Every July, just as the strawberries are ripening in England, the starched skirts come rustling out of their cloisters to damn the male species for its despicable objectification of women’s tennis.ÂÂ
What a creature man is (they hiss), this dribbling imbecile bereft of higher functions, voraciously watching thighs and cleavage and little pink panties, resolutely refusing to see the game as worthwhile in itself.
The dribbling imbeciles, meanwhile, are grateful for being enlightened: and there we thought we were watching Monica Seles and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario and Jennifer Capriati because the rallies last longer. Oh blessed relief, that we can now reveal our pent-up lust for divergent squints, moustaches and simian underbites!
But that’s where the enlightenment ends, because if the Olympics have given us anything apart from yet more proof that Sam Ramsamy is being paid for doing nothing, it is that men are mere sucking doves in the skin-worship stakes. Women are the true aficionados of flesh.
How else to explain the woman-hours lost to the nation as gals who can’t tell a salto from a saltcellar fixate on the high-bar final for two solid hours? To me these Transcaucasian masochists look like Tarzan dressed as a Las Vegas bellhop, but to feminine acolytes — transfixed on the treadmill at the gym, the kilometres slipping past unfelt — they are visual truffles of the highest order. Baby-soft, granite hard, the boys from the Steppes unfurl their shoulders, and the angels sing.
Of course, I am assured that it’s not all about contours of beefcake. For those of more refined taste there are the breeches and stockings of the fencing hall (a pleasure-dome of delights for students of the comely calf or well-turned ankle), or the virtues of Oriental hair, a subject entirely obscure to the male spectator, but one that fired the imaginations of two women I encountered.
”He’s got … such … divine … hair!” one declared of a Japanese high-bar specialist.
If cleanliness is close to godliness, then perhaps his pristine mop might have been considered celestial, but no, it emerged that it was the ”body and general spikiness” of the coif (the sort of anti-tank, barrier shape sported by the hyperactive and murderous Japanese cartoon characters that entertain our children every afternoon) that had won them over.
With such developed aesthetics at play, what chance do the swimmers have of being appreciated? In an age of divine Japanese hair and nouveau-Versailles calves, what hope for those gargantuan tadpoles with their meatloaf faces and shaved heads and atrophied legs trailing in their wake?
Surely Ian Thorpe, a man with the nose of Barry Manilow and the feet of Gollum, cannot expect much woo to pitched his way? But no. Fish got to swim, bird got to fly, and it seems that a six-pack and rubber underpants still go a long way. Some things you just can’t change.
Like men, for example. Just because the TV is perpetually jammed on finals involving scantily clad men (the remote having been hidden in an inconceivably cunning place, such as next to the kitchen sink), one shouldn’t think that male spectators aren’t allowing their eyes to stray from the score in the top right corner and down to more pleasing figures.
I mean, women’s yachting must be jolly interesting to those who follow it — sardines, mostly — but most men would have to confess that they’d rather be partaking of the gratuitous close-up footage of the Brazilian beach- volleyball captain’s left buttock, a caramelised breadfruit of a thing apparently in danger of cramping up, and therefore in need of minute inspection by the male camera crew.
And for the other men, the ones who don’t move their lips when reading, there is Svetlana Khorkina.
The Americans have brought with them a bevy of young gymnasts, each more saccharine and manicured than the next, soccer-moms-to-be with names like Carly and Tammy-Lee and Cindi (the i’s dotted with hearts). They are svelte and well-fed, curvaceous and cute. And they become irrelevant when Khorkina stalks into the room.
Despite having apparently acquired a ferocious eating disorder since the Sydney Olympics, and notwithstanding her fall off the uneven bars, Khorkina is worth going to the kitchen sink for; a deliciously spoilt Russian princess with the face of Juliet Binoche and the temper of Ivan the Terrible.
And so the Games are ending, and we still don’t know how the scoring works in sabre or what the nuances of backstroke are. Not that we cared anyway, not when he’s got … such … divine … hair!