ISBN: 0708814034
Godina izdanja: 1978
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Anne Cumming - The Love Habit
Futura, 1978
315 str.
meki povez
stanje: vrlo dobro

THE SEXUAL ODYSSEY OF AN OLDER WOMAN

Felicity Mason

Middle-aged film publicist Anne Cumming leches after young boys in print. Her odyssey consists of a diary of 50 or 60 "accidental" meetings with underaged men, and then the not-so-accidental seductions of said potent post-adolescents in such varied locales as airports, Roman villas, basement fiats in London, and even--really--a hospital bed, where our heroine is recovering from some sort of undefined and temporary (but total) paralysis. This is ridiculous. Especially since the curtain is generally drawn on her sex scenes just as they`re heating up, leaving us with only her literary (but not too literate) leer to attest to Cumming`s goings.

In later life, Mason became known in her own right as the author of two sexual memoirs: The Love Habit and The Love Quest, both published under the name of Anne Cumming. The two books together chronicle twenty-five years of sexual adventures from 1952 to 1976. The Love Habit, written first and published in 1978, covers the years 1966 to 1976; The Love Quest, published in 1991, begins in 1952 and ends in 1966 at the point where The Love Habit begins. The Love Quest is the more interesting book, not least because it describes her relationships with her husbands, Gysin (as “Max”), Burroughs, and Montresor (as “Rudi”). The book also narrates Mason’s travel adventures in North Africa and the Middle East, during the 1950s, where independent women travelers were rare. She journeyed on her own to remote places, avoided first-class hotels and colonial society, struck up friendships and sampled lovers among the locals. This volume also gives some explanation for her sexual activity: her second husband lost his ardor for her and encouraged her to find lovers, and her subsequent long-term relationship with Montresor was disrupted by his decision to commit to another man. Mason decided that pursuing temporary liaisons that she could control was preferable to a monogamous relationship concluding in indifference or abandonment. All this is conveyed in Mason’s version of the very English “stiff upper lip”, in that she accepts rejection philosophically, maintains lifelong friendships with ex-husbands and ex-lovers, pursues a career in the Italian film industry, and builds a sociable single life. Similarly, Mason’s description of travel to remote or dangerous destinations, and her potentially risky sexual encounters with strangers, are conveyed with the sangfroid of the intrepid explorer (traditionally male). The unstated purpose of the book is to show that a woman of her age and class and era could be as independent, adventurous, and sexually promiscuous as a man. (Mason practiced an ethic of sexual liberation before the sixties with the insouciance of the much later Sex and the City television series.) The Love Habit is a year-by-year chronicle of Mason’s sex life with younger men in the decade of her fifties, with the stated goal of showing that women over fifty are still attractive and can have active sex lives with young men. These later adventures occur in the context of her cinema work and family life in Rome, Paris, and London.


Non-Fiction, Biography