Some Girls Do
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.