only “too late”.

Still, she wrote in If You Can’t Live Without Me: “I regret nothing. I’m miserable because I was one of the first, and I believe that women my age are a sacrifice to the future. It’s not going to be the same for our daughters. They will have a much better chance of ‘having it all’.”

Cynthia Heimel, humour columnist, born 13 July 1947, died 25 February 2018

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