Some Girls Do

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.