In Praise of Boy Toys

Of course Isadora Wing is my doppelgänger. As I’ve said before, not everything that happened to Isadora in Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life and here in Parachutes & Kisses happened to me, but it might as well have. Parachutes & Kisses is partly a dirge to divorce and a celebration of the boy toy.

They come to me in my dreams: the tall boy with brown skin in tennis whites; the boy with long hair and long fingers who quotes Hamlet and brings me a pink rose from his mother’s garden; the long-limbed swimmer with legs that move amphibiously; the tango dancer who touches me lightly at the waist, guiding me effortlessly as if he were a passing breeze. And then there’s the roar of the black leather dude who arrives on his Harley, stirring up the white pebbles in my driveway. Or the half-naked, sweating stud I meet in the health club.

We meet for a moment as he grows up and I seem to grow young. He brings me the gift of his youth, and for a little while we unite. Then we both move on. Or perhaps not. Nothing is sweeter than that innocence, that stumbling on the way to learning how to dance—or the indefatigable cock that pumps its own iron.

Elizabeth I of England had her Essex and Colette her Maurice (whom she married). Eleanor of Aquitaine fell madly in love with and married Henry II of England, eleven years her junior. Agatha Christie married an archaeologist named Max Mallowan who was born when she was already fourteen.

“An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested in her he is,” Christie famously said.

I can evoke the allure of younger men if not entirely explain it. It is the magic of youth, of juice, of bounce, of badness. Nothing is headier than that sweetness mixed with that scent of sin. No wonder Tina Turner, Susan Sarandon, and Mary Tyler Moore all cleave to their younger men.

Older powerful women have always had boy toys, but in the eighties the boy toy was democratized. Women were making money and discovering that men their own age found that threatening. Younger men did not. They had changed with the times while older men had not. Women felt they had the right to hot sex. Men felt they had the right to older women. The age difference supplied an additional frisson. Sex thrives on fantasy and what can be hotter than the Oedipal fantasy—even if you don’t have a son.

Demi Moore is hardly the first to discover the incendiary combination of a man in his twenties and a woman in her forties. But it doesn’t have to end in marriage. It can be, as it is for Isadora, healing after a horrible divorce.

According to the AARP, older women and younger men are the wave of the future. Isadora didn’t invent this trend, but she certainly celebrated it.

I remember the younger man who lasted longest in my life. I could smell his sweatshirt and get high. The fact that he was dangerous and deceitful didn’t seem to matter. It may have even increased his appeal. He was a moocher and a no-goodnik and I knew it. That was part of the fun. If I could survive him, I could survive anything. He made a woman of me. He made me strong.

A happy marriage does nothing to dispel the dream of younger men. Marriage brings serenity, but bad boys bring excitement. Everyone needs both. We may be monogamous in life, but all bets are off in dreams.

 

—Erica Jong
January 2006