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"The Sensitive Bond" -- 007 Seen Through Feminine Eyes


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#1 Revelator

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Posted 10 November 2012 - 12:55 AM

This is an old article, but one of my favorites. It was originally published in Salon on May 1, 2000. Since I am trying to establish a list of all the genuinely decent articles published about Fleming (for hopeful use in my future blog), I thought I'd share this with the board, in case anyone missed it the first time around.

The Sensitive Bond
Even as a preteen girl, I knew that Ian Fleming's James Bond was a vulnerable guy -- and his creator, an equal-opportunity voyeur.
By Emily Jenkins

Believe it or not, James Bond had a childhood. In Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the seaside promenade of Royale-les-Eaux reminds Bond of “the velvet feel of the hot powder sand … of the swimming and swimming and swimming through the dancing waves — always in those days, it seemed, lit with sunshine — and then the infuriating, inevitable, ‘time to come out.’ It was all there, his own childhood, spread out before him to have another look at. What a long time ago they were, those spade-and-bucket days! How far he had come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade.”

I, too, had a childhood. There was lemonade and hot powder sand and all the usual stuff. But it ended in 1979 — the same year I discovered 007 and his license to kill. I was 12, desperate for pantyhose and fuzzy velour shirts, enamored of white roller skates with shiny blue wheels. After school, I used to throw myself down in the small space between the back of the couch and the stereo, turn the Kinks up loud and read about James Bond. I started with 1953′s Casino Royale, Fleming’s first novel, and barreled my way through Doctor No, You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and all the rest.

James Chapman, author of the smart new book Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, points out that reviewers have largely reviled Fleming’s novels as sadistic, sexist schoolboy fantasies. The majority of literary critics locate the books’ appeal in their propagation of an ideology of almost imperialist British supremacy. And Chapman himself notes that the irony and humor in the character’s film incarnation are noticeably lacking from the books.

Why then, would an American preteen girl (whose other favorite authors were Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton) read Fleming? I didn’t like other espionage novels. International politics bored me silly. The books weren’t funny, and by all rights I should have been alienated by what critics call their voyeuristic sexism. For example, Honeychile Rider, the heroine of Doctor No, playfully throws her naked body against Bond as they stew in the villain’s luxury spa/prison. “Honey,” Bond tells her, “get into that bath before I spank you.” She obeys, pouting, “You’ve got to wash me. I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to show me.” Infantilized, stupidly ignorant of the danger of her situation and as horny as hell, Honey epitomizes all that any budding feminist should detest.

Nonetheless, sex is interesting to an adolescent girl, whether it’s sexist sex or not, and certainly Fleming’s eroticism was part of the books’ appeal for me. The author once said that the target of his stories lies “somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh.” Still, I don’t think the relatively infrequent moments of nudity and arousal would have been enough to make me love James Bond novels if the heterosexual male gaze were really as pernicious and pervasive as the critics say — and as it is in the movies. The films portray the dominant Bond, if not the definitive one, and it’s hard for most people to read the books without images of Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan in their heads. And in the movies, Bond is a hypermasculine spy whose lustful eyes rove over bodacious female bodies, filmed through the vehicle of a camera that does likewise.

In contrast, Fleming is an equal-opportunity voyeur — a point lost on most critics. His sensual catalogs of men’s bodies easily equal those of women’s. An example, from Thunderball : “In contrast to the hard, slow-moving brown eyes, the mouth, with its thick, rather down-curled lips, belonged to a satyr … the muscles bulged under the exquisitely cut shark-skin jacket. An aid to his athletic prowess were his hands. They were almost twice the normal size … Largo was an adventurer, a predator on the herd.”

In From Russia With Love, SMERSH’s psychopathic head executioner is receiving a massage. The masseuse tries to analyze her “instinctive horror for the finest body she [had] ever seen” as she rubs him in the sunlight by a pool: “She poured about a tablespoon full [of oil] on to the small furry plateau at the base of the man’s spine, flexed her fingers and bent forward again. This embryo tail of golden down above the cleft of the buttocks — in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial … she shifted her hands on down to the two mounds of the gluteal muscles.” The description lasts for four pages.

Fleming also describes cars and meals with much of the same erotic charge. In Secret Service : “A low white two-seater, a Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder with its hood down, tore past him, cut in cheekily across his bonnet and pulled away, the sexy boom of its twin exhausts echoing back from the border of trees.” To Bond, a pair of exhaust pipes is as sensual as a dish of crabmeat, which is as sensual as a pair of breasts.

Another thing I liked about Fleming’s Bond back in those days was his vulnerability. He’s not the unflappable, historyless dandy of the films, but a man with a childhood, a heart several times broken, a body covered in scars. On-screen, as Chapman points out, snobbery was an essential part of the Bond character. When Connery picks up a champagne bottle to use as weapon in the first film, Doctor No remarks, “That’s a Dom Perignon ’55; it would be a pity to break it.” Bond, ever the aesthete, replies, “I prefer the ’53 myself.” But in the books, he is neither so particular nor so educated about his pleasures. He is a sensual man and smokes a particular brand of cigarette, but he’s as likely to drink a gin and tonic or a glass of bourbon as the famous “vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.” In the Bahamas with American sidekick Felix Leiter of the CIA, it isn’t Bond who objects to the watered-down gin in the casino martinis; it is Felix. He gives a lengthy diatribe on the shifty economics of hotel bars, sends the drinks back and advises Bond not to let himself be taken in. “I always knew one got clipped,” Bond says in astonishment, “but I thought only about a hundred per cent — not four or five.”

Fleming’s Bond is often frightened. Though you never see it in the films, the text tells us his heart is pounding in fear, his breath sounding in his ears: His “stomach crawled with the ants of fear and his skin tightened at his groin.” Rather often, too, he is embarrassed or emasculated. For example, when “pimping for England” in Russia, he wonders whether the defecting spy he makes love to in exchange for an enemy cipher device has found him too rough in bed. Near the end of You Only Live Twice, he is an amnesiac living in a Japanese fishing village, frustrating Kissy Suzuki because he has forgotten “how to perform the act of love.” (Never fear: She solves the problem by buying him a pillow book, and — virility restored — Bond begins to remember that he is a superspy.)

In Doctor No, Bond is nervous about keeping his job, having flubbed his assignment in From Russia With Love by failing to recognize an obvious trap and by losing a fight with an elderly woman who injects him with nerve poison. Physically depleted, Bond is given a minor job investigating a personnel problem in Jamaica because M. feels it will allow the spy to get some R&R. In Thunderball, he has once again been judged weak by the Secret Service and is forced by M. to renew himself in a spa, dining on weak broth and submitting to numerous physical examinations: “He had a permanent slight nagging headache, the whites of his eyes had turned rather yellow, and his tongue was deeply furred. His masseur told him not to worry. This was as it should be. These were the poisons leaving his body. Bond, now a permanent prey to lassitude, didn’t argue. Nothing seemed to matter any more but the single orange and hot water for breakfast.”

Though he’ll call a woman a bitch and doesn’t hesitate to forcibly kiss his massage therapist, Bond is still a sensitive guy. He is unbribable, says SMERSH’s dossier, but has a weakness for the ladies. On-screen, that weakness translates as a strong sex drive and roving eye, but in the books it is his genuine failing as a spy — a susceptibility, an almost needy urge, to drop everything for love. “Your brother was killed by Largo, or at least on his orders,” he tells Domino, the Italian mistress of the villain with the giant hands. “I came here to tell you that. But then … you were there and I love you and want you. When what happened began to happen I should have had the strength to stop it. I hadn’t.” After she saves his life in an underwater battle, he awakes, weakened and disoriented, in a hospital room. All he can think about is Domino, and the book ends with a cuddle: He finds her in a neighboring ward and collapses in exhaustion on the rug beside her bed, “with his head cradled on the inside of his forearm.”

Of course, Domino is gone and forgotten by the start of the next novel, but the point is that Bond’s character features the alluring mix of hard and open that typifies the heroes of romance novels. He’s not a womanizer in any calculated way: He feels a rush of emotion, lust and affection when a woman touches any of his few soft spots; he tries to protect whoever it is, but she usually rejects his efforts and rescues herself (as Honey and Domino both do) or rescues him (as Domino and Kissy do).

More important, the Fleming novels do something the films cannot possibly do: They put us inside Bond’s body. We’re not looking at the well-dressed Timothy Dalton driving a sleek car through an action-packed chase; we’re in the driver’s seat with Bond, with his aching head and multiple scars, his stomach tightening with the ants of fear, his job on the line because of some recent failure and part of his mind on a woman he’d be better off leaving alone. Fleming lets us in, and the movies do not.

When I read those books in seventh grade, I was James Bond. They elicited in me a kind of transvestite empathy that transcended whatever unarticulated problems I may have had with their politics or values. Bond is the spy of all spies not because he’s the hero of the most popular film series ever made, not because he knows what to drink, loves ‘em and leaves ‘em and never bats an eye, but precisely because he does not do these things. Before I moved on to Still Life With Woodpecker and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bond gave me a sense of the mysterious anxieties of the macho psyche — something I urgently wanted to understand.



As a sort of companion piece, Salon published another Bond-related article by Jenkins:


Best of Bond
Ian Fleming's 007 is often most memorable when he's most offensive.
By Emily Jenkins

Some of James Bond’s better moments are his worst. That is, he’s at his most memorable — providing that pleasant shiver that comes with scandal — when Ian Fleming is objectifying women or demonizing nonwhites and people with nonnormative bodies. For example, Doctor No begins with a thrilling scene in which a representative of the British Secret Service is murdered by three “Chinese Negros” pretending to be blind men. As the agent puts a coin into their beggars’ cup, they say “Bless You, Master,” then shoot him from behind: “one between the shoulders, one in the small of the back, and one at the pelvis.” They shove him in a hearse, remove their blind-man sunglasses, don top hats and drive away with their arms crossed respectfully over their hearts. Racist, ugly, violent and possibly offensive to blind people as well, but just the sort of thing to make an adolescent — all right, let’s face it, your average grown-up; OK, honestly, me — chuckle, “Heh heh heh. That’s pretty cool.”

Here are five of my favorite Fleming Bondian moments that don’t involve anyone’s degradation — unless you care about the giant squid.

Most frightening:

From You Only Live Twice

Infiltrating the castle of evil Doctor Shatterhand, whose garden of poisonous plants is legendary, Bond hides behind a tree when he hears a noise: “The distant crashing in the shrubbery sounded like a wounded animal, but then, down the path, came staggering a man, or what had once been a man. The brilliant moonlight showed a head swollen to the size of a football [soccer ball], and only small slits remained where the eyes and mouth had been. The man moaned softly as he zigzagged along, and Bond could see that his hands were up to his puffed face and that he was trying to prise apart the swollen skin around his eyes so that he could see out. Every now and then he stopped and let out one word in an agonizing howl to the moon. It was not a howl of fear or of pain, but of dreadful supplication. Suddenly he stopped. He seemed to see the lake for the first time. With a terrible cry, and holding out his arms as if to meet a loved one, he made a quick run to the edge and threw himself in.” The lake is stocked with piranhas, which make short work of the victim.

Most poetic:

From Thunderball

After being hunted by a hungry barracuda while spying on Emilio Largo’s SPECTRE-owned ship, Bond is actually rescued by the animal when it eats a big bite out of his human opponent. Enemies begin throwing grenades into the water, and as he swims out of their range, Bond witnesses the fate of his antagonist: “Wild commotion at the edge of his field of vision shocked him out of the semi-trance. A giant fish, the barracuda, was passing him. It seemed to have gone mad. It was snaking wildly along, biting at its tail, its long body curling and snapping back in a jack-knife motion, its mouth opening wide and shutting again in spasms. Bond watched it hurtle away into the grey mist. He felt somehow sorry to see the wonderful king of the sea reduced to this hideous jiggling automaton. There was something obscene about it, like the blind weaving of a punchy boxer before he finally crashes to the canvas. One of the explosions must have crushed a nerve centre, wrecked some delicate balance mechanism in the fish’s brain. It wouldn’t last long. A greater predator than itself, a shark, would note the signs, the loss of symmetry that is suicide in the sea.”

Most surreal:

From On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:

After an erotic encounter with a female allergy patient at the nefarious Blofeld’s Alpine clinic, Bond is drifting toward sleep in her bed when a bell chimes and a metronome begins to tick. A hypnotic voice intones, “Your bed is as soft and downy as a nest. You are as soft and sleepy as a chicken in a nest. A dear little chicken, fluffy and cuddly … You love them dearly, dearly, dearly. You love all chickens. You would like to make pets of them all. You would like them to grow up beautiful and strong. You would like no harm to come to them … Soon you will be able to help all the chickens of England … You will say nothing of your methods. They will be your own secret, your very own secret.”

Coolest gadgets:

From From Russia With Love:

Searching for Rosa Klebb, head of SMERSH, Bond opens her hotel door to find a little old woman instead. “She looked so exactly like the sort of respectable rich widow one would expect to find sitting by herself in the Ritz, whiling the time away with her knitting. The sort of woman who would have her own table, and her favourite waiter, in a corner of the restaurant downstairs — not, of course, in the grill room.” He sweats, examines her sensible shoes and old-fashioned dress, speaks to her politely — until he notices her nicotine-stained mustache. “Nicotine? Where were her cigarettes? There was no ashtray — no smell of smoke in the room.” He accuses her, and she attacks him with the telephone — actually a gun — and with her knitting needles, aiming at his legs with German nerve poison. Bond loses.

Best villain:

From Doctor No:

Doctor No has put Bond through an obstacle course designed to test his capacity for pain, then kill him. At the end of it, Bond plummets into an enclosed bit of bay, and quickly scrambles out of the water onto a wire fence. “Below him the water quivered. Something was stirring in the depths, something huge. A great length of luminescent greyness showed, poised far down in the darkness. Something snaked up from it, a whiplash as thick as Bond’s arm. The tip of the thong was swollen to a narrow oval, with regular budlike markings. It swirled through the water where the fish had been and was withdrawn. Now there was nothing but the huge grey shadow. What was it doing? Was it …? Was it tasting the blood? As if in answer, two eyes as big as footballs slowly swam up and into Bond’s vision. They stopped, twenty feet below his own, and stared up through the quiet water at his face … So this was the giant squid, the mythical kraken that could pull ships beneath the waves, the fifty-foot-long monster that battled with whales, that weighed a ton or more.” Bond finally makes it back off by poking its eye out with a wire spear he has been carrying down his pant leg, but not before getting a series of tentacle marks suckered across his stomach.



#2 freemo

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Posted 10 November 2012 - 01:10 AM

Thanks for posting.

The first piece, in regards to Bond's "vunerability", takes me back to reading Dr No for the first time (my first Bond book, after having seen maybe five or six of the films) and being immediately taken aback, and captivaed, by M and Moloneys conversation about Bond. A Bond who can get hurt, can feel physical and psychological pain, can spend time in hospital? A Bond who can be pushed too hard, who has a breaking point that might be reached? Mindblowing! Adult stuff. Awesome! (Dr No is a great tale of human endurance and what great physical and mental ordeals man is capable of overcoming)

There also is more to the Bond / Bond girl relationships in the books than in the films. The word "love" is spoken more for starters (more often "I want to make love to you", than "I love you" perhaps, but there's more than a few instances of the latter). If Bond is a sexual predator, once he's "captured his prey" he does become very protective of them.

#3 Revelator

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Posted 16 November 2012 - 06:01 PM

Dr No is a great tale of human endurance and what great physical and mental ordeals man is capable of overcoming


Definitely. And what the movies (though perhaps not the most recent ones) often overlooked was that for every moment of luxury Bond enjoyed, there was one of great physical hardship and mental suffering. Bond's luxuries are not the privileges of a fop, but the rewards for doing a hard job.

There also is more to the Bond / Bond girl relationships in the books than in the films. The word "love" is spoken more for starters (more often "I want to make love to you", than "I love you" perhaps, but there's more than a few instances of the latter). If Bond is a sexual predator, once he's "captured his prey" he does become very protective of them.


Agreed. And most of the time Bond doesn't make love to the heroines until the end of the book, after he has proved himself to them. Bond's relationships with Tiffany Case, Domino, and Tracy are all nurturing ones--Bond even thinks of himself as playing a therapist's part in Tiffany's case.

I think Jenkins is mostly in the right, and that her article is splendid. However, I would part company with her statement "Infantilized, stupidly ignorant of the danger of her situation and as horny as hell, Honey epitomizes all that any budding feminist should detest."
While no Bond heroine should be considered an exemplar of feminism, Honey comes closer than one might suspect--she is independent, looks out for herself, personally punishes the man who raped her, and even manages to rescue herself from Dr. No's clutches without Bond's assistance. And by the end of the novel she's even calling out the shots in bed! Secondly, Honey is not being stupid in the passage Jenkins cites--she is being purposely seductive and feigning the helpless little girl act, perhaps because she knows better than Bond that there's nothing they can do while waiting in their mink-lined prison.

#4 Dustin

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Posted 16 November 2012 - 06:39 PM

Fleming's heroines have little use for feminism because they are already remarkably strong and independent characters; they choose their lovers, they work - sometimes even in organised crime -, they live active and self-reliant lives and are even determined enough to go on their own missions of vengeance. The only two examples falling into the 'victim' cathegory are Vesper - blackmailed into treason - and Tatjana, who is more or less ordered on a honeytrap mission and too naive to imagine SMERSH's eventual plans for her. All the others are fairly confident in their lives and their relationships, do not fuss about marriage and in general are no doe-eyed caricatures of the 1950s staple diet of female characters.

Solitaire, despite being kept in a kind of pre-sexual slavery, takes the initiative and flees from her master at the first real chance of escape. Before Bond rescues her it's she who makes her move and risks the wrath of Big. Tiffany likewise chooses to end her days of crime and risks more than just an argument with her partners-in-crime. It's she who rescues Bond, before the beaten-up hero then can rescue the both of them. Similar examples of female endurance and decision can be found throughout the canon, none of the girls is a mere sexual 'object' in the way they are often found in the films.

#5 freemo

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Posted 17 November 2012 - 01:13 AM

Dr No is a great tale of human endurance and what great physical and mental ordeals man is capable of overcoming


Definitely. And what the movies (though perhaps not the most recent ones) often overlooked was that for every moment of luxury Bond enjoyed, there was one of great physical hardship and mental suffering. Bond's luxuries are not the privileges of a fop, but the rewards for doing a hard job.

...

While no Bond heroine should be considered an exemplar of feminism, Honey comes closer than one might suspect--she is independent, looks out for herself, personally punishes the man who raped her, and even manages to rescue herself from Dr. No's clutches without Bond's assistance.


Yep. When I said "great physical and mental (hardships) man is capable of overcoming" and survival, I didn't just mean Bond. I meant Honey (and Dr. No himself) too. What a back story! Even Bond finds it powerful stuff "it wouldn't do to make a habit of it". Applying her knowledge to just letting the crabs run across her (neither Bond, nor Dr. No, would have thought of that), good too.

Solitaire, despite being kept in a kind of pre-sexual slavery, takes the initiative and flees from her master at the first real chance of escape. Before Bond rescues her it's she who makes her move and risks the wrath of Big.


Bond not as the savoir, but as an oppurtunity for the heroine to save herself. Hadn't thought of it like it. Good point.