Men and Supermen

by Jilly Cooper

  FAIRIES

  Every girl should have one at the bottom of her.

  One is inundated with so much improperganda these days that it’s easy to think everyone is queer. You can be quite sure, though, if a young man comes floating up to you with flowing locks, gaudy shirt, matching flowered tie, a mass of necklaces, rings on each finger like a knuckleduster, bells on his toes, clouds of scent, and says “Hullo Baby” in a soft gentle voice, that he’s not queer.

  Everyone thinks all actors are queer. That’s why the straight ones rush round making it with women to prove they’re not. I always wonder what the gay ones think when they have to kiss girls on stage: “Shut your eyes, and think of Equity,” I suppose.

  People automatically assume that hairdressers and antique dealers are queer, but this is no longer so. Since both professions became big business, the butch has moved in.

  THE LOUSE BEAUTIFUL

  The toast is absent fiends.

  Lice Beautiful have accounts at the sex shop, seen-it-all-before eyes, and a million light years of sexual experience under their belts. They also smell of sulphur and brimstone rather than aftershave.

  The bounder will love you and leave you, but he’ll never put a tongue wrong while he’s loving you. If he stuck around you’d find he’d got hidden shallows, that he is the kind of man who has to keep on making love to women because he can’t think of anything to say to them in between.

  “I’ll definitely see you before the weekend, or after the weekend,” he says as he whisks off in his Lotus Elan after a night of passion. Next morning he’ll send you two dozen red herrings.

  He seldom likes other men, his philosophy being like Byron’s, a compound of misanthropy and voluptuousness.

  “Hate thy neighbour and love thy neighbour’s wife.”

  TOUCHERS

  Excellent well, thou art a fleshmonger.

  Touchers cannot keep their hands off you, they must touch flesh and are not safe in taxis. If they’re not pinching your bottom, they’re propelling you across the road, or putting their hands round your waist six inches too high. If you remonstrate with them they give you a lecture on the importance of grope therapy, and you end up feeling you’re both frigid and riddled with inhibitions.

  GIGOLOS

  Gigolos have the sort of hair styles that make older men snort, pencil in their moustaches every morning and cruise around with For Hire signs on their foreheads. They walk with bent knees because they’re so weighed down with presents, gold rings, cufflinks, watches, necklaces, and stoppings.

  CASANOVA—the Great Lover.

  I’ve always wondered why Casanova himself was so successful. It must be something to do with stamina: anyone who can keep up a diary let alone anything else for twelve volumes, must have remarkable staying power. Another secret of their success is blanket coverage. They ask every woman they meet to go to bed with them, and though they get their faces slapped fairly often, they also notch up some conspicuous victories. Others concentrate on ugly girls. Nostalgie de la boot, I suppose.

  “Harry—for God’s sake not now!”

  But how many women do you chalk up before you become a Casanova? My husband says 43, which sounds a somewhat arbitrary figure, but he refuses to elucidate. He believes Casanova provides a useful social service, claiming that the best women, like Rolls-Royces, should be delivered to the customer fully run in.

  Reputation helps, of course. Once a man has established himself as Mr Rat, women can’t wait for him to come along, for they see themselves as the saviour who halts the Rake’s Progress. Or as one libertine said of his ex-wife: “She complained I was too well endowed and went on too long, a remark which did me no disservice with her friends.” But what motive drives the compulsive womaniser on to fresher and fresher feels? Like the sportsman who sees a duck flying across the sky and can’t resist taking a pot at it, some men have bigger sexual appetites, I suppose, or are frightened of commitment and find safety in little numbers.

  The difference between Casanovas and the Louse Beautiful type is that Casanovas like women and enjoy making love to them. “I love the sex,” they cry, like Macheath. “Nothing unbends the mind like them.” Whereas Lice Beautiful only take pleasure in conquest. They regard women like Kleenex tissues, to be cast aside once they’ve been used, or like the pilot who, as the 109th Messerschmitt plunges flaming to the ground, leans calmly out of the cockpit and chalks another swastika on his fuselage.

  Some men are promiscuous because they’re unhappy, or frightened of growing old and losing their pulling power; others like the brinkmanship of living dangerously.

  But promiscuity feeds upon itself. If two women in a man’s life are cross with him because he’s not giving them enough attention, he invariably moves off in search of approbation and a clean slate, which sets up a chain reaction. Nobody too arouses more disapproval tinged with envy among other men than a Casanova. Empty pots, they mutter darkly, latent homosexual, only doing it because he hates women. No wonder Casanovas get a bit twitchy about their images.

  “I’m not promiscuous,” said one outraged libertine. “I just like girls.”

  VOYEURS

  Beautiful people looking through beautiful peep-holes.

  Part 2

  Action

  FANCYING

  “Tom—do come and meet Cynthia—she’s been dying to meet you for ages.”

  “To think I have wasted years and years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known is for a woman who doesn’t please me.”

  MARCEL PROUST.

  I HAVE ALWAYS contended there are two kinds of fancying. Some men you hardly notice for weeks, and then the whole thing jells like mayonnaise. Others you meet—and it’s lust at first sight. But the libido is so irrational. The quality you dote on in one man, you put up with a total lack of in another. Men are just the same.

  “I’m a tit man, I’m a leg man, I’m a behinds superman,” they cry, and promptly fall for quite the opposite. Ever since I was three, boys have been sidling up to me and saying: “I like my women subtle, but I’m making an exception in your case.”

  Or:

  “My wife likes tailored costumes. I can’t really think why I fancy you.” Then they quote Herrick’s ‘Sweet disorder in the dress’, and feel better.

  And people are always saying: what does he see in her? Probably no more initially than a favourable reflection of himself in the girl’s eyes. Sexual Norm fancies anyone who shows a glimmer of interest in him. Superman is invariably drawn to some cool ice-maiden, because he wants to ruffle her plumage—it’s all part of the untrodden snow syndrome.

  I think it’s mostly a question of chemistry. People either click sexually or they don’t, and if they don’t, well, nothing will make a magnet attract a silver churn.

  The libido also likes to do its own hunting. That’s why blind dates or ‘awfully sweet’ men people fix you up with seldom work out. I can understand exactly why Chi-Chi and An-An never got off the ground.

  Then of course there’s the ‘Snob’. Proust has a theory that people, particularly women, fall in love in the direction they want to go socially, which is why M.P.s, aristocrats, generals in time of war, and even Prime Ministers and of course dustmen, clean up. The most indolent women have been seen running to catch a boss.

  I really fancied an actor I met at a party the other day, but was appalled to find myself rapidly losing interest when someone told me he never got any work. And while we’re on the subject of actors, the libido never fails to surprise. Australian women recently voted Peter Wyngarde the man they most wanted to lose their virginity to. Men with big feet are fancied because they are reputed to be well endowed elsewhere.

  When a man says a woman isn’t his type, it’s a polite way of saying he thinks she’s totally sexless—but when people say a man has frightful taste in women, it means he’s having a ball with girls his friends rigidly disapprove of. Some unfortunate masochists only fancy women who give t
hem a hard time. As Shaw grumbled: “The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

  In fact so much misery is caused by people falling in love with people who don’t fall for them, or marrying totally unsuitable people merely because they momentarily fancied them enough to propose, that one cannot help feeling the whole thing is some monstrous legpull, that the Gods are laughing themselves sick up in the skies.

  HOW TO MEET MEN

  One of the basic dissatisfactions of a girl’s life is walking round and round the streets, seeing the most heavenly men wandering about and not being able to get at them. There is not much consolation in the fact that if you met them they might be as boring as hell.

  But where do you find men? Oxford and Cambridge used to provide inexhaustible supplies in the Old Days. One had only to learn to type there, or land a job in one of the colleges, or if you were brainy go to one of the women’s colleges, to have a string of men chasing after you. But since National Service was abolished, I am told all the male undergraduates are ‘too amazingly young to be any good to anyone’.

  There are also more men in the country—because they have to stay where their jobs are—whereas all the girls head straight for London believing this is where the action is. As it is, girls outnumber the men there by about six to one. Most of them end up as secretaries to boring married men, and spend their evenings gazing at the wallpaper in their bedsitters.

  You are also supposed to meet men at parties, but how do you get asked to parties if you don’t know anyone? Then of course there’s evening classes and meaningful glances across the basketwork or the thrown pot—or joining a club, which gives one awful visions of Youth Clubs full of scoutmasters or eager beavers called Stanley with badges on their lapels—or computer dating, which doesn’t seem to work much because you can’t computerise chemistry and everyone lies like hell. If someone asks you if you consider yourself utterly irresistible, quite irresistible, resistible, or canned nightmare, you are hardly likely to put canned nightmare.

  Picking up men in the street or in restaurants is dodgy because you never know if you’ve landed the Boston Strangler, and there’s always the irrational feeling that if he’s got time to go round picking up girls he must be desperate, even though you’re doing exactly the same thing yourself.

  On the other hand it’s different picking up men on aeroplanes (on the false assumption that if he can afford a plane ticket he must be rich), on holiday (the same applies) and at art galleries or at concerts (if he loves beauty he can’t be all bad). The Tate Gallery incidentally at weekends is one of the best pick-up places in London.

  I have also been reading The Sensuous Man, which encourages men who want to meet women to hunt them out in the supermarket. Instead of pinching a pretty woman’s bottom, a man pinches her trolley ‘by mistake’ and whisks it down to the check counter. When she rushes shrieking after him, he offers to pay for her groceries, and this way strikes up a friendship. So next time you’re in the supermarket, and you see a man lurking, throw a few jars of caviare and peaches in brandy into your wire basket.

  Another method the book recommends is for the man to bump into a girl in the High Street and send her parcels flying. He then picks them up, gets into conversation, and offers to buy her a drink to make up for any bruises or breakages he may have inflicted. (This ploy can, presumably, only be used in licensing hours.) It strikes me as being rather extreme—one has visions of the pavements of Oxford Street getting as bad as the M1 in a fog. Perhaps they’ll install a Pederasts Crossing for men who don’t want to get caught up in the rough and tumble.

  THE CHAT UP

  “Oh, you say that to all the girls.” DICK EMERY SHOW.

  Well, he does fancy you and he’s decided to do something about it, so he starts chatting you up. You notice the preliminary switching on of casualness, the quick range-estimating glance, the perceptible inner girding of loins, or squaring of shoulders. Sexual Norm straightens his Club tie, smooths his sweater down over his bottom, pulls in his stomach, whips off his spectacles, crinkles his eyes engagingly, and puts on his goat fatale face. He then goes upstairs, brushes his hair, and starts all over again.

  “Please, Mr Elmhurst, put me down this instant!”

  Usually a man indicates his interest in you by shooting you a penetrating glance, which you return and hold just a second longer than is polite, as you say: “Whoops tra la, here we go again.” Soon your eyes are meeting so often in penetrating glances it doesn’t matter that you’ve got nothing to say or he’s talking about garden sheds.

  Superman, when he’s chatting you up, never lets his eyes swivel to see if there’s something more amusing behind you, he howls with laughter at your weakest joke, and remembers what you’ve said an hour later.

  He only leaves your side, even if he’s given every chance of escaping, to go and fetch you another drink, so he can shoot you a long-distance smoulder across a crowded room, then bolt back to your side again. He keeps telling you how pretty you are, which works a treat—all women like a bit of buttering-up with their bed. Occasionally he touches your hand when he lights your cigarette. Sexual Norm, in an attempt at sophistication, puts the cigarette in his own mouth to light it for you, and hands it to you all soggy.

  A lot of men chat up girls by being rude to them. But personally I don’t fancy the plain blunt type. If a man’s likely to put me down, I don’t let him pick me up in the first place—I like soft soap, a flannel and a duck for my bath. My idea of an agreeable man is one who agrees with me. Nor do I like a man who boasts of his conquests. If he’s keeping open bed for half London, what’s in it for me?

  As he is leaving, Superman moves into action:

  “We must meet again sometime.” (Smouldering glance.)

  “We must.”

  “Where can I get hold of you?”

  “Wherever you like, darling.” (Smouldering glance.)

  “No, I meant your telephone number. We must have dinner sometime.” (Lunch if either of you is married.)

  Superman then memorises the number until he gets outside the room, when he writes it down. Sexual Norm overhears and jots it down in his diary, alongside the addresses of hundreds of other girls he’s never had the courage to telephone. In fact, knowing he’s got her number and could ring her up lessens his desire to try.

  THE DATE

  “And afterwards, Miss Dyson, you might like to come round to my place …”

  My experience has been that men who are interested ring you up within twenty-four hours, and ask you out.

  I get very irritated when they telephone and say: Guess who. I always guess wrong deliberately. Nor do I like men who ring up at twelve o’clock and say how about lunch today, giving you no time to wash your hair or appear faintly unavailable. Or, when you don’t want to speak to them, give someone else’s name, Omar Shariff or Sean Connery, to get you to the telephone. Even more maddening is when they call you and keep you on slow burn by chatting you up for a quarter of an hour and then don’t ask you out.

  I don’t like it either when men, having got your address, drop in uninvited at all hours of the night expecting an ecstatic welcome just when you’ve gone to bed covered in cold cream and rollers. This is a fundamental would-be-seducer’s error. Nothing makes a woman less sexually receptive than feeling unattractive.

  For the first date, any man who’s worth his salt will spend a bomb on dinner, the theatre, etc. Equally, the girl who is worth his assault will spend a bomb on a new dress, shoes, make-up, and at the hairdresser’s. Sex is expensive.

  Most courtships seem to be carried on in restaurants, helped along by soft lights and hard liquor.

  Superman never takes a girl on public transport—the lighting’s so frightful. It’s either cars, taxis, or a short walk (and I mean short), if it’s not raining or freezing, under the stars.

  ON THE FIRST DATE, MOST MEN TAKE YOU TO A RESTAURANT.

  Superman gives you plenty to
drink, doesn’t translate the menu from French for you, or spend so much time chatting up the patron and asking the waiters about their mothers that he’s got no time for you.

  “Darling, I’m so hungry I could eat you.”

  He also arranges for you to sit side by side on a bench seat at a decent distance from other people so that he can brush your hand with his occasionally, or even put a hand on your thigh when he’s making a telling point.

  “I definitely think Arsenal” (playful pummel) “are going to win the cup.”

  On a bench seat too, it’s much easier to make eyes at other people if you get bored.

  If you sit at a table opposite a man, you miss half his sweet nothings, you’ve got nowhere to look if there’s a lapse in the conversation, and you’re quite likely to waste the whole meal playing footy footy with a table leg.

  Another point to remember is that if your dinner-date chooses what he’s going to eat with infinite care, then eats all three courses, he’s not really keen on you. It’s those untouched plates of food that indicate a grand passion.

  Meanness of course is a great turn-off. Those men who say: “I thoroughly recommend the grape-fruit, they sugar it awfully well here, and why not have pasta for a main course?” afterwards expect you to pay for your dinner horizontally. The same type always fails to conceal that he’s keeping the bill afterwards, and if he takes you to a party first, encourages you to fill up on the canapés so you’ll only need a very plain omelette later.

  Lunch I have always thought is an even more erotic start to an affaire than dinner. When you have the enforced discipline of getting back to the office or the children, you always come on much stronger than you would normally.