THE MEN WHO DRIVE WOMEN WILD
Heartthrobs: A History Of Women And Desire Carol Dyhouse Oxford University Press €28
Throughout history, faced with a male person they collectively desire, women have rather frighteningly banded together and howled with a primitive animal frenzy. Whether they were pursuing Lord Byron, chasing Franz Liszt (‘women were said to have collected Liszt’s cigar stubs, which they would encase in jewellery or hoard as relics’), swooning over Rudolph Valentino or mobbing The Beatles and The Stones, the usual scene is pandemonium.
‘Girls began pulling out their hair,’ it was reported of a rock-concert audience. The pubescent females were ‘shaking uncontrollably’. And not only the pubescent females. One pair of old ladies has now been to see Cliff Richard perform more than 8,000 times.
The ‘screaming and fainting’ in reality is backed up by the high drama in literature and cinema. According to historian Carol Dyhouse in this study of what women have found desirable in men, women have always wanted to read about ‘intrepid masculinity’, and they’ve never had much time for mild-mannered fellas who push the pram and do the washing-up.
The ‘templates of desirable masculinity’ are instead Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester, Heathcliff, Count Dracula and Rhett Butler. The latest in this line is the sadomasochist in Fifty Shades Of Grey, who is amusingly described here as ‘Mr Darcy with nipple clamps’.
Women like pretty-boy vampires, Elvis grinding his pelvis, dashing adventurers in their military uniforms in the bestsellers churned out by Barbara Cartland. The idea always is that ‘a loving woman can elicit passion and devotion from a damaged and difficult man’. That is to say – it is incumbent upon Beauty to tame the Beast.
The feminists don’t like any of this, needless to say. They want to lecture women about ‘compliance with a male-dominated social order’, which they see as a bad thing. Whether it is, whether it isn’t, however, history and biology suggest rather strongly that proximity to throbbing male power is what women will gravitate towards. As the prevalence of the Cinderella fairy tale implies, to be ‘protected by marriage to a powerful man’ remains an ideal.
Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 was a real version of the story – but 60odd years on, does the legend hold? Dyhouse is probably right to say that feminist developments have left women unsatisfied and exhausted, as they ‘set their sights on personal achievement at the expense of family and domestic obligations’. Because where marriages used to be between teens or those in their early 20s, now marriage and having babies is put off until the mid-30s, which brings with it new issues with fertility and finance and childcare.
This is an even-tempered book that raises lots of fascinating questions. For example, why is it that so many of the men women traditionally dreamt about – Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Dirk Bogarde and Richard Chamberlain – were in fact gay?
Is it because women, being at bottom eminently sensible, knew that it was better, in the end, not to confuse fantasy with reality, even if Dirk Bogarde was told to ‘sew up his fly buttons at premieres’?
That would be the lesson of Brief Encounter. ‘Whatever your dream was, it wasn’t a very happy one, was it?’ mousy Celia Johnson is told at the end of the film by the dull but safe husband to whom she has returned.
As Dyhouse says: ‘family values triumph’ because propriety and pragmatism prevail.