The woman disappeared from view in the second act, save for glimpses of the crown of her head. At the interval, a stranger asked drily if we were enjoying the show
I was trying to watch Kathleen Turner. But it was hard. We weren't afraid of Virginia Woolf so much as we were afraid that the snogging couple in the box across from us were going to have sex in public. A woman showing décolletage in a black dress was deep-throating her fingers and then shoving them down her guy's throat. She was straddling him front and back, gyrating slightly. They went at it during every scene, even though it was hard to fathom how Albee's acid histrionics could inspire such erotic gymnastics.
As if that weren't distracting enough, the couple in the box below also seemed to be chasing the beast with two backs. The woman disappeared from view during the second act, save for a couple of glimpses of the crown of her head. At the interval, a stranger came up and asked drily if we were enjoying the show. She didn't mean Miss Turner's. Martha and George couldn't compete.
We assumed the exhibitionist must be a young mistress who did not get to see her married lover as much as she liked. But when we happened to see them on the street after the show, they had morphed into your average middle-aged British couple. She had on sensible black shoes and he a fedora and trench coat. They were strolling arm-in-arm to a nearby Chinese restaurant. How could they be so hot-and-bothered and then simply settle for hot-and-sour soup?
There has been talk that American men have grown more tentative sexually. Kate White, my friend and editor of Cosmopolitan, says her readers offer evidence to this effect. Newspapers and magazines chart trends such as "emo boys", emotionally labile young men who insist on over-sharing on first dates, "gay vague" guys, who are hetero but groom ambiguously, and "needballs" cresting 50, who need full-time attention, encouragement and Viagra.
When I set off on my European book tour for Are Men Necessary? I never expected London to be more sultry than Paris. The only erotic displays I saw in the French capital were the bathing nudes in the Bonnard exhibit. Have British men outgrown their sexual reserve as the Yanks have grown more reticent? Or is Edward Albee an unlikely aphrodisiac?
While I was in England and France, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Condi Rice all popped up, too. Everyone is fascinated by the idea of a Hillary-Condi face-off. Both women live at the intersection of Venus and Mars. Hillary's nickname is "The Warrior" and Condi is known as "The Warrior Princess". Condi's aides confirmed that she had given Jack Straw her pull-out bed on their night flight to Baghdad, while she slept on the floor. They figured it would make the boss seem both tough and chivalrous.
The reporters who travel with Condi are amazed when they go to hotel gyms to find her lifting weights in short-shorts and tight T-shirts. "She looks great," said one admiring male journalist who exercised with her.
I was interviewed by Robert Elms for his BBC London radio show. "He dated Sade," my publicist whispered.
He quizzed me about narcissism trumping feminism, about all the women queuing up to get plastic breasts and plastic faces. Were they shooting up with Botox and cow goo to please men? Were men to blame for the fact that many women over the age of 35 - think Marcia Cross and Meg Ryan - had lost the ability to look angry? After all the years trying to train men to respond better to emotional cues, women were making it harder for them by erasing the emotion from their faces.
The fault lies with us, I said. I explained the theory of Patricia Wexler, the New York dermatologist to P Diddy, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and other stars. She keeps in her office little refrigerators full of celebrity fat that is suctioned out of their derrières so it can be injected back into their faces. "Women are doing all this stuff not just for men, but for themselves; we're fulfilling our fantasies of the Barbie dolls we played with when we were young," Wexler told me.
Feminism also faltered because male evolution lagged behind female equality.
"I think men stopped evolving around the time the feminists got going in 1968," I told Elms. "Maybe it was your revenge." He laughed. "In '68? That was a good year to stop."
He had a point.
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