Fairytales are a particularly rich source of bad sexual women. Feminist commentators on fairytales have noted that the powerful instigating women in the stories we know best are without exception wicked. In Perrault or Grimm, good women are passive, sometimes so passive they’re fast asleep or comatose in glass coffins. The women who get things going are always bad.
For today’s children, these vibrant and alarming presences are most vividly evoked by Disney films. Who are the truly terrifying characters in the Disney films we saw as children – and which today’s children watch so avidly? Marina Warner comments that children find the masculine beasts in fairytales thrilling rather than scary – and certainly children above about three can be rather fond of the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, with his shaggy mane, lolloping gait and poignant air of self-pity. But the wicked women in Disney are something else. Some are directly based on fairytale, others are more recently invented but have fairytale resonances – and all of them send small children scuttling behind the sofa. In The Sleeping Beauty there’s the Wicked Fairy, and in 101 Dalmatians Cruella de Vil, who steals puppies to make into fur coats. The Rescuers has Medusa, who sends little Penny down a mine shaft in a bucket to hunt for a diamond. And in Disney’s first film, Snow White, there’s the Wicked Queen, whose baroque savagery makes her the most alarming of all Disney’s creations.
These women are the very embodiment of that ‘return to glamour’ which fashion journalists periodically attempt to foist on the reluctant woman in the street. They dress as vamps. They wear black and red, the sexual colours. Cruella de Vil and Medusa have spiky heels and spaghetti-thin shoulder straps, and the medieval-style villainesses have blood-red lips and fingernails and far too much mascara. For these women, desirability is everything; their aim above all is to go on looking good. This is why they send little girls down mines to look for jewels, or demand that the hearts of pretty teenagers be brought to them in caskets, or trap loveable puppies to turn into fur coats, or put nubile princesses out of the competition for a hundred years. These projects derive their urgency from the fact that these women are ageing and can’t bear it; they seek to hang on to their central role on the sexual stage at a time in the life-cycle when they should be handing over to a younger, more innocent generation. In seeking to present themselves as sexual women when they should be mothers, they go against the natural order. Their concern with appearance is also a sadistic agenda – in that the feelings, safety and even lives of others are sacrificed to the women’s superficial pleasures.
One of the perennially puzzling questions about women who do take sexual initiatives for their own pleasure is why, in our books and films and stories, they are always always bad. Part of the answer may lie here, with Cruella de Vil or the Wicked Queen – in the fact that some of the wickedest sexual women are in stories for children.
The wickedness of the Disney villainesses is very specific. It’s about being horrid to the weakest and most appealing creatures – small cuddly animals and the nicest little girls. It’s about competing sexually with the Princess when you’re old enough to be Queen Mother. It’s the precise opposite of mothering. For the child, this absence of mothering behaviour is the very essence of female badness. And the story makes clear that it’s the woman’s sexuality that drives her to behave in this unnatural way. So from the child’s viewpoint, there’s a profound opposition between nurturant and sexual behaviour in his or her mother.
Freud devoted much attention to children’s horror of the primal scene – the sight of their parents having intercourse. In PsychoDarwinism, Christopher Badcock puts forward a plausible sociobiological explanation for this.8 He argues that the child doesn’t want her parents to have sex because she doesn’t want them to reproduce anymore. Another brother or sister takes something away from her: she wants to keep everything for herself – the breast milk, the food, the parental care. And because it’s the mother who provides most of the nurturing, it’s the mother’s sexuality rather than the father’s that is particularly problematic for the child. A father can spread his seed around without taking anything away from his own offspring – but a mother’s sex drive inevitably pulls her away from her child.
Some feminist writers such as childbirth guru Sheila Kitzinger have suggested that the absolute division between the maternal and the sexual in women’s lives represents a triumph of patriarchal values.9 According to this view, patriarchy has taught us to overlook the voluptuous beauty of the pregnant body, lied about the orgasmic delights of giving birth, and tried to deny the powerful sexuality of mothers. Motherhood and sexuality, runs the argument, don’t have to be split and polarized as they are in our society.
This has never made sense to me. The conflict certainly isn’t experienced by women themselves as something that’s externally imposed: it’s felt at a very deep level. When a woman is most wrapped up in her children – when those children are dependent babies – she tends to feel little interest in sex, and the rebirth of her libido as her children become less dependent always involves some distancing from her children. Perhaps she pushes them away a little, or perhaps she’s just acknowledging their need for independence. Either way, she may experience this as a re-assertion of her own ‘selfishness’ and her children will probably see it that way too. This re-discovery of herself as a sexual being may also pull a woman away from her present family towards a new partner, with all the disruption for the child that such a move entails. No wonder children don’t want their mothers to be sexual.
This opposition between mothering and sexual initiating is one of the fundamental principles of sexual behaviour in the natural world. There are some species in which courtship roles are reversed: the female initiates and the male responds.10 And in all these cases where the female makes the first move in courtship, the male does most of the childcare: he guards the eggs and the young as well, as in some species of birds, or, like some fish, he carries the eggs with him, brooding them in the mouth. Sea-horses reverse roles in a startlingly complete way. The female has a sort of penis, a ‘prehensile ovipositor’, which she uses to inject eggs into the male’s body where they develop: and the female sea-horse actively courts the male. In the 1920s, a biologist observed a courtship in the Crypturellus variegatus, a species of bird in which the male alone incubates the egg and raises the young. He wrote that when the two sexes saw one another, the female ‘gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling’ – while the male gave only ‘a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion’.11
This broad pattern can also be traced out in human courtship. Just as, in the natural world, female animals which don’t rear the young are more likely to initiate so, too, in human society, it is those women who aren’t looking to bear and rear children as a result of the courtship who are most likely to make the first move.
Maybe the badness of female sexual initiators seems so natural because it hooks into a genuine conflict in the female psyche. Maybe the fairytale villainesses hint at dilemmas that are built into the female sexual life-cycle.
BAD WOMEN TODAY: Get down to business
But this notion of a perennial conflict between our sexuality and our feelings for our children – and specifically between sexual initiating and mothering behaviour – is only part of the story. There must also be something peculiar to our own time about the appeal of wicked female initiators for, recently, in our most popular public fictions, there’s been a positive efflorescence of wicked women who make the first move. The bad sexual woman whose story goes back to Sumer is still doing her stuff down at the multiplex – being a bitch, wickedly scheming, having great sex and, in the end, getting her just deserts. The tremendous commercial success of the films in which these women feature suggests they have something special to say to us today.
In stories for children, the sexual initiative-taking of the bad woman can only be hinted at. In films for adults, we’re left in no doubt as to what she does.
Meredith