My Story

23 about women

I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen. Wives have a tendency to go off like burglar alarms when they see their husbands talking to me. Even young and pretty Hollywood “maidens” greet me with more sneer than smile.

This sort of sex fear that women often feel when I walk into their barnyard has different effects on me. I find it flattering—and upsetting. I find it also mysterious. Women don’t resent me because I’m prettier or better shaped than they are—or show more of myself to the male eye. I’ve seen women at parties who had only enough clothes on to keep from being arrested, and I’ve heard such party-nudists buzzing about how vulgar I was. They were showing more leg, more bosom, and more spinal column than I was—and I was the “vulgar” one!

Women also don’t like the way I talk—even when I’m not talking to their husbands or lovers. One angry woman said my voice was “too premeditated.” I found out she meant I was putting on a sort of bedroom drawl. This isn’t true. The chief difference between my voice and the voices of most women I’ve seen is that I use mine less. I can’t chatter if I wanted to. I can’t pretend to laugh and be full of some sort of foolish good spirits when I’m in company. Standing around at a party looking serious attracts unfavorable feminine comment. They think I’m plotting something, and usually the same thing—how to steal their gentlemen friends from under their noses.

I don’t mind their thinking that. I would rather a thousand women were jealous of me than I was jealous of one of them. I’ve been jealous, and its no fun.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

Being given the social cold shoulder like that never made me too unhappy. I’ve done most of my thinking at such parties, standing in a corner with a cocktail glass in hand and nobody to talk to. I’ve thought about women. Their jealousy had little to do with me. It comes out of their realizing their own shortcomings. Men have told me a lot about women—how lame their love-making often is, how they mistake hysteria for passion and nagging for devotion. Looking at me, women think I’m different than they are in such matters, and this makes them angry.

When I see women frowning in my direction and cutting me up among themselves, I really feel sorry—not for them but for their menfolk. I have a feeling that such women are poor lovers and sexual cripples. The only thing they are able to give a man is a guilt complex. If they are able to make him feel that he is a bad husband or an unappreciative lover, then they consider themselves “successful.”