I had better confess at once that I am writing about a subject with which I have never slept; and nothing, as Genet has five or six hundred times reminded us, is quite so immoral as total innocence. To make matters worse, I can’t claim that my professional knowledge is any greater than my carnal, though I did recently spend some time at an important European film festival. Of course, starlets are a sine qua non of such gatherings—pleasanter to look at than, but as typical a feature of the landscape as, the kites round a dead elephant—and so at least I have watched them a little at what I suppose one must call their work. I think I would just as soon watch the kites at theirs. But I am not interested in what starlets are; only in why they are. And I am going to use them simply as caryatids for my quarrel.
At the festival, tirelessly, shamelessly, with smiles as natural as those cut in a Halloween pumpkin, Scandinavians, French, Germans, English, they exhibited their poses (and almost everything else) on the various plages, to the greater glory of their agents and the delectation of the cosmopolitan bird-watchers—for like music, the body is an international language—assembled on the promenade. I am sure some went away as intact as they came; others had propositions and refused; and a few, rediscovering or remembering a celebrated bit of Californian female folklore (‘If you wanna get on, get laid’), no doubt chose, at the pricking of their ambition, to buy a kind of stardom with a kind of whoredom.
Well, life may reek on what the snobs now call the Côte de Sewer, but again and again I caught myself wondering what it was that drove, or required, all these good-looking but in the main dramatically untalented young women to hawk their golden curves along the beaches and hotel corridors of Cannes. Not many of them are conspicuously innocent, however virginally their fair hair streams, Primavera-like, in the breeze from the passing cameramen. They all know that in the world of the entertainment industry, which is half a cosmos away from that of the art cinema, they can expect nothing but ruthless exploitation and an absolute subordination of all other considerations to the economic. Few of them go like captured medieval princesses, their eyelids sewn with silk, to the lecherous pasha-producer’s bed, or studio; and yet they are not, even at their worst, what Hollywood cynics sometimes maintain they are: simply prostitutes.
If they were (and charged money for their services), I think they would be treated with less contempt than they privately but generally are inside the industry. However, it needs only a very short acquaintance with the movie world to see that there is something anomalous about this contempt. Any given starlet may be sneered at, but starletry as an institution is far from despised. Indeed, it is essential, one of the most important elements in the walling myth of power-and-glory that international moviedom erects to keep reality at bay. Individual starlets are as common and gettable as individual bricks; but the wall they together make is something other. And as these callipygous and cone-breasted bricks lie on their beach mattresses, or simper imbecilely under the flashlights on some demicelebrity’s arm, or sit in silent loveliness (until they open their mouths) around a producer’s dinner table, they exert a subtle hegemony over the whole; just as do, in Watteau’s pastoral paintings, those ghostly flocks of silly-pretty girls sitting on the grass or strolling down the allées in their pink and grey sateens and ribbons.
While I was watching the shepherdesses at Cannes I was aware of a constant nagging echo, from something much further back in history than Watteau. Then one day I overheard someone use the word mogul. I had it. I remembered those swarms of houris that infest every Moslem picture of paradise. The houris too were not simply prostitutes, but indispensable creators of ambience—and shutters-out of reality. Naturally they offered glimpses of free sexual bliss, they suggested that it was not only the gates of Heaven that opened gratis to the brave; but their primary function was to constitute the visual-tactile decor in a best of all possible male worlds. At the same time it is surely significant that we speak of movie moguls but not, for example, of movie samurai or movie aristocrats. The real samurai and aristocrats liked culture and intelligence in their geishas and demimondaines, as the ancient Greeks liked them in their hetaerae. Women such as Thaïs and Aspasia, Ninon de Lenclos and Harriette Wilson, had fascinating minds first and fascinating bodies second; their lovers sought from them an intellectual as well as a merely copulatory relationship. So here we begin to see two quite different roles demanded of the woman as mistress. In one she is the hetaera-geisha, prized as an individual and judged as much for her other accomplishments, her full humanity, as for her value as a bed partner. In the other she is the houri-starlet, and it is this role that I want to explore.
The Old Persian huri is derived from an Arabic verb meaning ‘to be black-eyed like a gazelle’—that is, the etymology springs from appearance rather than function, from the world of dreams and wish fulfilment rather than from that of practical reality. Now it is plain that a profusion of beautiful but will-less (therefore tongueless and mindless) girls is an essential of any decently run male paradise, just as it is equally plain that monogamy, with its filthy doctrines of responsibility and fidelity, is the nastiest subversive activity of them all. It accordingly may not seem remarkable that a congregation of insecurity-prone men such as movie executives should enjoy having coveys of houris surrounding them; indeed, it is not remarkable. But before I say what I do find remarkable, I should like to widen my field and point out some allied contemporary phenomena.
First there are the bunny girls, who offer a vicarious substitute for the true Paradise (from the Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning ‘park of pleasure’, or open-air bunny club). Then there are the front-office girls who can barely write longhand, let alone shorthand. There are the expense-account secretaries, the company hostesses, the executive escorts—a whole monstrous regiment of peculiar euphemisms for the old houri. Next there is the meteoric mid-century rise in the social cachet of what twenty years ago was known as the mannequin—now, by another significant linguistic change, the model. That is, the perfect type, the one to be imitated.
There is the weird and now universal fashion of referring to women decades past thirty as ‘girls’; and a corollary down-stretch at the other end of the timescale to include in full girlhood, or hourihood, what once were known as schoolgirls. One sees this yearning of all womankind for girlhood in cosmetics publicity, which is more and more orientated towards rejuvenation (‘Smooth away the years with . . .’); and unmistakably in their clothes fashions, which are now all based on those of the generation in its late teens and early twenties. Once daughters dressed up to their mothers; now mothers dress down to their daughters. The same theme runs through the reports of the 1965 Paris collections: the ‘in’ look is the young look. Yves St Laurent makes his models wear ‘little-girl hairstyles’; and perhaps for once Paris is only copying the trends set by the ‘Chelsea’ designers in London: Mary Quant, Caroline Charles, and the rest of the (of course) girls.
Then consider the nature of the six great female stars (and therefore the sociological fashion setters) in the world cinema since the war. Lollobrigida and Loren are on the whole honourable exceptions to my thesis, no doubt because they come from a country where mothers have never given in to daughters—or to silence. But Monroe, perhaps to counteract the visual effect of her copious figure, cultivated a marked little-girl voice and mannerisms. Audrey Hepburn (compare her with her older, and much greater, namesake on the screen) is beautiful, but even more beautiful because she never looks a day over twenty-four. Bardot, who in her heyday probably had the greatest impact of the six, was never presented as anything but an inarticulate bundle of pouting nineteen-year-old sensuality—one hundred per cent houri. And the current darling, Moreau, admirable actress though she is, undoubtedly owes a large part of her popularity to her chameleon-like ability to change in a second from a bag-eyed old wreck of forty to a ravishingly pretty girl of half that age. Bardot set the pace, so to speak; but Moreau suggests that an older woman can keep up with it. The one, in this context, was inimitable; but every woman in her thirties can today put her hopes into Moreau.
And then each age has a favourite member of the family. A hundred years ago it was the father; today it is beyond any doubt the daughter. We see this in the now-characteristic desire of many prospective parents to have daughters rather than sons, a desire that might have been predicted from Professor Galbraith’s forecast that in an affluent society children must partly become status symbols, or luxuries. The factors we apply to other domestic luxury acquisitions (visual decorative value, voguishness, cost and ease of maintenance, and so on) must weight the dice against boys. We see it also in the increasingly common pattern (promulgated in fiction by Sagan) in the marriage age gap: the man old enough to be the father marries the girl young enough to be the daughter. It is true that on the fatherhusband’s side, such marriages are very often second marriages, and that they seem most popular among the most successful. But it is precisely this group that has always been the least inhibited about surrendering, if no ostracism from their peers is risked, to new general sexual drives and infantilisms.
Equally revealing is the Beatle cult. The best-known visual emblem of the Beatles is the wig—the girlish hairstyle. Whoever they may appeal to now, they began by exciting predominantly girl audiences, and it was because they excited girls that other young men began copying their appearance: the long hair, the androgynous dress styles, and all the rest. Nor should one overlook the use made by many of these male singing groups of soprano voice techniques, unfashionable since the days of the castrato and the countertenor—the High Renaissance, another woman-dominated age. Crosby, Sinatra, and the other great crooners never quit the safely virile corral of the male octaves. Similarly, the tough male image made familiar by countless Hollywood stars, such as Bogart and Wayne, is as ‘square’ as can be—and every anthropologist knows, incidentally, that the square is a male symbol, and the circle a female. I listened the other day to an intelligent young woman defining what she found attractive about the New Young Man. She said, ‘Older people think they’re effeminate, but for us they’re sexy’; and she followed up this interestingly narcissistic statement by saying, ‘Muscles and virility are out. It’s things like the way they dress and the way they walk.’ The New Young Man is still, I am sure, fundamentally a male man; but he wants to look like a she-man, not a he-man.
Now it may seem that the other great pop cult of the day, that of the idiotic and ithyphallic James Bond, proves the contrary of all this. But Bond is notoriously more enshrined among the over-thirties than among their juniors; and I see in his following a very thinly concealed nostalgia for a world where men controlled girls, not girls, men. In fact, under the contemporary veneer, Bond is once again the mogul. Several critics have remarked on Ian Fleming’s considerable skill as an evoker of visually erotic scenes and on his apparent inability to write anything but the most cursory and stereotyped love dialogue. Bond and his houri of the hour may act very sexily, but they talk (as one expects of a mogul and his moll) in a most painfully stilted way. Agent 007 was always a victim of that most dreadful secret organization of them all: his own century. And if you doubt this sacrilegious view, you must account for the fact that there are at the moment (I write in September 1965) no less than five films in production featuring female James Bonds. No clearer (and since one of these Jane Bonds is in real life none other than Mrs Sean Connery herself, no more ironic) proof could be given that we are facing an insidious revolt of the houris.
This girlification of the boy has also been encouraged by the huge boom in two special types of magazine in recent years: the girlie magazine and the girl’s magazine. The first spreads the idea that the high peak of human bliss is to be surrounded and sensually dominated by semi-naked girls, and the second is devoted largely to showing its gazelle-eyed readers how to effect the surrounding and dominating in practical fact. But perhaps this tyranny of the girl is seen most patently in the advertising techniques of the sixties. We have become so used to seeing the girl selling everything from Cadillacs to coffins that we have hardly noticed the disappearance of the older woman as a selling image. The family, too, has lost much of its old sales appeal. Characteristically, where men appeal in publicity material, they are cast (by positioning or camera angle) as disguised worshippers of the girl. And even in those masculine products that need to suggest they are aids to seduction, the seduced one more and more assumes the appearance of a propitiable goddess rather than a helpless victim.
Well, by now my quarrel has emerged. I am saying that Western, or at any rate Anglo-American, society has become girl-besotted, girl-drunk, girl-distorted. Our artificial world sprouts girls as Cadmus’ teeth once sprouted armed warriors, and regardless of gender we all worship this plague. It has become one of the ubiquitous follies of our time. It so happens that there is a word that expresses this condition: nympholepsy. The dictionary defines it as ‘a state of rapture inspired by nymphs, hence an ecstasy or frenzy caused by desire of the unattainable’, and that is more or less what is infecting us today.
I am very far from being a misogynist, and I immediately acquit the girls themselves of any intention to subvert the progress of the human republic. They are not consciously befuddling us, or at any rate no more than Eve first befuddled that egregious dimwit Adam; it is we, the men, who are befuddling ourselves with girls. We can assume that men will always be more or less fascinated by them; and all I am complaining of is the current intensity of that fascination. There is, in connection with this, an interesting passage in a famous essay of George Orwell’s.1 ‘The impulse,’ wrote Orwell in 1941, ‘to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself.’ To bring that sentence up to date, one needs to make a change: ‘only precariously’ should be ‘now fully’.
Man’s adoration of woman has taken many forms. In primitive societies it was generally the mother (as fertility goddess) who was chosen as the ideal, a tendency that has survived in the various cults of the Virgin Mary and—until recently—in many Socialist (and totalitarian) theories of woman’s place in society. In the classical age it was the virgin who symbolized the more mystical and noble of man’s feelings about the female sex. Pallas Athene, the Roman Minerva, stood for wisdom and reason; though often got up as a sort of tough female Marine, she was for arbitration in war rather than for war itself. Her emblem was the olive branch. Artemis (Diana), goddess of the moon, of chastity, of lust controlled, reaches back into the furthest recesses of human civilization, and we can perceive in her perhaps the earliest of all man’s attempts to turn himself into a moral being.
But it is difficult to detect much mother- or virgin-worship (unless in the one aspect I mention later) in our present adulation. The urgent need to reduce the population of the world, about the only matter both East and West can agree on, has tarnished the image of the mother beyond redemption. And as for virginity, it has surely become with us much more a temporal than a physical matter—something to do with age, an asset a woman loses at twenty-five rather than at first sexual intercourse. Time is the great violator now, not man; and virginity is a cosmetic, an extra titillation, rather than a source of mystery. But if we reject woman as fertile mother and as mystic virgin, then we are (or appear to be) left only with woman as a source of pleasure, as an instrument, as a substitute for masturbation—in short, as a houri. And it is not man who is imposing this role; woman herself is accepting it.
We do not have to go very far to find social reasons for this. There is the revolution in sexual self-understanding—and sexual mores—initiated by the discoveries of Freud. And there is the universal collapse of religious belief. However gallant a rearguard action the churches of the world are fighting, however intrinsically just their causes, it is as obvious as the dome of St Peter’s that twentieth-century man is not a religious animal. It is the here and now that obsess him, not the there and then of an afterlife, which comes more and more to seem simply a charming medieval hypothesis. Heaven knows, or apparently doesn’t know, that life on earth is precarious enough, since Hiroshima. So gather ye starlets while ye may; and if the almighty powers of commerce, public relations, art, and show business all invite us to the gathering, to the consumption of as many pleasures as the already lax conventions of society will allow, we need wonder no more why we have all turned Moslem—that is, into would-be houris and moguls.
We live in a typical entre-deux-guerres period, one that is history-bound to be rococo and frivolous in its pursuits and loves; and what the painted and carved cherubs and cupids and putti were to the age of Boucher and Fragonard, the omnipresent image of the starlet-model-cover girl is to ours. There have been various explanations of the Baroque and Rococo ages’ mania for combating the horror of empty spaces with hordes of plump little pink male children. The Marxist explanation is that the putti served, like the heavy perfumes of Versailles, to cover a stink—the metaphorical stink, in this case, of grossly unjust economic conditions—and it is certainly easy to find in such great and period-revealing pictures as Watteau’s Embarcation pour Cythère a grim retreat from reality as well as a poetic entry into fantasy. The putto was very much a member of the ancien régime; and his head fell, along with many others, soon after 1789. Another theory is that the cherubs were, in an age of atrociously high infant mortality, wishful symbols of fertility. In Boucher, for example, emblems of death and old age are surprisingly frequent in the shadows. They are never spotlit, but they are there. In general, though, the skies, or at any rate the ceilings, of the eighteenth century rained showers of deathless babies, just as our pages and screens now rain immortally ageless girls.
It cannot be a coincidence that the reign of the fat pink baby was also an epoch of insecurity, of turmoil in the province of ideas, as was that of the theory of perfectibility (humankind marching into an ever happier future); and the dawn of industrial technology, barred—or so it seemed—from glorious fulfilment only by a shortage of manpower. What the age was saying with its cherub mania was something like, Give us the real babies, and we’ll create a perfect world. In a way the putti were symbols of man’s sense of injustice, both at the failings of his self-created social system, as the Marxists maintain, and at the far less comprehensible cruelty of the human condition itself.
I am not maintaining, of course, that our contemporary turning of women into houris represents a desire for higher fertility. The one thing no one wants from a starlet is a baby. What we do want is more pleasure. That is why both Lolita and her grandmother have got to be girls. It is tempting to see in this a partial revenge of man on female emancipation. Woman’s old dependence, her need to cling, was an attractive condition to many men; and it is not a long step from having economically enslaved women to creating sociologically enslaved ones. Tempting it may be, but not, I think, convincing, especially since women themselves are conspiring to bring about the present situation. I see a greater, darker, and sexless shadow behind; and it is fundamentally the same as the one behind the eighteenth-century cherubs.
For above all, the houri-girl is ageless. Like a true goddess she never grows older. And nowadays it is not only women who fear menopause. Like virginity, menopause has become as much a temporal as a physical thing. It is sexless; it is that moment when we know (or think we know) that we shall never be young again; and carried to its ultimate horror it is simply what begins the moment virginity (that is, being fashionably young) ends. Against this black delusion the girl stands like a charm, an amulet, a proof of agelessness, as the rococo putti stood, or tumbled, as proofs of fecundity.
Death is, in terms of life, the passing of time. The houri appears to make time stand still; and if we manage to make love to her, then it will not matter that time never stands still, so she is both amulet to the blind and consolation to the clear-sighted. This is why for an older man happiness so often comes to mean the affaire or the marriage with a girl young enough to be his daughter. And here I must point out that another important function of the virgin in mythology and religion has always been that of patroness and protectress. It may seem absurd, before the exiguous bikinis and flesh-peddling poses of the starlets at Cannes, to talk of the virginal and the protective. Yet in a sense what these girls offer—the mythical sexual happiness in their arms, the myth-youth to be milked from their unmaterial bodies—is the only protection against old age that modern man can understand, because he knows now that death, his total extinction, cannot be averted; it can only be made anodyne. And the only palliative of death, he is led like an ancient mogul to believe, is a life full of onanistic pleasure.
This is what we are saying with our mania: give us the houris, and we’ll never grow old.
Just as I am certainly not a misogynist, I am certainly not a hater of pleasure. Progress can mean only that more pleasure is brought to more people; and it is because I believe this, and especially in the importance of those last three words, that I am against the houri. She may bring pleasure, but never to more people. Earlier I compared the starlets to a defensive wall; but walls have two sides. One defends, the other imprisons, and both obscure the real world outside. A mogul may appear, from outside, to be encapsulated in Paradise; from inside he may well, and in my view he does, live locked in Hell.
But the real victim in this sick situation, and the one for whom I feel most pity, is the older woman. She is torn between trying to keep up with the houris and wishing them all death and disfigurement. Thus three important groups in our society live permanently on the verge of a situation like that found in the early Mormon households2: an intolerable triangle of strain between husband, older wife, and younger wife; between man growing old, woman growing old, and girl (or girls) still young.
The irony of all this is that most of us know damned well—and I mean damned—that we shall never be twenty again. We also know, unless we are stupefied by our nympholepsy, that the notion that a woman’s attractiveness and her ability to find and give sexual satisfaction diminish abruptly after the age of twenty-five is ridiculous. If anything, the opposite is true. And the human mind, thank goodness, has a built-in system of contra-suggestibility. Tell a man that the surface of the world is flat, and he will one day begin to suspect it is round. Monks may dream of orgies, but orgiasts dream of monasteries; and this age’s quirk is not likely to be the next’s. But meanwhile we aged relics who were born before 1935 are besieged on all sides. It is as if we were a shadowy ring of grey failures who could only stare, mesmerized and envious, at a bright little green-golden ring of film starlets, fashionable models, and their attendant parasites. And this I find inhuman and outrageous.
I have, over my desk, a putto hanging on the wall. He was carved in limewood and painted in the early eighteenth century, and given a small glistening smile essentially the same, in all but subtlety, as the smile on every starlet’s fixed public lips—and the smile, it seems to me, that haunts the maxillae of every skull. The trouble and the truth are that death rarely uses that particular old-bone cliché of a mask. Once it was the done thing for writers to have a skull on their desks. But I prefer my limewood boy, who, given that he spent the first two hundred and fifty years of his life in Rome, may have smirked down on that celebrated nympholept Casanova, and seen John Keats (‘What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?’) die. For I need nothing to remind me of death; but always something to remind me of death’s cunning.
Starlets, putti, the inexorable passage of the years . . . easy to know what we desire, but wiser to learn to know what we fear. The next time you see a pretty girl, look at her; and then, I beg you, look beyond her.
1. ‘The Art of Donald McGill.’
2. The parallels between Mohammedanism and Mormonism are obvious, right down to the special use of the word prophet and Brigham Young’s Victorian nickname, ‘American Mahomet’.