Men and Supermen

“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

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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.