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.
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