This initiative has absolutely nothing to do with the woman’s pleasure. She is initiating as part of her work, and for decidedly ulterior and covert motives.
These women make good fiction, because of the tension generated by our uncertainty about them. They are stock characters in thrillers and spy stories. They are sexually exciting and they always mean trouble. When, in John Grisham’s The Firm, Mitch, the clever but naive lawyer, encounters a beautiful woman with a twisted ankle on a beach in the dark, a woman who unbuttons her blouse and tenderly pulls his hand towards her, we know there will be trouble ahead. Sure enough, someone is busily clicking away with a long-range lens. Eve Kendall, the blonde agent in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, only has to start making direct sexual suggestions to Roger Thornhill and we know she’s up to no good – though in the end, like most of the fictional entrappers, she falls in love with the man she’s seeking to ensnare: perhaps we couldn’t quite tolerate the idea that this highly appealing woman might have ulterior motives for going through her seduction routine.
The last few years have seen the emergence of a new group of initiating women with secret motives for their seductions. According to a recent Sunday Times article, these women can be found hanging out in New York bars and cafés.
Sofia is dressing for work. She has ‘shimmied into a figure-hugging, moss-green power suit that accentuates her peachy skin and has tucked her cleavage into a low-cut silk teddy.’3 She goes into a bar, picks out a man, sits down beside him and crosses her legs seductively and starts chatting him up. He loves it and makes a date with her. What he doesn’t know is that she is a decoy from the Check-a-Mate agency: his wife has paid $65 an hour to have a ‘fidelity check’ done on him.
This is women’s work. Eighty per cent of the agency’s clients are women checking up on their partners, so most of the decoys are female. Given that there’s apparently only a one in ten chance that your man will resist a Sofia-style overture, that $65 could surely be better spent.
Unsurprisingly, given her choice of work, Sofia is deeply contemptuous of men. Her appearance speaks of seduction – but her talk is full of contempt and hatred. To her, men are ‘scumbags’. The contrast between her appearance and behaviour – that seductively feminine persona – and her covert purposes and perceptions makes her deeply alarming.
Women like Sofia – who initiate to show men up in all their weakness, to take some act of delicious revenge, to punish men for some crime or misdemeanour, or just to have a good laugh at men’s expense – have always been around in comic fictions. In Twelfth Night, the pompous steward Malvolio is the butt of a cruel joke. Maria, the serving-maid, writes him a love letter purporting to be from the beautiful Olivia and leaves it for him to find: he promptly appears in yellow cross-garters as specified in the letter and everyone falls about. And in the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, there are a number of comic stories of women who make the first move.4 Al-Haddar, the Barber’s Second Brother, is seduced by a beautiful and wealthy young woman who plies him with wine, then takes off all her clothes. She urges him to undress, too, and to chase her through the house. She entices him into a darkened room where he falls through a trap door into the market of the leather merchants who laugh at him, beat him up and take him to the Governor of Baghdad to be publicly disgraced.
The women’s strategies in these stories are predicated on beliefs about male sexual weakness. The men succumb to the women’s overtures because they’re such dupes: they’re so easy to pull. The laugh is on men for their willingness to be persuaded that such marvellous dazzling women – so far out of their class – might actually want them. As Sofia says, ‘Men think with the wrong head.’
ALTRUISTIC WOMEN: Kissing the frog
Another classic story-line concerns a female sexual initiative that is essentially altruistic. The motive here is perhaps too noble to be described as ulterior – but these women do have something in common with women who seduce for laughs or to show men up, in that their motives for making a move are hidden, and have nothing to do with their own pleasure. In these stories, women take sexual initiatives to save somebody.
One of the most widely found folk or fairytale themes is the ‘animal groom’, in which a woman is married to an animal or monster. Here a kiss or act of love initiated by a woman effects a magical metamorphosis. In ‘Hans My Hedgehog’, ‘The Frog Prince’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the heroine kisses or shares her bed with some physically unprepossessing creature, often in response to a request from her father – perhaps in order to set her father free, or to fulfil a pledge made by him. She does it with a sense of repulsion but is pleasantly surprised how it all turns out: the frog becomes a prince and the beast beautiful.
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim reads a deeper meaning into these stories. For Bettelheim, the animal represents children’s feelings about adult sexuality and adult genitals – the frog, which blows itself out when excited, is a particularly vivid symbol – and the transformation of frog, hedgehog or beast into prince is a metaphor for a psychosexual transformation that must be accomplished if sexual maturity is to be achieved. The story shows that, in order to enjoy sex, ‘the female has to overcome her view of sex as loathsome and animal-like’, so that what was once repellent becomes desirable.5 In the story, the woman – usually a pubescent girl – initiates without any hope or expectation of pleasure, and has a delightful surprise. Here is one female initiative that has a happy ending – though it wasn’t embarked on with that intent and the woman’s motives are purely altruistic.
Feminist writer Robin Norwood, in her self-help book, Women Who Love Too Much, has a different take on these stories.6 She sees them as terribly misleading lessons for women, with their implicit promise that women can save and reform unlovely men through the power of their sexual love. She suggests that whenever a woman says, ‘I thought I could save him’, she’s been taken in by the patriarchal propaganda that urges us to love addicted or disturbed or needy men – that urges Beauty to ‘stand by’ the Beast. Intriguingly, the suspicion that there’s some dreadful patriarchal kernel to these stories seems to be shared by today’s canny little girls, who find stories like ‘The Frog Prince’ unacceptably wimpish and favour the Babette Cole version in which the princess’s kiss works the other way round, and the unappealing prince that the princess doesn’t want to marry is turned into a frog.
Here then is our first category of initiating women. These sexual initiatives are purposeful and direct, but the motive has nothing to do with the woman’s own pleasure: she is doing her job, serving her country, setting her father free, exposing a man’s weakness, saving someone, doing her bit for the Russian industrial complex. And, except in the fairytale where her move breaks the spell that bound him or kept him beastly, the men who succumb to the women’s advances come to regret it; they find themselves recruited as spies, in prison, blackmailed, rejected by their women, or made a laughing stock.
BAD WOMEN: Watering the tree of strife
Njal’s Saga is a labyrinthine Icelandic epic that dates from the thirteenth century. It tells the story of Njal and Gunnar and Gunnar’s wife, Hallgerd. As Hallgerd grows into womanhood, she becomes very lovely, with long legs and long silken hair that veils her body and, at first, only Hrut her uncle sees through her: ‘The child is beautiful enough,’ he says, ‘and many will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief’s eyes have come into our kin.’7
Hallgerd exemplifies a peculiarly female form of wickedness; she acts covertly, she’s a stirrer. A whispered word from Hallgerd, and storehouses go up in flames, minor slights are brutally avenged, and men come home with their axes covered in blood. Her