The Male Reaction
By Marcia Armstrong
Handsome
Let's consider first the romantic scenario of the handsome young concert pianist on his evening off, who mistakes you for a front-page model and whisks you off to the Maldives on his private jet. It may happen, and even as I write a winged porcine has just gone soaring past the window....
The reality, in my experience is rather different. There was Mike, a burly Irish textile salesman in an attrocious emerald green cardigan. Married, he told me, and as befits a good Catholic, father of five. "Er, let me get this right, now. You are a man, yes? And you're dressed as a woman?"
Nothing if not perceptive, our Mike. "This is very interesting, what you're doing. D'you see, this sort of thing doesn't exist in Ireland." (He clearly didn't know about the Dublin-based Friends of Eon)
"How do you mean?" I asked. "Well, er, ho....er, ho...sexuality." There, the word was out, and I could spot the way the conversation would soon be turning. Did I know I was a very attractive woman? How would I like to go back with him to his hotel room...?
Henri, at the fancy dress ball in France, was far more debonair with his goatee beard and corsair looks - no, not an eye patch, but the kind of creased face that comes from living fifty years on a windy coast. He spotted me across the dancefloor while I was still sipping my first glass of dutch courage, grinned and pointed at me knowingly.
Within seconds he was whisking me away in a tango, oblivious of the fact that I couldn't dance a step of it. Several dances and several glasses full of courage later, he sat down beside me and began: "Mais, est-ce que vous etes vraiment une femme?" - but are you really a woman?
"What do you think," I asked him in my deepest baritone.
The third one was Dave, and here I began to suspect a pattern designed by fate. Dave was a lorry driver from Wolverhampton who must have thought it was his birthday when this blonde in the pub gave a cheeky smile and said that yes, the seat next to him was free. A few sentences into the conversation, and his delighted grin began to waver.
"Er, excuse me for asking this, but you are a woman aren't you?" "This evening I am, yes." "Ah, good." And then the double-take. Really, Dave was well out of his depth. My voice was rather deep? Because of my cold, I explained.
"But you have very feminine hands," he assured me. Or was he trying to reassure himself? At any rate, alongside Dave's great shovels, even Mike Tyson might have been said to have feminine hands.
So, what was the pattern that I saw emerging? That I seem to attract rugged middle-aged men? Ah, well, mustn't grumble: I'm no longer in my first flush of youth myself. No, it's not that. It's firstly that all these three, so far as I could judge from what they told me, were full-blooded heterosexuals and yet they went for me.
Am I so utterly convincing? No way. Because all three of them, at a certain point in the conversation asked the crucial question: am I or aren't I a woman?
Now this is not a question that real girls get asked. No man seriously in search of a partner for the evening asks the lady he's dancing with if she is really a woman (he might ask if she's really a lady, but that's another issue....). It seems a calculated way to get a slap across the face and a stiletto in your instep.
No, the very fact that they dared put the question meant that deep down they already know the answer. And yet, when given an honest reply and modest proof, they all three pursued the bedroom sales patter.
It seems to me that there are two things happening here. One is the astonishing way in which the human mind is influenced by sensory input from the eyes in far greater proportion than from the logic centres of the brain. "He'd try to get off with a lamp-post if you put a skirt on it", the old saying goes, and it seems to be entirely true that, with a modicum of snazzy dressing and careful make-up, even the least feminine of us can create a visual impression that overwhelms some men's sense of reason.
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