Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (10 page)

My thought would be that no matter how unassailable your virginity or unattainable your charms, most girls want to
appear
to be sexy. Sex is a powerful weapon for a single woman in getting what she wants from life, i.e., a husband or steady male companionship. Sex is a more important weapon to her than to a married woman who has other things going for her—like the law! And other fields in which to prove herself … housework, bookkeeping, nursing, mending dishwashers, motherhood. A smart single woman doesn’t prove herself in
any
of these fields before marriage. She doesn’t have to prove herself in sex either. But she should act as though she
could
if she wanted to.

A married woman who uses sex as a weapon is being a kind of rat. By the traditional convenants of marriage she is supposed to sleep with her husband in return for his giving her his name, a home, an income, and a father for her children. If she blackmails him for dining-room chairs by withholding her body, he has every justification for losing the rent money at poker. A single woman who doesn’t deny her body regularly and often to get what she wants, i.e., married or more equitable treatment from her boy friend, is an idiot.

We have been discussing one kind of sexiness … the most authentic kind … the kind which is self-generated.

If you are pretty certain you aren’t sexy by this particular definition, what can you do?

You can wait until you are married and work it out then. That is a popular solution and has efficacy. Why solve your problems with somebody you won’t have around permanently? On the other hand, why jeopardize the pleasure of your early married years by letting your fears deepen and set? And what if you don’t marry?

No one is suggesting that you go on the prowl for a perfect bed mate. That is the nymphomaniac’s unfortunate way. Far from being the sexpot many people think she is, having fun fun fun, she is frigid, technically. Instead of eschewing sex entirely like many psychosexually impaired people, and hiding in the basement, she is on a frantic search for the one penis that can unlock her sexuality. From man to man to man she goes with her burning but unspoken question, “Can
you
help me feel something?” And all the time the key to her sexuality is within herself. Only
she
can unlock it … with
qualified
help.

The “right” man does sometimes help a “cold” girl realize her sexual potential, but this compassionate assist comes more often in marriage than outside. If a husband doesn’t get to a mutually enjoyable level with his wife, she may cut him off without any sex at all. He’d better help her like it. If a single woman isn’t having a good time in bed, her partner would just as soon not know about it! And he really isn’t suited to help with her emotional problems anyway, since he is maybe her worst one!

It might be supposed there is more frigidity in single women because of their perpetual anxiety about public—and divine—disapproval of their so-called promiscuity. Actually a single girl can have enough anxiety to fill Grand Canyon, and it won’t diminish her sexuality if she has it. A happy marriage may give her the confidence to be sexy without guilt. No. I won’t even go that far! A guilt-ridden participator is guilt-ridden, wed or not.

If your problem is deep-rooted; if you find sex absolutely abhorrent, or even if you don’t really “mind” it but nothing nice ever happens to you, the most practical “cures” are effected through psychiatry. It’s a presumptuous thing to tell anyone to go get a psychiatrist—like go get religion! And it’s expensive. I only suggest it because getting people turned on who were turned off is one area in which psychiatrists have a long record of achievement. Remember, frigidity isn’t a physical disability. It’s a curable state of mind. Unfortunately, however, you can read about your problem and gain great intellectual insight like mad and still not be able to slay your fear-dragon without professional help.

Is She or Isn’t She?

Now we come to a paradox. A woman can be sexy and
not
be sexy. She can have a patina of sexiness and be as cold as ice! Some of the coldest girls in history have been the most fatally fascinating. George Sand (Aurore Dupin), the mistress of more than one famous man, said her body felt like a “marble envelope.” One of the great movie-star courtesans of our time, who has had prime ministers deserting their posts and oil tycoons drowning themselves in their own oil, is virtually “sexless” by her own admission to friends. Prostitutes rarely enjoy their work. According to medical surveys, they are nearly all frigid, at least with “clients.”

How can it be that a totally unfeeling woman can attract so madly, almost as inexorably as a genuinely feeling one? Because she can put on a sexy act, and if her zeal
is
great enough and her act polished enough, no one will ever know she isn’t a genuine, 102 per cent, dyed-in-the-wool sexpot. After all, most of the men a girl attracts she never sleeps with, and if she does, her “authenticity” is seldom doubted anyway. (This act is harder to maintain in marriage where she may get bored playing Tondelayo the jungle princess every night and finally confess her perjury.)

Until then, what a playmate the pseudo-wildcat is! She doesn’t worry one moment whether or not
she’s
having fun because she
never
has any anyway, but she never lets on. She will spend the entire evening in selfless concentration doing what makes a man happy. She either doesn’t know what she is missing or is too shy, yes shy—too unsure of herself and anxious to please, to demand equal rights. What man wouldn’t like this except the most perceptive and emotionally mature man?

As for being genuinely oversexed, I don’t think there is such a thing. Although in our society it’s considered slightly immoral to enjoy oneself too often or too much in bed, calling someone oversexed would be to describe her as overendowed with the life force—to say that she was overliving. I imagine the few people actually fortunate enough to be “oversexed” (not nymphomaniacs or Don Juans because their interest is compulsive) simply make love in quiet and peace and never tell anybody. Those who brag are in doubt about their own powers.

To sum up. One way to be sexy is to be sexy inside yourself. You will attract like a magnet. We are not talking about men to marry you but
men
… as many as you want in this capacity.

More Black Magic

Another way to be “genuinely” sexy, though not recommended, is to be an actress.

And still another method by which women attract men is that phenomenon called “chemistry” … the inexplicable affinity of one person for another. Only is it really so inexplicable? The fascination might better be defined as subconscious preselection. (I wish Havelock Ellis or somebody were here to help!) One man is unerringly drawn to plump, buxom girls because his mother was one and for years she was the sex sun of his galaxy. Another man likes skinny, caved-in girls because that’s how
his
mother was. Just as often the guy with the plump mama likes skinnies and the other guy likes fatties because that’s how their mothers
weren’t.
A man may gravitate to icy angels because his first love was the five-year-old cool-as-ice angel next door. I know a man who traces his predilection for pale, thin girls back to a science teacher who haunted his dreams with her skimpy wrists and paper-white skin.

A girl can preselect too. You may like men who are like your father, or not
anything
like your father, like the hero of a “good” book or a “bad” book. You may unconsciously search for a man who treats you rough because he coincides with your early indoctrination into sex, i.e., sex is dirty, therefore you can only enjoy it with a man who isn’t nice. (Havelock, for God’s sake, where
are
you?)

I know a girl who was seduced by her uncle at age ten (he was only fourteen); though it was a shocking experience and he was packed off to military school, she now goes only for men who look and act like him.

When you meet the man who fulfills your preselected needs and you his, it’s no wonder a giant staple remover couldn’t get the two of you apart!

All cultures have a kind of composite girl, or girls, whom they consider sexy. Ours currently are Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In your father’s time they were Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara. In his father’s time she was Lillian Russell.

These “ideal” girls vary not only from era to era but country to country, just as with other tastes. The British and Germans abhor cars with chrome. For Americans, the chromier the better. In the Middle East in our time a king seeking a new queen picked a girl our guys considered thirty pounds overweight. In French Equatorial Africa where bulbous bosoms earn few green stamps, the really desirable chicks have plates in their lips. This, like the ancient custom of foot-binding in China, makes the girl feminine and helpless, and she can’t run away. In the case of the dish-lipped lady, she can’t even feed herself.

Although there is much wailing at the wall among us who do not fit the current masculine ideal of female pulchritude (Joan wishes she’d lived in Pericles’ time when big bulking girls were the rage), fortunately a man’s individual preselection will generally supersede the national favorite. Also, the girl he enjoys in his fantasies may not be the one he woos and weds or even beds. He prefers somebody he can be comfortable with and maybe even feel superior to. Men!

The Better To Please Him

Besides a more or less general agreement on the current national best-sellers in female form, certain trappings are often agreed on as girl-enhancing for a particular period. These too differ madly from place to place and time to time, but a smart woman in any culture packages herself to please her particular clientele. This is something you
can
do, sexy on the inside or not.

Many of these personal adornments and attitudes are dictates of the
haute couture.
And oh, how men do scream about fashion! At this writing they’re in a snit over the relaxed waist and low-heeled squared-off shoes. I’m sure they were just as teed-off about powdered wigs, hobble skirts, bee-stung lips and padded shoulders. Or were they? It’s a funny thing. The guy who says, “Honey, I’m sure glad
you
don’t paint your fingernails or wear all that goo on your mouth or go around in those crazy-looking dresses,” is the guy who, at a party, deposits his wife at the first potted palm to chase the girl with the reddest lips, the shimmeriest fingertips and a crazy dress with no waist at
all.

Obviously these accessories haven’t anything to do with our intrinsic worth as women or our intrinsic sexiness. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times I guess. A sexy woman is
sexy
regardless of her last year’s permanent wave and round-toed shoes. A good woman, a dear woman,
is
that to the core.

Maybe we can compare sex to food. Dover sole is Dover sole and just as nourishing fried in corn oil and served on cracked china. But how much more enticing slathered with toasted almonds and beckoning from Wedgwood.

The sheer stocking, the twenty-four-inch waist, the smoldering look have nothing to do with successful mating or procreating, but they say to a man, “I’m with it. I have tried to make myself beautiful for you. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble because I think you’re worth it and I like myself. I want you to notice me and want me.”

What if certain insecure men and women make almost too much of an effort toward sartorial splendor? Is that less attractive than if they said the hell with it and never brushed their teeth or combed their hair?

Does all this attention to “sexy detail” pay off? I’ll say it does! Here is a true story:

An ex-roommate of mine was nutty about an executive in her firm. She went absolutely ape the day he started to work there and she launched a campaign to get him. (We never knew why exactly. He had tiny little hands and a tiny little head, and many people thought a tiny little brain. But he was Madge’s sunshine and she wanted him to shine on
her
alone.) In four weeks she had husked seventeen pounds from her five-foot-two frame to make her large bust really amount to something. She made up her face—never a pretty face—with the infinite care of a Geisha. She plowed every sou into the silkiest, witchiest dresses. And from someplace she got the guts simply to “put on” all the sexy airs she had ever seen a sexy girl wear. She worked like a Trojan to learn and perfect her art. When some guy called her on the phone, her other roommate and I used to shut ourselves up in the kitchen where the syrup at least had passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. You wouldn’t
believe
a man could absorb so much sugar!

It was the most amazing metamorphosis I have ever seen. And her other roommate, now living in New York, would swear to this too. She went sexy to the last detail. When we sent her off to work in the morning, cleavage cleaving, perfume wafting therefrom, we feared for the sanity of the men in the office, to say nothing of the work load.

And did Madge get her man? No. Not ever. She just wasn’t for him, I guess. But she had other guys dropping like yellow-fever victims. Perhaps because she thought she was only interested in one particular man, to others her sexiness had a kind of maddening insouciance about it. Anyhow it felled them.

Madge married within the year. It was inevitable. And I’m sure she forgot old pinhead. But this was a case of a mouse (big bosoms to the contrary notwithstanding) wanting to be sexy … willing it. She never had it but she got it … by adopting sexy attitudes and trappings.

How To Be Sexy

Outside of some mildly eccentric fellows who are sexually aroused only by girls who wear hobnail boots and paperclip necklaces (old pinhead may have been one of them), or union suits plastered with chicken feathers, I think we can nearly all agree on what attitudes and accessories are sexy—and what aren’t—in our time. Bear in mind you are sure to know a girl who does all the don’ts and none of the do’s and has more beaux than a Greyhound bus can load, as well as other girls who do the do’s and don’t the don’ts and whose loneliness is heart-rending!