THE GIRL MEN DREAM ABOUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 125, 14 November 1941, Page 43

THE GIRL MEN DREAM ABOUT

Dorothy Lamour Is American Soldiers’ Idea Of The Perfect Mate

VERY week millions of women all over the world scan beauty magazines, screen pictorials, fashion folios,

hoping to learn some formula that will make them the desired of many. But, according to the New Yorker, this formula has been discovered and even proclaimed to the world by Dorothy Lamour, who, judging by a routine study of the present national emergency conducted in the newsmagazine Life (and contrary to the opinion in the article on the opposite page that imported glamour is preferred) is the girl above all others desired by the men in American Army camps. Says the New Yorker: This fact illuminates the war, the national dream, and our common unfulfilment. If you know what a soldier wants, you know what Man wants, for a soldier is young, vigorous, and is caught in a line of work which leads toward a distant and tragic" conclusion. He personifies Man. His dream of a woman can be said to be Everyman’s dream of a woman. In desiring Lamour, obviously his longing is for a female creature encountered under primitive conditions and in a setting of great natural beauty and mystery. He does not want this woman to make any sudden or nervous movement. She should be in a glade, a grove, or a pool below a water-fall. This is the setting in which every American youth first encountered Miss Lamour. They were in a forest; she had walked slowly out of the pool and stood dripping in the ferns, The dream of the American male is for a female who has an essential languor which is not laziness, who is unaccompanied except by himself, and who does not let him down. He desires a beautiful, but comprehensible, creature who does not destroy a perfect situation by forming a complete sentence. She is compounded of moonlight and shadows, and has a ctr husky voice, which she uses only song or in an attempt to pick up a}

word or two that he teaches her. Her body, if concealed at all, is concealed by a water lily, a frond, a fern, a bit of moss, or by a sarong. For millions of years, men everywhere have longed for Dorothy Lamour. Now, in the final complexity of an age which has reached its highest expression in the instru-

ment panel of a long-range bomber, it is a good idea to remember that Man’s most persistent dream is of a forest pool and a girl coming out of it unashamed walking towards him with a wavy motion, childlike in her wonder, a gir) exquisitely untroubled, as quiet and accommodating and beautiful as e young green tree. That’s all he really wants, He sometimes wonders how al this other stuff got in-the instrumen’ panel, the night sky, the full load, the moment of exultation over the black ened city below...