"The femme fatale, who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad"
George Bernard Shaw experiencing his boyhood sexual awakening, in the Golden Age [Note: this is not the primal scene itself, but a dramatic reconstruction for illustrative purposes]
Yesterday I was reminiscing fondly to myself about a thing I said to myself barely a couple of years ago, which is something you can do if you are the kind of ego-monster I am, a free pleasure in expensive times:
(there’s more where that came from if you click the click.)
Because I did say “Sometime I ought to repeat in public,” it’s high time I did repeat it in public or why else would I say that for. What’s very funny to me, but unfortunately less funny to many of you, maybe, is that what I remember saying isn’t at all like what I thought I did say, but the longer I wait to dig it up the more disappointing it will be. Sorry about the recap preceding the anti-climax ahead, sorry for the anti-climax as well, not sorry for any disrespect to a man who couldn’t earn my respect in ten thousand lifetimes and would never try, whose very best friends said appalling things about him, and who said the most appalling things of all about himself.
[Originally composed circa September 2017 or thereabouts]
"We are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman, the femme fatale, who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy."
—H to Orianna Fallaci, 1967
I think old Hef was embalmed some decades ago, so I am not really sure he underwent any fundamental change of state yesterday. Or maybe the day before yesterday, I don't know. but I am proud to be the still-living definition of the sort of woman in whom his publication was not interested. In his own words!
Death's extremely tardy but still welcome collection of Hugh Hefner is making me remember the thing George Bernard Shaw said about how all young boys should jerk off exclusively to the Venus de Milo because it would give them high and pure classical standards and immunize them against the risk of running off with some girl who probably doesn't read very many books just because she gives them a cheap thrill. Or was it that they shouldn't do this, because no earthly woman will ever speak to their senses afterwards? Who knows. but I'm sure it's a famous remark, whatever it is he said.
While I cannot remember where it is he says it, I definitely did not imagine it, it is probably in the preface to one of his plays, and I certainly read it while skipping class in middle school or high school. Oh—what is the use in trying to invent a little extra bygone precociousness, it was certainly high school, we didn’t have free periods until then and in middle school I was still spending all the time wrapped up in my complete works of Oscar Wilde and being unbearable. So as I say, it would have been in high school that I did skip class to go hide in the library and find out what George Bernard Shaw thought about pornography, Wagner, and the New Woman. It was good for me.
I'm sure he, Shaw, also allowed that youths could be titillated by reproductions of the Venus de Milo, not only the original. not like he meant they had to make annual pilgrimages to the Louvre for their pleasure times. But I really don't remember exactly, he might even have said the Venus de Medici, since he was talking about early imprinting for maximum mental wellness. You want to focus your conditioning around an art image with arms or else you will be even more disappointed by the average live girl than you need to be.
Anyway that is what a sound and healthful heterosexual male temperament and sexual appetite looked like in pre-Playboy days. He lived to be three years older than Hefner did so that proves he was more correct in his philosophies.
[Fin]
Well, there you are and good luck with it. It isn’t what I remembered saying but I stand by it, especially the part where I refused to check the Shaw bit I was thinking of in order to cite it correctly or summarize it accurately. And I could! But I am not going to. I remember I was proud of the Camus paraphrase and guess what, I still am.