Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
If he were to run with the wolf-pack, it was felt, he must learn how to hunt. The time had come for him to be blooded. Even the lambs were complaining of his vegetarian habits. The course was to begin at the bottom—with the technique of the playful pinch in the corridor. (How this belief originated that women cannot resist a posterior nip I do not know—it is undoubtedly a fixed conviction among predatory males.) The method was explained to him in detail, demon- strated on invisible behinds by many dextrous and experienced hands, and he was pushed off in the dimpled wake of the next swinging skirt.
My friend, embarrassed but game, plunged off in pursuit. 'I say,' he said gallantly to the girl bent over the file drawer, and seized a handful of flesh, rotating it forcefully in a clockwise direc- tion. There was a noise like a cat being stepped on and he came staggering backwards into view of the onlookers, his nose a bright purple and his glasses misted with involuntary tears.
Another conference of sex maniacs was con- vened. It was decided by a large majority that the graduate lacked the touch for the Approach Direct. He must be initiated gradually through the Approach Devious. A list was drawn up of likely girls who might appreciate as a novelty the full seduction routine even including the actual expense of real money on gin and orange, steak pie and chips and a long-way-round ride in a taxi. After several ballots, one or two recounts, and a keynote speech by the oldest lecher on the floor, the band-wagon sentiment swung towards one name. Some of the convention arrived the next morning at what seemed to them around dawn to greet the return of the happy couple. They found the girl at her desk making up a mys- tified face. And my friend pacing the room look- ing both defiant and frustrated. The general opinion was that he should be instantly examined by Our Medical Correspon- dent. They regarded his explanation with more amazement than even the most bizarre physical revelations would have produced. 'I'm sorry,' he announced. 'I really am—but I just cannot make a pass at a girl who has not got her School Certi- ficate'.
From then on, my friend was left alone with his sex problems. He had become a Fleet Street Character to be pointed out to visitors as a rare specimen of his kind. Perhaps there is a form of intellectual impotence which grafts itself on to healthy males after they have been educated beyond puberty. I know that I share his inhibition and find positively maddening the assumption that any man should warm to a dull and silly girl because she has a pretty face and a lively figure.
But we are in a minority even among the most self-conscious of intellectuals. On every side, I see witty and original men positively fawning on creatures whose conversation would stupefy a pop singer. They interrupt their anecdotes to explain who Freud was and simplify their opinions until they are practically putting hyphens between the syllables. They flatter and cosset girl- friends who could not possibly be friends if they were not girls. It is a form of racialism, sexual apartheid, biological chauvinism, which puts an unbearable strain on the tolerance of their male colleagues. It is not a self-deception produced by love (which Mencken defined as 'the illusion that one woman differs from another') for the girls change, but their conversation remains the same. Whatever the colour of their eyes, their IQs stay dim. It cannot be that boring girls are thought to be more accessible and amenable than brainy girls—a visit to any University, even for a week- end, should dispose of that misapprehension. The truth seems to be that most men are afraid of a fair fight in the duel between men and women. They cannot face a bout with a female who is not inferior to them in some department. The result is that even the brighest woman now .pretends to be foolish for fear of putting off admirers.
I should make it clear that, unlike my friend (who was very young at the time), 1 am not advocating an education-bar. What is necessary to make a woman attractive, as a person as well as a body, is not passing examinations or even reading books, but an ability to reveal an equality of mind, to show that she is willing to call me an idiot if she thinks so. What is incomprehensible to me about the Don Juan is that he is willing to undergo so many hours of vertical tedium for such a short interlude of horizontal satisfaction. The female mind, with its practicality, its humour, its tolerance, its generosity, its malice, its vivacity, can be just as aphrodisiac as the female appear- ance, I would like to believe the theory that all Don Juans are basically homosexual—but I'm afraid that this is probably a rationalisation of envy. What seems to me incontrovertible is that the womaniser is a Narcissicist who only wants a sounding board for his own voice and mirror
for his own face. The most insulting thing you can say about a real woman is that she is a good listener. The Don Juan aims to keep body and soul apart—it is the one blot on the splendid history of femininity that he should be so success- ful at the job.
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