Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (9 page)

Brief Interludes

Waiting for the bus, buying a magazine, guiding your groceries through the checkout line, borrowing books from the library, rounding a corner with your arms full of packages and crashing into a divine overcoated thing are all ways that movie heroines meet princes traveling incognito. But no ordinary girl can devastate a prince or anybody else that fast, or even have him asking where she works. If he
should
ask, she ought to be suspicious because he’ll probably try to sell her insurance.

There are of course even more dramatic crash programs. Magda Lupescu bagged King Carol of Rumania by throwing herself in front of his Rolls-Royce as he was returning from a party. Cars were slower in those days. You and I would run the risk of being halved. If we weren’t, who wants to be treated like rare old Napoleon brandy just to keep us from suing?

Strangers Across a Crowded Room

You’ve got to be a beauty contest winner before anybody is going to fall flat on his face over you across a theatre lobby or an intersection. However, if you keep seeing the same attractive stranger in more or less the same place every day—say, where you eat lunch—you may eventually start chatting and a nice friendship will develop.

Riding up or down the elevator with a man you don’t know but would like to, may work out eventually. This can happen in your apartment or office building. Elevators have the same coziness of airplanes, but you don’t have as long to work. Be sure you smell nice on these occasions and are charm itself to the elevator operator. And in the new automatic express elevators your chances are even better.

Church

Friends tell me it offers spiritual benefits, but few men.

Man Bait

Let’s assume you’re in one of the places where the men are. You’re sweet and scrubbed, groomed and coifed, perfumed and palpitating … but when it comes to making an overt move, you have all the aplomb of Molly Cottontail gazing into the eyes of a bloodhound.

This book is written on the premise that you, like me, are warm and friendly on the inside but outwardly a pitiful, cowering coward. You may even cling wantonly to the dream of the days when men did the chasing!

It’s okay. You don’t have to open a single conversation if you don’t want to. You’ll flunk anyway if the act renders you such a shambles you can’t get your breath for five minutes.

There are perfectly good ways of making it easy for a man to talk to
you
which he’s probably dying to do but is merely shy. (Isn’t it embarrassing? That men are shy too!) The thing to do is give him something to start a conversation
about.

Wear a lapel pin with a message printed on it. I’m serious about this. I have three. One says, “I have gray hair, brown eyes and a black heart,” and has always been a smash hit. Another carries the
Ladies’ Home Journal
slogan, “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” Another, which I thought very clever at the time though nobody gets it, and I’m not sure I do either, says, “Fight that will power.”

Once people see writing on you, they won’t rest until they’ve read it. Total strangers will put on glasses to make the grade, and after that, they almost have to say
something
to you not to be rude.

Any silversmith in town can make up your favorite slogans, or you can write to Allan Adler, 8626 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, who made my pins. They are of heavy wrought silver, cost about $18 apiece (well worth it) and are about the size of a silver dollar. You make up your own messages.

A loaded charm bracelet is a conversation piece. By the time you’ve explained what all the charms represent, you’re on friendly enough terms to exchange Christmas cards.

Any unusual jewelry is a come-on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look too Ubangi. A huge but delicate cameo is a crowd-pleaser. So are garnets like a grape cluster—if you have garnet money.

Carry a controversial book at all times—like Karl Marx’
Das Kapital
or
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It’s a perfectly simple way of saying, “I’m open to conversation,” without having to start one.

Gloria has been tugging around Rupert Brooke poetry for years. It started because she genuinely liked Rupert Brooke. We
know
what her motives are now. Apparently girls who read poetry are considered very romantic and approachable.

When you beach, pool or lakeside it, have the maddest beach towel you can lay hands on. One with a checkerboard background, for example, actually invites a game. (Never mind that you’ve never mastered the jump play—just bring the checkers!) Other towel charmers I remember are Catalina’s giant Model T Ford in red, gold and black; a gingerbread man; a friendly, whiskered lion; and dozens of others. The towels cost three to six dollars and have a practical dry-off side too.

Play solitaire on your towel. Someone may come over to make it gin.

Have a memorable beach hat or two. Ditto a crazy ski cap if you ski.

Drive a funny car … though not so funny it won’t
run
! A really crazy old car is more interesting than a shiny new one. Donna piloted a 1940 Buick station wagon around as late as 1956 with the name “Ferny Briar” painted on its side. There was no Ferny Briar, nor ever had been, nor was there another car like that one in North America. Its real wood sides had long since become as wormy as driftwood and the roof leaked so badly that Donna used to drive about town with an umbrella open inside the car. (How about
that
for starting conversations … if not with you,
about
you.) But everybody knew Ferny Briar and accorded it special attention … Donna too!

Paint your car hot orange … or shocking pink.

Ride a bicycle to work. Or a Vespa. Be the only girl who walks while everybody else rides.

If you must, though I wouldn’t recommend it, you can bump into the man who is bringing a sherry flip from the bar to his girl. She will leave while you are mopping him off, and the least you can do is buy him a get-acquainted drink!

N
OW WE KNOW WHO
the men are and where they are, and we’ve planted ourselves squarely in their paths. Scented and smiling, with charm bracelets dangling, we’ve even invited them to start a conversation. But now with a longing like red blood cells for oxygen, we yearn to exude that old black magic which will have them on the ropes.

Have you got it? Can you get it? Are you sexy? Let’s see.

What
is
a sexy woman?

Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex.

Being sexy means that you accept yourself as a woman … with all the functions of a woman. You like to make love, have babies, nurse them and mother them (or think you would). Being sexy means that you accept all the parts of your body as worthy and lovable … your reproductive organs, your breasts, your alimentary tract. You even welcome menstruation as the abiding proof of your fertility.

A woman who feels all this is sexy. She wears it like perfume. It doesn’t matter how remote she is from the salons of Fifth Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard or whether she knows what
Playboy
magazine is all about. She’s got smell No. 5, which is even better than Chanel of the same denomination.

The Australian sheepherder’s wife in the movie
The Sundowners
(played stunningly by Deborah Kerr) had it.

“Older women” often have it.

So if you think only the
jeunes filles,
the voluptuous or sleek-cat creatures are the sexy ones, you have been living in the rumble seat of an Essex roadster the past twenty-five years.

Gorgeousness has little to do with sexuality either. (And mark this as one of my rare, unbiased appraisals of the advantages of beautiful women over plain ones!) The physiologically sexy woman, be she droop-shouldered, flat-chested, horse-faced or bone-headed, will find somebody to be sexy with. She’s got it. He’ll find it.

Once Upon a Time

Why are some women sexier than others?

Well, the truth is everybody starts out sexy … or with terrific potential. A sixteen-month-old baby girl is the prototype of sexiness. Watch her play peekaboo, wiggle her lovely fanny or turn to give you a last melting look before wriggling off to bed. Furthermore, she likes her body. It feels good when she’s dried off with a terry towel. At night she may fall asleep across her doll because that feels good too.

She will be sexy all her life if nobody interferes.

Unfortunately, in our society somebody nearly always interferes!

When she touches herself with pleasure and curiosity, her mother will take her hand away and say, “Naughty!” When she expels squashy brown cones not unlike the modeling clay she likes to play with, her mother will put over the idea they are icky, dirty … to be flushed away quickly. If the child isn’t dim-witted, she figures out that where the cones came from is dirty too.

At six, when the little girl asks a few perfectly reasonable questions like how did she get here, and how come her little brother has more interesting things on his front than she, her mother will give her the halibut-eye and a phony answer or worse, pretend she didn’t hear the questions and hustle her out to play. The little girl concludes there is something mighty funny about baby production and little brothers’ anatomies too.

Even if enlightened parents answer this little girl’s questions in a direct, factual way (I know one fortunate little boy whose parents told him the facts of life so satisfactorily, he said in the next breath, “Now tell me how they make peanut butter.”), she will still learn to equate sex with dirtiness from her playmates, her playmates’ parents, her teachers and other benighted adults.

All her growing-up years she will be exhorted to keep her dress down, her knees crossed, her thoughts pure, never to let anybody touch her
there
; never, never to touch herself, and to protect that part of her body as though it were precious jade … or is it more like guarding a Mongolian idiot—the kind relatives used to hide in the attic when company came?

One fine day—maybe on her wedding night but probably sooner—she will want to unlock her chastity belt and she won’t be able to find the key. People have been hiding the key from her since she was a tiny baby.

A few girls, mercifully, manage to survive this cultural blight and come through with most of their sexuality intact. Certainly parental education along these lines is growing more enlightened.

How About You?

How many “naturally” sexy women are there? Are you one?

Kinsey says one-third of American women achieve orgasm most of the time. They’re sexy (in the context we’re talking about). One-third rarely achieve it. They aren’t (again in this context). And one-third achieve orgasm about half the time. Are they sexy? Perhaps.

A single woman in many instances doesn’t have a regular sex life (again according to Kinsey; she may be perfectly capable of enjoying one, but long lapses occur between involvements). Therefore she can’t measure her sexuality as a married woman can.

If you feel you aren’t “naturally” sexy—sexy on the
inside
—it’s possibly because you haven’t had a real opportunity to find out. You may still be a virgin. Or you may have been paired with the wrong man. Kinsey (and I really did read another book once) says nearly everybody in our culture is paired incorrectly. Ideally, seventeen-year-old boys and thirty-five-year-old women would be teamed, and thirty-five-year-old men and seventeen-year-old girls. Thus people at the peak of their sexual powers would be together and so would those in the beginning stage and decline of theirs.

If you can’t match the quantitative enjoyment of a man, that doesn’t mean you’re a second-class participator. Men usually arrive at maturity less deadened sexually than girls and so may achieve more climaxes. They weren’t as often admonished to keep their dresses down and their knees together! Also, men’s sex equipment being more in the open, they were apt to experience a perfectly happy sexual climax just by rubbing against bed sheets in their sleep. Not much scolding parents can do about
that.
And having found out how wonderful an experience it was, they were freer to seek it again consciously than a totally unawakened girl.

In determining sexuality we must remember too that women differ in their capacities and it has nothing to do with how much quashing their sexual curiosity got in girlhood. Some appetites crave three hot fudge sundaes at one serving. Others are happy and sated with one.

A woman who even occasionally enjoys an orgasm from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes is sexy. And remember we’re talking about sexy only in this one sense—in terms of being sexy within yourself … able to enjoy sex.

Why Be Sexy If You’re Single?

Are you totally, horribly, hideously, irrevocably offended by this whole discussion of sex? Do you feel it is a subject better left for married girls to probe? If so, by all means skip this chapter! Or skip the whole book! It is written for girls who may not marry but who are not necessarily planning to join a nunnery. It is also for girls nearing thirty or beyond. If you are as virginal as a Sunkist orange and plan to stay so, good for you! That’s your affair (oh dear, what have I said
now
?) You can still tell whether you’re sexy by how tough a struggle it is to control your desire, or whether you gratefully use “singleness” as an excuse not to give in.

Most of the single women I’ve known well in the last twenty years have experienced sex gratification with someone at some time, if only with the man they later married. And they were concerned with their own enjoyment or lack of it for two reasons: They instinctively knew that a girl with a “natural” predilection toward sex is sexy. They also figured as long as they were involved in an affair, they deserved some of the joys as well as most of the headaches.

But—I must point out again—this is a one-woman survey. I don’t know whether my friends are typical (or whether we’re still friends after the way I’m using them!). They were all working girls. They all live in a big city. They are above average in brain power.