The gaggle of girls who hung about outside the restaurant were pitiful in their disconsolate finery. Miniscule black cocktail dresses ballooned like tiny soft-porn spinnakers up their toothpick thighs in the Cape Town gale, and when no one was watching, beautifully manicured hands rubbed concentration-camp elbows and shoulders in a vain attempt to keep warm.
All had the distant, stupid look of the modern courtesan, whose politically correct mandate is to lure men towards satin sheets draped over tables before offering them the delights of phallic chipolatas. Strata of cosmetic Polyfilla had been applied to their faces with a shovel to make them look older, dangerous, sensuously mature and outrageously experienced; but the knock-knees braced against the cold and the oversized front teeth exposed by fixed smiles revealed them to be children playing at being princesses.
But it was not their youth that made the overt sexuality of their poses and outfits seem mysteriously unappealing, even distasteful, to this male observer. Why, when these girls had clearly been invited as the most desirable crumpets ever to break a nail, did they look like…something else? Were they more than the sum of their extremely thin, extremely smooth parts? Who is this ideal young woman whom we men are meant to wax primordial over?
Let us consider her sanely, and out of the wind that drove everyone into the restaurant last Thursday evening. For starters, she is emaciated. Not thin, not sleek, not trim, not toned — she is skeletal. Her musculature is underdeveloped, and she has small hands and big feet, huge doleful eyes, a red bee-stung pout, narrow hips, tiny buttocks, and no breasts whatsoever. The whole physical ensemble is rounded off with a slouching, up-yours attitude that oozes boredom and a sense of being hard-done-by. The ideal desirable, beddable young woman is, in other words, a 15-year-old boy.
Which makes some sense, given that Western aesthetic trends are invented, circulated and policed by designers and stylists who are for the most part homosexual. Queer eyes set the sexual agenda for straight guys, and it is one of our age’s great ironies that red-blooded hetero blokes, sexual predators with the gender awareness of a Babylonian aristocrat and the erotic craft of a diesel-powered pile driver, are so busily and so desperately wooing a homosexual fantasy.
But the homosexual fantasies that shivered and bobbed about in the gathering dusk outside the launch of Vodacom’s new sponsorship deal with Western Province rugby paled into insignificance next to the homo-erotic onslaught inside the restaurant. One pupil-dilating glance around the walls, festooned with black-and-white photographs of rugby players in various stages of undress, was a salient reminder of what happens when players and administrators who are fiercely homophobic (and who therefore pride themselves on knowing nothing about gay culture), try to indulge the gentler arts.
It would be cheap and unnecessarily facetious to suggest that homophobic rugby people doth protest too much. No, the administrators who milled about in suits a size too large for them, and the players who crouched at the bar, wearing that ubiquitous juvenile uniform of beige slacks and light blue shirts, are not latently gay. Their dislike of homosexuals is genuine, wholesome and far-reaching. That noone noticed that the players who champion their macho aspirations had been transformed into gay art was not an indication of some hidden desires. Instead it was an indication of being dumber than a bag full of hammers.
Of course, not all the pictures were the sort of thing one finds in hardcover books on the bedside of famously ambivalent and erotically athletic spaniel breeders. Some verged on the downright kinky, such as the image that lingered lasciviously on the puckered scar on Tonderai Chivanga’s shoulder. Others aspired to a sort of rugged masculine beauty born of combat and hetero manliness; inspirational art, in other words, for German SS divisions trying to keep warm in the snows of Stalingrad. But once again it seemed a fair bet that the people who organised the exhibition had never heard of Leni Riefenstahl (Didn’t he play fly-half for Herzlia?), and once again an aesthetic trope had been stumbled into purely by accident.
Man shall not live by gay Nazi soft-core porn alone; so I lit out.