Men and Supermen

by Jilly Cooper

  The girl becomes more and more bitchy and resentful, even though she knows she’s not furthering her cause. Men like to come home to someone restful and neutral who doesn’t make scenes.

  Or she resorts to the awful boredom of playing games, flirting with other men to keep her man on his toes, or rather on his elbows.

  If only she had the courage to break it off. But it’s rather like trying to get out of a tepid bath, the water is getting colder and colder, but it’s still warmer than the cold outside.

  Some girls try and shove a man Gretna Green-wards by showing him what a grand little home-maker she is, mucking out his flat, washing his shirts and rugger shorts, being fantastically good with all his married friends’ children, currying favour and chicken leftovers. But I don’t think it works.

  “Well, I just thought we could go out after all …”

  I’m against Women’s Lib because I think women come unstuck when they do the chasing. They can’t keep the beseeching or the stammer out of their voices when they ring men up. Then there is the expense of giving a whole cocktail party, in order to extend a casual invitation to one man, who probably doesn’t come anyway, or asking a man to dinner and filling the place with so many flowers and candles it looks like a funeral parlour.

  Now most young men are far more house proud and domesticated than girls. They live in bachelor flats with all mod cons. They shop at the late-night supermarket, and their washing is done for them by the dragon in the launderette who has a soft spot for men. Their shirts drip dry over the bath They have no difficulty in getting a char.

  In the kitchen in the evening they know all about basil and tarragon as they whisk around in their butcher-boy aprons, blinding you with domestic science. They are even marvellous at washing up. Gone are the good old days, when indulgent wives used to say: “Norm’s a wonderfully imaginative cook, but it takes me three days to clear up the pots and pans after him.”

  As they listen to the Women’s Lib screeching, men must wonder why they should bother to marry at all, and get terrible complexes about enslaving a suffering female, or turning a graduate into a cabbage. They don’t need wives to darn their socks or the holes in their arguments.

  THE COOLING-OFF PERIOD

  Nothing is sadder than to feel a man going off, it’s like trying to hold water in cupped hands.

  The coward usually does it with a kiss, and then stops ringing up. If he starts saying things like: “I’m awfully fond of you, Jennifer,” or “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” or “We don’t have much in common except the obvious thing, do we?” Or if he’s married: “I think Honor suspects something, so perhaps we’d better cool it for a month or two”—you know the end is very near.

  Personal Habits

  HYGIENE—ME AND MY FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW

  “Well, it’s quicker than a bath any day.”

  TELEVISION ADVERTISING HAS made us positively paranoiac about hygiene. A man hardly looks at a girl without fretting whether he’s forgotten to use his roll-on deodorant, his anti-perspirant, his Lifebuoy Soap, or his Gold Spot. A lot of his time will be spent shaving twice a day so he can dunk himself in aftershave, cleaning his teeth, worrying about the Y-fronts and Wherefores of Under Stains, and lobbying to have a bidet installed in the office Gents.

  The sweet smell of success has been replaced by the success of sweet smell. If a man smells remotely rancid you can assume he hasn’t got a television, or only watches B.B.C.

  I like men to wear scent. I hate mouths like mossy caverns and I prefer fur coats to furlined nostrils. But it is very turning off if a man stops his car and starts crunching Polos, before he crushes you in his arms and fills your mouth with peppermint-flavoured splinters.

  The nicest men taste faintly of garlic—but not of onions.

  Sexual Norm, who wants to get his teeth into Dental Floss, is wondering whether he ought to get circumcised because he’s heard it’s more hygienic.

  CLOTHES

  Once upon a time there were hard and fast rules about what a gentleman wore. But recently the young have raised two fingers at fashion, and now anything goes as long as you wear it without selfconsciousness, and with style.

  One was always being told that no gentleman would wear rings on anything but his little finger, or coats with belts, or suits without a tie or braces—but somehow with shoulder-length hair they all look perfectly all right.

  I’m still not wild about jerkins, or knickerbockers, or any kind of hats, baggy flannel trousers, lovat-green cardigans or white polo-necked sweaters on older men trying to look younger (“a touch of white is so flattering near the face when you get beyond a certain age”).

  I’m also allergic to shorts except on athletes, belted camel-hair coats, vests, and gloves except on ski instructors or gynaecologists. And I can do without the anorak brigade, and old school ties—that awful idea of looking at someone’s neck first to see if he’s acceptable.

  It also amazes me how few men have a sense of colour. They don’t seem to realise that grey looks hell with a sallow skin, and red with an English red-brick complexion.

  “Your HAT, Charles.”

  Or, as a chum of mine said who went to see a friend in prison: “Brown simply isn’t Gordon’s colour.”

  Well dressed men always seem to get someone else to wear their suits in for them. Sexual Norm wears a blazer with a Rotary Club badge, a club tie with shields on it, and a battery of fountain pens in his breast pocket which leak onto his white nylon shirt when he presses himself against girls.

  HAIR

  Very few Englishmen seem to realise the importance of having their hair cut properly.

  They also seem to have no control over their barbers. Having just grown their hair to a reasonable length over their collars, they suddenly start muttering about having too many wisps round their ears or the older men in the office looking disapproving, and disappear to their barbers. They emerge with their sideboards shaven, absolutely nonexistent back, front and sides, and looking just about as gruesomely sexless as soldiers used to on their first leave from National Service.

  “But, Celia, I’m working until 3 every morning. How do you expect me to get it cut?”

  It takes at least two months for them to be bearable to look at again.

  I can’t think why they’re so reluctant to grow their hair. Not only is long hair pretty, it also covers a multitude of sins, such as an ugly hair line, a dirty neck, protuberant or dirty ears, and carbuncles.

  Dreadfully square men who fancy themselves often have it cut short at the back but slightly longer at the front, so that it curls on their foreheads and makes them look boyish.

  BEARDS

  I’m not wild about beards on men or women, particularly if the men have very full red lips, or their beards are always getting clogged with soup, cream or melted butter. I suppose if you shut your eyes you can fancy you’re being kissed by some furry animal who might be Jupiter in disguise.

  The Common Market

  THE COMMON MARKET

  IN THE NEXT few years, the country will be flooded with foreigners, Frenchmen who would a-wooing go, Italians who take every remark you make with a pinch of flesh.

  Wives will greet their husbands with the question: “Had a good Dago at the office, darling?”

  When I was eighteen I spent a fortnight in Majorca with a girl friend. The beauty of the Majorcan men affected us like a fever and they soon returned the compliment. The first day we sat on the beach we suddenly became aware of hundreds of small, dark, handsome men edging inch by inch towards us on their stomachs like an army on manoeuvres, and soon we were surrounded. Every night we seemed to go out with at least six men.

  After a few days my friend settled for a flamenco dancer, but I couldn’t make up my mind between a taxi driver and a telephone mechanic called Angel, until one evening the taxi driver took me for a long walk along the beach. A huge white moon had turned the sea to gunmetal.

  The taxi driver removed his coat a
nd hung it on a breakwater, then took my scarf and spread it out on the sand. How like Sir Walter Raleigh, I thought, very moved, and was preparing to sit on it when I was firmly pushed out of the way and he sat on it himself. He was damned if he was going to have his new suit covered in sand. After that I settled for Angel.

  What other single men is a girl likely to get off with on holiday? Sexual athletes from the Gorbals in their prehistoric shorts and their sandals and socks. Pallid Belgians in snorkel masks, airtubes and flippers looking like something out of Doctor Who. Germans who spring 100 yards across a crowded beach to light your cigarette. Danes so impossibly blue-eyed and beautiful that they couldn’t be interested in women at all.

  Beware too the French gigolo with his curls and flat stomach, his flashy crawl and his superb English. If you spill Ambre Solaire on his shirt, he’ll drop his accent in a trice and turn out to be some hairdresser from Palmers Green.

  Even the stolid English wolf will find his sheep’s clothing too hot on holidays and emerge in his full colours as Playboy of the Western World.

  When he gazes deep into your eyes and murmurs: “Let’s spend the rest of our lives together like that ah, um, you know, that classical couple who spent their lives together” he doesn’t mean it. Holidays produce beautiful ephemeral relationships but rarely husbands.

  Angel the telephone mechanic turned up in England that winter. Without his suntan, without a job, but with gold teeth and a shiny suit, and speaking no English, he was a far less attractive proposition.

  When Sexual Norman goes on holiday he gets drunk on the B.E.A. flight going out and sings ‘Valencia here I come’.

  Man and his Recreations

  MAN AND HIS RECREATIONS

  “I’D RATHER HE had his hobbies than other women.” I think a lot of male-female resentment stems from men spending so much time away from their beloveds—not even earning money, but spending it instead in clubs, pubs, or playing games.

  THE CLUB

  One of the last bastions of male chauvinism. Not only do they discriminate against women but also against each other. If you are Jewish or foreign and want to get into one of the more august clubs, you have to change your name not once but twice in case they ask you what your name was before you changed it.

  If a wife rings up to speak to her husband, the call is taken by the porter or the steward who puts his hand over the receiver and asks: “Are you in, my Lord?” After lunch at a boys’ school, dining in one of the ladies’ annexes is about the most unglamorous thing in the world. Awful décor, overhead lighting, cress on everything and musty waitresses called Dolly with indiscreetly dyed hair. The ladies usually consist of a few felt hats, and their pale daughters fingering their pearls and about to go back to school.

  HIS FRIENDS

  “Darling, you must meet Leo and Roger, my oldest friends.”

  “Some of my best friends are friends.”

  One of a man’s most irritating habits, along with revving up his car when he thinks you ought to be ready, leaving one sock in his trousers and talking about time and motion when he watches you doing housework, is showing off in front of his friends. He only has to be surrounded by a few cronies to start making snide remarks, about you but more likely about your friends. If you take him to task at the time, you will be accused of making a scene. If you bring it up later, he will have forgotten what he said, and accuse you of making a mountain out of a molehill.

  One of the silliest things one is ever told as a gel, is to avoid men who haven’t got any men friends.

  HIS CAR

  “Yes, definitely a big end …”

  Cars are a complete sex substitute. Why else do men refer to the beastly things as ‘she’? Let a carman into your life, and you will be woken every morning by the squeak of chamois leather, or be stood up on a date because he’s ‘moving cars’ this weekend. Carmen howl round the shopping centre effing and blinding at every traffic light, wear awful gloves with holes in the back, rush up to anything with a strap round its bonnet and pat it as though it had just won the Grand National, and are so used to lying underneath cars that they always take the underneath position when making love to you, and then complain your big end’s gone. Beforehand they wind you up with a starting handle.

  On the coldest day in winter, they put woolly hats with pom-poms on, and drive you for hours with the hood down to blow the cobwebs and your wig and everything else away.

  In the summer as a treat they’ll take you to Silverstone where you will stand pressed against a railing surrounded by men in flat caps talking about gaskets. Occasionally a car flashes by making the sort of noise that unpleasantly resembles a dentist’s drill, and a voice says “that was Old Graham”, or Jackie. If you say you admire a certain driver, it’s always someone who, it turns out, kicked the bucket last week.

  A few years ago, sports cars were the thing, but now I’m glad to see they have been replaced by Rolls-Royces with blacked-out windows. Riding in them you always think the weather is much worse than it is, and feel very cheerful when you get out.

  BOATS ARE EVEN WORSE

  Sailing is absolutely terrifying. You arrive for the weekend all dressed up in brand-new old clothes with your hair just done, and as soon as you set sail a dirty great wave rolls up and absolutely drenches you. Next moment, the sail is lying on the water, and the darling amiable man who asked you on the boat has turned into Captain Bligh and is yelling blue murder at you. Something about going aft. The nicest men become absolute monsters once they get a bit of string between their hands. Most of your weekend will be spent in the hold, cooking meals which everyone throws up.

  The amazing thing about sailing is that although by day the men bellow at you and can’t tell the girls from the buoys, at night everything changes. The boat is moored, the whisky comes out and they’re all ready to seek out your Jolly Erogenous zones and play deck coitus. If there is another couple aboard, you are bound to have changed partners before the weekend is out, for there is something about lack of space, appallingly uncomfortable beds, and seasickness, that makes people incredibly randy.

  GOLF

  If you go out with a man who plays golf, your biggest problem will be not to laugh the first time you see him in action. Once they get on the course, the most sober, steadfast and demure individuals suddenly blossom out like court jesters, in the most brilliant colours and fashions—lemon-yellow caps, pale-blue anoraks, cherry-pink trousers. And when they wiggle their feet to get their stance right they look exactly like cats preparing to pee.

  Their language is even more colourful. My uncle had a house near the fourth tee in Yorkshire, and all his children had to wear ear plugs.

  In the club house afterwards they will suddenly start kissing your hand, downing gins and tons, asking you what’s your poison and saying haw, haw, haw all the time.

  Golfers never have one night stands—they hole in one.

  RUGGER MEN

  Here comes, Thunderthighs.

  Rugger can be the most romantic game in the world—who could resist Gareth Edwards? It can also be the most boring, if you’re watching on the touchline in the icy cold and it’s Harlequins 42, H.A.C nil.

  After the game, having covered themselves with mud and glory, rugger players spend hours and hours in the bath, and then expect you to talk to other rugger wives while they down pint after pint of beer. Occasionally in the back of a car, they will make a forward pass at you.

  If you marry a rugger player, you won’t get sex on Friday night in case you put his eye out, all the towels will disappear, and by the end of the season his suitcase of kit no longer needs carrying, it walks by itself.

  Rugger players love orgies, because they remind them of the scrum.

  “But Gilbert, I played front row last night …”

  ROWING MEN

  Row me oh, oh Row me oh.

  HORSEY MEN

  Goodness, she isn’t wearing a bridle.

  Horses and sex seem to go together. If you’ve got some
thing between your legs all day, you want to carry on in the same vein at night.

  Horsey men have tough faces, vice-like thigh muscles (although that may be an illusion created by their jodhpurs), and figures of eight engraved on their bottoms from sitting on so many shooting sticks.

  They will tighten your girths before they mount you and pin a red rosette on you afterwards. Never make love to them upside down or the luck will run out of them.

  SHOOTING

  Hearing about shooting is very tedious, with all those Harris Tweedledumbs who roll up at a girl’s flat with a bloody grouse in each hand and proceed to twelve-bore everything but the pants off her, telling her about their exploits on the Glorious Twelfth. Going shooting on the other hand is rather fun—like walking under armer’ escort—as long as you make sure the guns stop for a long boozey lunch in the middle of the day.

  Between each drive you will hear rather ambiguous cries: “Where’s Rufus?”

  “Picking up birds in the woods.” or

  “Hey, that’s my cock you’ve got hold of.” The guns work off so much aggression being beastly to their dogs that they’re usually quite nice to women.

  BRIDGE

  Definitely addictive—people who are short on conversation or old before their time play bridge—and once hooked they would rather play than take a girl out. All bridge players sweat heavily.

  FOOTBALL