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.
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