Chivalry cowed,
I’d love to pay a woman a compliment, MAX DAVIDSON says, but nowadays I’d likely find cynicism and suspicion.
It is a brave man who pays a woman a compliment nowadays. Bouquets that would have been gratefully received 20 years ago are now greeted with suspicion and cynicism — which is all rather sad.
“The slightest compliment can be seen as harassment,” reflects a rueful Barbara Taylor Bradford in Radio Times. The 80-year-old novelist grew up in a world where men opened doors for women and tried to treat the fair sex with chivalry. But woe betide men who even use expressions like “the fair sex” in this age of political correctness.
As a middle-aged smooth-talker raised on a diet of movies starring David Niven, Leslie Phillips and other purveyors of upper-class English smarm, I still cling to the belief that compliments per se are a good thing. I enjoy it when people pay me compliments, so why should other people not enjoy my compliments?
But I recently got my comeuppance when interviewing a woman over the telephone. She had just been photographed for a magazine feature and was bemoaning the fact that she was 42 pounds overweight.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, going into knee-jerk compliment mode. “There’s not a spare ounce on you.”
“How do you know?” she snapped. “You’ve never met me.” It was a fair comment, but I came back strongly. “Because all women who say they are three stone overweight are nothing of the sort.” She conceded the point with a laugh and the call ended amicably.
Compliment-paying has become a minefield. We were never very good at it in the first place, preferring understatement to hyperbole. In Latin countries, they have no such inhibitions. My partner and I were having lunch in Italy last year and, after two gut-busting courses, my partner was dithering over whether to have a dessert. “La signora does not have a calorie problem,” said the waiter with a gracious bow. Brilliant! But he would never have got away with it in Soho.
The zeitgeist is puritanical, taking half the fun out of flirtation. It is not just cheesy chat-up lines (“If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?”) that have had their day. Even compliments with no sexual connotation are becoming taboo. You can hardly congratulate a woman on her cooking, parenting skills, or work, without getting a suspicious look.
The irony is that everyone — and perhaps women in particular, hardwired not to blow their own trumpets — desperately needs the affirmation that compliments bring. Starved of praise, people shrivel.
One of the biggest regrets of my life is not a clumsy compliment, but one I was too shy to pay. In 1990, I watched Judi Dench play Cleopatra in the most extraordinary stage performance I had seen. Half an hour later, I shared an elevator ride with her. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
The point about a compliment, provided it is sincere, is that it makes the recipient feel special — a lesson I learned this year, in the most deliciously unexpected circumstances getting off a crosschannel ferry at Dover.
My partner is Australian, a fact not missed by the eagle-eyed passport officer. She inspected our documents and said to me: “You must be a very special man to get this lovely young lady to come to England to live with you.” It was a double-barrelled compliment of such stunning virtuosity that we were both grinning two hours later.
If a lowly public servant can pull off that sort of coup after hours sitting in a stuffy booth stamping passports, what is stopping the rest of us?