Men and Supermen

by Jilly Cooper

  As a result the world is now full of seventy-year-old ravers, locks clustering over the collars of their shirts, sideboards laddering their artificially tanned cheeks, and fifty-year-old ton-up boys, forcing themselves into tight jeans, brushing their thinning hair forward, and touching up the grey roots of their jet-black Viva Zapata moustaches. In the evening they wear sawn-off kaftans to hide their pot bellies.

  In an attempt to keep up, they exhaust themselves going on vegetarian diets, giving up drink, and dancing all night in discothèques, then going round with grey faces saying they feel twenty years younger. In trying to be Peter Pan, they look more like petered-out pansies.

  They also embrace all the phoney mysticism that surrounds smoking pot, and at parties they can be seen going furtively into back rooms and tearing cigarettes apart. Later they gaze into young girls’ eyes and say: “My dear, you’ve made an old man very hippy.”

  Dolly birds like them—because it gives them kudos in the typing pool to be going out with an older man. Older men can also take them to trendy restaurants younger men can’t afford, and are said to be ‘experienced’ sexually. (I shudder to think what rubbish is dished up in the name of experience.) They also take them occasionally for dirty weekends at a Truss House in Hernia Bay.

  FIANCÉS

  Fiancés are out of date and not getting it. If pressed they will say: “My fiancée and I have slept together all night in the same bed, but we haven’t actually slept together.” Fiancées never give their fiancés their all—only about seven-eighths.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Harriet …”

  Fiancés have soft curly hair, pink faces from permanently blushing at their predicament, starry eyes, and a mosaic of scarlet lipstick on their downy cheeks from having been embraced by so many new aunts-in-law.

  They also manage to appear vacant and engaged at the same time by having a far away abstracted expression on their faces. People naturally assume they are dreaming of the moment when they and their betrothed will be one flesh; actually they are completely shell-shocked by all the talk about soft furnishing and wedding-present lists.

  Caught off guard, they have a trapped expression.

  As one fiancé said, just before his wedding: “I feel as though I’m going into hospital for a major operation and all the anaesthetists are on strike.”

  On their desks they have photographs of their fiancées given them by their fiancées, looking mistily soppy in pearls.

  BACHELORS

  Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid’s fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right. Because they are not married, or living with a woman, they don’t feel the need to bath very often. Occasionally they have a shower after cricket and pinch their married friends’ towels. They can be recognised by their white underpants. (Married men have pale blue or pink-streaked underpants, because one of their wife’s scarves has run in the washing machine.)

  Bachelors dread Christmas because they’ve got so many god-children to remember, and have a very high threshold of boredom through enduring so many grisly evenings with awful girls thrust on them by their married friends.

  By way of revenge, they spend a great deal of time sponging off their married friends, turning up for lunch on Sunday and not leaving until the Epilogue, and knocking their disgusting pipes out on the carpet so that they get a chance to look up the wife’s skirt when she bends over to sweep up the mess.

  They also get wildly irritated by their friends’ children, cast venomous glances at a two-year-old, and say: “Isn’t it time he went to prep school?”

  A married man often rings up his bachelor friend and after a lot of humming and hawing asks if he can borrow the flat to ‘change in’ that afternoon. When the bachelor gets home in the evening, he often finds various bits of female underclothing, and his bed has been far more tidily made than he left it that morning.

  Married friends are also inclined to turn up with whisky bottles, having been locked out by their wives, and spend all night berating the matrimonial state.

  It is hardly surprising that although a lot of bachelors would like to get married, they cannot bring themselves to take the plunge—like bathing on Christmas Day.

  “So pleased to beat you …”

  Bachelors can mostly be divided into the following categories:

  GAY BACHELORS (See Fairies and Airmen)

  ELIGIBLE BACHELORS

  They have three address books, and an ejector seat for getting girls out of their flats in the morning. They never have any free evenings because they are constantly being asked out to dinner by designing mums or married women for their divorced girl friends.

  MOTHER’S BOYS

  “Darling, this is Mummy …”

  They wear scarves, berets, long macintoshes, galoshes and often work for the White Fish Authority. They always wash apples before they eat them and suffer from hypochondria. When they say they have relations all the time, they don’t mean sexual ones, only that they live at home with their mother and sisters.

  They have hot milk with skin on it before they go to bed, and read the Lesson on Sunday. People often say they need the love of a good woman, but what they need is the love of a really bad woman to get them off the hook.

  They wear camel-hair dressing gowns and grey striped pyjamas. Penalty for pulling the cord is disillusionment.

  MARRIED MEN

  Let’s Play Monogamy.

  Married men mostly chat up girls to bolster their self-respect and prove they haven’t lost their touch. They are more likely to flash photographs of their children at you than anything else. Although they may claim they’re unhappily married and carry on something shocking at parties, they seldom leave their wives for other men.

  The confirmed adulterer usually operates from a position of strength: “I’m very much in love with Jennifer, you know. I wouldn’t do anything to endanger my marriage, and little Gideon and Samantha mean everything to me.”

  When you ask if his wife ever gets up to tricks, knowing from the gripevine that she does, he shakes his head smugly and says: “Oh no, Jennifer never looks at another man.” (Presumably she does it with her eyes shut.)

  I think married people should only have affaires with other married people who know the rules (a sort of: “If you don’t leave scratch marks on my back, I won’t leave scratch marks on yours”), keep the same hours and are batting from the same position of strength and weakness. There is a freemasonry about married people: they seem to feel it doesn’t matter how much they hurt the single person they got entangled with, as long as nothing is allowed to endanger the married state.

  But as with older men, it gives a girl terrific kudos in the typing pool to say she’s having an affaire with a married man—everyone imagines he looks like Mr Rochester. And the hours are good too. She’ll have most evenings and all weekends free, including Easter and Christmas, to run another man.

  Younger married men often have their trousers done up with a nappy pin, and black rings under their eyes, not from making love all night but from teething babies. Wedding rings are worn by men who marry foreign girls or who think other people might think they were not attractive enough to get anyone.

  Married men of course vary enormously. Some are so henpecked they’re absolutely covered in beak-marks, and a burglar alarm goes off if another woman so much as shakes hands with them. Others have what are called adultery toleration pacts, which means they can go off and sleep with whom they like, as long as they tell their wives all about it afterwards. It is all a question of wife-styles.

  DIVORCED MEN

  “I’m not so old and not so plain, and I’m quite prepared to marry again.”

  W. S. GILBERT.

  It always amazes me how vitriolic divorced people are to each other. One girl friend of mine came back from work to find her drawing room piled high with dusty books. Her ex-husba
nd had arrived and taken all the bookshelves away because he’d put them up in the first place.

  Another wife stripped her house of all its possessions and moved in with her lover. Three days later there was a knock on the door: it was a special delivery of 400 gallons of water.

  “But I didn’t order any water,” she protested.

  “This was the address we were given,” said the delivery man, handing her a note. It was from her husband, saying: “You forgot to take the water out of the swimming pool.”

  Divorced men can be divided into two types: those who left their wives, and those that were left by their wives. If you marry the former, you worry that he’s going to do the same to you, if you marry the latter, you worry whether he’s still crazy about his first wife, and trying to compete with her. First wives always look like Scarlett O’Hara, or are wonderful little homemakers like Katie in the Ads, who spend their time running up thousands of delicious puddings tasting of Oxo. Or they are boots who don’t get married again and cost their husbands a fortune in alimony.

  Even if a man’s first wife doesn’t cast a long shadow, there are always his children to amuse on those eternally long weekends. Scenting weakness, they generally play the new wife up shamelessly. If she cooks their favourite food, they say their mother makes it much better. If she plays with them, they get over-excited and won’t go to bed. If she tries to suck up to them and buy them expensive presents, they’ve always got them already.

  “I got it from a 13th century recipe. Was it all right?”

  And then there are those endless dreary afternoons on the Serpentine steering the little mites away from necking couples, or at the Zoo steering them away from copulating animals.

  If she’s a girl friend rather than a wife, they spend their time telling her how much prettier the girl friend was who came last weekend. Having snapped at them, she remembers they’re victims of a broken home and feels guilty.

  “Now, come of children, you do remember Susan …”

  Don’t catch men on the rebound immediately after they’ve been left by their wives: they’ll sob all over you, and then go off with someone else.

  Any girl who is determined to get married should go for a man who’s been married six times, and get him into bed. He will then divorce his sixth wife and marry her, being one of those incurable romantics who believes that if he sleeps with a girl he’s got to do the decent thing by her.

  Divorced men who show no sign of marrying again and appear to be thoroughly enjoying themselves will be a constant source of irritation to their friends, for the men will be jealous and the wives will sense their husbands’ jealousy.

  Another person who will be disapproved of by society if he appears to be enjoying himself is the lover.

  LOVERS

  “There always seems something so dirty-sweatered and dirndl-skirted about living with a man you’re not married to.”

  ELAINE DUNDY

  Lovers live in unmarried respectability, furnish their love-nests from Co-habitat, and are disapproved of by society, which feels that the man is having his cake and eating it and that both of them shouldn’t be avoiding tax. Society is slightly less shocked by men living in sin with girls under twenty-four, because it doesn’t feel the man has yet ruined the girl’s chances of getting married.

  It never enters anyone’s head that it might be the girl who is refusing to get married.

  Lovers in fact behave far more respectably than married couples. Have you ever heard of a mistress-swapping party? Although they wear their unconventionality in public like a banner, in private they are watching television, washing up and having sex 2·8 times a week like everyone else.

  A liaison like this usually begins when a girl is moving flats and wants to leave her luggage somewhere so she dumps it with her boy friend. Before he really knows it, she’s moved in, had a key cut, changed the wallpaper in the drawing room, and is adding the usual little feminine touches—bras dripping over the bath, make-up on the carpet. For the first few months they enjoy the thrill of living in sin and playing at being married. The possibility that Daddy might roll up with a horse-whip adds an edge to the situation. Soon other couples are asking them to dinner and they start asking them back, until it becomes a habit.

  Men who are living with women are at pains to tell you within five minutes that they are not actually married. On the whole they seem to be more overtly randy than married men just to prove they’re not tied down.

  SCHOOLBOYS (see Students, Bachelors, Lovers, Married Men, Divorcés)

  Class

  CLASS AS A subject is as taboo today as sex was during Victorian times. Nevertheless there are still certain differences between the classes.

  THE ARISTOCRACY

  Sir Galahad everyone in sight

  “Open yer legs, dam’ yer!”

  Aristocrats spend their childhood being beaten by fierce nannies and their later years murdering wildlife, so it’s hardly surprising their sex lives are a bit cock-eyed. When they get ‘awf’ with a girl they automatically expect her to go to bed with them—a hangover, I suppose from the old droit de seigneur days. The girl will have to experience a good many gaucheries de seigneur first, including a lot of coarse fishing around to find where her bra unclasps. She should be careful if she makes love to him in his own house, or the bedroom door may be suddenly flung open and the general public pour in, having been charged 50p to see over her.

  Aristocrats have their mouths permanently open so that the back of their throats is coated with flies like a windscreen after a long journey. They have double-barrelled fowling pieces, wives called Fiona, and never go on holiday.

  THE MIDDLE CLASSES

  The middle class man indulges in wife-swapping parties and swinging—it is all-important for him to keep it up in front of the Joneses. He buys a great many porny books and magazines which he carefully locks away every morning, in case the daily woman finds them. He inconsistently disapproves of what he calls P.D.A.—public displays of affection, or necking in the street. The words ‘privacy of one’s own home’ are often on his lips. He keeps a large box of Kleenex for Men by the bed.

  THE LOWER CLASSES

  Ever since Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the lower classes have retained a tremendous reputation for being sensation in the sack—more vigorous and muscular, less fastidious. It’s all part of the New Brutality.

  Photographers of both the lower and the upper classes are very much in vogue. But the upper class ones have to say ‘yer know’ every five minutes, and ‘ubsolutely funtustic’, to show how democratic they are. Photographers have long arms like monkeys from carrying so much equipment about, and usually shack up with models so they can talk shop in bed instead of doing anything else. And they don’t have to pay any model fees.

  SNOBS

  “I came up the hard way. The lift wasn’t working.”

  Snobs or parvenus are very much to be avoided as it’s chips on the shoulder with everything. To justify his own insecurity, the snob tries to pull any girl he meets, a case of local boy makes everyone.

  His intentions are always honourable: unless you have a title, he will never marry you. What are a few nights of passion to him compared with a lifetime at the wrong end of the table.

  I once went out with a Harrovian parvenu. He said: “I fancy you more than any woman I’ve ever met, but I can’t marry you because you’re not Upper Class Enough.” I was later irritated to see his smug little face in the Tatler on his wedding day, a horse-faced duchess’s daughter on his arm flanked by a battalion of large bridesmaids. Tiara Boom-de-ay. Many parvenus are:

  RICH MEN

  “His voice was full of money.” DOROTHY PARKER.

  Rich men are much more attractive than poor men, beggar men or thieves, but not all that interested in sex. They’re too busy training camels to jump through the eye of a needle, and worrying about being down to their last villa in the South of France.

  Rich men come complete with all mod cons, saunas, swi
mming baths, indoor and outdoor barbecues and flagellation rooms. They are marvellous between the balance sheets.

  They are funny about money, suspicious of being used, and afraid they are not being loved for themselves alone and all that.

  It would be very boring to marry a really rich man, for he’d either be at the office night and day, or else under your feet all the time. You’d spend your life playing tinker tailor with the caviare, and waiting for Jackie Onassis to ask you to coffee parties.

  Sexual Types

  NARCISSISTS

  ONE OF THE great misconceptions is that women don’t like very good-looking men. They do—the best lovers are either men who cater for and play on your fantasies or who are so beautiful you don’t need to fantasise at all. The trouble is that beautiful men aren’t usually interested in women.

  You also have to spend so much time jostling with them for the mirror, telling them how marvellous they look, and knowing they’re only gazing passionately into your eyes to admire their reflection in your dark glasses. And because they feel secure on the basis of their looks, they’re inclined to be apathetic in bed.

  They are also a bit boring about keeping fit, not eating or drinking much and getting up early to do press-ups. The only press-ups a man ought to do should be on one.

  They usually have portraits of themselves in the attic getting older and older, and marry plain women because they don’t like competition.