Considering that the world has been wanting to see her without her clothes for more than 50 years, I reckon there should be few complaints at Sophia Loren now finally deciding, at close on 72, to pose for a picture in the Pirelli calendar. It remains unclear what precise state of déshabillement she is intending — one report suggested nude but for a pair of earrings, other sources scoffed at this — but she has always been beautiful and is apparently just out of a detox regime to restore her to her former glory.
Men have always adored her, including my late husband Gavin Lyall, who claims to have been the only man ever to have beaten her at ping pong because, he said bitterly, he was the only one fool enough to keep his eye on the ball.
Sophia is presumably still gorgeous enough not to provoke the usual reaction to older bodies revealing themselves, which tends to be a mixture of incredulity and disgust. The notorious British Women’s Institute naked calendar, celebrated in the film Calendar Girls, had all the crucial bits hidden by kettles and potted plants — presumably, a wise move. I once met some elderly survivors of something called the Progressive League — in the 1930s, apparently, they went in for naked country dancing — and, I confess, I fervently hoped they did not go in for it still. When nudists assert that their nakedness does not provoke unbridled lust, it usually takes only one look at the photos of them in their birthday suits to realise why. And in Italy, a few years ago, some eccentric man suggested that older women should be banned from going topless on the beach, on the grounds that they looked awful — what he got, as I recall, was the appropriate response from women that men with pot bellies should not appear, on the beach or anywhere else, ever, in swimming trunks.
But how far do we have a right to dictate how other people look? To insist on a certain way of dressing for a particular place or occasion seems fair enough, just as churches on the continent don’t want tourists wandering about in beachwear or Piccadilly, London, clubs insist on visitors wearing a tie. But short of outright indecency, I don’t see how we can object too much.
I hate people chewing gum, but I can’t complain of passive chewing; if I loathe some fatty’s too-tight trousers, they may equally deplore my loose, cheapo market ones.
A lot that other people do is displeasing — cellphones, for example, but though I relished the story, I can’t really approve of the irate passenger who threw another’s cellphone out of the train window. (Last weekend I found myself discussing such girly things as bra sizes with a friend, to the evident disgust of the two men near us; I reckoned we were paying back the business community for all those hours we’d had to listen to their blasted cellphones.)
Hot weather brings the men out in shorts, and nine out of 10 of them look ghastly: some have legs that would look better on a piano, others that are pale and spindly like young birch trees — in the days when men wore tight-fitting hose with their breeches, they often had to pad their calves with falsies: seeing those now shown to the world, I’m not surprised. Girls with bulging midriffs see nothing odd about adopting the fashion for leaving a big gap between top and skirt, irrespective of how far it protrudes and wobbles — I often want to take a felt pen and write some slogan on it.
But I don’t honestly think I have a right to ban any of this. It is not a human right to go about naked, but the old, the ugly, the fat and the frightful are not to be censored any more than other people. All we can do is to look away — until they invent Eye-pods to block out sights, as iPods block out sounds. — Â