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.
‘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