MARGARET LEROY
Some Girls Do

Why Women Do – and Don’t –

Make the First Move

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © Margaret Leroy 1997

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780002555920

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780007484942

Version: 2016-06-20

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER 1: COURTSHIP TODAY

CHAPTER 2: WOMEN WHO DO

CHAPTER 3: WOMEN’S FEARS

CHAPTER 4: MEN’S DOUBTS

CHAPTER 5: MYTHOLOGIES

CHAPTER 6: LOOKS AND SMILES

CHAPTER 7: DO WOMEN SAY NO AND MEAN YES?

CHAPTER 8: MONEY

CHAPTER 9: DANGER

CHAPTER 10: HOW TO

References

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 COURTSHIP TODAY

I ASK men out,’ said Emma. ‘I’m doing my bit. I can’t understand why more women don’t do it. It feels so good to go out with somebody you’ve chosen.’

Emma is a teacher in her early twenties. She’s warm and friendly – but not unusually assertive. She’s pretty – but not particularly confident about her appearance: like so many women, she’s forever struggling to lose weight. She enjoys her sex-life – but she’s not particularly sexually self-assured. In most ways, she’s as full of self-doubt as the rest of us. Yet she asks men out: she finds it easy: and making the first move is a source of real pleasure in her life. She relishes her sense of achievement when she thinks, I chose him.

My conversation with Emma was the genesis of this book. It set me thinking how extraordinary it is that so few women make this move. Why is it still so difficult? What could help us to change?

Since talking to Emma, I’ve asked all the women I’ve met if they’ve ever asked a man out. All of them have wanted to – but few have ever done so: most said, ‘I simply couldn’t …’. Some of these women edit glossy magazines or manage social services teams or work in busy casualty departments. They feel strong, autonomous, entitled. In every other area of their lives, they’re in control: they shape what happens to them. But this they wouldn’t do. Unlike Emma, they don’t think it would feel good, and they can understand why more women don’t do it.

Even women in the age-group where it’s often assumed that sexual patterns are changing most rapidly said the same. Nineteen-year-old Natalie told me: ‘I do leave it up to the lad to make the first move – with telephone calls, the first kiss, everything – and if they don’t do it, well then it’s tough cheese isn’t it?’ Lucy, aged fifteen, said: ‘Girls could, yeah – they don’t though … It’s just that nobody does. I think it would be good but no-one has the courage to.’

There are a few Emmas in every age group, of course. Most of the men I talked to had been asked out by a woman – but usually only once or twice.

Women’s reluctance to ask men out does seem amazing. Over the past few decades, so much has changed in our sexual behaviour. Women have been setting limits and drawing lines in the sand. We’ve said no to male sexual violence and attempted to outlaw the darker expressions of male sexual initiative by establishing rape-crisis centres, taking action on child sexual abuse, legislating against sexual harassment. Some women have sought to set the sexual agenda with that effective act of vengeance, the kiss and tell, with its ‘That’s no way to treat a lady’ subtext. And many of us have been exploring our own sexuality – by reading collections of female fantasies, or going to orgasm workshops, or buying ‘Black Lace’ books, or photographing the male nude, or queuing up to scream at the Chippendales.

Most notably for this book, women have been imposing their own agenda on courtship by highlighting the risk of sexual violence within a dating relationship. This is the sexual change that is causing most controversy. It’s been suggested, most notably by Katie Roiphe in her book The Morning After, that awareness of the possibility of date rape creates a climate of fear which makes it harder for men and women to get close. As Martin Amis told an audience at Princeton University, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can change your mind before, even during, but just not after sex’.¹ The worry is that now women are changing their minds afterwards, and that sometimes the men involved will be wrongfully blamed – like Austen Donellan, who was threatened with expulsion from university after a woman he’d slept with claimed he’d raped her. Wisely he chose to be tried in a public court, and was acquitted.

But there were certainly casualties too under the old dispensation. And by and large it surely makes sense to see the date-rape panic as part of something bigger, and something to be celebrated. Our questioning of the old sexual certainties is part of a general move towards more egalitarian ways of relating, as we strive for gender equality in so many areas of our lives.

Yet the puzzling fact remains that one piece of the new pattern is missing. Few women are like Emma: few women ask men out. This simply doesn’t fit with the rest of our sexual behaviour. We no longer see men as creatures who always have to be in control. We know that men like their regular partners to initiate sex: we know that they sometimes prefer to lie back and let us do all the work in bed. Our reticence also seems at odds with other aspects of our social behaviour – because once a couple have got together, it’s usually the woman who makes all the social arrangements. Yet mostly we still believe to the bottom of our hearts that men don’t like us to make the social and sexual moves at the very start of courtship.

When I gave women a list of sexual assertions and asked how hard they’d find them, a clear hierarchy emerged. Women find it easy to initiate sex with a man with whom they have a steady relationship – whether by dropping hints and touching suggestively, or by asking directly. Telling him what you want in bed is more difficult: some women say ‘I just couldn’t’, but others are happy to suggest a new position or ask for a different kind of touch. Initiating the first sex in a new relationship – deciding when to turn up with a toothbrush – is also something many of us manage. But asking a man out comes right at the top of the list: it’s by far the most problematic assertion. It’s during the very first moves that women are at their most tentative and indirect and feminine. ‘I’d never do that’, we say, or ‘I’d love to but I simply wouldn’t dare’, or even ‘Well, we aren’t equal, are we?’

COURTSHIP SCRIPTS: The hundred and fifty initiatives

In the past few years, US ‘close relationships researchers’ have looked at our courtship scripts – the behaviour we expect of ourselves and others when we go on a date. The results of their studies confirm that tradition still shapes our behaviour right at the start of our sexual relationships.

Psychologists Suzanna Rose and Irene Friez asked men and women to list the things they’d expect to do as they prepared for a date with someone new, and through the evening.² They found that men and women largely agreed on the scripts. On a first date a woman expects to: tell her friends and family, check her appearance, wait for the man, welcome him to her home and introduce her parents or room-mates, keep the conversation going and control the rate of sexual intimacy. A man expects to: ask the woman for a date, decide what to do, prepare his car and flat, check his money, go to the woman’s house, meet her parents or room-mates, open the car door, pay, initiate sexual contact, take her home, and tell her he’ll be in touch. Here, men are making the arrangements and taking the sexual initiatives, while women set the scene and have a right of veto – they worry about what to wear and what to say, and they tell him when to stop. In their commentary, Rose and Friez acknowledge that ‘many young women today pay date expenses, and a majority of young men report having been asked for a date by a woman’. But the more dating experience the participants had, the more important they felt it was to stick to the time-honoured roles.

Other researchers have found the same. According to psychologist Susan Sprecher, men are still much more likely than women to take direct steps – to ask the other out, plan what to do on the first date, pay, and initiate the second date.³ Susan Green and Philip Sandos found that both men and women feel it’s more acceptable for the man to take the initiative – whether he’s simply starting a conversation or asking a person out.⁴

Less academic writers reiterate the theme. In her book Hot and Bothered, a ‘guide to sexual etiquette in the 1990s’, based on hundreds of interviews with men and women in Canada, Wendy Dennis says she’s found that women still aren’t taking the lead at the start of relationships. ‘Most women realize that many men still find the notion of a sexually assertive woman distasteful,’ she writes.⁵

US writer and researcher Warren Farrell runs mixed workshops on gender issues. In his book, Why Men Are The Way They Are, he describes how he asks people to simulate meeting at a party. He says, ‘That’s how I discovered how rare it is for a woman ever to take the hand of a man who had never before taken her hand, or to kiss a man for the very first time, or to take any of the hundred and fifty initiatives between eye contact and sexual contact I found are typically expected of a man if the relationship is ever to be sexual.’⁶

COURTSHIP LIBERALS: Passive – moi?

Men still make the arrangements. Women still wait to be asked. Yet many of us would like things to be different. There were hints of this hunger for change in the way both men and women described their dating behaviour to me. Almost invariably, they played down the gender differences.

When women talk about the moves they do make, they strive to show that they have some control over what happens. A woman will emphasize the potency of her glances, gestures, smiles. She’ll claim her signals are crystal clear. She’ll describe how she’ll cross a crowded room to talk to an appealing stranger, and how she’ll touch the man before he touches her, or put her arm round him.

The behaviours that women present as examples of making the first move usually fall within the parameters of the traditional script. For instance, touching first – a light touch on the shoulder or arm – has tended to be the woman’s prerogative. Initiatives like this that women do take are often open to interpretation. She goes up to him and starts talking. Is it flirtation or friendship? She puts her arm round his shoulders. A sexual move – or a warm affectionate hug? These initiatives are indirect: it’s not obvious what they mean. And because they’re ambiguous, they’re a lot less risky than the traditional male initiatives – an invitation to dinner, a kiss on the lips. This distinction was clearly recognized by Rowena, who said, ‘If you open your eyes wide at someone, you can pretend it wasn’t really happening if it all goes wrong. But if you went and said, “Can you come to the cinema with me on Friday?” and he said no, you’d feel pathetic.’

Yet the fact that women highlight the moves that we do make shows how ready we are to move on. Women today are well aware of the rewards for sexual assertion. ‘Passive’ is a dirty word: no woman wants to be seen as passive in her sexual behaviour, and many of us would love to be more confident and innovative in our sex lives. I suspect that we put such stress on the active parts of our courtship behaviour because we yearn for more control at the start of our sexual relationships.

Men also tended to present themselves as thoroughly egalitarian. Men told me that yes, of course, it was fine for women to ask them out, it was a thoroughly good thing, they didn’t go in for this man-the-hunter act anyway. They said they were sure it was happening a lot, because it had happened to them – though, on probing, I usually found that they’d been approached only once or twice, while they’d approached large numbers of women themselves. They also stressed how tentative they were in their traditional male role and how difficult they found it: they told me how few risks they took, how shy they were, how they waited till they were sure.

Younger men in particular played down the amount of planning they did. Geoff, twenty-six, said, ‘I think planning spoils it. I take it as it comes, play it by ear according to the situation. With some girls you genuinely just want to have a coffee and a chat and see what happens … .’ He mused on this, then added, ‘Subconsciously I probably do plan what’s the best way to go about it.’

Our attitudes to courtship are Janus-faced. Like Geoff, we look to both the past and the future. People talk first about how things should be – women should initiate, men should welcome women’s initiatives, we should all be as clear as day in our sexual dealings, no-one should scheme. It’s only later in the conversation that they reveal, like Geoff, what they actually do – which may well be less open and egalitarian than they’d at first implied. It’s all very encouraging for those of us who’d welcome a new kind of courtship. In our heads we’ve invented a whole new world: we’re just not living there yet, because we’re not quite ready to risk it. In courtship the stakes are so high. And when we’re approaching someone we’d love to get into bed with, we do what seems safest – and for now that so often means looking back to the past and taking our lines from the familiar script.

COURTSHIP CONSERVATIVES: From the Stone Age

But I also talked to people who felt that the pattern simply couldn’t be changed, however much they might want it to be changed. These courtship conservatives were always women. To explain why men should always do the asking, they referred back to the ultimate authority – their mothers – or invoked the concept of the ‘natural’ and pointed to the sexual behaviour of their children’s pet hamsters.

Jessica was one of these sexual conservatives:

‘I’ve wanted to ask men out, but I wouldn’t have done, ever, ever. I’ve always used other ways to invite them out, to do with one’s behaviour, as I think most women do. You don’t use words, you play a game.

‘I don’t think men like to be asked, I really don’t. I think they do like to have a woman come and make sexual passes at them, I think that’s lovely for them. I think what you get then is the one-night stand – where he says, “Ooh, that was great fun, wasn’t it? Bye, maybe see you next year …” . But I was never into doing that because I was never that into sex, I was into long-term relationships. I think they like to play a game of chase, where it looks like they’re doing the chasing – and it may well be you’re doing the chasing but no-one’s going to admit to that.

‘It’s probably based on what my mother said, “Don’t chase them, they hate it …”, so there’s all that kind of feminine lore from the past which I think there are seeds of truth in. Of course, women should be able to ask men out – but I just can’t see it happening, the game is so set.

‘My brothers have had streams of girls whom they laughed at. One of them actually booked a flight on the same aeroplane to Canada – he got on the plane and there she was, booked a seat next to him – and as far as he was concerned she was just a one-night fling – and it’s been a joke ever since. So the horror of that sort of thing – realizing it was not a tactic that worked, and it was far better to pine by the telephone for a few days and then get over it than to make a fool of oneself – “hurling yourself at a man” as my mother would say.’

Jessica refers back to the past, to female lore, to the way things have always been. It’s because this is how the game has always been that she feels it can’t be changed.

Yet this belief that ‘the game is so set’ is worth examining. Because in fact Jessica is wrong. There are crucial elements in our present courtship patterns that don’t go back as far as we imagine. Conventions about who initiates have changed radically within living memory.

In her study of courtship in the US from 1900 to 1950, From Front Porch to Back Seat, Beth Bailey describes how before the First World War, in the calling system that preceded the dating system, it was women who took the initiative at the start of romantic relationships.⁷ The behaviour required of the genders at the beginning of a relationship was then quite different. Even though women had little power in the public world, they did have complete responsibility for making arrangements at the start of courtship. At first the young girl’s mother invited men to call. Later the young woman herself could invite round any unmarried man to whom she had been properly introduced. These initial encounters took place in a social milieu controlled by women. It all happened in the parlour, in the women’s sphere, and even the patterns of consumption were quintessentially feminine – little cakes and hot chocolate. This is the world of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock – written in 1915 – whose life was measured out in coffee spoons in rooms full of the rustle of women’s skirts.

And in this world, male initiative at the start of sexual relationships was very differently viewed. In 1909 a worried young man wrote to an agony aunt of the time, the US Ladies Home Journal adviser, Mrs Kingsland. He asked, ‘May I call upon a young woman whom I greatly admire, although she had not given me the permission? Would she be flattered at my eagerness, even to the setting aside of conventions, or would she think me impertinent?’ A man making the first move? Absolutely not, said Mrs Kingsland: ‘I think that you would risk her just displeasure and frustrate your object of finding favour with her.’⁸

But after the First World War, courtship changed. It moved out from the private female world into the public male-controlled sphere. Under the dating system, the couple went out – to a meal, to a dance, to the pictures – and the man took all the initiatives: he asked her out, planned the evening, bought the tickets, booked the table, paid the bill, opened the car door. And once the required behaviour had changed, people rapidly came to believe that the new convention was the way it had always been. In our thinking about sex, we have very short memories and no sense of history. A mere fifty years later, advice books were giving precisely opposite advice to that offered by Mrs Kingsland – and referring back to the palaeolithic as their authority. ‘Girls who try to usurp the right of boys to choose their own dates’ will ‘ruin a good dating career. Fair or not, it is the way of life. From the Stone Age, when men chased and captured their women, comes the yen of a boy to do the pursuing.’⁹

COURTSHIP LIFE-CYCLES: Looking for love

For people today, the very word ‘courtship’ can be alienating. It seems to come from another era. Courtship is for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, eyeing each other lecherously while doing the most decorous of dances. Yet surprisingly we have no other term for that sequence of behaviour through which we indicate our sexual interest in a more or less stereotyped way.

‘Courtship’ also implies quite a narrow range of relationships as the goal of the behaviour. As in Pride and Prejudice, we take the purpose of courtship to be the formation of the pair-bonds that lead to marriage. In this analysis, it’s the marriage that defines it as courtship in retrospect. This is the kind of courtship that’s examined in much US close relationships research. But in this book I’ll include every type of relationship – casual sex, adultery, passionate and troubled affairs lasting six and a half weeks – all the many and various kinds of sexual activity or connection which are preceded by some kind of courtship process, however truncated, elliptical or secret it may be.

Courtship isn’t only for the young, either. It’s obviously young people who are most involved in this process, and the US research on the subject is all about people aged between about eighteen and twenty-three for purely pragmatic reasons: psychology students on US campuses get extra credits for participating in experiments. But this is behaviour that we may engage in at any time in our lives after puberty. There are love affairs even in old people’s homes. In my interviewing for this book, the people I talked to ranged in age from the early teens to the mid-fifties.

Courtship doesn’t follow a similar pattern right through the life cycle. Our courtship behaviour, and the kinds of relationship we seek to achieve through that behaviour, vary with age. In particular, as we get older our sexual negotiations gradually move out of the public into the private domain. Eventually, for many of those people for whom courtship continues, it becomes one of the most secret parts of their lives. To get a clearer picture of courtship, let’s look at how our behaviour changes through the life-cycle.

The first bits of courtship behaviour are enacted in a very public arena. Chloe at thirteen says, ‘These ten- and eleven-year-olds will see Eve Taylor on the bus, and they’ll say, “Ooh isn’t she gorgeous, isn’t she hot” – and they don’t really mean it, they’re just doing it to show their mates they’re cool. I’ve heard these little ten-year-old boys say to their friends, “I got off with Eve Taylor last night!” I’ll think, oh yeah I’m sure you did. She’s fifteen, I don’t think so … Even your friend when it comes to a boy – well, you might think she’s your friend, but she isn’t really – if they thought someone was going to ask me out, they’d sort of sabotage it a bit and spread different messages and rumours.’

In a sense, young people at the start of adolescence are playing at courtship. Most of the time, it’s rather like ITV’s ‘Blind Date’ – the form without the content of sexual behaviour. There’s talk about who you fancy – even if you don’t. Passions are communicated via go-betweens, though the message may get distorted in the telling. Love letters are written and sent: some express real feelings, some are fake and may have a group authorship, and any of them may get read out on the school bus.

The public nature of this courting can cause distress. Young people of this age tell cautionary tales about the risks of using go-betweens. As Chloe points out, friends entrusted with messages may have their own jealous or malicious agendas. And in the tabloid culture of the school cloakroom, everyone knows how far you went: girls get given marks out of ten and a fourteen-year-old who admits to still being a virgin may be consigned to the ‘V-group’. Rumours are spread and reputations destroyed: and a girl who’s been out with too many boys will be cornered by girl bullies in the toilets and called a slag or a dog.

But the public nature of this behaviour also has a protective role. Friends are used as a source of courage: a boy who goes to visit a girl he likes may take his best mate too – rather like working-class adults in the eighteenth century, who often went ‘a-wooing’ together.¹⁰ And the social group protects by establishing the norms, however cruel its effect on an individual young person. For instance, though there may be sexual harassment – and boys’ early attempts to show interest in girls are often crude and intrusive – there will also be social support for coping with the harassment. Girls are by no means the voiceless and innocent victims of boys’ playful or bullying expressions of sexual interest that they are sometimes made out to be. Kieran’s approaches to Lydia mixed romantic offerings like letters saying how much he fancied her with more harassing approaches: he offered her a pepperami from his lunch – ‘I cut it off just for you’ – to which she responded with a well-rehearsed gagging routine, to the delight of her friends.

As people reach their mid- and late teens and early twenties, they move into the kind of courtship territory with which most of the existing research is concerned. Courtship is now a more private affair but the resulting relationships are highly public, and may be recognized with public ritual. Pairing-off may lead to a one-night stand or life-long marriage and parenting or anything in between.

Recently there have been some fascinating changes in courtship customs for this life stage – and there’s a ‘back to the future’ theme to several of these developments. Some of our new customs – cohabitation, the rave, and sharing a bed without intercourse – revert to older ways of doing things. We’re returning to courtship patterns that predate that era, lasting roughly from Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 to the 1950s, which was the most sexually repressive period in recent English history – a period when the sanctions against pre-marital sex were particularly punitive, when the clitoris got forgotten, when the very essence of femininity was a denial of the woman’s sexuality.

Today’s custom of cohabitation, to be followed by marriage at the point at which the couple decide they want children, has analogies with the betrothal system that pre-dated the Victorian system of courtship. Betrothed couples lived together and were sexually intimate but the contract was not regarded as binding until they got married, with the proviso that the man would support the child if the woman got pregnant.¹¹ Cohabitation, like betrothal, is a profoundly rational custom: both give the couple a trial period together before they take the irrevocable step of having children. Both institutions also allow women a lot of independence. The betrothed woman kept her name and single legal status, and today a cohabiting woman will probably have her own bank account and her own circle of friends – signs of separateness which she may give up on marriage.

The changing role of dancing in courtship also looks back to the way things used to be. Club culture restores to dancing its atavistic function. ‘When we go to clubs, it tends to be all the girls,’ Natalie told me, ‘and all we want to do is just dance and have a good time. We don’t talk to anyone else except the barman.’ For the past hundred years or so, dancing has had a narrowly sexual purpose as a form of regulated physical contact between men and women who otherwise were rarely permitted to touch. But today, as in the more distant past and in other cultures, dancing isn’t only a route to sexual pairing, it’s also an end in itself. It’s about a sense of oneness with the group which may or may not be enhanced by street drugs and is sometimes almost transcendent. ‘There was such an intense, communal feeling of happiness, it was overwhelming. Everyone facing each other, smiling, singing, hands in the air.’¹²

The young couple who get into bed together but don’t have intercourse are also reverting to an older pattern. In sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England and Wales, bundling or night-visiting was commonly practised by courting couples: this is what those folksongs in which men come tapping at women’s windows are all about. The man would come to his sweetheart’s window after her parents had gone to sleep and she might choose to let him in and invite him into her bed. Historian John Gillis writes, ‘We know from accounts of bundling practice that a certain degree of fondling and kissing was permitted’, but couples must have taken care for the woman not to get pregnant while they were still unsure about each other.¹³ 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.¹⁴

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.’¹⁵ 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

‘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.¹

‘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.²

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.’³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.’⁷

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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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’.¹¹

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.’¹²

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 …’¹³ 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.

These women are exquisite. They are quintessentially feminine, scarcely made of solid flesh, almost translucent, with the perfect facial features of beautiful children – yet the enchanting surface is pure illusion.

The romantic poets – Keats, for instance – adored the beautiful predator.

I met a Lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild. She took me to her faery grot And there she wept and sighed full sore …¹⁴

She takes the initiative; she takes him back to her place. There she weeps and sighs, moving the man with some hint of sorrow beyond words – but it’s all just part of her seduction technique. She leaves him spent and desolate, enslaved or vampirized amid a barren landscape – ‘The sedge is withered from the lake.’

Lady Arabella March in Bram Stoker’s psychotic last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, is another beautiful predator.¹⁵ In Ken Russell’s film version, luscious Amanda Donohoe entices a marvelling young man back to her house, where she strips to her black suspenders, grows a splendid set of fangs and kills him with a venomous bite. Bob Dylan also seems to know about these women and their beauty, their initiatives and their supernatural erasures and thefts: his Melinda ‘invites you up into her room’ – but then she ‘takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon’.

One of the most delectable predators can be found in Angela Carter’s short story, ‘The Lady in the House of Love’. Some of Keats’s themes re-surface in Carter’s thoroughly camp postmodernist telling. This Lady hides her lust for blood behind an air of exquisite vulnerability. She is so delicate she is almost transparent, her hair ‘falls down as straight as if it were soaking wet’, she has ‘the fragility of the skeleton of a moth’, her nails and teeth are ‘as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar …’, and she seems weighed down with some hidden sorrow: ‘A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates that she is inconsolable … When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.’¹⁶ Later the unvampirized parts are buried under her roses, which grow obscenely lush. She is saved from her undead torment by a man on a bicycle who, totally oblivious to all the clues, sees only a nice girl who needs looking after, and undoes the enchantment by sucking the blood from a cut on her hand.

The predator has feminine qualities to excess – she is almost too beautiful, too fragile, too difficult to console. The one thing that doesn’t fit is her taking of initiatives. The men should have suspected: why would so lovely a creature need to make the moves? She takes him back to her place, she invites him into her bed – but the consummation is not at all what he had in mind.

These stories hint at archetypal fears about women’s sexual attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the biological purpose of female beauty is to publicize good genes and good health and so to suggest that this woman is a good reproductive bet; apparently, for instance, symmetry of feature, which is one of our criteria of beauty, is only found in an organism that has been well-nourished while developing.¹⁷ If this is what female beauty is for, then the male fear must be that this is all illusion. (As indeed it often is – given women’s struggles to re-make themselves with all the money and skill at their disposal.) So in Keats’s poem the landscape is barren and withered; for all those signifiers of health and youth – the woman’s childlikeness and loveliness – there is no fertility here.

In these stories, essential feminine qualities are subverted. The female fragility which evolutionary psychologists suggest appeals to men because it suggests youth and implies that the woman is not carrying another man’s child is in fact a hint that all is not well: here, she is so thin because her unnatural appetites need appeasing. And the nameless sorrow with which she moves the man, stressing her vulnerability, allowing him to take on the role of protector – as strong women still do around men they desire – is just one of her courtship ploys.

The very imagery of vampirism itself – or of the Knight left ‘so haggard and so woebegone’ – suggests the capacity of female beauty to drain the male body. Camille Paglia writes of the temporary impotence that follows desire and its consummation, ‘That women can drain and paralyze is part of the latent vampirism in female physiology.’¹⁸ And on the psychological level, this imagery of greedy women who drink the man’s lifeblood perhaps hints at the male fear that women want just that little bit more than men are willing to give.

Among the romantic poets Coleridge, in particular, seems to have been preoccupied with women’s capacity to ‘drain and paralyze’. In his notebooks he describes dreams in which he was pursued by ghastly female figures who attempted to mutilate or abuse him.

… was followed up and down by a frightful pale woman, who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, and had the property of giving me a shameful Disease by breathing in the face.

…the most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye and attempting to pull it out.¹⁹

Coleridge’s dreams of ‘frightful’ women are reminiscent of delusions sometimes experienced by men suffering from psychotic illness, when feelings of arousal are associated with the delusional presence of a woman – and the man’s response is felt as something dragged out of him, as an assault. The fantasy of the succubus, the medieval female demon who arouses men in the night against their will, probably had its origins in such delusions.

The purest expression of these fears of unnatural initiating women in Coleridge’s work can be found in his unfinished poem, ‘Christabel’, which Camille Paglia describes as ‘blatant lesbian pornography’.²⁰

Geraldine is a beautiful witch or vampire, dressed in white silk, ‘surpassingly fair’ – the original lipstick lesbian, perhaps. She’s literally glamorous (glamour means magic or spell), and Christabel, the sweet and guileless heroine of the poem, is completely taken in by her enchanting surface. Christabel finds Geraldine moaning in the moonlight outside her castle, invites her in, and unwisely lets her share her bed. Geraldine undresses – revealing an unspecified witch-like deformity – ‘a sight to dream of, not to tell …’ and some vague and terrible sexual assault takes place.

Like the other voluptuous predators, Geraldine has a sob story – in her case, a tale of gang rape:

Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn, They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white.

But as with everything else about her, this is a fabrication: Geraldine herself is the rapist.

Geraldine has certain masculine qualities which are underlined for the reader of the poem and which are clues to her unnatural purposes, but which innocent Christabel doesn’t recognize. She looks rather than being looked at – always a cross-sex sign; she has a penetrating gaze – ‘her large fair eye ’gan glitter bright’; but sometimes her eyes shrink as small as a snake’s. And she is in total control: she tells Christabel to undress and get into bed, pretends to pray, then gets in too and pulls her to her.

O Geraldine! one hour was thine Thou’st had thy will!

It’s always men who ‘have their will’ of women: this is a way of describing sex that belongs exclusively to male experience.

The voluptuous predator connects with both the bad sexual woman and the man-trapper. Like Alex and Brigit, she is wicked. Like Mata Hari and Sofia the decoy, she has ulterior motives, sometimes of the most extreme kind: she wants blood. Above all, she is not what she seems. Her unfeminine sexual initiatives point to her unnaturalness. But the object of her sexual attentions, dazed by her loveliness, is blind to all the clues.

LIBERTINE WHORES: Those scandalous stages of my life

‘My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor and, I piously believe, extremely honest…’²¹

These words, from the first page of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure of 1748, inaugurated a new literary genre all about women who initiate and enjoy it. John Cleland’s two-volume story was a blockbuster of its time. This first prostitute confession was followed by a host of others, especially in France. Today’s pornography has its origins here. ‘Pornography’ actually means ‘the writing of prostitutes’.

In these books, the heroine briefly describes her childhood and adolescence, then comes to her main subject matter, her training and progress as a prostitute, depicted in a series of sexual encounters which are always graphically described, and in the case of Fanny Hill, highly colourful: John Cleland invariably describes genitals as roseate, rubied or vermilion. Unlike earlier English prostitute biographies, such as Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, which ended in misery and death, the story ends happily with the prostitute’s worldly success and contented retirement.

The heroine of these stories is always sensible, clever and sensuous. She makes a lot of money. In the French versions, she’s often a proponent of the anti-religious philosophy of the time. And she loves her work.

She is, of course, entirely a male creation. The first-person narrative is a confidence trick; it creates the illusion of a female subjectivity that is entirely absent. Though the woman appears to be speaking for herself, she tells us nothing about female sexuality. The use of the first person is an erotic device; as writer Lynn Hunt puts it, ‘The reader is provided with the vicarious pleasure of an encounter – be it only textual – with a prostitute.’²² Her sexual initiatives are contained within the male imagination: they express male desires. This is what makes her initiatives so very acceptable.

The ultimate libertine whore was created by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette is the heroine of his pornographic novel of 1792, Juliette ou les Prosperités de la Vice, the companion volume to his Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. Juliette and Justine are sisters and polar opposites. Juliette is the archetypal whore, Justine the perfect virtuous courtesan. Juliette enjoys sex, Justine is abused. Juliette is knowing, Justine is innocent and guileless, her innocence a constant incitement to the sadism of others. Juliette is brunette, Justine is blonde: Angela Carter has Juliette as the original bold brunette – like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, and Justine as one of the many put-upon blondes down to Monroe, whose ‘dazzling fair skins are of such a delicate texture that they look as if they will bruise at a touch, carrying the exciting stigmata of sexual violence for a long time’.²³ Juliette makes lots of money, Justine has to plead to be given shelter – invariably with dire consequences. And Juliette initiates; she is the subject of her sexual encounters: while Justine is passive, used, done-to. Even among prostitutes, it seems, there are madonnas and whores.

Juliette the sexual initiator has some of the qualities of Fanny Hill or her French counterparts in books like Margot la Ravaudeuse: she’s affluent, clever, materialistic and knowing. But unlike Fanny she is also very wicked. She seduces her father, is impregnated by him, murders him and subsequently aborts his child. She enjoys orgies in churches, poisoning, robbery, murder, castration, necrophilia. As Camille Paglia warns – don’t read de Sade before lunch.

Juliette is the most striking and influential example, but there are many other initiating women in de Sade’s stories. Madame de Clairvil, the Princess Borghese, Catherine the Great of Russia and Charlotte of Naples all have something in common with the bad sexual woman: they lack maternal qualities, their goals are money and power, they enjoy sex but it isn’t an end in itself. Yet these fabulous female initiators go way beyond the bad-woman script. With their cruelty, vast sexual appetites and schemes for world domination, they have a close affinity with the ogresses in the roughly contemporaneous French fairytale tradition – like the prince’s mother in Perrault’s version of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, who was ‘of the ogre race’ and liked eating the fresh meat of little children²⁴.

The female initiators in de Sade’s pantheon are also literally phallic, in that they have masculinized physical attributes and like to reverse roles. They have obstructed vaginas, or enlarged clitorises: they use dildos and are enthusiastic about buggery – which was a capital crime in France at the time. In the phantasmagorical world that de Sade’s characters inhabit, metaphor becomes reality. Here, the idea that the woman who takes sexual initiatives must have some male attributes is given concrete expression, in that she penetrates.

In reality, women rarely penetrate for pleasure: the dildo-wielding lesbian is a myth. But there is one group of women who regularly penetrate with objects – women who abuse children.²⁵ Such abuse involves the expression of cruel or violent impulses, and this equation of female penetration with cruelty is apt, because this is what most interests de Sade about sex – the way it can be used to control, exploit and dominate. De Sade seems to have little interest in gender, in the relationships between men and women: what really fascinates him is the relationship between master and slave.

Pornography today has lots of initiating women. Juliette is the prototype of one kind of pornographic heroine – though since de Sade’s time she’s been very much watered down – just as her sister Juliette is the prototype of the ‘heroine’ or victim of the masochistic scenario.

But all this female initiating is contained in structures that are by and for men: men pay, men say what they want, men write the stories. Or if women write the stories it’s to please their men – like ‘Pauline Reage’ who wrote The Story of O for her lover, or Anaïs Nin who wrote purely for money for an anonymous collector of erotica, and whose erotic style was by her own admission ‘derived from a reading of men’s works’.²⁶

Pornography is one context in which even extreme female initiatives meet with a lot of male approval – because the larger arena is male pleasure. It’s interesting to reflect that today’s pornography originates with a male fantasy about prostitution – a fantasy about women who obey male desires, however extreme, to the letter, and in so doing experience pleasure. No wonder women find pornography so problematic. We’re cut off from it at source. For, whatever the fantasy, prostitution in reality has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s own sexual self-expression. The prostitute is yet another female initiator who isn’t doing it for her own pleasure.

FAT FUNNY WOMEN: Come up sometime and see me

In the most celebrated come-on in cinematic history, Mae West, well past forty, all huge round shoulders, cleavage and diamonds, approaches a young and impassive Cary Grant, whom she believes to be a Salvation Army officer. ‘I always did like a man in a uniform, and that one fits you grand. Why don’t you come up sometime and see me? I’m home every evening.’

Mae West does all the male things. She looks with lust, she expresses approval of what she sees, she makes the arrangements. She defines what happens; she even does it in a typically male form of humour – in the celebrated one-liners that she wrote herself and that invariably express sexual appetite: ‘It’s better to be looked over than to be overlooked’, or ‘When I’m good I’m very very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.’

Angela Carter has suggested that Mae West’s sexuality could only be tolerated on the screen because she didn’t become a star until she’d reached virtually menopausal age. ‘This allowed her some of the anarchic freedom of the female impersonator, pantomime dame, who is licensed to make sexual innuendos because his masculinity renders them a form of male aggression upon the woman he impersonates … She made of her own predatoriness a joke that concealed its power, while simultaneously exploiting it.’²⁷

Mae West is larger than life. And her successors today are the fat funny women like Dawn French, Jo Brand and Vanessa Feltz, who also make a joke of their libidinousness while simultaneously exploiting it. Dawn French tells us that fat is sexy; Jo Brand jokes about tampons and oral sex; Vanessa Feltz writes salacious articles for She, and a tape of her writings is called What are these strawberries doing on my nipples? All three project a public persona that is explicitly about sexual appetite.

Why should big women, at least in their public and comic personas, be free to express sexual interest directly? There’s the obvious equation between appetite for food and appetite for sex – but are there deeper or more subtle explanations?

Fat has certain culture-specific qualities. Today we see female fat as unappealing, but in this we’re quite different from most other cultures. In some African societies, women are fattened up for marriage. In the Finnish saga, The Kalevala, a girl is urged by her mother to eat up to make herself beautiful:

One year eat melted butter: you’ll grow plumper than others; the next year eat pork: you’ll grow sleeker than others; a third year eat cream pancakes: you’ll grow fairer than others … .²⁸

Fat women are, in fact, physiologically more feminine than thin women, because they have higher levels of female hormones. But paradoxically, because of the public preference for thin women, we see fat as a denial of certain female qualities. Femininity is about reducing yourself; fat is about substance and taking up space, about a kind of power – which may be seen as male. And to be fat is to have permission to do masculine things. Conventional beauty imposes restrictions and implies a behaviour code: girls learn this at adolescence – drop your eyes, keep your knees together, don’t be too available. But fat may confer the kind of licence that postmenopausal women have in some societies – like Bali, where Margaret Mead found that women of child-bearing age were expected to behave modestly, but older women could use obscene language as freely as any man.²⁹

A need for initiative also results from the common perception of fat women as unattractive. More men are turned on by female fat than would publicly own up to it, given fat’s extreme unfashionability. But that is never acknowledged, and in their public personas these women aren’t there to be looked at. They have to express their sexuality through what they do – or what they say they do – rather than through what they look like. They have to bypass the normal mechanisms. Fat puts you outside the sexual game. The fat woman can’t wait for the man to come on to her; she has to go and get what she wants for herself.

The fat funny woman is quite different from the women we’ve considered so far – the women with ulterior motives; the bad women, the predators, the prostitutes. The fat funny woman has her own sexual pleasure – and that alone – in mind. She introduces another principle of female initiating.

Imagine the most orthodox paradigm of a sexual relationship. A heterosexual couple: she’s young and pretty; he’s a little older, taller, richer and higher status than her; they’re entering into a sexual relationship with a view to marriage and reproduction. That’s the stereotype. And the further we move away from that stereotypical coupling, the more likely we are to find female initiatives. The fat woman doesn’t fit the stereotype because of her unconventional appearance. And whenever women are unconventional in other ways – perhaps in their ages, perhaps in their sexual objectives – they also become more likely to make the first move.

OLDER WOMEN: Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

The Graduate was made in 1967. It tells the story of the seduction of naive Benjamin by his family’s forty-year-old neighbour, Mrs Robinson. The affair comes to an end when Benjamin falls in love with Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine.

Mrs Robinson takes every initiative. She makes the suggestions, touches first, sends him off to book the hotel room, takes off her own clothes. In other ways, too, she behaves like a stereotypical man: she’s the one who just wants sex and doesn’t want to talk.

The gender dynamics of the film haven’t worn nearly as well as the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. Today, in a social climate in which women consider themselves attractive well into their forties and fifties, we like Mrs Robinson a great deal more than once we did. Her brittle sexuality fascinates, and there’s something sad about her transformation from feisty seducer into vindictive old hag. By contrast, Benjamin’s relationship with Elaine seems pallid and asexual, though we’re clearly meant to approve of it.

But even though it all looks very different from the way it looked when it was made, The Graduate remains an intriguing film. In spite of the two decades of sexual liberation that have elapsed since it first came out, it’s still one of the most striking examples of female sexual initiating on celluloid. Compared to Mrs Robinson, Alex in Fatal Attraction is quite the Girl Guide – at least until she starts going crazy.

Here is another kind of woman who initiates – in our stories, and in reality: the woman who initiates sex with a much younger man. This pairing is another illustration of the principle that women are more likely to make the first move in unconventional relationships. Usually she does it to please the man. One model is the golden-hearted whore who gives a young man his first sexual experience: like the woman with armpits that smell of smoke who seduces José Arcadio in One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘She had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact.’³⁰ Mrs Robinson, though, isn’t in the least like this. What was once shocking and is now interesting about her is that her motives aren’t remotely pedagogic. She does it all for her own pleasure.

Because of this clash between the two versions of the seductive older woman – the warm altruistic sexual teacher, and the hard self-seeking aging seductress – when we come across cases of women having sex with boys, we don’t know what to think. Child protection workers struggle to know how to respond to accounts of sexual contact between older women and under-age boys. Such cases give rise to heated debate. What frame of reference to use? Is it abuse – or love and mutual pleasure?

A male social worker told me, ‘This lad was about thirteen, and the woman was around thirty. There was a lot of hinting and denying but nothing that amounted to a disclosure – but it was clear as daylight what was going on. My colleague was keen to see it as abuse – and was arguing by analogy that you should treat it as though it was a man with a thirteen-year-old girl. I felt intellectually that the argument had some force, but I couldn’t get worked up about it. There was no issue that he was being coerced into it. There was a very inconclusive child protection conference and it was registered as “grave concern” rather than abuse.’ But the older man who has sex with an under-age girl will always be seen as an abuser.

From time to time, cases of female teachers having sex with pupils hit the headlines. There’s confusion in our reaction to these news stories. We don’t know how to judge what has happened.

Jane Watts at forty-two had sex with a thirteen-year-old pupil whom she’d first met when she was his teacher at primary school. The newspaper reports when the case came to court in 1994 used a language of relationship: she ‘seduced’ him.³¹ They’d have used a quite different language if it had been a forty-two-year-old male teacher and a thirteen-year-old girl.

Tina, one of the women I interviewed, had a story like this to tell. As a young teacher, she’d been strongly attracted to a sixteen-year-old boy in her class. ‘I wormed and wheedled and went out of my way to be near him and with him,’ she said, ‘and I asked him out and I took him out. He was desperately shy. I finally got him out, I thought, God, I’ve put this boy in a situation that he doesn’t really want to be in for the time being – so I kind of left it – there was no need to be in contact because I was causing the contact – and then I used to get messages from his sister saying, “Oh, Kyle said, give him a ring for a game of tennis if you ever feel like it.” But I never did – I moved on to someone else and the excitement had faded into the past.’

Is she a loving teacher or a scheming seductress? She doesn’t know what to think of herself. She’s in love and wants to be with him: she worries he’ll feel abused. Kyle, too, is ambivalent. He seems shy and out of his depth. But then he sends messages hinting he might still be interested.

This theme of older women initiating with younger men will crop up again and again in this book. In our stories, older women do sometimes seduce younger men – but not very often because as a culture we don’t have much interest in older women as subjects of fiction. In the real world, though, being older than the man she wants is the kind of unconventionality that most frequently encourages a woman to make the first move.

Tina decided not to pursue the relationship with Kyle, but is now living with a man twelve years younger than her, a relationship she initiated.

LITTLE GIRLS: I got sommat to show you

One of the most delectable female initiators is a little girl. ‘She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was as rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings …’³² This is Rosie Burdock, who gives her name to Laurie Lee’s autobiography Cider with Rosie, first published in 1959, and celebrated for its explicitness about childhood sexuality.

Rosie is a girl around puberty, her age unspecified – ten or eleven, perhaps, to the narrator’s thirteen. In this encounter, he has the female role. She’s the one who plots and plans, asks, persists, tells him how he feels, makes it happen; he’s the one who says no when he means yes, acquiesces in her schemes, is swept away, has a sexual awakening.

‘I got sommat to show you.’

‘You push off,’ I said.

I felt dry and dripping, icy hot. Her eyes glinted, and I stood rooted.

‘You thirsty?’ she said.

‘I ain’t, so there.’

‘You be,’ she said. ‘C’mon.’

She takes him to the secret place she’s found under the waggon, gets him drunk on cider, and makes her move. ‘Then Rosie, with a remorseless strength, pulled me down from my tottering perch, pulled me down, down into her wide green smile and the deep subaqueous grass.’³³

Many of us have vivid memories of childhood sex play with other children of our own age. Perhaps we undressed and looked, or shared a self-stimulation technique involving blankets or rope-climbing we’d just discovered, or played Doctors and Nurses, or did ‘what grown ups do’. Sometimes there was a sexual thrill, sometimes it was purely play – and it wasn’t abusive, because there was no bullying or power imbalance. And girls suggest and start off these activities just as often as boys; girls also think up sexual games, explore, express curiosity, look and show.

This kind of initiating female behaviour fades at puberty – or perhaps becomes channelled into transient lesbian expression, in that mutual caressing of breasts with a best friend that many women who now feel thoroughly heterosexual recall from adolescence. Rosie probably wouldn’t have made such audacious moves with a lad she fancied a year or two later. With sexual maturity, the adult rules about male/female relationships assert themselves and, while they’re learning how they’re expected to behave, girls tend to be especially traditional – hence the rigidity of the double standard for girls in their early teens. Once the potential is there for conventional heterosexual pairings between almost sexually mature teenagers, girls act by the rules: no more wide green smiles and deep subaqueous grass.

Unless the object of a girl’s affections is a musician in her favourite band – in which case those rules may be flagrantly disregarded. Groupie behaviour can be seen as an extreme form of childhood sex play. The feeling itself may be deeply serious – a girl with a crush, just like a mature adult in the throes of sexual obsession, will think about almost nothing else – but there’s no hope of a response. The best that the boldest and most persistent rock chick could hope for is a one-night stand and a chance to steal his cigarette lighter to show off to her friends. This is a sexual behaviour that’s ‘outside’: it’s not about pair-bonding. And in this context a girl or woman may play extravagantly, taking outrageous initiatives – sending him her knickers, insinuating herself past the security men and hiding under his bed, or like ‘Cynthia Plastercaster’, making intimate casts of her favourite rock stars as a lasting memento of her passions.

PERVERSE WOMEN: I really fancy you and Josh

The older woman and the little girl are unconventional subjects for sexual stories because we don’t think of them as having any sexuality. But women who fit the classic sex object mould may also initiate if they want an unusual kind of sex.

The most baroque perversity in our stories is sex with animals – a kind of copulation that’s necessarily sterile, or in the wilder reaches of the imagination gives birth to monsters – and that can be read as a quest for extreme sexual experience. Titania wakes on her flowery bank to fall in love with Bottom in his donkey’s head. In Greek myth Pasiphaë conceives a passion for Poseidon’s white bull and hides herself in a carving of a beautiful cow in order to be penetrated by him. Catherine the Great, the nymphomaniac Russian empress, was rumoured to have died while attempting to have sex with a horse.

These women all initiate. In real life, too, where women have perverse sexual purposes, they’re more likely to make the first move.

Anna remembered, ‘Cindy just came up to me one night and said, “I really fancy you and Josh, I’d like to go to bed with you both, would that be alright?” I thought, Good grief. Then I thought, Mind you, it sounds quite sexy, I quite like the idea of slightly way-out things – so I told Josh and he said yes and off we went to bed.’

Among my interviewees, sexual arrangements involving two women and one man were always initiated by a woman, and negotiated between the women involved. This makes sense because it reduces competition between the women. Here Cindy initiates from outside the couple. But if it’s one of the couple who asks another woman in, again it makes sense for the woman to make the arrangements. If the man made the move, the two women might be in competition, but when the woman does the asking, the second woman is there for her.

This sexual arrangement may seem wonderfully decadent in fantasy. But, in reality, female-initiated threesomes sometimes have an agenda that isn’t primarily sexual. The threesome can be an attempt to domesticate or make safe a disruptive lesbian desire in a married woman, or a way of defusing sexual jealousy between two women who’ve slept with the same man. These strategies tend not to work, or only to work in the most temporary way. Three is an uncomfortable number, and such an arrangement can never satisfy the deepest needs we bring to our sexual relationships. (As W.H. Auden put it, ‘Not universal love, but to be loved alone’.³⁴) It’s rare for a threesome to meet more than once. But here women are clearly initiating for their own pleasure, though that pleasure may only be of the most transitory kind.

Group sex situations may also be set up by women, or involve bold female moves. And one reason why a woman might be keen to initiate this kind of sexual activity is that it enables her to have sex with another woman without calling her own sexual identity into question. This was clearly one of the attractions of group sex for Ginny, who said, ‘It was with my boyfriend Dave and my best friend Claudette and her bloke and another bloke. We were really quite drunk. Claudette was very flirtatious, we were both flirtatious women, and we were enjoying turning the men on, and we got into playing Strip Jack Naked. We were peeling our clothes off playing this card game and ended up totally naked and there was music playing, and Claudette and I got up and started dancing with each other, very much trying to turn the men on, and enjoying being exhibitionists. It was Dave who came up and put us together physically and Claudette and I just did what was expected really and carried on. The thing that was doing a lot for me was thinking the men were being turned on by it.’

Here the lesbian love-making is carefully placed within a heterosexual frame. Ginny stresses that for her the turn-on was the element of voyeurism and display, rather than the chance to make love to her closest friend.

Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, has a female initiator who sets up group sex, but this time with no lesbian element. Marlene is married to Pyke, the trendy theatre director. Her lust for Karim, the narrator, is the ostensible trigger for group sex involving the two couples – Marlene and Pyke, and Karim and his girlfriend, Eleanor.

Marlene is a comic figure, a little too old to be attractive: ‘… as my mother would have said, she was no spring chicken.’ She initiates with Karim: ‘ “Shall we have a kiss?” she said, after a while, stroking my face lightly.’ She has boundless sexual enthusiasm. ‘When we broke apart and I gulped back more champagne she raised her arms in a sudden dramatic gesture, like someone celebrating an athletics victory, and pulled off her dress.’ But towards the end of the session her libidinousness becomes pathetic as she gets drunk. Even her sexual skills are for laughs. ‘When she wanted to stop my moving inside her she merely flexed her cunt muscles and I was secured for life.’³⁵

In the end, as so often in male fictions, conventional and male-centred sexual values assert themselves. The group sex ends with the disruption of both relationships involved. At first Marlene seems rather splendid – but she’s revealed as a woman past her sell-by date. Her initiatives are comic, and she loses out in the end. It’s Pyke rather than Marlene who gets what he wants.

So who are the women who make the first move? Bad women, predators, prostitutes, and women with ulterior motives. Fat women, older women, little girls, and women who want threesomes or group sex.

Meredith Johnson, the Wicked Queen, Mrs Robinson and Mae West may entertain us delightfully. But they’re also profoundly influential and their influence is of the most retrograde kind.

They teach us that women only make the first move if they are exceptional, or want something exceptional, and that this isn’t something an ordinary woman might do with an ordinary man she likes. And they teach us that men are right to be wary of women who ask them out. As Kevin said, when I asked him how he’d feel about being approached by a woman, ‘I’d just always worry there’d be something behind it, or you’d be being pissed about in some way.’ No wonder.

Above all, they seem to be showing us that women shouldn’t do this if it’s true love that they’re after. What women who make the first move in our stories never ever get – except in the metamorphosing climaxes of fairytales – is love that lasts.

CHAPTER 3 WOMEN’S FEARS

‘I told him I was a nice girl.’

(Woman on ‘Blind Date’)

HERE’S SOME typical advice to the girl between about ten and fifteen who’s fallen in love and is wondering what to do about it.

‘Summer’s too short to wait around for him to make the first move, so take a deep breath and do it … . “D’you wanna go to the beach with me on Saturday” fixes the place and date and makes your intention clear so that you both know where you stand …. [Or you could try] the cheeky approach: “If you don’t come to the beach with me this Saturday I’ll tell all your mates that you wear knitted underpants”.’¹

‘All the signs are there – yes, he probably does feel the same way … Next time you’re both standing there smiling at one another – give him a kiss! That should sort things out.’²

‘Do plan some things to say. You don’t need to write a script, just have a few suggested date locations up your sleeve. Do be persistent. When his Mum says he’s out, he probably is out. (Unless she says it, like, all the time!) Do call him. Just do it.’³

The magazines in which this advice can be found – It’s Bliss, Fast Forward, Just 17 – have a very young readership. The girls who buy these magazines are on the cusp between childhood and sexual maturity, poised on the edge of the world of adult relationships – curious, excited, perhaps a little hesitant. Many of them aren’t yet going out with boys. Where they do have boyfriends, their relationships may have all the deep seriousness of first love – but they’re unlikely to lead to lasting pair-bonding.

The magazines reflect the ‘in-between’ status of the girls who read them. Sex advice columns, often vibrantly frank, jostle with pictures of polar-bear cubs. The mix of sexual sophistication with the artefacts of pubescent girl culture – Simba rucksacks, pop-star icons, pets, butterfly barrettes – gives these magazines a rather touching charm. And in this half-play, half-serious world of snogs, dreamy boyfs and Russian hamsters – a world that’s still close to that ‘little girl’ one in which girls take outrageous initiatives – making the first move is actively encouraged. Girls are urged to ring him, ask him out, get a life. Take a deep breath and say it – summer’s too short. If you want to know if he likes you, give him a kiss. Ring him, just do it. We seem to have entered the broad sunny uplands of female sexual assertiveness already.

Advice for young women who’ve left the hamster stage behind is quite different, though. Sexually mature women for whom sexual relationships might be about reproduction are urged to take quite another approach.

‘Great Date – but will he call again?’ asks an article in Company.⁴ The sub-heading urges, ‘Forget waiting by the phone – make that second date happen.’ The illustration shows a buoyant-looking woman in a slinky red dress. The promise of both illustration and sub-heading is that this will be all about female assertiveness.

The writer reflects, ‘I’ve called men up. I’ve even asked a few out on dates … I’ve since discovered how great it can be if you give a man the space to make a move on you. It’s a wonderful confidence boost for you when he does ring. Calling him first can deprive you of that pleasure … .’ What looked at first glance like a paean to female sexual initiatives turns out on closer inspection to be a manifesto for the courtship backlash – the story of a woman who used to act unconventionally and who reverts with a sense of relief to the traditional way of doing things and finds it rewarding.

The writer bases her advice on a concept of men’s true nature. ‘Why can’t we just come out and say what we really mean? Something along the lines of, “Listen, I really enjoyed myself tonight. Let’s do it again. How about next Wednesday?” Why? Because we all know how most men would react to such a request. What you mean is, you’d like to see him again; but what he thinks you mean is, “I am after commitment, not a casual fling, so if you’re not the marrying kind, you’re wasting my time.” ’

So what to do? She has a solution: to fib a bit.

‘So if, like me, you can’t stand shampooing your hair with the water off in case the damned phone rings after a great date, get real. He wants to call you? Don’t give him your number. Madness? No. Ask him for his. That’s what I did when I first went out with Jack. I told him the telephone line wasn’t yet connected at my new flat and, because I was temping, he couldn’t call me at work either – but I’d be happy to call him. It worked. For once, I didn’t have to stare at the phone and will it to ring.’

An article in Cosmopolitan is called ‘The lure of the sexually aggressive woman’.⁵ The illustration shows a woman with tousled hair and underwear embroidered with flowers gleefully hitting a prostrate man with a pillow. This is female sexual aggression as sexual display: like the flowery underwear, it adds to her appeal. But the text itself is full of qualifications. Every description of what an assertive woman might do is followed by a warning.

“The sexually aggressive woman … propositions men as easily as most of us play coy, never hesitates to tell her partner what she needs. If he can’t handle her directness, she dismisses him, reasoning that she’s better off with a man who lets her take the lead. Not all such women are acting out of healthy desire. Some are motivated by a deep-rooted hostility towards men.’

We’re warned that not only may sexual assertiveness be pathological, it may also be deeply unattractive – and even lead to sexual dysfunction in the man. ‘Few men will take orders from a drill sergeant. Telling him to “give it to me like a man” … may immediately kill desire … Angry demands may even result in your partner suffering from impotence or premature ejaculation.’

Above all, Cosmo Woman is warned not to be too assertive at the start of the relationship. The writer’s parting shot is about timing: the risks of female sexual ‘aggressiveness’ are greatest at the beginning of the relationship. ‘It’s true that some men are scared off by women who like to take charge; other men may welcome an assertive stance – but only after they’re well past the initial stages of courtship. And since nobody likes rejection, you’re probably better off playing by the old rules of seduction – at least until your romance develops … . Just remember that it’s best to hold off until he trusts you. When you are sure that he feels safe, unleash the tigress!’

Both these articles ooze ambivalence. Their ostensible subject matter is female sexual assertiveness: that’s the promise of the titles and the illustrations. But the writers have a problem. They like the idea of women asserting themselves – but they’re also worried that the woman who makes the first move will drive the man she wants away. They struggle to reconcile their enthusiasm for female initiatives with their beliefs about the nature of men – as creatures who hate to be told what to do, flee from commitment, are scared by women who come on too strong, and only want casual flings.

The solution both writers offer? Be devious.

The Company writer’s suggestion is to tell a little lie. Women are advised astonishingly often to lie in the early stages of courtship: advice columns in women’s magazines frequently urge us to lie to new lovers about how old we are and how many men we’ve slept with. This advice connects with a long tradition of female sexual pretence – faking orgasms, pretending to be a virgin when you’re not, or – its contemporary version – pretending not to be a virgin when you are. Different theories are brought to bear on the later stages of relationships. We’re always being told that successful marriages are all about openness and honesty: the Relate buzzwords are trust, sharing and communication. But here we’re only on the second date, and covert stratagems are called for. And the highly complicated way of taking the initiative that’s advocated is to pretend our phones don’t work to take away from him the option of ringing us so we have to ring him … .

For the Cosmopolitan writer, too, the answer is to act covertly, and to conceal your true sexual nature – ‘the tigress’ – till you’re sure he feels safe. Family therapists sometimes use paradoxical injunctions, where they try to upset rigid and pathological behaviour patterns by giving clients instructions that contain a contradiction: for instance, a client who can’t control her anger might be told to lose her temper at a specified time each day. Something rather similar and equally complicated is happening here – when women are told only to act on impulse with great caution.

We’ve moved a long way from the clear injunctions and cheerful egalitarianism of the pre-teen and teen magazines. In their later teens and twenties, it seems, women enter a sexual world where female initiatives are much more fraught and have all sorts of complicated meanings – insecurity, repressed hostility, a pathological need to control – and where there are huge discrepancies between male and female interests. In this world women may want one thing and men quite another, and women are urged, for their own good, to be cautious and cunning: to be devious when they yearn to be direct, to fib about their phones.

Articles in women’s magazines help to set the love agenda of the culture, and shape the stories women tell one another about their relationships. But of course it’s two-way traffic: these articles also reflect that culture. And advice to women in magazines, however contradictory or retrograde, does at least accurately mirror the uncertainty and ambivalence that many women feel.

Women react to the idea of female initiatives quite differently from men. ‘I wouldn’t do it, it’s just a thing I’ve got’, they say, or ‘You think if you look too keen they’ll go off you’, or ‘It’s a nice idea – but I really can’t see it working’, or ‘I just think there are all sorts of things in man/woman relationships which sorry to say are true’. Where do all these fears and worries come from?

FEMALE SHAME: Why true love still waits

Charlotte met a man at a party. ‘He was in love with me for the night,’ she said. ‘He was everso gorgeous, and he was going to Scotland the next day, and he gave me his address and said, “You must write” – and I did write, and I got this letter back which was clearly saying, “I had this fantasy about you for one night but I’m not interested.” It was a mistake to hurl myself – I felt I’d crossed some boundary and I shouldn’t have done.’

Charlotte’s letter was actually a response to a male initiative. By writing to him she didn’t really cross a boundary. But she thinks even this was going too far, and what she feels is a time-honoured form of sexual shame that’s clearly marked ‘Women Only’.

‘Shame’, says psychotherapist Susie Orbach, ‘acts as an internal censor, checking our thoughts and desires; sometimes protecting us from transgression, but more often constraining desire. The desire often can’t even be examined because it is fused with a shame that acts as a prohibition, telling us that it is wrong to want.’⁶ And there are good historical reasons for this vestigial shame about ‘hurling yourself’ that tells us that it is wrong to want. It’s a hangover from a time not so long ago when a woman’s sexual reputation was a practical and financial issue with far-reaching implications.

The system of patrilineal inheritance that is the foundation of any patriarchal system depends on the chastity of women: men have to be sure that their children are indeed their own. The very essence of patriarchy is the notion of sex outside marriage as a property violation. And under patriarchal regimes the risks of unchastity have far outweighed the pleasures of sex outside or before marriage for women. Women have suffered appalling punishments for being unchaste: stoning, clitoridectomy, institutionalization, the loss of their children. Within living memory, unmarried women who fell pregnant were thrown out of the family home and set to scrub floors in grim Church Army hostels.⁷ When the punishments for a minor sexual misdemeanour were so draconian, it’s no surprise that women drastically suppressed their delight in sexual expression: it simply wasn’t worth it.

The system of male dominance maybe dying, but the thinking that went with it lingers on. The traditional sexual code is still around – but not in its original brutal form. What we have today is a slim-line fat-free version.

We know we won’t be carted off to institutions for delinquent women if we act on our desires – but we may still feel there’s a price to be paid for the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

We don’t think it’s wrong for women to have sex outside a committed relationship, but we may still feel shame about certain kinds of sex – like one-night stands where afterwards the man doesn’t phone.

We don’t believe you’d be wise to wait till the ring is on your finger: today only born-again virgins from the True Love Waits movement believe you should put off sex till marriage. But we do suspect that relationships last longer if you don’t have sex the first time you go out. (Research shows that this belief is false: the Boston Dating Couples Study found that relationships where people made love the first night were just as likely as others to last.⁸)

We don’t consider it sinful for women to sleep with lots of men, but we do suspect that women who pursue pleasure too avidly will mess up their chances of having lasting love affairs, like those fictional bad women who flash their pubic hair at policemen or have sex in lifts with decent married men, and who come to no good in the end. It’s as though there’s an either/or quality about the sexual persona we project – whore or madonna, sleeping around or long-term committed relationships.

We no longer maintain that nice women don’t enjoy sex – yet much of the discussion about date rape is based on a concept of the female body as something that needs defending, of the penis as a dangerous weapon, of intercourse as something he wants to take and she doesn’t want to give, and of sexual negotiation as a struggle between two parties with opposing interests, a struggle around a possession – the woman’s sexuality. All of this is highly reminiscent of the old discourse about virginity.

We no longer believe that a woman who loses her virginity outside marriage is ‘ruined’, but we do believe that coercive sex usually causes permanent psychological ‘damage’ – today’s version of ‘ruin’. Of course, rape can and often does have devastating psychological consequences; but the idea that this damage is inevitable, is quite different to that caused by other kinds of assault, and cannot be repaired, does surely relate back to an antiquated sexual code.

And we know that men aren’t put off by women who initiate sex within an established relationship, who suggest innovative sexual practices they’d like to try, or who sometimes like the man to lie back while they do everything – yet we still believe men are turned off by women who take the lead at the very start of relationships.

Among the women I talked to, the ones who held most strongly to this slimline version of the old sexual code were girls in their early and mid teens. Paradoxically, it’s among the girls in the age group most often advised in their magazines to take direct initiatives that the double standard has most force.⁹ Co–existent with the wholesome upfront egalitarian vision of It’s Bliss – Take a deep breath and do it – there’s another darker, older and desperately unequal sexual universe.

GIRLS AND THEIR REPUTATIONS: Inside she’s a Skoda

Chloe is thirteen. She’s a thoughtful, cerebral girl, sometimes dazzlingly articulate. When I talked to her, she’d just started going out with her first boyfriend.

I asked her if girls ask boys out. ‘Yeah, they do,’ she said, ‘but the type of girls that ask boys out, they’re thought of by other girls as tarts. The girls that get really nice boys and have nice relationships at about fifteen are the girls that didn’t run after boys and aren’t sort of tarty, because the boys can respect them.

‘There’s a girl in my class called Lauren. We went to this concert at the boys’ school, and she took down her hair, combed it while she was sitting there, folded her waistband over, pulled her shirt out, tucked her socks down. All the boys were looking at her thinking, “What’s she doing?” She’s very pretty and the boys would all say to themselves, “I don’t like her really, she’s a bit of a show-off”, but to their mates they’d say, “Oh isn’t she nice?” She’s got a bad reputation with the boys, and now she’s never going to get a clear reputation – not after running after them like that. There was a comment that went round the school, I heard it from some boys, “Oh, Lauren: on the outside she’s a Porsche but inside she’s a Skoda … .” ’

Roxanne is a street-wise sixteen year old. There’s a poignant air about her: friends have described her as looking rather like a hungry puppy dog, with a pleading look in her eyes. When I asked her if she’d ever asked a boy out, she said she thought she’d be able to – but she’d never actually done it.

Roxanne already seems to know quite a lot about the darker side of sexual relationships. ‘Some men would just have sex with you and then that’s it,’ she said, ‘just want you for the sex and not want to get to know you, and I think because women find it easy to be intimate with each other and want to be intimate with men, that it’s quite hurtful when someone just wants sex. It’s different when the woman just wants sex and the man just wants sex, ’cos that’s just a quickie, but when the man sort of does it to you, you think, “What’s going on here?” – I’m being used by this person ’cos they don’t want to know, they obviously don’t care whether I feel good about having sex, whether the sex is good for me or whether it hurts me, physically or emotionally …’

Natalie is a nineteen-year-old law student. An elegant young woman with a very contained manner, she sees herself as highly traditional in her courtship behaviour, and likes it that way. ‘I’d never make a first move,’ she said. ‘None of my friends do, none of us have ever.’

When I asked her why she felt so strongly about this, she explained, ‘I can’t stand the idea of someone knowing that I like them when they don’t return it. A lot of times my friend’s said to a lad, “Oh Natalie does like you, she thinks you’re alright,” and they’ll say, “She doesn’t act like it,” and they think I’m really cold towards them. When I was in secondary school, a couple of boys started spreading stories about me and mud like that does stick, it turned out I had this reputation, and I had this string of unsuccessful relationships, and I couldn’t help thinking it was because of that, that they thought that was all I was good for. Now whenever there’s someone I like, I act like I don’t want to know. I have to know that he likes me just that little bit more than I like him, because that way I don’t get hurt as much.

‘I tend to be really offhand. Someone asked for my number the other night, and I was really bitchy actually, I just said, “Yeah, look it up”, and walked off. I wouldn’t have minded going out for a drink, but I think I really really did put him off.’

When Chloe, Roxanne and Natalie talk about courtship, they speak a highly traditional language – a language of being used, of mud that sticks, of girls who act sort of tarty, of playing hard to get to protect yourself from being hurt. These girls all have staunchly feminist mothers: they learnt at their mother’s knee that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, and The Female Eunuch and The Women’s Room were on their shelves at home. But they talk about their relationships as though all that feminist theorizing never happened. I’m saddened to hear these glittering girls still talking like this.

The sexual world they describe is all about reputations. When Chloe’s pretty friend Lauren hitches up her skirt and unpins her hair at the concert at the boys’ school, she is risking her reputation: and once she’s got a bad reputation, it’ll stick. It’s like that Victorian concept of the unchaste woman as ‘damaged goods’: in this sexual world, what’s done cannot be undone. When the boys in the Fourth Form start spreading stories about Natalie, she worries that her relationships don’t last because boys think sex is all she’s good for. So she learns to behave in ways that she doesn’t like. She calls herself cold, bitchy, and offhand, she’s very off-putting and then regrets it, but still feels a compulsion to abide by the old script because your reputation matters more than whether you get what you want.

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