December 11, 2016 |
Women. How I adore them. Let me count the ways. I especially love those women with attributes that do not conform to standard definitions of female beauty, as promoted by fashion mags and social media. Women seem to be another species entirely.
Women are an unruly god’s gift to the blockheads with whom they mate and procreate, many of whom, present company included, have only a vague understanding of how these heavenly creatures’ minds and bodies work. This is a shoutout to all the proud owners of a personal gate to heaven, that barely concealed door to delirium, the celestial palace where all men wish to dwell.
WINNER BY A NOSE
The exquisite schnozz on Monica Vitti as her face fills the screen in L’Avventura, that Roman nose so ennobling, it dominates her patrician features, makes her look bright as well as beautiful. (She was both.) I had a friend whose nose was similarly large and madly elegant, and I saw her, one day, at a restaurant, having lunch with a woman who turned out to be her mother. My friend’s face was all bandaged up and I thought she had been involved in an accident, but no, it was simply a nose job. Her gorgeous hooter had been reduced to a sweet little upturned bob that made her resemble every other American girl with shiny teeth and pert little nose. Alas, I cried, but realised, as I complained, that her mother was very pleased at this improvement, as she perceived it, in her daughter’s looks.
CATHOLIC GIRLS
Many young women and some men, too, make a wrong turn on life’s nail-studded highway, take to drugs and alcohol in excess, but those who have been raised in the Catholic faith seem to do it best. Is it the priests’ influence, telling them they will burn in hell if they so much as look at a boy before marriage? Is it the gaudily decorated churches, so reminiscent of nightclubs, where the gilt becomes synonymous with guilt? When Catholic girls go off the rails, they plunge down the ravine and burst into a tower of flame, from which they emerge wearing their plaid schoolgirl uniform accessorised with fishnet stockings and spike heels, brandishing a Jameson bottle in one hand and a joint in the other, ready to follow the road of excess as far as they can go, and they will go far, further than most. Miss Marianne Faithfull is the most recent patron saint of this ancient and wonderful sect.
GAP-TOOTHED WOMEN
This phenomenon, a variable-sized gap between the two front teeth, was once thought a defect, rather than an enhancement, of a woman’s beauty. Also as an indicator of a woman’s advanced sensuality, as far back as the Middle Ages. One of Chaucer’s bawdy tales concerns a woman known as the Wife of Bath, a lusty old lass, five times married and looking for a sixth husband, even though she admits that “age… hath me bereft / my beauty and my pith”. Her sprightly sexuality is partially ascribed to the gap she displays between her teeth, synonymous, in her case, with the gap at the juncture of the thighs, which is for me another major enhancement of female beauty.
Some notable gap-toothed women, whose sexiness is only inferred, include Avedon’s muse Lauren Hutton, the singer Sherryl Marshall and Mick Jagger’s daughter Georgia, whose gap caused a sudden dental trend among the young and impressionable to have their own dentition tampered with.
CELIA JOHNSON IN BRIEF ENCOUNTER
I saw this film as a small boy at the Majestic cinema in Retford, Notts, and its lead actress has remained embedded on my private wall of sensual stimulants. Celia Johnson, the definition of posh totty, sipping tea from those thick white cups that British Rail provided, the well-stewed brew endlessly dispensed from gleaming silver urns, a concoction that supposedly helped us win the war. Johnson is a bored housewife who meets Trevor Howard, the dashing doctor in his spycatcher’s Burberry, who removes a lump of railway grit from her eye. So English, so proper and decent, oh how I wanted him to take Johnson down the end of the platform and rapidly remove her knickers. There was a war on, they might never meet again, their mutual attraction was almost igniting the station waiting room, but they were both too good, they didn’t cross the line. And they went on to regret it for the rest of their lives.
SCARS MAKE YOUR BODY MORE INTERESTING
There’s a girl I know well who, before I knew her, had her wrist tattooed to cover a suicide attempt made when she was younger and misled and mean mistreated. I find that ink so poignant, marvellous. She came back from the edge and covered the mistaken mark on her slender arm with gorgeous patterns. You’d never guess her past was less than blissful when she walks down Madison Avenue in springtime and the horndogs’ hard-ons rise in her wake like tulips reaching for the sun, old men’s hands trembling on their walkers as the scent of a woman awakens the crusty remnants of their testosterone. (Remember Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, sniffing the air like a hound when he wasn’t busy chewing the scenery? Men truly are dogs.)
THE WITCH OF POSITANO
Tattoos remind me of another foxy beauty, Vali Myers, an artist and Wiccan of the first order. I encountered her briefly (and behaved just like Trevor Howard) at the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived at the time. She had flame-red hair and a tattooed moustache that resembled Dali’s and magically enhanced the fox-like beauty of her face. She lived at the Chelsea for years, but then went to live in a cave in a ravine above Positano, southern Italy, with an 18-year-old local boy, who stayed with her for the rest of her life. She was a goddess out of Robert Graves’s tome on the same – he lived not far across the sea from Positano, on Mallorca, only about 600 miles by boat. I see him now, old Gravesy, blisters on his palms, the rowboat weighed down by a box of signed first editions of The White Goddess, which he will use as bargaining chips to get a little bit of love, rowing across the sea to see her. This is what men do for women, taking desperate measures all the time, to please these magical creatures who, like the sirens before them, lure us onto the rocks of eternal servitude.
POSH TOTTY
As a working-class lad I grew up in mute adoration of upper-class women, indeed never spoke to any before the age of 15. My brother Bruce had a job cleaning out the hounds run by the local hunt and sometimes he took me along. The whips and riding crops on the walls, the smell of wet dogs and the elegant woman walking through the stable in galoshes and a silk headscarf had the most astounding effect on my emergent libido. It couldn’t have been more profound if she had struck me with her riding crop. Or did she strike me? No, she merely flashed a look in my direction as if to say, “Peasant boy, kneel!” I was reminded again of posh totty while looking at some exquisite portraits by Vigée Le Brun (Vicky Brown) (1755-1842) at the Met recently. I was there with two old friends and we were laughing rather too loudly as we substituted lewd captions for each painting. Patrick M won the prize with his minimal but pointed, “Call that a cock?” Vigée’s subjects were all titled ladies, duchesses and queens, even Marie Antoinette, whose long neck must have been an easy target for the executioner’s blade. They were beautiful paintings, rich with humanity, and what each sitter had in common was a certainty of their place in the world. A place far beyond my reach.
THE MOON AND THE MONTHLIES
I was recently talking to a young friend who has the marvellous Christian name of Fabiola, though she strikes me as a pagan sort of gal. Her latest enterprise is the Fortnight Institute, on East 4th Street in Manhattan, a gallery she recently opened with another bright young woman, Jane Harmon. They turned down all offers of financial backing because they want to remain independent of any meddling male money, however well intended. We talked, among other things, about the phases of the moon and menstrual blood and how, in some societies, it is sacred and, in others, women are regarded as unclean for the duration of their monthly flow, which only goes to show that men, and theocrats especially, still don’t have a handle on who or what women are. In the oldest existing encyclopedia, Pliny’s Natural History, the list of dangers caused by menstruation is longer than any other hazard. A bleeding woman can blunt razors, dim mirrors, rust iron and brass, turn wine to vinegar – the list is long. I don’t believe a word of it. Fabiola explains the art to me, and it feels like love. Paging Plato.
Beauty is a passing thing, but it does not pass in women. When you love them, their beauty remains, even when the stays in their corsets are frayed and the extra flesh peeks over the edges. Doctor Freud says, “That sounds like your mum!” I say, “Shove it, you old coke fiend!” Beauty – I found it.
Text by Max Blagg
Illustration by Stephen Doherty
Taken from Issue 57 of 10 Magazine, TRUE RANDOM AUTHENTIC, on newsstands now…
