Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (23 page)

My first inclination was to write her a letter and say how ridiculous it is to expect a woman to do a fraction that much. And maybe we’re turtles, but turtles have feelings too—and don’t like to be criticized for hating “bicycles.”

Well, I didn’t write her but kept reading, and a little farther on was a whole chapter on exercises you can do when you aren’t doing anything
else—
waiting for an elevator or for the light to change, walking or driving … times like that. She’s got a thing about stairs. Never just
go
upstairs. Go up two at a time, hop, skip or
jump
up. Come down backwards! I’ve been walking up the seven flights to my office just on the strength of this nonsense. And no coronary yet!

Farther on in the book is an absolutely fabulous chapter called “Sexercise” which tells you how to develop your pelvic muscles, so you’ll be a better bed mate. She doesn’t say this stuff is for single girls, but she doesn’t say it isn’t.

And she keeps reminding you, page after page, that women and men with beautiful bodies usually have more fun in bed because they’re proud of themselves and the way they look in the buff.

One of her really fun projects is: after a shower put your feet up on the washbasin, one at a time she says, to dry them off. This stretches
everything
! It’s a good time to rub baby oil into your ankles and heels too … something you always mean to do.

She’s got exercises for when you talk on the phone or just stand still. If you could sum up Miss Prudden’s exercise philosophy, I think it would be: “Never leave anything lying around unused.”

Well, after doing a bunch of the “painless” routines just two days—gluteals at the elevator or a pelvic walk if nobody was looking—I went to a party. And for the first time in my life I stood up straight all evening, tummy tucked in, chest out, shoulders back and felt perfectly comfy. Somebody even told me I had a lovely posture, and I’ve always had a
crummy
posture. It’s a dangerous book!

As for passive exercises by machine, or muscle-tightening by electric impulse, it seems to me that’s for
old
folks. It’s just as big a headache as do-it-yourself, takes as long, and you can’t have the fun of a playmate to do it with.

This shape business is important—inside and out—if you’re not going to take singleness lying down—except when you want to.

L
ODGED IN YOUR PRETTY
head somewhere is the image of how you’d like to appear to your public. You’re a sophisticated gamine, a creamy and elegant princess. You’re tweedy, sexy, Grecian, a bird of paradise or any of twenty other fascinating creatures. I’m sure the least specific image you have of yourself is that of an attractive, nicely dressed woman.

I don’t think anyone should try to tamper with your image. You should dress in a manner that preserves and strengthens it—makes it feel cozy and secure!

But how about men? Shouldn’t you dress to please
them
?

One of the best ways
not
to, in my opinion, is to let them get into the act. Why is it assumed just because a man is a man he knows what
you
should wear? Do you tell
him
what to look for in a car?—a subject on which he is undoubtedly more knowledgeable than you. Do you tell him how to
shave
? The
expert
, it seems to me, is the woman who has spent years (
most
working women) shopping for and buying women’s clothes, perusing fashion magazines and getting acquainted with her figure and what it looks nice in.

A man can have a knack for picking out gorgeous dresses but not necessarily for
you.

There you are in the gold lamé sheath old Henry Higgins conned you into, your complexion looking like mud, your bank account in shreds and your bust line definitely not making the scene.

Admittedly
some
men do have a sense for clothes. I have known several who had far better taste than I and I tried to learn from them. I think the idea is to see through their eyes for a while, listen to their ideas, then try to inculcate them into your own clothes judgment. Otherwise a man gets to be a bit of a bore telling you when you
may
and when you may
not
wear your peach chiffon. Leave those chaps to the girls whose chiffon they’re
paying
for.

Occasionally a man you truly adore has a clothes preference, and you must humor him, of course. My husband is a fiend for slinky black … wants it worn winter or summer, day or night. I remember one hot August afternoon when we were first dating, he said, “Get into something slinky black. We’re going over to meet my friends Jackie and Ernest.”

Naturally I wanted Jackie and Ernest to like me, so I got right into something slinky and black. Well, everybody was out by the pool in wet swimsuits and faded denims, and there was I—Vampira at high noon.

When I get my slinky-black instructions
now
, unless it’s
night
, I just pretend everything’s at the cleaners or fell into the bathtub when I was trying to steam the wrinkles out.

Unless he’s
the
man, it seems to me it’s better not to pander to his idiosyncrasies anyhow. While you are running around in little dimity peasant blouses to please
him
, you are hopelessly alienating other men who prefer you in Indian saris!

Now we know pretty definitely that men love pink, and a girl in pink summer cotton is a delectable concoction indeed. Most men like girls in slinky black for that matter. These two are as standard as “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” Have them in your wardrobe if you truly like them, but a far more important rule for man-pleasing to my way of thinking is
DRESS TO PLEASE YOURSELF.
If you do it with exquisite taste, you’ll be amazed how few men or anybody else will try to change your stripes for polka dots. (Can you imagine anybody trying to get Audrey Hepburn into more black satin or badgering Princess Grace to go more froufrou?!) And never mind what Grace and Audrey are spending—their taste came first.

The question is: Is your image really coming through?

If your clothes aren’t saying “Wow!” it’s probably the lack of taste. Not
money
…
taste
!

Good taste doesn’t mean you have to dress sedately or even elegantly. Gina Lollobrigida has much more flamboyant taste than Grace Kelly, for example, and usually looks terrific too. (I’m sorry to use all these movie-star examples. I certainly don’t know them, but at least we both know whom we’re talking about.)

Let’s take the sexy image. I maintain that when you add the element of good taste to it, even
this
look can be enhanced.

Suppose the shoulder-length hair were clipped evenly around the bottom with ends blunted to add body and bounce … isn’t that sexier than the scraggly, split-ends, nine-different-lengths look? In the first place you’ll seem to have
more
hair. Suppose the sexy black dress is beautifully short and even around its hemline too. Isn’t that come-hitherer than the three-seasons-ago mid-calf length?

Suppose the neckline is a recent vintage—say a low, low V front and back with little underneath instead of the much-boned and stayed strapless style of five years back. Wouldn’t the uniform have more woo and wow? What if you left off all junk jewelry and just let your ivory
skin
gleam at him? Very likely all but a most deez, dems and doze guy who doesn’t notice what a girl is wearing anyway, except whether it zips, would find this look a hundred times more alluring than that of the floozie.

David and I were recently in Cyrano’s, a coffeehouse on the Sunset Strip frequented by what surely must be some of the most beautiful young women in the world, median age twenty-three. (It was David’s birthday so I let him stay exactly one hour.) Most of these girls—young movie hopefuls, models, starlets—outdazzle the Miss Universe contestants by a million kilowatts. Several nights a week with their dates they mill about Cyrano’s, to be seen by agents and producers and to talk shop.

Was there a tousled hairdo? A fat fanny? A limp T-shirt? An ill-fitting garment in the whole place? Not that I could see. Just total chic, even in the pants and sweater contingent.

My point is that whatever their income—and I’m sure many were on a diet of Mounds Bars—they were doubling and tripling their sex appeal, their chances of being discovered, by looking as tasteful as a cappuccino royale.

Usually when people attack your clothes, they aren’t attacking your
image.
They are just saying, “Look, kid, it isn’t coming off!” In other words, you aren’t applying enough taste.

Taste Buds

Why is there so much lousy taste among working girls who should know better? (And we won’t even bring
up
the subject of
home
bodies!) I think it’s because they can’t
see
themselves as others see them. Yet one word of criticism and the guilty girl will crawl right into her hollow log, dragging in with her the twelve petticoats that make her look like an apple dumpling! Oh how we hiss and resist and tell ourselves the detractors are just
jealous
!

What is this highly touted little item called good taste and where do you get it? I think good taste is what’s beautiful … what looks most pleasing to most people. And you get it by absorption!

Everybody can’t have the same taste, of course, but it’s amazing how many people can agree on someone who
has
it. Even the Las Vegas jeweled-sweater-and-wedgie crowd concede that San Francisco women have chic and Los Angeles women don’t.

Before writing this chapter, I polled the thirty girls in my office to see who they thought had the best taste, so that I could describe her to you. I knew who
I
thought did, but there are lots of different “images” where I work.

Well, the secret ballot was cast overwhelmingly for my girl, and here’s what she looks like: Jeanne (that’s her real name) is thirty-six, single, not beautiful, a whopping big girl but graceful. She has a small bust, small fanny and big sense of humor. Her wardrobe runs the gamut from Harris tweeds to Taibok silks so loud they look as though they could burst into a chorus of “Babalu.” She isn’t conservative. At client meetings she sometimes wears black dresses just this side of cocktaily. Yet on office Saturdays the rest of us feel overdressed in jump-ins because Jeanne is tooling about in an ancient sweat shirt, scruffy poplin jeans, and barefooted.

This was her yesterday’s outfit: black cotton dirndl skirt, little-nothing black and white polka-dot crepe blouse, bare brown legs (with feet, of course), fragile black patent sandals with fiery red toenails peeking out, a rhinestone clip at her waist. Bizarre? But the
Harpers
kind! (Of course, we work in an office where bare legs are permitted.)

She has a backless evening dress of blue and green checked silk that would make you want to give up your day job and find something to do nights, so you could wear evening dresses.

I’ve seen her make a hat out of dead leaves that had dropped off an indoors plant in her office and wear it to a cocktail party. She also has gray flannel and cashmere sweaters like all good career girls. Yes, I
know
she sounds revolting … like one of those oh-so-clever girls magazines are always making up to taunt you. Only this girl is
real
and isn’t revolting at all. She spends money on clothes, but her taste came first. She too used to pinch pennies. About half her wardrobe she made herself. Some of her good suits are twelve years old.

I have gone into detail about Jeanne’s clothes because they definitely help her get what she wants—recognition in the business world and men for her charm bracelet. She’s been married, and I don’t believe she’s champing at the bit to do that again. She has a gang of beaux-the tennis-playing you-could-take-anywhere kind, which aren’t so easy to collect. For all her chic and clothes sense, I’ve never seen a girl more at ease around a bunch of fellows.

Your taste may not necessarily be Jeanne’s, and it needn’t be. And we can’t legislate good taste for you. But I would like to share a group of rules that I think can help you dress beautifully and please a man. They’re mine, not Jeanne’s, and my only qualification for passing them on is that I used to wear artificial flowers in my hair and tight sweaters and things like that. I think I’ve come a long way in the taste department since then. Naturally all the rules are budget-minded.

Acquiring Taste

1. Count the fashion magazines—
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour—as friends
! Within their pages you will see the best photography, the best clothes, the best looks of our time, assembled with loving care by people whose profession and sole aim
is
to show you what’s beautiful.

If the styles seem extreme, it’s only because they are
new
and you aren’t used to them yet. If
Vogue
presents a hair style a yard wide, they hope perhaps you’ll be jolted into poufing your page boy out just a
trifle.
That’s all they’re after … not total, slavish follow-me.

It isn’t so important to read what these books
say
, though their articles and stories are terrific. But look at the
girls.
Click them into your head to remember when you shop.

2.
Do
follow fashion!

Nobody is asking you to give up your beloved shirtwaist, but get it at the length skirts
are
this year. Wear it with a totally new shade of sweater … and lipstick.

If you will get yourself in the way of thinking that changing “looks” is not just capricious and expensive but a means to being a totally new and fascinating
creature
every
so
often, you’ll feel happier. Fashion
is
your ally. Would it were that easy to get a new face!

The obsolescence factor
is
exaggerated by the grumps, I feel. Each new crop of styles usually looks fine for years, up to and including the much-maligned sack dress if you will go to the pains to remodel. I have thrown out only one dress in the last ten years because fashion said, “Out!” And it was never pretty to begin with.