la Ravaudeuse: she’s affluent, clever, materialistic and knowing. But unlike Fanny she is also very wicked. She seduces her father, is impregnated by him, murders him and subsequently aborts his child. She enjoys orgies in churches, poisoning, robbery, murder, castration, necrophilia. As Camille Paglia warns – don’t read de Sade before lunch.
Juliette is the most striking and influential example, but there are many other initiating women in de Sade’s stories. Madame de Clairvil, the Princess Borghese, Catherine the Great of Russia and Charlotte of Naples all have something in common with the bad sexual woman: they lack maternal qualities, their goals are money and power, they enjoy sex but it isn’t an end in itself. Yet these fabulous female initiators go way beyond the bad-woman script. With their cruelty, vast sexual appetites and schemes for world domination, they have a close affinity with the ogresses in the roughly contemporaneous French fairytale tradition – like the prince’s mother in Perrault’s version of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, who was ‘of the ogre race’ and liked eating the fresh meat of little children24.
The female initiators in de Sade’s pantheon are also literally phallic, in that they have masculinized physical attributes and like to reverse roles. They have obstructed vaginas, or enlarged clitorises: they use dildos and are enthusiastic about buggery – which was a capital crime in France at the time. In the phantasmagorical world that de Sade’s characters inhabit, metaphor becomes reality. Here, the idea that the woman who takes sexual initiatives must have some male attributes is given concrete expression, in that she penetrates.
In reality, women rarely penetrate for pleasure: the dildo-wielding lesbian is a myth. But there is one group of women who regularly penetrate with objects – women who abuse children.25 Such abuse involves the expression of cruel or violent impulses, and this equation of female penetration with cruelty is apt, because this is what most interests de Sade about sex – the way it can be used to control, exploit and dominate. De Sade seems to have little interest in gender, in the relationships between men and women: what really fascinates him is the relationship between master and slave.
Pornography today has lots of initiating women. Juliette is the prototype of one kind of pornographic heroine – though since de Sade’s time she’s been very much watered down – just as her sister Juliette is the prototype of the ‘heroine’ or victim of the masochistic scenario.
But all this female initiating is contained in structures that are by and for men: men pay, men say what they want, men write the stories. Or if women write the stories it’s to please their men – like ‘Pauline Reage’ who wrote The Story of O for her lover, or Anaïs Nin who wrote purely for money for an anonymous collector of erotica, and whose erotic style was by her own admission ‘derived from a reading of men’s works’.26
Pornography is one context in which even extreme female initiatives meet with a lot of male approval – because the larger arena is male pleasure. It’s interesting to reflect that today’s pornography originates with a male fantasy about prostitution – a fantasy about women who obey male desires, however extreme, to the letter, and in so doing experience pleasure. No wonder women find pornography so problematic. We’re cut off from it at source. For, whatever the fantasy, prostitution in reality has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s own sexual self-expression. The prostitute is yet another female initiator who isn’t doing it for her own pleasure.
FAT FUNNY WOMEN: Come up sometime and see me
In the most celebrated come-on in cinematic history, Mae West, well past forty, all huge round shoulders, cleavage and diamonds, approaches a young and impassive Cary Grant, whom she believes to be a Salvation Army officer. ‘I always did like a man in a uniform, and that one fits you grand. Why don’t you come up sometime and see me? I’m home every evening.’
Mae West does all the male things. She looks with lust, she expresses approval of what she sees, she makes the arrangements. She defines what happens; she even does it in a typically male form of humour – in the celebrated one-liners that she wrote herself and that invariably express sexual appetite: ‘It’s better to be looked over than to be overlooked’, or ‘When I’m good I’m very very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.’
Angela Carter has suggested that Mae West’s sexuality could only be tolerated on the screen because she didn’t become a star until she’d reached virtually menopausal age. ‘This allowed her some of the anarchic freedom of the female impersonator, pantomime dame, who is licensed to make sexual innuendos because his masculinity renders them a form of male aggression upon the woman he impersonates … She made of her own predatoriness a joke that concealed its power, while simultaneously exploiting it.’27
Mae West is larger than life. And her successors today are the fat funny women like Dawn French, Jo Brand and Vanessa Feltz, who also make a joke of their libidinousness while simultaneously exploiting it. Dawn French tells us that fat is sexy; Jo Brand jokes about tampons and oral sex; Vanessa Feltz writes salacious articles for She, and a tape of her writings is called What are these strawberries doing on my nipples? All three project a public persona that is explicitly about sexual appetite.
Why should big women, at least in their public and comic personas, be free to express sexual interest directly? There’s the obvious equation between appetite for food and appetite for sex – but are there deeper or more subtle explanations?
Fat has certain culture-specific qualities. Today we see female fat as unappealing, but in this we’re quite different from most other cultures. In some African societies, women are fattened up for marriage. In the Finnish saga, The Kalevala, a girl is urged by her mother to eat up to make herself beautiful:
One year eat melted butter: you’ll grow plumper than others; the next year eat pork: you’ll grow sleeker than others; a third year eat cream pancakes: you’ll grow fairer than others … .28
Fat women are, in fact, physiologically more feminine than thin women, because they have higher levels of female hormones. But paradoxically, because of the public preference for thin women, we see fat as a denial of certain female qualities. Femininity is about reducing yourself; fat is about substance and taking up space, about a kind of power – which may be seen as male. And to be fat is to have permission to do masculine things. Conventional beauty imposes restrictions and implies a behaviour code: girls learn this at adolescence – drop your eyes, keep your knees together, don’t be too available. But fat may confer the kind of licence that postmenopausal women have in some societies – like Bali, where Margaret Mead found that women of child-bearing age were expected to behave modestly, but older women could use obscene language as freely as any man.29
A need for initiative also results from the common perception of fat women as unattractive. More men are turned on by female fat than would publicly own up to it, given fat’s extreme unfashionability. But that is never acknowledged, and in their public personas these women aren’t there to be looked at. They have to express their sexuality through what they do – or what they say they do – rather than through what they look like. They have to bypass the normal mechanisms. Fat puts you outside the sexual game. The fat woman can’t wait for the man to come on to her; she has to go and get what she wants for herself.
The fat funny woman is quite different from the women we’ve considered so far – the women with ulterior motives; the bad women, the predators, the prostitutes. The fat funny woman has
