Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Jilly Cooper

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

The Ages of Women

Ladies and Sport

The Arts

Female Types

Women and their Pastimes

Copyright

About the Author

Jilly Cooper comes from Yorkshire and was educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury. For twenty-five years she lived in London and for thirteen of them she wrote for the Sunday Times, during which time her column was one of the most widely read features in the paper. In 1982 she moved to Gloucestershire and began writing a column for the Mail on Sunday. Recently she has devoted more of her time to writing books, ten of which have been published by Mandarin; she is also the author of six romances, three best-selling novels, Riders, Rivals and Polo, a book of short stories, two anthologies and several children’s books. She makes frequent appearances on television and has done many radio broadcasts.

About the Book

Whatever their grading, Super Woman or Slut, Jilly submits all women to remorseless scrutiny. In public and private, home, office or bed, none escapes her beady eye – from debs to divorcees, models to maiden aunts, tarts to Tory ladies, this is Jilly Cooper’s brilliantly funny guide to the female sex.

Also by Jilly Cooper

The British in Love

Riders

Animals in War

Class

Violets & Vinegar

Mongrel Magic

The Common Years

Super Men & Super Women

Men & Super Men

Jolly Marsupial

Super Jilly

Super Cooper

Jolly Super Too

Jolly Superlative

Jolly Super

Little Mabel Saves the Day

Little Mabel

Little Mabel Wins

Little Mabel’s Great Escape

Octavia

Emily

Harriet

Bella

Prudence

Imogen

Lisa & Co.

Hotfoot to Zabriskie Point

How to Survive Christmas

Leo & Jilly Cooper on Rugby

Leo & Jilly Cooper on Cricket

Leo & Jilly Cooper on Horse Mania

Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

Rivals

How to Stay Married

How to Survive from Nine to Five

Angels Rush In

Polo

To Ilsa Yardley

With love

Introduction

You may ask—not unreasonably—what excuse there can be for adding as much as a jot to the wordy flux that has poured off the presses in the last few years on the subject of the female sex. Can it be that there yet remains a syllable unuttered on the topic of ‘unpaid domestic servitude’, or some unignited spark of controversy over the locale of the female orgasm?

The Female Ghetto, The Sensuous Eunuch, The Ascent of Women etc. etc.—the only thing these joyless outpourings have in common is a dreary ability to take themselves too seriously and an infinite capacity for grumbling about the female condition.

Only a couple of decades ago there was a universally hummed popular song called I enjoy being a girl. Today, in the mid-seventies, Jan Morris was practically lynched for saying the same thing.

In fact in turning from man into woman, Miss Morris has gone very much against the tide, for the most depressing aspect about women today is that so many of them seek to be becoming more and more like men. One sees them wearing trousers the whole time, cutting their hair short, storming the stock exchange and the civil service, taking over men’s top jobs, taking the sexual initiative, refusing to do more than a minimum of housework, paying someone else to look after their children.

The hand that is stretching out to rule the world, seems no longer to have any desire to rock the cradle. Gone are the days when girls were dear little things exclusively manufactured from sugar and spice.

Women, as we knew them, in fact, are a rapidly vanishing phenomenon in grave danger of extinction. Conservationists fretting over the fate of the rhinoceros or the butterfly should immediately turn their attention to rescuing the female, if only to preserve her in Wild Wife Parks or Bird Sanctuaries before it is too late.

I felt it was essential before the sex became extinct or disappeared in a pouffe of smoke to get down on paper details of the female’s behaviour pattern, her hobbies, her breeding and brooding habits, and also to categorise the physical characteristics of the various sub-species: nymphomaniacs, Tory ladies, virgins, debutantes, lady cricketers and many more.

The result was Women and Super Women. And Timothy Jaques, who did the drawings, and I sincerely hope that this little monograph may be placed beside the dinosaur skeletons in the Natural History Museum, as a memento for future generations of the days when the female sex still roamed the world.

Woman proud woman clad in little briefs…. I shall no doubt be accused of being too harsh on my sex. But I would like to protest like Macheath, if perhaps for different reasons, that I love the sex: “Nothing unbends the mind like them.”

I am constantly amazed by their beauty, their vulnerability and above all by their intrinsic sillyness even when they are at their most serious and tub-thumping. All women are good, as the proverb says, for something or nothing.

Women and Super Women was written very appropriately in longhand in the pages of a publisher’s dummy (a book with blank pages) for The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill.

As we hurtle towards gynocracy, and the strident howls of the Women’s Liberationists become more clamorous, I doubt if the battle of the sexes has ever raged more bitterly. But before they take over altogether I think women should perhaps heed Sir Compton Mackenzie’s words:

“Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men; but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.”

The Ages of Women

SCHOOLGIRLS

SCHOOLGIRLS WRITE ENDLESS letters to schoolboys scented with Goya’s Great Expectations, which progress from Dear to My Very Dear to Darling Darling Darling as the term passes. Status is entirely dependent on how many Valentines they get. A lot of wishbones are wasted on Paul Newman.

During the school term schoolgirls smoke like chimneys but don’t inhale, smuggle in pornography and spend a good deal of time asking more sexually experienced pupils: “What’s it like, what’s it really like?”

During the holidays they lie on the floor, play pop music too loudly for their parents’ liking, and keep transistors under the bedclothes so they can listen to Capital Radio all night. A lot of time is spent reading beauty advice books about not squeezing blackheads and drinking P.L.J. Occasionally they make out lists of every part of their body, and launch heroic campaigns to make each part more beautiful.

Schoolgirls are supposed to be filled to the brim with girlish glee, but are actually permanently in despair because there is no possibility of Paul Newman or anyone else who looks like him ever loving them back. Meanwhile Paul Newman and thousands of men who look like him are having fantasies about nubile schoolgirls.

TEENAGERS

Teenagers have spots, puppy fat, immortal longings, sleep all day, and worry about kissing properly, whether they’re exchanging too much saliva or going on too long, or whether they should be stroking the back of their boyfriend’s neck as they do in films. When they first progress to French kissing all they can think of is how disgusting the underneath of men’s tongues feels.

All teenagers live in jeans with mottoes embroidered all over them, which are evidently a great icebreaker: you read each other’s private parts and suddenly you’re friends. To quote from one teenage magazine:

“He had Beauty is Truth down one side of his jeans and Abandon all hope ye on the crutch and the sort of smile that labelled him a very real person.”

Most teenagers are very keen on someone called Mousy Tongue.

They change at least three times a day, and spend three hours on their faces before coming downstairs, in the hope that one of their father’s friends will chat them up, or a group of workmen will whistle at them in the street They also stuff Kleenex into their bras, giggle a lot, spend all their money on Movie Magazine, Jackie and pop records, and wonder why they can’t marry Paul Newman. After all, Juliet was married at fourteen, wasn’t she? Permanently Spock-marked, they believe the world owes them a living, and stay in jobs only three weeks.

Other occupations are slamming doors, having wild parties when their parents are away, smashing crockery from pre-menstrual tension and pinching their mothers’ clothes.

“She’s got a man, and she’s past it, what does she need with clothes anyway?”

To get their revenge, mothers often hang around when their daughters have friends in, cramping everyone’s style when they want to neck and talk about sex.

Teenagers are also intensely irritated by their parents continually grumbling about money, but still spending fortunes on drink.

VIRGINS

Per Ardor ad Asterisks.

Almost a collector’s item these days. Virginity is supposed to be something you give your husband like engraved cuff-links on your wedding day.

When I was a gel girls kept fantastically quiet if they lost their virginity, now they get panicky if they haven’t lost it by the time they’re twenty-one.

Virgins are permanently under siege from Herrick urging them to gather rosebuds, which is a euphemism for losing it. They worry that once they’ve lost IT they’re going to want IT all the time. They know they’re saving IT for something, but are terrified that it’s getting too late, and soon, no one’s going to want IT. Virgins also worry about the pain on their wedding night, but so much will be going on, rockets exploding, asterisks, the breaking of waves and Ravel’s Bolero in the background, that they’ll be completely distracted from any pain.

“What d’you mean—lost it?”

Girls who have lost their virginity often move to other parts of the country so they can pretend to be virgins again.

One’s mother and one’s daughters are always virgins and have children by internal combustion.

DEBS

Red Eyes at night, Deb’s delight.

Debs live in the General Trading Company, are all called Fiona and Georgina, wear headscarves on the chin to keep their mouths from falling open, have high clipped little voices, never dye their hair and fornicate like stoats. They also wear trousers that don’t fit, carry Gucci bags with another scarf attached to the handle and wear flat shoes with tongues and chains.

Much of their time is spent grumbling to the newsagent that the latest copy of the Tatler hasn’t come in, eating their way through five-course charity dinners in aid of the starving, and working as “sekketries” in offices, where they get on surprisingly well because they talk to everyone in an attempt to prove that only the middle classes treat the lower classes badly.

In ten years’ time, their hair will be tucked inside a petalled hat, red veins will be springing on their cheeks, and they’ll be wearing exactly the same clothes that were fashionable when they were Debs.

FLATSHARERS