“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!”