Sex, seduction and men's secret shame

IF YOU happen to be a chap, late twenties or early thirties, rather funny, specialising in property renovation, working at present in one of our more venerable shires, this could be your lucky day, because a friend of mine - a rather beautiful woman, fancied her myself at one time but nothing doing - is yearning to take you to her bed.

This doesn't of course apply to all youngish property renovators. I have better things to do than make friends with women all around Britain just so that builders can read about them here and scuttle off to a garden of earthly delights. Frankly, I would be happiest if I could be sure that no builder would ever get laid again, not ever; but that is beside the point. The point is that my snake-hipped chum - a lithe 41 years old, and thus at the very peak and flower of carnal attraction - is up for it, but cannot articulate her desire.

She said so in a fax. "The object of my desire," she writes, "is a witty young man who is original, says a lot through his eyes when he comes to see me, but is shy... I hope. What move can an old brunette make or say?"

Nicely put, although I'm a little concerned about this bugger's habit of saying a lot through his eyes. In my experience, when a man really desires a woman, he instantly starts talking out of his hat or his arse. But perhaps it doesn't matter. He is "original", after all. Nor should we waste time wondering why she should consult me, for heaven's sake, on these matters, when my own position can best be summed up by the exchange between Paul Henreid and Joan Bennett in Hollow Triumph: "You're a bitter little lady." "It's a bitter little world."

Instead, we have to be mature and creative and work out what my friend, A, can do to encourage hammer-wielding, eye-babbling X to go to the mattress. The simplest thing would simply be to flatback the bastard: a sharp kick behind the kneecaps and over he'll go, whop! on to the hearth-rug, at which point A merely smiles sweetly, murmurs, "While you're down there, you could do me a small favour," unpeels and climbs aboard.

But we can't do that. We're civilised. My second thought was that next time he "drops by" with an armload of firewood, nails, plaster-board off- cuts or whatever else builders offer as tokens of their regard, and instead of clasping her to his manly bosom ("Oh, A!" "Oh, X!"), sits there with his eloquent eyeballs popping out and his mouth hanging open, she should seize the moment. "Look," she should say, "I am going mad with lust here. I do not want to make you a cup of coffee. I do not want to chat about joists and soffits. I want to take you into the bedroom and reduce you to a husk."

That would do the trick... or would it? Never mind the business of X fancying A. Doesn't come into the question. The genetic imperative would take care of all that. The problem would be the terrible cultural dislocation engendered in X by the phenomenon of a woman who wanted to take him to bed because that's what she wanted to do, rather than its being something she was prepared to do as her side of a deal, his side of the deal being to know what his side of the deal was without being told, and to deliver it without being asked, because it doesn't count if you have to be told or asked.

Perhaps this bit of the column had better be men only, because I really can't be bothered with the firestorm of pissy letters which will otherwise burst forth from affronted women. You might say that if I dish it out, I ought to be able to take it. Nuts. Dishing it out and taking it are widely different talents and it's unreasonable to expect them to co-exist in one individual.

But the sad truth is, we live in an age when we are supposed to be ashamed of being men. We are assailed from all sides by a rude, mephitic torrent of ill-digested afflatus spelling out how horrible we are. Now the television has found a rich new seam of belittlement which it is mining frenziedly, proving that men are constitutionally weak, psychological cowards, make a fuss when in pain and drop off the perch with the regular prematurity of sickly kittens. We're not just shits, we're doomed shits, and in the long run we'll just die out and won't the world be a better place? In this nasty climate, even a gentle reminder that we have done plenty to be proud of is interpreted as a declaration of war. Let us remind ourselves that it is we who brought humanity out of its primeval bucolic stupor. With a few exceptions, it's men who have done the science, the architecture, the art, the music, the exploration, the technology, the medicine, the civil engineering, the inventing, all the wonderful glittering pandemonium of energy and curiosity and enterprise that makes our species such an astounding and moving phenomenon.

And what has that to do with X and A? Everything. The consensus among the women I know is that things have gone wrong. They wanted men not so much to change as to double in psychological size, remaining what men used to be, but without the bad bits, while at the same time adding the attributes of women, too. Can't be done. And now men, having been taught that their tremendous achievements didn't count, were not enough, have learnt shame and can no longer gather nice women like A to their manly bosoms; while women sit there sadly, wondering why men like X have apparently abjured manly-bosom-gathering for good and seem mostly to want just to be left alone to rot.

And our sperm counts are falling? Look no further. It's not oestrogens; it is pride turned to shame. In the meantime, I say again to X: she desires you. You are on safe ground. Drop your armload of wood and gather an armload of A. This is one case where the old Darcy routine is guaranteed to bring pleasure and delight. And if thousands of handsome, witty young men throughout Britain mistake themselves for X, and clasp thousands of astonished women in their arms, believing them to be A, well: it'll be a step in the right direction. !