If a woman lost her temper with me even once, I wrote her off for ever. I have no forgiveness in me. Full stop. Nor am I tolerant towards women whose mouths smell like cesspools.
Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.’ Can you think of anything nicer to say to a woman by way of compliment? I promptly put them in my personal anthology of quotations. The words were penned by R. B. Sheridan. I stumbled across them reading the silliest book I have ever read: What Makes a Woman Sexy? by Julia Grice. But once I started reading it, I could not put it down till I had finished it.
It is the usual kind of thing American writers of erotica churn out; pretending that it is the outcome of years of research into what turns men on and off in their relationships with women. For example, what percentage of men are attracted by eyes, short noses, bosoms, hourglass figures, large behinds, shapely legs or feet… and so on.
I compared Grice’s conclusions to the ladies I have known in my younger days. They came in all shapes and sizes, snow-white to ebony black, big-bosomed and flat-chested, elephant-bottomed and boyishly small-bottomed. What turned me on was their responsiveness. What kept the relationships going were common interests, witty conversation, and cheerfulness. What shortened the tenure of our association were sulks. What ended them from my side were explosions of temper or halitosis (bad breath). If a woman lost her temper with me even once, I wrote her off for ever. I have no forgiveness in me. Full stop. Nor am I tolerant towards women whose mouths smell like cesspools.
The sexual lives of eminent people reveal a wide variety of appetites. Creative writers, poets, painters, composers make fascinating reading. Colin Wilson in his The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders catalogued some of them.
Victor Hugo in his seventies had a long affair with a 27-year-old laundrywoman while he was carrying on with two well-known stage actresses. At the age of 83, six weeks before he died, he recorded in his diary sexual encounters with different women.
The sanctimonious Leo Tolstoy, who preached celibacy as a release from the ‘degrading madness’ of sexual desire, made passionate love to his wife when he was 79. He achieved his moksha from his libido only in the last year of his life.
Philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell married four times, the last marriage being when he was 80. Aldous Huxley in his novel Genius and the Goddess lampooned him as an old satyr whose young wife took on a secret younger lover to keep her genius husband’s sexual morale high.
Somerset Maugham, after many affairs with women, turned gay in his seventies and had a male lover 41 years old. They continued having a sexual relationship till Maugham’s death at 84.
Pablo Picasso, despite having children through his mistress, cheated on her with other women in his eighties. He regarded sexual adventurism as a stimulus to his creativity as an artist.
Moral:
Lives of great men all remind us
We too can make our lives sublime
And leave behind us bastards
On the sands of time.