It is official. What Harry told Sally in Harry
met Sally was not just a witty comment; Harry was telling the universal
truth.
Men and women can’t be just friends,
because sex always comes in the way. Men, it seems, are incapable of having
purely platonic relationships with women. They are, by nature, debarred from
forming friendships with women without also wanting to have a sexual congress
with them.
According to a recent ‘research’ carried out
(a hyperbole, if you ask me, to label a survey as a research, a bit like calling
American baseball the greatest sport on earth) and published in British newspapers, a significantly
higher proportion of men admitted that they secretly fancied their female
friends, and fantasized about going out on a date with them. The percentage was
much higher amongst younger men than older men. (In other news Pope is Catholic
and dogs like to shag your leg.)
Interestingly, amongst middle-aged persons,
the proportion who fancied a friend of opposite sex was roughly the same
amongst men and women. With one difference: women were more likely to fancy
unattached male friends, while men had no such compunctions.
So there it is. Men are not to be trusted.
If, say, you are an attractive young woman with a chest worth pressing, and are
meeting a male friend in order to have a shoulder to cry on, because you are,
say, going through a personal crisis, your boyfriend, say, has cheated on you
with a woman-you-can’t-understand-why anyone-would-want-to-sleep-with, then it
is not at all unlikely that your friend, who, you think, has no sexual interest
in you, and who is listening to your woes with a show of concern worthy of a
Samaritan, is in fact wondering whether you have saucerised areoles and
harbouring a desire to tweak your nipples as if turning the knobs on his
transistor to get Radio Ceylon in record time.
I have a friend who doesn’t do platonic
relationship (he says). As far as looks are concerned, he is (like the majority
of blokes I know) neither sensationally good looking nor stunningly ugly, but
average, give or take a few points depending on the fat-muscle ratio on a given
day and other factors such as the angle at which the sunlight is falling on his
face. He is a good raconteur and the desire to be interesting has a tremendous
force for him; he is always devising ingenious, intricate schemes to make
himself interesting to women.
This friend tells me that there isn’t a
single woman among his friends and acquaintances he wouldn’t sleep with given
half a chance. To the best of my knowledge he has not been offered even a
quarter of a chance (although I don't think that is for want of trying).
We have a few common female friends between
us, and he is secretly obsessed about one of them. She is more of his friend
than mine; I meet her mostly at parties and gatherings where both of us are
invited (2-3 times a year; if she gives parties I am not invited; as for me I
do not give parties). However, I feel as if I know her very intimately because
my friend can’t stop talking about her, especially when he is drunk. In so far
as I can see, she is a pleasant enough woman of pasty complexion whose face
would be more ogleworthy if she did not have a large nose placed on it at an
awkward angle, irregularly arranged teeth, a mircognathia, and large ears
(although she hides them under her tresses). She has a warm enough personality
although I wouldn’t have thought she would win medals in the IQ Olympics. She
has big(ggish) breasts, chunky thighs and legs like French furniture. As for
her buttocks, I am reminded of Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s
extremely funny novel, the protagonist of which has a theory that the way
people park their cars has much to do with their intimate self-image and how
they feel about their own backsides; I have not seen this woman parking her
car, but I should imagine that she needs a lot of parking space and, after
parking the car gingerly, she rushes away so as not be noticed as the owner of
the car. I have to say that I do not find this woman, who, for me, is between
an acquaintance and a friend, particularly attractive, physically; but as far
as my friend (the male friend) is concerned, he would like nothing more than to—paraphrasing
Mohammad Al-Fayed, the erstwhile owner of Harrods—f**k her up and down, then
from front and behind (Fayed was describing how the British system treated him
when he applied for a British passport). He (my friend, not Fayed) used to tell
me that while having sex with his ex-partner he used to imagine that he was screwing
this woman (quite a feat of imagination on his part, I thought, as his then
girl-friend was so skinny that had she taken off her clothes in front of me,
I’d have been tempted to give her lumps of sugar than do anything else). He is
single now, and I guess the mental image of this woman helps him to pass lonely
nights.
My friend’s sexual attraction, bordering on
obsession, with our common female friend, means that he has, over the years
(usually after a few pints), forced me to listen to his sexual fantasies
involving her. The content of the fantasies changes from time to time, but the
common element of all of them is what can be described as the element of
surprise. The latest one involves him creeping on the woman from behind and, in
one swift motion, pulling down her skirt and knickers, exposing ‘the globes of
her buttocks’. She then turns towards him, revealing a dense triangle of pubic
hair (my friend wouldn’t have it any other way; he insists on a luxurious bush;
she has to be so hairy, he says, that when she sits down, naked, it must look
as though she has a fat squirrel in her lap; experience has taught me to let
him continue unchallenged; it’s all fantasy-island, anyway) and (instead of
giving him a resounding slap) kisses him full on the mouth.
‘No offence,’ I said to my friend on one
occasion, ‘but what exactly do you see in this woman? Granted she is not ugly
and can be said to have a decent figure if you go for fuller figures, but come
on, you must have been with women more attractive than her. What’s the deal
here?’
My friend agreed with me. He said that he
could not explain what it was about this woman that gave him an erection every
time he thought of her. ‘There is rumble in the horn section,’ he said after a
while, doing with his hands the universal male gesture to emphasize his point.
‘I bet she is dirty in bed,’ he concluded. I doubted that, but all that it told
me was that he wanted to have sex with her; he couldn’t explain the attraction.
Once I interrupted him in the middle of his
graphic (and brutal) description of the angle from which he would apply
pressure on her bare arse with his penis, and said, ‘But she is your friend!’
My friend made a grimace ‘I know,’ he said.
‘It is not right, but I can’t help it. I think it would help if I can somehow
get it out of my system.’
We then had a further discussion on the
subject and came to the conclusion that the only way to get the whole thing out
of his system was to have sex with this woman (preferably from behind). That,
my friend ruefully admitted, was never going to happen.
‘Do you think she is at all interested in
you?’ I asked.
‘She might be,’ my friend said.
‘Why do you say that?’
It then turned out that once when he (with
his then partner) had gone out for an outing with this woman and her husband, she
had brushed her breasts against his arm.
‘On two occasions. In quick succession,’ my
friend said, and looked at me as if he had presented me with the final clue
that would solve a particularly vexing problem I was struggling with.
I looked back at him.
‘Come On!’ my friend said. ‘Can brushing of
tits by a woman against a man’s arm ever be accidental? You know where your
breasts are. You know where the man is standing. How can you accidentally press
your tits against his arms?’ Then, looking at my face, ‘OK. Once might be
accidental. But twice?’
‘Do you have,’ I asked, ‘any other evidence
that ___ is succumbing to your sexual allure?’
He had. My friend told me that there were
occasions when, during parties, he had (strategically) placed his hand on the small
of the woman’s back and gradually slid it down on to her buttocks. ‘She just
stood there. Didn’t even change her position,’ he concluded.
‘Did you touch her buttocks with the back
of your hand or with your palm?’ I asked.
‘Is that important?’
‘Well, if in a crowded room the back of
your hand touches someone’s bottom, it may be construed as accidental. But if
you use the palm, that might denote an intent. Did you apply pressure?’ I
asked.
‘I can’t remember. To be frank, I was
slightly drunk myself,’ my friend said. ‘But,’ he added, in case I had not
heard him correctly first time round, ‘she just stood there. She obviously
didn’t mind.’
‘So how are you going to take this
further?’ I asked him. ‘The signs are ominous. She is clearly falling for you.’
‘That’s the problem,’ my friend said. ‘I
don’t want to ruin our friendship.’
‘But you think she might be interested in
you,’ I pointed out.
‘I think she is, but what if she isn’t? Or,
does not want to go all the way? It might create complications.’
‘Do you want to have a relationship with
her?’
‘Oh God! No!’ My friend was scandalized at
the suggestion. ‘I just want to sleep with her. Don’t look at me like that.
Haven’t you fancied your female friends?’
‘I can say with complete confidence that I
have not fancied___. I have no wish to press my penis against her buttocks,’ I
told him.
‘Not her, maybe. There’ve got to be others
you must have wanted to shag,’ my friend appealed to me.
‘Never,’ I said. ‘I don’t look at my female
friends like that.’
‘You are a f**king lier.’
I can say with complete candour that of my current group of female friends (about 6 to 8) I don’t fancy any
one. (That one has a skin condition and another has bleeding gums helps, I
suppose). I should like to think that sex does not play any part, at least not
consciously, when I form friendships with women. My friend, mentioned above, who wants to sleep with each and every person of his acquaintance with XX chromosome, is an exception (I hope). I think that men might fancy some but not all of their female friends and acquaintances. Whom they will fancy will depend, in no particular order, on how good
looking the women are, how they dress, and (there is no escaping this) the size of
their breasts and peachiness of their arses. And no; it doesn’t matter whether
the women are single or attached. Disgusting, I know; but there it is.
Many years ago I read a novel titled Alchemy of Desire by the Indian
author Tarun Tejpal. I do not remember much about this novel other than that it
was pretty dire, with repeated (and repetitive) cringe-worthy descriptions of
sex. But I remember a conversation in the novel between the protagonist and his
girlfriend. The protagonist explains to his disbelieving girl-friend the male
psych when it comes to fairer sex. Essentially a man wants to have sex with any
woman he finds sexy. It doesn’t matter who the woman is. She could be a friend,
friend’s wife, friend’s sister (or mother), a colleague, a casual acquaintance he
has met at a party, the woman at the Tesco till, or a complete stranger he has
happened to have looked at in passing. (Thus, if a man happens to glance at a
woman, a complete stranger, for a few seconds, with tennis-ball breasts or legs
longer than Marathon, even in passing, in a crowded London underground, he will
make a mental note of her: one for the wank bank. Indeed—and this is
important—the woman does not even have to have a terrific figure (it could be
Claudia who cleans his house and weighs 200 pounds); but if there is
anything about her anatomy that triggers the man’s fancy, there will be a
nightly deposit in her name.)
Doctor Obvious says that men are able to
make a differentiation in their minds between love and sex. A man may have no
crisis of conscience while bonking woman A (whom he doesn’t love but wants to
f**k) while in a relationship with woman B whom he loves (and also bonks).
Women may be more likely to equate sex with love.
Men, as they say, are from Mars . . .
