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(#litres_trial_promo) This situation, where two people who are attracted to one another share a bed in privacy but try to avoid pregnancy, implies a particular kind of sexual activity – orgasmic but not penetrative – a pattern that tends to suit women well.
And it’s a distinct change in sexual etiquette today that a woman’s agreement to share a bed with a man doesn’t essentially mean she’s assenting to intercourse. This move makes sense: it’s safer, protecting from infection as well as pregnancy, and it often means more pleasure for the woman. But in the absence of clear guidelines, it’s also potentially problematic. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a generally recognized code: if she went back to his place late at night, and certainly if she got into bed with him, she was saying yes to penetration. Where some of us, but not all, no longer act by that code, everything depends on clear communication, and on that communication being listened to; in particular, men have to understand that for women intercourse has a different meaning to other sexual acts, because of its attendant risks. A number of cases in which men have been prosecuted for rape and subsequently acquitted – the cases of David Warren and Ben Emerson, for instance – have hinged on this issue: surely if she shared his bed, undressed, massaged him, had orgasms, slept beside him, she was assenting to intercourse? No, not anymore. Articles critical of the women in cases like these are invariably written by female journalists now in their forties and fifties, who followed a very different code when they embarked on their own sexual lives.
Over the past ten years, there’s also been something quite new in courtship customs for those in their teens and twenties, something that’s never happened before. Today women are looking at men. Looking is the first move in a more egalitarian courtship sequence for women: before you ask you have to choose – and in order to choose you have to look. Most women in this age group may not be asking – but they’re certainly looking.
Suddenly we’re surrounded by images of beautiful men. Gorgeous male bodies are used to sell ice-cream and aftershave. The unreconstructed male has lost his appeal: it’s no longer the essence of masculinity to smell of sweat and be covered in coal dust. Young men are dressing stylishly, growing their hair, even waxing their chests. Sex education videos like The Lover’s Guide include scenes that show off the man’s body as well as the woman’s – and women sometimes confess to watching those aroused male bodies with the educational soundtrack turned down. And then, of course, there are always the Chippendales, and Adonis, and all the other sexy floor shows that women flock to see.
In some innovative publications today, this new female looking is taken one stage further and the male image is deliberately presented as part of a new courtship ritual. First there was the magazine Alaska Men, an attempt to get around the acute woman shortage in Alaska: women across America wrote in to pursue relationships with men they liked the look of. Sony Magazines’ Boyfriend Catalog, which has photos of teenage boys from Tokyo and Osaka and details of their weight, height, hobbies and blood group (the Japanese equivalent of star sign) was first published in March 1995: all 170,000 copies sold. Here, Marie-Claire’s ‘Man of the Month’ featured one man at a time with a photo and a few details: women who wanted to go out with him wrote in, he chose one of them, and their evening together was described in the magazine. In September 1995, Cosmopolitan introduced their Eligible Men Service. ‘Each month, we’ll feature four single men, all looking for love.’ The photos are grouped together on one page: to find out about the men’s occupations, ‘relationship history’ and ‘idea of relationship bliss’, you have to turn over. A male way of going about things – with looking as primary – is structured into the way the men are presented; you’ve decided who you like the look of before you know anything about them. There’s an air of not quite being serious, and sometimes a lot of laughter, about all these ventures: but they’re unquestionably the first step in a new female courtship sequence.
As people get older, courtship becomes more secret. A majority of people over thirty are in long-term relationships, so much courtship over that age will be adulterous. When a friend starts to talk about ‘needing something for me’, ‘searching for something’, or even ‘having a mid-life crisis’, you know you are going to hear an adultery story. There is no knowing how many people have affairs. Research will probably underestimate the numbers involved, because some people are going to keep this secret part of their lives hidden even from sex researchers. A recent ICM survey found one in five people admitting to having an affair while in a steady relationship – and it seems reasonable to assume that this is a conservative estimate.
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In her book, Adultery, Annette Lawson writes, ‘If the social institution of marriage is changing, adultery, as its underside – as another but hidden institution, deviant, like the Mafia, the rules of which are secret – must also change.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And what of the courtships by which adultery is arranged? Do the sexual negotiations in these deviant relationships mirror those in socially approved relationships, or do they have their own rules?
There are ways in which adultery is formally different from the classic courtship story. The love-into-marriage narrative is linear: the courtship gradually intensifies, with more intimacy, more sex, more disclosure, and with marriage or cohabitation as its climax. But the adultery story has a different structure. Unless it leads to the break-up of the marriages and the lovers marry one another – in which case it reverts to the shape of classic courtship – the adulterous relationship has no momentum: it isn’t ‘going anywhere’. This is reflected in our fictions. David Lean’s 1940s’ film, Brief Encounter, and Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, are two of the most wonderful adultery stories of the last half-century. Both start with the end of the affair, and Betrayal moves backwards in time throughout, so the moment of high drama at the end of the play is the beginning of the relationship – the disclosure of attraction.
There may also be differences in courtship behaviour where the intention is to form a secret relationship. There are some kinds of sexual strategy – playing games, blowing hot and cold, playing hard to get – in which we may create deliberate obstacles to heighten tension. It’s plausible that there will be less of this behaviour when people have adultery in mind, given that obstacles are built into affairs – practical restrictions like separations, and psychological impediments like guilt and emotional conflict. So in some ways the courtships by which adulterous relationships are negotiated may be a little different. But research suggests that, in general, adultery is arranged much like any other form of sexual relationship. The rules about who initiates, who pays, who waits for the phone to ring, are much the same.
The high rate of adultery is part of a wider picture: for a host of reasons – including the availability of contraception, women’s greater financial independence, and the fact that we live so long – our relationship structures are becoming increasingly fluid, with a new tendency toward serial monogamy. And because men tend to pair up with younger women, there is now a huge number of women in their forties and fifties who find themselves back on the dating scene. If they’re looking for another lasting relationship, they may have a sense that time is running out. Geraldine, who is forty-five and just separated, said, ‘My sister told me, “You’d better get a move on.” My solicitor said just the same – and I know what they mean. I know I’ve got about four years – I’ll keep my looks for four years …’ Often women in Geraldine’s situation find it hard to meet available men – or they may work with men they like but struggle to know how to transform a companionate relationship into a sexual one if the man isn’t making any moves. These women, more than any others, are acutely aware of the advantages of making the moves themselves. They’re also ideally placed to take the initiative because they’re experienced enough to know they can survive rejection. But, even among this group, it’s rare to meet women who ask men out.
COURTSHIP STORIES: What a man's still gotta do
Courtship is the narrative part of our sexual behaviour. With its clear goal and many potential impediments, it lends itself to story-telling. In a sense this book is about stories – the stories that shape our sexual interactions. Courtship stories are about what it means to be male or female, about money, about danger, about heroism, about guilt and punishment, about waiting around.
Our stories have a complicated relationship to the events of our lives and how we experience those events. They shape what we feel; they may also shape what we do. They are a rich source of morality and help us to make predictions about experience. But they can also be fallacious, because the very act of ordering our experience into a story necessarily involves simplifications and distortions.
There are different genres of courtship story. First, there are the stories we tell ourselves about what happens to us. Often these private stories concern our closeness to or deviation from the traditional scripts. Hannah says no to sex on a first date because she believes that if couples make love too soon the relationship is less likely to last. Here, she’s using a story as a guide to her own behaviour. Gaby believes she lost a man she loved because she made herself too available: her story provides Gaby with an explanation for what went wrong, and also prescribes how she should behave in future.
Then there are private stories that enter the public world. These are invariably formulaic: personal experience is shaped into predictable patterns. Some radio shows invite people to write in with their own love stories. Classic FM for instance has ‘Classic Romance, sponsored by Black Magic chocolates’. Here the climax to the narrative is invariably the couple’s realization that they’re in love – a realization that only comes after many weeks of looking into one another’s eyes to the accompaniment of music from the popular classical repertoire: ‘As we listened to “The Lark Ascending” in the beautiful setting at Kenwood we knew we were deeply in love …’.
On ITV’s ‘Blind Date’, the public and private spheres are entangled in a thoroughly post-modernist way. Though these are real people having a real relationship, the viewers share in the narrative tension. We guess who’ll be chosen, we’re there at the moment of revelation, we speculate on what will happen – and we’re there, too, when they come back and say how it all went, to see how the actual narrative matches up to our imagined one. The programme is set up on principles of scrupulous equality: a man chooses one of three women, and a woman one of three men. But when the couple return from their date, the real world breaks through the egalitarian veneer, and the carefully scripted innuendo of the earlier dialogue – ‘If I were a beer and you pulled me, I’d certainly make your legs wobble’ – is replaced by the clichés of our unequal courtship rituals – ‘He respected me’, ‘I told him I had a stop button’, or, from a man, ‘I came away with nothing’.
And then there are the stories that are purely public and shared – our novels and films. These public stories reflect collective preoccupations – but they also shape those preoccupations. And our public stories tend to take the same line as many of the people I interviewed: they may question male initiative but in the end they always sanction it. The plot dénouements – like the things that people do, as opposed to what they say they do – reaffirm men in their traditional role.
Recently, some of our favourite films have explored male sexual initiative in the context of a renewed interest in the erotic and narrative possibilities of lengthy courtship. Dangerous Liaisons, The Piano, Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral are all love stories that investigate the possibilities and limits of male sexual power. These films show where we are now – what is open to question and what is taken as read.
To make a story of courtship, it has to be protracted – and within the traditional script that will depend on the woman’s continuing lack of compliance: she has to be difficult to woo. One way to achieve this is to set the story in the past. Dangerous Liaisons takes place in eighteenth-century France, where the grotesque physical displays of the period – the pushed-up breasts, powdered hair, hips in cages – mirror the artifice of the manners; both appearance and behaviour involve a fabulous exaggeration of notions of sexual difference. The plot centres on two seductions. The Marquise de Merteuil begs her friend the Vicomte to seduce and corrupt Cécile, the convent-educated innocent her former lover wants to marry; this is seduction as an act of revenge. The Vicomte then sets out to seduce a pious married woman – Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel, seething with delicately suppressed sexuality. The sadistic thrill comes from the clash between the male and female agendas; for the Vicomte, seduction is an elaborate game, but for the women who are the objects of his sexual interest, it’s a deadly serious thing.
Jane Campion’s film The Piano is also set in the past. Ada, the mute heroine, enters into a sexual bargain with George Baines, her taciturn neighbour: in order to buy her beloved piano back, she’ll do just what he says. He tells her to take off her stockings, then her dress to reveal her marvellously authentic whalebone petticoat, then all her clothes. It’s a formalization of a traditional courtship process that proceeds in stages dictated by the man, in which he gradually undresses and exposes her and learns her secrets; she’s there to be revealed and it’s his initiative that makes that happen. This is a film that strives for authenticity, not just in its relishing of the textures of the period – the lisle stockings with holes in, the greasy unwashed hair – but also in its recognition of the potential cruelty inherent in the gender roles of the time.
As with Dangerous Liaisons, the film’s erotic charge comes from its sadism: it’s the eroticism of male control. Once the bargain has been agreed, the man has all the power. The sadism is only tolerable because we know the outcome – that she’ll come to desire him, too. A lot of women loved it.
Where protracted courtship has a contemporary setting, the goal of courtship can’t simply be the sex. Today people make love too early in the process to allow space for much of a story. To make a narrative of it, the significance of making love has to be changed: there has to be a different consummation.
Pretty Woman gives the courtship theme a clever twist, restoring the kiss to its climactic place in the narrative. This is a Mills and Boon story from a decade or two ago: ‘and then he kissed her …’. Julia Roberts is a hooker whom Richard Gere pays to spend a week with him. She’s fallen for him; will he fall for her? As she’s a prostitute they have lots of sex anyway, but kissing is defined as more intimate than sex – something she doesn’t let her clients do. It’s only when she lets him kiss her that their relationship changes and becomes something more than a business arrangement.
Four Weddings and a Funeral is also about a courtship that proceeds beyond sex. Superficially, the film might seem to challenge gender stereotypes. Charles is a type of the new hesitant masculinity, all fluttering self-deprecation, and his story is a female one – the story of a search for a spouse, while Carrie is quite sexually assertive. But it’s his definition that matters: though they’ve made love twice, it’s only when he asks her to have a relationship with him that the courtship is completed. It all looks quite fresh and contemporary – but it’s really highly traditional. Men define what a relationship is about, men make the arrangements, and women are blameless whatever they do, so long as they remain indirect – however much pain they may cause by their failure to be clear about what they want. Carrie behaves very badly, and her sin is a failure of initiative: when her marriage breaks up, she doesn’t get in touch with Charles, though she knows he adores her: she simply turns up at his wedding.
In each of these films, the end of the courtship process isn’t sex but a re-definition. In Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral, a private sexual arrangement becomes a publicly recognized love affair. In The Piano and Dangerous Liaisons, the courtship ends with the person who entered coldly into a sexual arrangement or contract falling in love. So the Vicomte, who seduced the virtuous Madame de Tourvel for the sheer pleasure of making her unvirtuous, falls in love with her, and in The Piano, Ada, as in all the best patriarchal fairytales, falls in love with her oppressor.
These films all supply intriguing glosses to the traditional narrative movement. Yet for all their variety, they only deviate within the conventional parameters. They explore different kinds of male sexual power: the cynical and sadistic power of the seducer, the financial power of the man who uses a prostitute, the erotically explicit control of the man who strikes a sexual bargain that allows him to make all the moves, and, in Four Weddings, the highly tentative and self-conscious instrumentality of Charles the New Man, who finds it such a struggle to do what a man’s gotta do. In all these love stories, it’s still the man who sets the terms of the bargain, makes the arrangements, defines, pursues, seduces. We’re playing around with the script, we’re self-conscious about it – but we aren’t yet going beyond it.
The seeds of change are there – in public and in private. Our favourite public love stories – the films we all go to see – are questioning the traditional roles, yet they rarely transcend them. And when people talk about their own courtship behaviour, they emphasize their deviations from the classic script, as though hungry for things to be different. But mostly it’s still men who make the initial moves. Yet, of course, there are women who initiate and there always have been. Who are these women and what can we learn from them?
CHAPTER 2 WOMEN WHO DO (#ulink_2047090c-ffdc-5b78-a797-3621d503f81f)
‘When Gilgamesh had put on the crown, glorious Ishtar lifted her eyes, seeing the beauty of Gilgamesh. She said, “Come to me, Gilgamesh, and be my bridegroom; grant me seed of your body, let me be your bride and you shall be my husband …” ’
(Epic of Gilgamesh, 3000 BC)
A WOMAN writes erotic letters to a man. In a sexual initiative rare even between the most intimate partners, she shares her highly transgressive fantasies.
She says her imagination runs riot. She hopes he has the same unusual dreams as her. Sometimes, she says, she scares herself with what she really wants. She finds his inner violence a turn-on. She wants to know all about him, to learn his inner secrets.
She urges him to greater and greater intimacies, to an exposure of the depths of his psyche, of the most secret parts of himself. She wants to feel overwhelmed by him, so she’s completely in his power. She urges him to show less control. In fact, she says, she wouldn’t be scared if he’d committed acts of extreme violence. The revelation that he has this potential is something she longs for. ‘In certain ways,’ she writes, ‘I wish you had because it would make things easier for me … That’s the kind of man I want … .’
The woman was the policewoman known as ‘Lizzie James’. The man was Colin Stagg, who was under suspicion for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. The sexual letters were an elaborate entrapment technique devised by a forensic psychologist.
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‘Lizzie James’s’ use of a sexuality that has been invented for her in an attempt to elicit a confession from a man suspected of a sex crime is an extreme example of a time-honoured use of female initiative, where women make the first move in order to get men to confess to crimes or to give up their secrets. Mata Hari, the Belgian spy executed by the Germans in the First World War, was perhaps the most celebrated exponent of the art. During the Cold War, both sides recruited women who specialized in seduction and blackmail. Today, in Russia, there are the ‘swallows’ – well-educated women fluent in foreign languages who are trained by the Russian security services to set honey-traps for foreign businessmen.
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This initiative has absolutely nothing to do with the woman’s pleasure. She is initiating as part of her work, and for decidedly ulterior and covert motives.
These women make good fiction, because of the tension generated by our uncertainty about them. They are stock characters in thrillers and spy stories. They are sexually exciting and they always mean trouble. When, in John Grisham’s The Firm, Mitch, the clever but naive lawyer, encounters a beautiful woman with a twisted ankle on a beach in the dark, a woman who unbuttons her blouse and tenderly pulls his hand towards her, we know there will be trouble ahead. Sure enough, someone is busily clicking away with a long-range lens. Eve Kendall, the blonde agent in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, only has to start making direct sexual suggestions to Roger Thornhill and we know she’s up to no good – though in the end, like most of the fictional entrappers, she falls in love with the man she’s seeking to ensnare: perhaps we couldn’t quite tolerate the idea that this highly appealing woman might have ulterior motives for going through her seduction routine.
The last few years have seen the emergence of a new group of initiating women with secret motives for their seductions. According to a recent Sunday Times article, these women can be found hanging out in New York bars and cafés.
Sofia is dressing for work. She has ‘shimmied into a figure-hugging, moss-green power suit that accentuates her peachy skin and has tucked her cleavage into a low-cut silk teddy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She goes into a bar, picks out a man, sits down beside him and crosses her legs seductively and starts chatting him up. He loves it and makes a date with her. What he doesn’t know is that she is a decoy from the Check-a-Mate agency: his wife has paid $65 an hour to have a ‘fidelity check’ done on him.
This is women’s work. Eighty per cent of the agency’s clients are women checking up on their partners, so most of the decoys are female. Given that there’s apparently only a one in ten chance that your man will resist a Sofia-style overture, that $65 could surely be better spent.
Unsurprisingly, given her choice of work, Sofia is deeply contemptuous of men. Her appearance speaks of seduction – but her talk is full of contempt and hatred. To her, men are ‘scumbags’. The contrast between her appearance and behaviour – that seductively feminine persona – and her covert purposes and perceptions makes her deeply alarming.
Women like Sofia – who initiate to show men up in all their weakness, to take some act of delicious revenge, to punish men for some crime or misdemeanour, or just to have a good laugh at men’s expense – have always been around in comic fictions. In Twelfth Night, the pompous steward Malvolio is the butt of a cruel joke. Maria, the serving-maid, writes him a love letter purporting to be from the beautiful Olivia and leaves it for him to find: he promptly appears in yellow cross-garters as specified in the letter and everyone falls about. And in the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, there are a number of comic stories of women who make the first move.
(#litres_trial_promo) Al-Haddar, the Barber’s Second Brother, is seduced by a beautiful and wealthy young woman who plies him with wine, then takes off all her clothes. She urges him to undress, too, and to chase her through the house. She entices him into a darkened room where he falls through a trap door into the market of the leather merchants who laugh at him, beat him up and take him to the Governor of Baghdad to be publicly disgraced.
The women’s strategies in these stories are predicated on beliefs about male sexual weakness. The men succumb to the women’s overtures because they’re such dupes: they’re so easy to pull. The laugh is on men for their willingness to be persuaded that such marvellous dazzling women – so far out of their class – might actually want them. As Sofia says, ‘Men think with the wrong head.’
ALTRUISTIC WOMEN: Kissing the frog
Another classic story-line concerns a female sexual initiative that is essentially altruistic. The motive here is perhaps too noble to be described as ulterior – but these women do have something in common with women who seduce for laughs or to show men up, in that their motives for making a move are hidden, and have nothing to do with their own pleasure. In these stories, women take sexual initiatives to save somebody.
One of the most widely found folk or fairytale themes is the ‘animal groom’, in which a woman is married to an animal or monster. Here a kiss or act of love initiated by a woman effects a magical metamorphosis. In ‘Hans My Hedgehog’, ‘The Frog Prince’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the heroine kisses or shares her bed with some physically unprepossessing creature, often in response to a request from her father – perhaps in order to set her father free, or to fulfil a pledge made by him. She does it with a sense of repulsion but is pleasantly surprised how it all turns out: the frog becomes a prince and the beast beautiful.
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim reads a deeper meaning into these stories. For Bettelheim, the animal represents children’s feelings about adult sexuality and adult genitals – the frog, which blows itself out when excited, is a particularly vivid symbol – and the transformation of frog, hedgehog or beast into prince is a metaphor for a psychosexual transformation that must be accomplished if sexual maturity is to be achieved. The story shows that, in order to enjoy sex, ‘the female has to overcome her view of sex as loathsome and animal-like’, so that what was once repellent becomes desirable.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the story, the woman – usually a pubescent girl – initiates without any hope or expectation of pleasure, and has a delightful surprise. Here is one female initiative that has a happy ending – though it wasn’t embarked on with that intent and the woman’s motives are purely altruistic.
Feminist writer Robin Norwood, in her self-help book, Women Who Love Too Much, has a different take on these stories.
(#litres_trial_promo) She sees them as terribly misleading lessons for women, with their implicit promise that women can save and reform unlovely men through the power of their sexual love. She suggests that whenever a woman says, ‘I thought I could save him’, she’s been taken in by the patriarchal propaganda that urges us to love addicted or disturbed or needy men – that urges Beauty to ‘stand by’ the Beast. Intriguingly, the suspicion that there’s some dreadful patriarchal kernel to these stories seems to be shared by today’s canny little girls, who find stories like ‘The Frog Prince’ unacceptably wimpish and favour the Babette Cole version in which the princess’s kiss works the other way round, and the unappealing prince that the princess doesn’t want to marry is turned into a frog.
Here then is our first category of initiating women. These sexual initiatives are purposeful and direct, but the motive has nothing to do with the woman’s own pleasure: she is doing her job, serving her country, setting her father free, exposing a man’s weakness, saving someone, doing her bit for the Russian industrial complex. And, except in the fairytale where her move breaks the spell that bound him or kept him beastly, the men who succumb to the women’s advances come to regret it; they find themselves recruited as spies, in prison, blackmailed, rejected by their women, or made a laughing stock.
BAD WOMEN: Watering the tree of strife
Njal’s Saga is a labyrinthine Icelandic epic that dates from the thirteenth century. It tells the story of Njal and Gunnar and Gunnar’s wife, Hallgerd. As Hallgerd grows into womanhood, she becomes very lovely, with long legs and long silken hair that veils her body and, at first, only Hrut her uncle sees through her: ‘The child is beautiful enough,’ he says, ‘and many will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief’s eyes have come into our kin.’
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Hallgerd exemplifies a peculiarly female form of wickedness; she acts covertly, she’s a stirrer. A whispered word from Hallgerd, and storehouses go up in flames, minor slights are brutally avenged, and men come home with their axes covered in blood. Her sexual power, that has men falling over themselves to do what she wants, is part of a wider pattern of wickedness: she ‘waters the tree of strife’. The bad sexual woman goes back a long way.
Fairytales are a particularly rich source of bad sexual women. Feminist commentators on fairytales have noted that the powerful instigating women in the stories we know best are without exception wicked. In Perrault or Grimm, good women are passive, sometimes so passive they’re fast asleep or comatose in glass coffins. The women who get things going are always bad.
For today’s children, these vibrant and alarming presences are most vividly evoked by Disney films. Who are the truly terrifying characters in the Disney films we saw as children – and which today’s children watch so avidly? Marina Warner comments that children find the masculine beasts in fairytales thrilling rather than scary – and certainly children above about three can be rather fond of the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, with his shaggy mane, lolloping gait and poignant air of self-pity. But the wicked women in Disney are something else. Some are directly based on fairytale, others are more recently invented but have fairytale resonances – and all of them send small children scuttling behind the sofa. In The Sleeping Beauty there’s the Wicked Fairy, and in 101 Dalmatians Cruella de Vil, who steals puppies to make into fur coats. The Rescuers has Medusa, who sends little Penny down a mine shaft in a bucket to hunt for a diamond. And in Disney’s first film, Snow White, there’s the Wicked Queen, whose baroque savagery makes her the most alarming of all Disney’s creations.
These women are the very embodiment of that ‘return to glamour’ which fashion journalists periodically attempt to foist on the reluctant woman in the street. They dress as vamps. They wear black and red, the sexual colours. Cruella de Vil and Medusa have spiky heels and spaghetti-thin shoulder straps, and the medieval-style villainesses have blood-red lips and fingernails and far too much mascara. For these women, desirability is everything; their aim above all is to go on looking good. This is why they send little girls down mines to look for jewels, or demand that the hearts of pretty teenagers be brought to them in caskets, or trap loveable puppies to turn into fur coats, or put nubile princesses out of the competition for a hundred years. These projects derive their urgency from the fact that these women are ageing and can’t bear it; they seek to hang on to their central role on the sexual stage at a time in the life-cycle when they should be handing over to a younger, more innocent generation. In seeking to present themselves as sexual women when they should be mothers, they go against the natural order. Their concern with appearance is also a sadistic agenda – in that the feelings, safety and even lives of others are sacrificed to the women’s superficial pleasures.
One of the perennially puzzling questions about women who do take sexual initiatives for their own pleasure is why, in our books and films and stories, they are always always bad. Part of the answer may lie here, with Cruella de Vil or the Wicked Queen – in the fact that some of the wickedest sexual women are in stories for children.
The wickedness of the Disney villainesses is very specific. It’s about being horrid to the weakest and most appealing creatures – small cuddly animals and the nicest little girls. It’s about competing sexually with the Princess when you’re old enough to be Queen Mother. It’s the precise opposite of mothering. For the child, this absence of mothering behaviour is the very essence of female badness. And the story makes clear that it’s the woman’s sexuality that drives her to behave in this unnatural way. So from the child’s viewpoint, there’s a profound opposition between nurturant and sexual behaviour in his or her mother.
Freud devoted much attention to children’s horror of the primal scene – the sight of their parents having intercourse. In PsychoDarwinism, Christopher Badcock puts forward a plausible sociobiological explanation for this.
(#litres_trial_promo) He argues that the child doesn’t want her parents to have sex because she doesn’t want them to reproduce anymore. Another brother or sister takes something away from her: she wants to keep everything for herself – the breast milk, the food, the parental care. And because it’s the mother who provides most of the nurturing, it’s the mother’s sexuality rather than the father’s that is particularly problematic for the child. A father can spread his seed around without taking anything away from his own offspring – but a mother’s sex drive inevitably pulls her away from her child.
Some feminist writers such as childbirth guru Sheila Kitzinger have suggested that the absolute division between the maternal and the sexual in women’s lives represents a triumph of patriarchal values.
(#litres_trial_promo) According to this view, patriarchy has taught us to overlook the voluptuous beauty of the pregnant body, lied about the orgasmic delights of giving birth, and tried to deny the powerful sexuality of mothers. Motherhood and sexuality, runs the argument, don’t have to be split and polarized as they are in our society.
This has never made sense to me. The conflict certainly isn’t experienced by women themselves as something that’s externally imposed: it’s felt at a very deep level. When a woman is most wrapped up in her children – when those children are dependent babies – she tends to feel little interest in sex, and the rebirth of her libido as her children become less dependent always involves some distancing from her children. Perhaps she pushes them away a little, or perhaps she’s just acknowledging their need for independence. Either way, she may experience this as a re-assertion of her own ‘selfishness’ and her children will probably see it that way too. This re-discovery of herself as a sexual being may also pull a woman away from her present family towards a new partner, with all the disruption for the child that such a move entails. No wonder children don’t want their mothers to be sexual.
This opposition between mothering and sexual initiating is one of the fundamental principles of sexual behaviour in the natural world. There are some species in which courtship roles are reversed: the female initiates and the male responds.
(#litres_trial_promo) And in all these cases where the female makes the first move in courtship, the male does most of the childcare: he guards the eggs and the young as well, as in some species of birds, or, like some fish, he carries the eggs with him, brooding them in the mouth. Sea-horses reverse roles in a startlingly complete way. The female has a sort of penis, a ‘prehensile ovipositor’, which she uses to inject eggs into the male’s body where they develop: and the female sea-horse actively courts the male. In the 1920s, a biologist observed a courtship in the Crypturellus variegatus, a species of bird in which the male alone incubates the egg and raises the young. He wrote that when the two sexes saw one another, the female ‘gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling’ – while the male gave only ‘a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion’.
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This broad pattern can also be traced out in human courtship. Just as, in the natural world, female animals which don’t rear the young are more likely to initiate so, too, in human society, it is those women who aren’t looking to bear and rear children as a result of the courtship who are most likely to make the first move.
Maybe the badness of female sexual initiators seems so natural because it hooks into a genuine conflict in the female psyche. Maybe the fairytale villainesses hint at dilemmas that are built into the female sexual life-cycle.
BAD WOMEN TODAY: Get down to business
But this notion of a perennial conflict between our sexuality and our feelings for our children – and specifically between sexual initiating and mothering behaviour – is only part of the story. There must also be something peculiar to our own time about the appeal of wicked female initiators for, recently, in our most popular public fictions, there’s been a positive efflorescence of wicked women who make the first move. The bad sexual woman whose story goes back to Sumer is still doing her stuff down at the multiplex – being a bitch, wickedly scheming, having great sex and, in the end, getting her just deserts. The tremendous commercial success of the films in which these women feature suggests they have something special to say to us today.
In stories for children, the sexual initiative-taking of the bad woman can only be hinted at. In films for adults, we’re left in no doubt as to what she does.
Meredith Johnson in Disclosure attempts to seduce Tom Sanders in her office. She grabs him when he’s making a phone call, snatches the phone away and presses herself against him. ‘Get down to business,’ she says. In Presumed Innocent, Carolyn Polhemus pulls Rusty Sabich by his tie into a dark office: ‘You’re going to be so good,’ she says as she meaningfully removes her earrings. In The Last Seduction, Brigit sticks her hand down the trousers of the man she’s just met in a bar. When she first meets Nick, Catherine Tremell in Basic Instinct says, ‘Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice …’: she also famously flashes her pubic hair at a group of policemen – which is about as direct as an indirect initiative can get. Alex in Fatal Attraction doesn’t make the first move: she is asked to dinner by Dan. But she does signal her interest in an affair by saying, ‘I can be very discreet’. And then, when he doesn’t ring after their weekend together, she takes a whole range of follow-up initiatives that might be more typical of men – she rings him at work, rings him at home, buys opera tickets, turns up at his office. Later her initiatives become still less conventional.
These women have all entered the public world on their own terms. They power-dress, they carry briefcases, they understand financial markets and make lots of money. They are also all bad. It isn’t just a question of breaking a few rules and wearing fuck-me shoes. These aren’t just Gutsy Girls who Get Ahead. They are seriously wicked. Catherine Tremell is a serial murderess. Carolyn Polhemus takes bribes, and loses interest in Rusty when she finds he’s less ambitious than she’d like. When Meredith Johnson’s attempt to have sex with Tom backfires, she takes out a sexual harassment suit against him, and the attempt at seduction turns out to have an ulterior motive – to frame him and have him fired for a mistake she’d made. Alex abducts Dan’s child, has a close affinity with Cruella de Vil in her propensity for doing horrible things to cuddly animals – the emotional climax of the film is her boiling of the pet rabbit – and turns up in Dan’s bathroom with a carving knife. And Brigit, by far the most stylish of the bunch, makes off with the money from her husband’s drug deal, kills off a few philandering partners along the way, and then – in a neat inversion of notions of women’s vulnerability to male violence – murders her husband with her Mace spray.
The role sex plays in these stories is the mirror image of its role in the traditional woman’s romance. In Mills and Boon, the heroine doesn’t always enjoy sex – she may well have her first orgasm in bed with the hero – but her whole life is about love, and love is the motor and climax of the plot. In the bad woman stories, it’s the other way round: the women enjoy sex effortlessly – they certainly don’t need hours of delicate fingerwork – but it isn’t the main event. Catherine Tremell may be ‘the fuck of the century’, but what really turns her on is writing books and sticking ice-picks into people. Often a sexual encounter is about something else, a means to an end – as it was for the women with ulterior motives at the start of this chapter. Through sex, the women in these films further their career ambitions, get material for their next book, or find someone to take the rap for their crimes. They are using the men.
When these stories are aimed at women, they’re funny. We laugh – and we want her to win. The story taps into that part of every woman that makes her grin when she says ‘Lorena Bobbitt’. The Last Seduction is a woman’s film. And we identify with Brigit: we long to smoke with her kind of style, to speak with that husky rasp, to be so coolly unburdened by conscience. And Brigit gets away with it triumphantly in the end: the final shot in the film shows her reclining in her stretch limo as she languidly burns the last piece of evidence incriminating her.
But when the story is aimed at men, it is horror, and the woman is punished. Fatal Attraction is a male fantasy – and here the initiating woman meets a bloody death.
These stories are powerful: they shape our thinking. Fatal Attraction, in particular, has been a stunningly successful piece of modern myth-making. It’s as fantastic as 101 Dalmatians – but people talk about it as though it were real. Sara told me, ‘Quite honestly I think women who ask men out are punished. It’s like Fatal Attraction – I think that’s what happens.’ Geoff said, ‘If you have an affair, you need to be sure you can trust the girl – you don’t want to end up like Fatal Attraction’. Sara and Geoff don’t question the film’s veracity; Alex seems plausible to them. As Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, apparently remarked, ‘Everybody knows a girl like Alex.’
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The notion that Alexes are everywhere involves two distortions of thinking – an over-reaction to women’s new assertiveness, and an over-valuation of sexuality as the key to personality.
There’s often a ludicrous over-reaction to small gains for women. As Susan Brownmiller comments, ‘ “The women are taking over” is a refrain many working women hear from their male colleagues – after one or two women are promoted at their company, but while top management is still solidly male. In newsrooms, white male reporters routinely complain that only women and minorities can get jobs – often at publications where women’s and minorities’ numbers are actually shrinking …’
(#litres_trial_promo) So, too, the fact that women are asserting themselves a bit more sexually gives rise to fantasies that the world is full of glossy and alarming women who help themselves to the sex they want without regard for the destructive consequences.
In every system of oppression, what is kept down is fantasized about and feared. Studies of colonization have looked at the way the qualities of the oppressed group or race, especially their sexuality and aggression, are exaggerated and then feared: hence, for instance, notions about the super-potency of black men. So, in the fantasies that underlie these films, the kind of sexual initiative that women might be taking – asking for the touches they want, perhaps – becomes a shocking or destructive sexual assertion: Meredith sexually harassing Tom, Brigit putting her hand down a man’s trousers in a public place.
The second distortion that drives these fantasies is the over-valuation of sexual behaviour as a true litmus test of personality – especially for women. In the films, the women’s sexual behaviour is part of a gestalt. Their assertiveness in bed is one manifestation of their assertiveness in every area of their lives. The woman who makes the first move in her sexual relationships puts herself first in other areas too, and the woman who disregards the traditional sexual script is deficient in other traditional female qualities. Like Hallgerd in the old Icelandic saga with her ‘thief’s eyes’, she takes things that rightfully belong to others.
Sex is sometimes seen as the key to personality for men as well. Hence the demands for the resignations of adulterous politicians: if they cheat on their wives, runs the argument, they surely can’t be trusted to govern the country well. But it’s also recognized that for men sex isn’t the whole story. Oskar Schindler, for instance, is venerated as one of the great altruists of the twentieth century, for the hundreds of lives he saved during the Holocaust. He treated women badly: he was openly unfaithful to his wife, seduced his secretaries, and doubtless created a lot of misery all round. He fascinates us as a flawed human being who was also capable of startling love and courage.
But a woman’s sexuality is never seen as a thing apart. It’s impossible to imagine a female Oskar Schindler – a woman who was thoughtless and promiscuous in her sexual life, but also revered for doing great good.
The bad woman script takes it as axiomatic that a woman’s sexual assertiveness is part of a wider assertiveness or even aggressiveness in her psychological make-up. But this is a distortion. A woman’s courtship behaviour doesn’t essentially correlate with the rest of her personality. When I talked to women about their courtship styles, I simply didn’t find that the more assertive women were more likely to ask men out.
Certainly there may be connections between a woman’s willingness to take direct initiatives and other aspects of her sexuality. Among the women I talked to, the few women who sometimes made the first move tended to be good at asking for what they wanted in bed, turned on by visual sexual imagery, and attracted to younger, less affluent, less powerful men. And women with a very indirect style at the start of courtship tended to be attracted to powerful or older men, to be turned on by masochistic fantasies and to find it hard to ask for what they wanted in bed. Indirect women were also more likely than women who sometimes made the first move to have had sex forced on them at some time.
But there were no consistencies at all with the women’s behaviour at work or in other parts of their lives – no connections between how they’d rate on sexual assertiveness and the rest of their personality and functioning. I met women with high-status careers and an air of great self-assurance who had the most reticent and evasive courtship styles – and quiet women with conventional views and unremarkable jobs who were married to men they’d asked out.
Female sexual initiatives are not part of a gestalt – and the fact that a woman makes the first move doesn’t reveal anything about other aspects of her personality. And it certainly doesn’t mean she is more likely to assert herself to accomplish evil ends.
The bad sexual woman may be great entertainment – but there’s no psychological truth in her. Adrian Lyne is wrong. None of us knows any girls like Alex.
BEAUTIFUL PREDATORS: She took me to her faery grot
There is a sub-class of bad sexual women who are scarcely women at all – women who, in a more profound way than Sofia the man-trapper or ‘Lizzie James’, are not what they seem.
