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 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.