style="font-size:15px;"> In every system of oppression, what is kept down is fantasized about and feared. Studies of colonization have looked at the way the qualities of the oppressed group or race, especially their sexuality and aggression, are exaggerated and then feared: hence, for instance, notions about the super-potency of black men. So, in the fantasies that underlie these films, the kind of sexual initiative that women might be taking – asking for the touches they want, perhaps – becomes a shocking or destructive sexual assertion: Meredith sexually harassing Tom, Brigit putting her hand down a man’s trousers in a public place.
The second distortion that drives these fantasies is the over-valuation of sexual behaviour as a true litmus test of personality – especially for women. In the films, the women’s sexual behaviour is part of a gestalt. Their assertiveness in bed is one manifestation of their assertiveness in every area of their lives. The woman who makes the first move in her sexual relationships puts herself first in other areas too, and the woman who disregards the traditional sexual script is deficient in other traditional female qualities. Like Hallgerd in the old Icelandic saga with her ‘thief’s eyes’, she takes things that rightfully belong to others.
Sex is sometimes seen as the key to personality for men as well. Hence the demands for the resignations of adulterous politicians: if they cheat on their wives, runs the argument, they surely can’t be trusted to govern the country well. But it’s also recognized that for men sex isn’t the whole story. Oskar Schindler, for instance, is venerated as one of the great altruists of the twentieth century, for the hundreds of lives he saved during the Holocaust. He treated women badly: he was openly unfaithful to his wife, seduced his secretaries, and doubtless created a lot of misery all round. He fascinates us as a flawed human being who was also capable of startling love and courage.
But a woman’s sexuality is never seen as a thing apart. It’s impossible to imagine a female Oskar Schindler – a woman who was thoughtless and promiscuous in her sexual life, but also revered for doing great good.
The bad woman script takes it as axiomatic that a woman’s sexual assertiveness is part of a wider assertiveness or even aggressiveness in her psychological make-up. But this is a distortion. A woman’s courtship behaviour doesn’t essentially correlate with the rest of her personality. When I talked to women about their courtship styles, I simply didn’t find that the more assertive women were more likely to ask men out.
Certainly there may be connections between a woman’s willingness to take direct initiatives and other aspects of her sexuality. Among the women I talked to, the few women who sometimes made the first move tended to be good at asking for what they wanted in bed, turned on by visual sexual imagery, and attracted to younger, less affluent, less powerful men. And women with a very indirect style at the start of courtship tended to be attracted to powerful or older men, to be turned on by masochistic fantasies and to find it hard to ask for what they wanted in bed. Indirect women were also more likely than women who sometimes made the first move to have had sex forced on them at some time.
But there were no consistencies at all with the women’s behaviour at work or in other parts of their lives – no connections between how they’d rate on sexual assertiveness and the rest of their personality and functioning. I met women with high-status careers and an air of great self-assurance who had the most reticent and evasive courtship styles – and quiet women with conventional views and unremarkable jobs who were married to men they’d asked out.
Female sexual initiatives are not part of a gestalt – and the fact that a woman makes the first move doesn’t reveal anything about other aspects of her personality. And it certainly doesn’t mean she is more likely to assert herself to accomplish evil ends.
The bad sexual woman may be great entertainment – but there’s no psychological truth in her. Adrian Lyne is wrong. None of us knows any girls like Alex.
BEAUTIFUL PREDATORS: She took me to her faery grot
There is a sub-class of bad sexual women who are scarcely women at all – women who, in a more profound way than Sofia the man-trapper or ‘Lizzie James’, are not what they seem.
These women are exquisite. They are quintessentially feminine, scarcely made of solid flesh, almost translucent, with the perfect facial features of beautiful children – yet the enchanting surface is pure illusion.
The romantic poets – Keats, for instance – adored the beautiful predator.
I met a Lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild. She took me to her faery grot And there she wept and sighed full sore …14
She takes the initiative; she takes him back to her place. There she weeps and sighs, moving the man with some hint of sorrow beyond words – but it’s all just part of her seduction technique. She leaves him spent and desolate, enslaved or vampirized amid a barren landscape – ‘The sedge is withered from the lake.’
Lady Arabella March in Bram Stoker’s psychotic last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, is another beautiful predator.15 In Ken Russell’s film version, luscious Amanda Donohoe entices a marvelling young man back to her house, where she strips to her black suspenders, grows a splendid set of fangs and kills him with a venomous bite. Bob Dylan also seems to know about these women and their beauty, their initiatives and their supernatural erasures and thefts: his Melinda ‘invites you up into her room’ – but then she ‘takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon’.
One of the most delectable predators can be found in Angela Carter’s short story, ‘The Lady in the House of Love’. Some of Keats’s themes re-surface in Carter’s thoroughly camp postmodernist telling. This Lady hides her lust for blood behind an air of exquisite vulnerability. She is so delicate she is almost transparent, her hair ‘falls down as straight as if it were soaking wet’, she has ‘the fragility of the skeleton of a moth’, her nails and teeth are ‘as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar …’, and she seems weighed down with some hidden sorrow: ‘A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates that she is inconsolable … When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.’16 Later the unvampirized parts are buried under her roses, which grow obscenely lush. She is saved from her undead torment by a man on a bicycle who, totally oblivious to all the clues, sees only a nice girl who needs looking after, and undoes the enchantment by sucking the blood from a cut on her hand.
The predator has feminine qualities to excess – she is almost too beautiful, too fragile, too difficult to console. The one thing that doesn’t fit is her taking of initiatives. The men should have suspected: why would so lovely a creature need to make the moves? She takes him back to her place, she invites him into her bed – but the consummation is not at all what he had in mind.
These stories hint at archetypal fears about women’s sexual attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the biological purpose of female beauty is to publicize good genes and good health and so to suggest that this woman is a good reproductive bet; apparently, for instance, symmetry of feature, which is one of our criteria of beauty, is only found in an organism that has been well-nourished while developing.17 If this is what female beauty is for, then the male fear must be that this is all illusion. (As indeed it often is – given women’s struggles to re-make themselves with all the money and skill at their disposal.) So in Keats’s poem the landscape is barren and withered; for all those signifiers of health and youth –
