Young guns

My friend Queen Latifah likes 'em young. Sexy, strapping, and obedient. But what self-respecting woman doesn't? There is something to be said for the respect and yes, adoration, a lightie will bestow upon a more mature woman.

To schnack on a boy-child, four years your junior, barely out of University, wide-eyed, untamed: there is something so wrong, (yet so right) about it all.

The pluses are multiple. There are those toit abs. Surplus carbs from years of beer drinking have not yet taken hold on these chiseled packs of muscle. The boyish charm. Put that down to relatively less life experience in which to accumulate baggage. The reckless abandon - read: excitement factor. The freshness of it all. The general absence of cynicism; the as yet un-jaded world view as a result of not having egos broken by the steely corporate system. Essentially, and in a non-condescending way: his idealistic bubble is still intact. As is his spontaneity. These boys are keen to tackle the world (and you) by the ankles. ARRRRR!

Susan Sarandon did it and has not looked back.

I’m a quarter of the way through Scar Tissue, Head Boy of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Anthony Kiedis’s biography. There is a poignant moment between his eighth grade self and Cher. She’s babysitting him. After a semi-innocent, voyeuristic moment where she whips her kit off, leaving the bathroom door wide open, she climbs into bed with him. Nothing happens, but the boy is in awe. AWE. Fair enough, the age gap is extreme, and yes, Cher remains a transcendent, archetypal feminine form, ageless, and hot. Still, it illustrates the point.

Real life example. Varsity, for most of us, was one gargantuan display of childish behaviour, but Rhodes Formal Dinners took lack of restraint to a whole new level. Absurd outfits. Blind dates, bottles of cane. Ridiculous games. Name-throwing. There was an Understanding that regardless of mutual levels of attraction between you and your designated partner, that by the end of the night, you would be smooching like sucker fish. Tongue-slapping guaranteed.

My all-girl digs in third year hatched an ingenious plan involving a group of hand-picked first year seals for our own clubbing purposes. Our blind dates were cowboys. Hot ones. Damn. We pulled it off. We had water pistol fights. Spin the bottle wasn’t even necessary. Most importantly, we got great pictures.

The romance of it all began to wane when at least three feisty young bucks were still lurking around the next day at 3pm. Night of wild abandon – yes. Daycare – not so much.