"Sex is a perverse little devil and the minute you ignore it, it has a serious temper tantrum and tries every trick in the book to get you to notice. It clamors for your attention until it gets it, at which point it disappears."

Wrote Cynthia Heimel in "Sex Tips for Girls," a 1983 collection of columns that had run in The Village Voice.

When an incoming Village Voice editor fired her in 1997 — he called her writing “predictable” before dismissing her — she told The New York Post, “I feel like I’ve walked into a Kafka novel where old stupid guys get to fire you.”

I'm sorry to say I'm quoting from her obituary (in the NYT). Ms. Heimel was 70 years old and had been living with dementia.

Here's "Sex Tips for Girls" at Amazon, in case you want to read the 1980s version of the kind of thing we see so much of today, when we are overloaded with alternative media. It was fresher then. Here's another book of hers, with a fantastic cover that I remember seeing in bookstores (we had stores for books in those days):



And now we must live without Cynthia Heimel, who laughed back then about the notion that it was possible for anyone to be so important that without them we would die.