Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 6

Men have their own list when it comes to sources of happiness. ‘The love of a good woman’ is high in the ratings. Shopping and chocolate don’t get much of a look in. Watching porn and looking at pretty girls in the street, if men are honest, feature large. These fondnesses of theirs (dismissed by women as ‘addictions’) can make women unhappy, break up marriages and make men wretched and secretive because the women they love get upset by them.

Women should not be upset. They should not expect men to behave like women. Men are creatures of the cave too. Porn is sex in theory, not in practice. It just helps a man get through the day. And many a woman too, come to that.

Porn excites to sex, sure. Sex incited by porn is not bad, just different. Tomorrow’s sex is always going to be different from today’s. In a long-term partnership there is room and time for all kinds. Sex can be tender, loving, companionable, a token of closeness and respect, the kind women claim to like. Then it’s romantic, intimate, and smacks of permanence. Sometimes sex is a matter of lust, release, excitement, anger, and the sense is that any woman could inspire it. It’s macho, anti-domestic. Exciting. Don’t resist the mood – try and match it. Tomorrow something else will surface more to your liking. Each sexual act will have a different feel to it, the two instincts in both of you being in variable proportions from night to night, week to week, year to year. It’s rare for a couple’s sexual energies to be exactly matched. But lucky old you if they are.

I have friends so anxious that they can’t let the man in their life out of their sight in case he runs off with someone else. It’s counter-productive. Some girls just do stop traffic in the street. So it’s not you – so what? Men like looking at pretty girls in the street not because they long to sleep with them, or because given a choice between them and you they’d choose them, but because it’s the instinct of the cave asserting itself. Pretty girls are there to be looked at speculatively by men and, if they have any sense, with generous appreciation by women. It’s bad manners in men, I grant you, to do it too openly, especially if the woman objects, but not much worse than that.

This will not be enough, I know, to convince some women that for a husband or lover to watch porn is not a matter for shock-horror. But look at it like this. A newborn baby comes into the world with two urgent appetites: one is to feed, the other is to suck. Because the nipple is there to satisfy both appetites, the feeding/sucking distinction gets blurred for both mother and baby. If you are lucky, the baby’s time at the breast or bottle is time enough to satisfy the sucking instinct. If you’re not lucky, the baby, though fed to completion, cries, chafes and vomits yet goes on sucking desperately, as if it were monstrously hungry. At which point the wise mother goes to fetch a dummy, so everyone can get some peace. Then baby can suck, digest and sleep, all at the same time, blissfully. (Most babies simply toss the dummy out of the cot as soon as they’re on solids and the sucking reflex fades, thus sparing the mother social disgrace.)

In the same way, in males, the instinct for love and the need for sexual gratification overlap but do not necessarily coincide. The capacity for love seems inborn; lust weighs in powerfully at puberty. The penis is there to satisfy both appetites. If you are lucky, the needs coincide in acts of domestic love; if you are not, your man’s head turns automatically when a pretty girl passes in the street, or he goes to the porn channels on the computer. He is not to be blamed. Nor does it affect his relationship with you. Love is satisfied, sex isn’t quite. He clutches the dummy.