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| Rudolph Valentino |
Appropriately, the term Matinée Idol can be traced back
through the Romance Languages.
Matinée is from
the French meaning “afternoon performance,” from matin (morning), and old French matines.
A matineé is a daytime performance of a show that also comes on at night; the term
originally carried with it the sense that the actors appearing in the earlier
show were less good than those one could see in the evening. A Matinée Idol,
then, had a cheapness about it, sort of like being a tabloid star.
Matines comes from
the latin matutinas, referring to
morning prayers, or merely “of the morning” which was derived from the old
Roman Dawn goddess Matuta. She eventually morphed into Aurora, or the Greek
goddess Eos.
Eos, that naughty girl, had an affair with Ares, the god of
War, for which she was cursed with unsatisfiable sexual desire by Aphrodite,
who was jealous. Them bitches were old school.
Thus we have a celestial nymphomaniac, a woman with
uncontrollable sexual desire. Perhaps, when unable to sate herself during the
day when all the men were at work in the city, she passed her time lusting
after Matinée Idols down the flicks, sucking on ginger candy.
