Men and Supermen

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 them 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.

OR YOU CAN TAKE HER TO A PUB.

Sexual Norm usually takes girls to his pub on the first date, because it’s cheap, because his friends will be impressed if they see him with a girl, because there’s someone else to talk to if he runs out of conversation. And he knows where the Gents is.

I’m not wild about pubs, they’re all right in their place but not for courting, with all those bursts of well lubricated laughter, and large men in sports coats wanting to break into song. The bar stools are just the wrong length for my legs, and if you collar a table someone always comes shuffling over clutching a glass of lager and a cheese roll, sits down and inhibits your conversation.

Invariably too your date drinks pints of beer, when you have a gin and tonic, and as you finish long before he does, if you’re polite you hide your glass, or if you’re like me, you rattle your ice or ostentatiously eat your lemon peel to encourage him to buy you another.

Pubs however are infinitely sexier than Indian restaurants: nothing could be less turning on than flocked wallpaper, bright lights, glasses of warm light ale, a meat vindaloo-flavoured kiss afterwards, and onions, which recur through the night.

Going to the theatre is nice for a first date—as long as you choose something jolly and the man doesn’t spend the whole time grumbling that there’s nowhere to put his legs. You should also dine afterwards rather than before.

Cinemas are all right too—but here again you should dine afterwards with plenty of alcohol. There’s always something faintly depressing about the return to reality: your date doesn’t look quite as good as Steve McQueen, and you certainly don’t look so good as Jane Fonda. Horror films are excellent because they’re good for a giggle, and you’ve got a marvellous excuse for pretending to be frightened and clutching each other.

THE PASS

Sexual Norm by this time will be treading out the ground for the pass. We all know the tell-tale signs: the slowing down of a car on a lonely road, the hand edging along the back seat, the manoeuvring into an empty office in the lunch hour, the sidling up on the faded rose-patterned sofa accompanied by a murmur of: “Are your flat mates really out?”

The girl if she fancies the man is wondering how much and how soon she can give in without feeling cheap.

Norm has been known to pounce from the arm of a girl’s chair, and be rudely deposited on the floor when she leaps to her feet.

A lot of men reluctant to face a rebuff, make verbal passes.

“Can I come up for coffee?”

“Does your husband ever go away?”

“When are you next going up to London?” (This to a country wife.)

“I thought next time we lunched it might be fun if we had a leg of chicken and white wine at my flat.”

“The grass really isn’t wet, you know.”

“Our bodies do talk the same language, don’t they?” (This one usually on the dance floor.)

Or the more direct but less subtle approach: “I fantastically want to fuck you.”

Sexual Norm, who realises the importance of being a good sexual conversationalist, sometimes says: “Would you mind awfully if I kissed you, Jennifer?” and then lunges even if she says no.

It must be difficult being a man. If you pounce too soon everyone calls you a wolf, if you hold off too long everyone calls you a queer. If you make a pass of Khyber-like proportions at a girl who fancies you, she’ll say you’re wonderfully passionate, if you do exactly the same to a girl who doesn’t, she’ll complain you’re mauling her.

“Big feet, darling …?”

In theory, Superman is never in a hurry. His timing is so good that he always waits to make a pass at you at exactly the moment you’re worrying he might not—so you plummet like the proverbial ripe plum into his arms.

But the whole pass-making business has become such a game—the man waiting until you’re getting worried, you falling over backwards not to appear worried—that it all goes on until you both go off the boil.

Other men are so impervious to the come-on signs that you don’t know if they’re genuinely shy or just playing hard to get. They’re so reserved you wonder if someone else has reserved them already.

The smooth operator of course, who always prefers to play on home ground, lures you back to his flat. Soon you’re lying on his sofa without your shoes. The central heating is up, the lights are dimmed, soft music is spilling into the room, and out of the corner of your eye in the next room you can see the most enormous double bed covered in furs. Within minutes the zips are down.

*

Bed

“Sex isn’t the best thing in the world, or the worst thing in the world, but there’s nothing else quite like it.”

W. C. FIELDS.

LOCATION

ONCE A MAN knows a girl’s interested, where does he take her? It’s all right if both of them have got a flat—but if they haven’t there’s all the hassell of packing a suitcase to spend a few hours at a hotel, or borrowing a friend’s flat to ‘change in’, or waiting till nightfall to do it in the back of a car, or for summer to do it in the long grass.

Wives always say they couldn’t possibly commit adultery in their own house, but lust is a great leveller.

Superman books a room at the Ritz and launches the girl into a sea of vice with a bottle of champagne, ordering smoked salmon in the interval. He believes in mixing pleasure with pleasure.

I’ve often wondered why smoked salmon is so erotic. Perhaps because it reminds one of rather warm bare flesh.

Before he was married Sexual Norm used to commit fawnication (sic) on a creaking single bed. The girl invariably bumped into the landlady on her way to the bathroom on the next floor.

Some women with marvellous figures like to be undressed before they leap into bed. And for this reason boys ought to take a course in undoing bras at prep-school. But with most people it’s a race to get undressed and into bed before the other person has time to see their stretch marks or spindly calves.

“But Angus, I always thought one never wore anything underneath …”

Bachelors sometimes take their clothes off and fold them up in polythene bags. Older hippies get undressed in another room, so they can remove their corsets in private and return with a swish of terry towelling.

Adulterers look in the cupboard or under the bed. Superman takes the telephone off the hook. He also has a fire extinguisher on the wall in case the girl bursts into flames.

Once in bed both parties breathe deeply and say “A-a-a-ah” several times. This is usually construed as ecstasy, but is in reality because of the coldness of the sheets and other people’s hands.

People always try harder with new people. Sexual Norm will spend the next ten minutes worrying whether he’s giving the girl enough sexual foreplay or fiveplay, and then grimly thinking about cricket or football to keep his mind off sex. He occasionally says ‘Howzat’.

The girl, remembering what the sex books told her about not lying back and being passive, will be frenziedly stroking Norm’s neck, tickling his toes, kissing his navel, and putting on such a display of acrobatics that he has to try and think even harder about cricket or football.

Finally with the words ‘there are no frigid women, only incompetent men’ ringing in his ears, Norm starts threshing away like a sewing machine that’s got out of hand.

THE BLAND LEADING THE BLAND

Then come the lies.

The man, crossing his fingers, will say: “I don’t do this very often, you know.”

The girl, crossing her legs, will say: “Neither do I.” He: “I’ve only been to bed with, er, five women in my life.” She (uncrossing her legs): “This is the first affaire I’ve had since I’ve been married.”

He: “I wouldn’t dream of going to bed with a girl I didn’t feel deeply about.” (Feeling deeply under her dress.)

Several asterisks later he will say: “That was wonderful, darling. Was it wonderful for you, darling?”

“Gosh, that was marvellous, darling. Was it wonderful for you, darling?”

I’m sure one of the reasons for the permissive society is because girls wear so few underclothes these days and are more getatable. Whenever I went out with a new man—fifteen years ago—I used to buy a new pantie-girdle to keep my curves at bay, which acted as a complete chastity belt. And, even worse, there were those all-in-one corselettes, which totally denied access.

MULTIPLE BOREGASM

Sex books in fact have made Sex absolutely impossible. Havealot Ellis and the still small voice of Kama Sutra were all right, but recently I was sent a book consisting of 287 pages devoted to Oragenitalism, which needed a degree in engineering to be understood. And you can go crazy trying to memorise all the refinements of The Sensuous Woman. “The Velvet Buzz Saw, the Butterfly Flick.” Nor can I see that it honestly adds anything to your sex life if you suddenly disappear in the middle of a steaming session to get chocolate ice-cream from the fridge to smear all over each other. And think of the laundry bills.

I’m sure all those ludicrously controlled positions they advocate are responsible for the high incidence of slipped discs these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most sex books were written by osteopaths to encourage business.

“Oh damn, I’ve lost the place again.”

Cosmopolitan magazine the other day was exhorting girls to excite and cajole their lovers with wildly obscene language. Sexual Norm, who’s been brought up not to swear in front of a lady, would be absolutely horrified.

In fact after reading a sex book manual, I’m amazed any man dares pounce on a girl at all. He must be so worried about ‘ejaculatory incompetence’ or being a tower of jelly in a crisis, or not being able to come ten times a night. Then there’s always the problem of having wined not wisely but too well. Of the four stages of drunkenness: jocose, bellicose, lachrymose and comatose, it is essential to catch the girl at the post-jocose stage.

And novels are so sexy too these days that even if a couple are having a quiet read before going to bed, the girl is liable to become insanely amorous just after the man’s taken his sleeping pills.

LUST IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

I’m a believer in lust—if two people fancy each other silly, they usually have a nice time in bed without the aid of chocolate ice-cream or the Velvet Buzz Saw.

Of course there will be men like the Old Man of Thermopylae who never did anyone properly, or lazy men, who believe in labour saving vices, and just lie on their backs and let the girl do all their work.

But on the whole I think the good lover has a way with women as some people do with horses—he makes them relax, he creates the kind of cosy emotional atmosphere in which a woman is not afraid to ask him to do the thing he wants to her. He is also an enthusiast, he cares for making a woman happy rather than making her, he is not frightened of getting his feet or anything else wet—relief would be just a lovely wallow away.

I don’t think most women are crazy about sexual athletes. If he can twist you into every position in the Kama Sutra that’s gym not sex. Nor are they wild about marathons. The third day he rose from the bed may be all right for some, but it’s no good if he doesn’t press the right buttons.

Finally the most important thing in a good lover is a sense of humour. He should be someone who can send the whole thing sky high, who wouldn’t mind if you were having an off day or didn’t feel up to it.

“But sweetest, why in the bedroom?”

BATHS

Afterwards lovers are supposed to have baths together, which I’ve always thought was an overrated pastime, particularly if you sit at the wrong end and have the taps digging into your back, with one side scalded and the other one frozen. On the other hand if you don’t have a bath together, whoever has last bath not only has to make the bed but also clean the bath.

THE VENERABLE BIDET

Then of course there’s the bidet—somehow if you go to someone’s house and see a bidet in their bathroom you assume they must be sexually switched on, or French. Sexual Norm thinks bidets are for bathing the dog. American girl in Paris hotel: “Dig that crazy drinking fountain.”

VASECTOMY

According to a recent article this is the most beautiful thing a man can do for a woman; it’s also one of the shrewdest. If a man has a vasectomy, he can have an absolute hayride sleeping with anyone he wants to without danger. His wife however is completely stymied if she suddenly gets pregnant.

DIRTY WEEKENDS

“But, darling, when you said a dirty weekend …”

Dirty weekends are divided into two kinds, the first when both the man and the woman intend to sleep with each other, the second when the man is intending to sleep with the woman.

As the former usually take place in hotels, the couple’s main problem is to appear married, because if the hotel staff rumble the fact that they are not married they may easily try to put one of them in the Annex. A girl friend of mine recently spent a dirty weekend in Scotland, punctuated by dour Highland Ladies banging on the bedroom door and crying: “Come out, come out.”

“Oh for goodness sake, Annabel, we’ve got to leave early in the morning.”

The couple should therefore remember not to roll up in separate cars with separate luggage bearing different names. They should also not appear too animated at mealtimes, but gaze gloomily into space like other married couples. The girl should also remember not to ask the man whether he likes sugar in his coffee at breakfast or what name she should put in the register.

One wife I know after her husband had spent a dirty weekend in the Cotswolds with his secretary found the bill in his name. When taxed, the husband told her it was his partner’s bill. “The swine always uses my name when he gets up to any of his tricks.” The wife believed him, and went round saying what a louse her husband’s partner was.

If a girl goes on one of the latter dirty weekends when the man is trying to make her and has promised there are no strings attached, he usually invites her to stay with married friends who immediately steer her into a room with a large double bed, which they claim is their only spare room. Or he will take her on a boat, and not until it’s at sea, does she realise it only sleeps one.

Love

LOVE

“If you believe in me, I’ll believe in you”

ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

“I am melancholy when thou art absent, look like an ass when thou art present, wake for thee when I should be asleep, and even dream of thee, when I am awake; sigh much, drink little, eat less, court solitude, am grown very entertaining to my self, and (as I am informed) very troublesome to everybody else. If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.” The Old Bachelor.

A GREAT DEAL of time is spent kidding oneself a man is keen on one when he isn’t. Once a man is hooked he will:

find every one of your idiosyncrasies endearing

roar with laughter at your most inane jokes. (People in love sound like hyenas)

write you letters, when he’s going to see you the next day, which he tears up

bore all his friends talking about you in the tones of gross hyperbole

lose interest in everyone else

telephone all the time

make heroic efforts to spend every moment he possibly can with you to the extent of driving you 30 miles home after a date, picking you up from the office to take you to the station, or crossing London in the rush hour for the sake of being with you for two minutes.

Men quite often behave like this to a girl before they get her into bed. If they act like this afterwards, she’s on to a good thing and should stay on.

NORMAN’S SEXUAL CONQUEST

Being susceptible, Norm falls in love about three times a year. At present he is hooked on a well stacked typist in the office called Dental Floss.

His wife Honor can always detect the signs. She hears Norm yelling for clean underpants in the morning. She then watches him putting deodorant between his toes, cutting himself shaving because his hand is shaking with excitement, shrieking with agony when his new French Aftershave gets into the cuts, leaving a snowfall of talcum powder on the bathroom floor, and cutting his toe nails surreptitiously into the waste-paper basket instead of in bed as usual.

He then polishes his shoes, changes his mind five times about what tie he’s going to wear, picks the only rose in the garden for his buttonhole, spends hours combing his hair over his bald patch, and can be seen slipping a toothbrush into his briefcase. Sometimes he cleans his teeth.

Honor notices he has also taken to carrying cigarettes and a lighter although he doesn’t smoke, and spending a lot of evenings at regimental dinners or out with the boys and returning completely sober. When she rides in the car she finds her seat belt has been let out to accommodate a vast bust.

FOR EVER AMBER

Some men are so filled with caution, they can never bring themselves to propose. I’ve seen so many girls go out for years with a man in the hope that they might hook him in the end. They spend their time looking for signs: “He’s talked about our going on holiday together, he’s going to get a house when the lease of his flat runs out, he’s taken me to meet his mother, he’s got my photograph in his wallet, I’ve looked in his diary and he’s got nothing but squash with Geoffrey and cricket fixtures for the next six months.” But the man still won’t say he loves her or ask her to marry him.

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 and 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 something 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

I’ve never actually met a football player but ‘Match of the Day’ is an absolute godsend. It’s the only time you will have free to wash your hair, or pluck your eyebrows—your man will be absolutely glued to the box. Watch out for Action Replays, though.

Orgies

ORGIES

“Er yes, yes, Miss Weldon, the matter of your overdraft will be quite all right …”

TWO WAY MIRROR on the wall, who is the barest of us all?

Very few people will admit they’ve been to an orgy, and those who do say they only watched and it was very boring.

“No central heating, and not enough to drink,” said a male friend of mine. “And lots of bank managers in their underpants talking about cars. It was rather like having a bath with one’s Nanny. Not much fun and nowhere to look.”

This is a far cry from one’s fantasies of pulsating wall-to-wall couples, people in sheets drinking wine out of goat-skins, girls coming out of pies and crushing black grapes with very white teeth, and sophisticates with jaded parrots watching through two-way mirrors.

I’d be a dead loss at an orgy, for I’d be convinced everyone in the room was looking at my awful feet. In order to participate I’d have to drink myself silly, and as soon as I drink myself silly I feel sick and am a write-off sexually.

But I’m fascinated by the ethics of orgies. Do men come up to girls they want to couple with, tap them on the shoulder, and say shall we lie this one out? And to get everyone going, do they say: last man in works the gramophone? And do they have Ladies Excuse Mes? How awful too if no one asked you and you were a floor flower all evening.

If Superman goes to an orgy, of course, it’s like the first day of the sales, with all the women trying to get at him. Sexual Norm however, although he is excited about loving dangerously, is worried about his wallet and the size of his member, and is still in his Y-fronts. He tries to look like a film producer, hoping that the starlet in the corner might be the sort who wants to get to the top on her back.

Dental Floss, who is looking skittish in Woolworths pearls, exhorts him to strip.

“You’ve got nothing to hide,” she says.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” says Norm. He watches her rush up to a trio of car salesmen.

“You three can have a body like mine,” she cries.

Norm looks across at his wife Honor, who is still wearing her roll-on and talking about deepfreezes to another housewife. Norm decides he’s really much better doing it with Honor. He wishes he was completely hairy up to his waist like a satyr, then it wouldn’t show if he took his underpants off. It must have been easy for satyrs in the old days. He wishes he could go home.

Next day however he will regale his friends in the pub with a torrid account of the mountains of heaving flesh, adding: “I really didn’t know where to put myself.”

“Come again?”