For Your Eyes Only by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

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Bond Girls

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Bond Girls

It is a mark of James Bond’s cultural reach that, for better or worse, a ‘Bond Girl’ has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for a new love interest. She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond’s women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and have some small physical flaw. Like Bond’s cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an expansive sex life before the war, but the war had loosened sexual mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.

Sex does not play a part in the lives of Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay. Indeed, Bond is really the first major British thriller hero to have an active sex life. Bond’s attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. Bond saves the girl; the girl sleeps with him: it is a simple contract. But even those critics prepared to see Bond’s bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond’s sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond’s sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just fourteen women in twelve books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared to an astonishing fifty-eight conquests in the first twenty Bond films. Readers who liked the Bond women in the books looked askance at the parade of almost characterless beauties being loved and left in each successive film. The writer Anthony Burgess wrote that ‘the girls in the Bond films tend . . . to be nothing more than animated centrefolds. In the books they are credible and lovable because of some humanising flaw.’

Bond’s approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming’s own distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the times he lived in, the class he occupied, and his own psychological and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been characterised as simply a seductive lounge lizard, a philanderer gathering sexual scalps. The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it.

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