the most orthodox paradigm of a sexual relationship. A heterosexual couple: she’s young and pretty; he’s a little older, taller, richer and higher status than her; they’re entering into a sexual relationship with a view to marriage and reproduction. That’s the stereotype. And the further we move away from that stereotypical coupling, the more likely we are to find female initiatives. The fat woman doesn’t fit the stereotype because of her unconventional appearance. And whenever women are unconventional in other ways – perhaps in their ages, perhaps in their sexual objectives – they also become more likely to make the first move.
OLDER WOMEN: Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson
The Graduate was made in 1967. It tells the story of the seduction of naive Benjamin by his family’s forty-year-old neighbour, Mrs Robinson. The affair comes to an end when Benjamin falls in love with Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine.
Mrs Robinson takes every initiative. She makes the suggestions, touches first, sends him off to book the hotel room, takes off her own clothes. In other ways, too, she behaves like a stereotypical man: she’s the one who just wants sex and doesn’t want to talk.
The gender dynamics of the film haven’t worn nearly as well as the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. Today, in a social climate in which women consider themselves attractive well into their forties and fifties, we like Mrs Robinson a great deal more than once we did. Her brittle sexuality fascinates, and there’s something sad about her transformation from feisty seducer into vindictive old hag. By contrast, Benjamin’s relationship with Elaine seems pallid and asexual, though we’re clearly meant to approve of it.
But even though it all looks very different from the way it looked when it was made, The Graduate remains an intriguing film. In spite of the two decades of sexual liberation that have elapsed since it first came out, it’s still one of the most striking examples of female sexual initiating on celluloid. Compared to Mrs Robinson, Alex in Fatal Attraction is quite the Girl Guide – at least until she starts going crazy.
Here is another kind of woman who initiates – in our stories, and in reality: the woman who initiates sex with a much younger man. This pairing is another illustration of the principle that women are more likely to make the first move in unconventional relationships. Usually she does it to please the man. One model is the golden-hearted whore who gives a young man his first sexual experience: like the woman with armpits that smell of smoke who seduces José Arcadio in One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘She had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact.’30 Mrs Robinson, though, isn’t in the least like this. What was once shocking and is now interesting about her is that her motives aren’t remotely pedagogic. She does it all for her own pleasure.
Because of this clash between the two versions of the seductive older woman – the warm altruistic sexual teacher, and the hard self-seeking aging seductress – when we come across cases of women having sex with boys, we don’t know what to think. Child protection workers struggle to know how to respond to accounts of sexual contact between older women and under-age boys. Such cases give rise to heated debate. What frame of reference to use? Is it abuse – or love and mutual pleasure?
A male social worker told me, ‘This lad was about thirteen, and the woman was around thirty. There was a lot of hinting and denying but nothing that amounted to a disclosure – but it was clear as daylight what was going on. My colleague was keen to see it as abuse – and was arguing by analogy that you should treat it as though it was a man with a thirteen-year-old girl. I felt intellectually that the argument had some force, but I couldn’t get worked up about it. There was no issue that he was being coerced into it. There was a very inconclusive child protection conference and it was registered as “grave concern” rather than abuse.’ But the older man who has sex with an under-age girl will always be seen as an abuser.
From time to time, cases of female teachers having sex with pupils hit the headlines. There’s confusion in our reaction to these news stories. We don’t know how to judge what has happened.
Jane Watts at forty-two had sex with a thirteen-year-old pupil whom she’d first met when she was his teacher at primary school. The newspaper reports when the case came to court in 1994 used a language of relationship: she ‘seduced’ him.31 They’d have used a quite different language if it had been a forty-two-year-old male teacher and a thirteen-year-old girl.
Tina, one of the women I interviewed, had a story like this to tell. As a young teacher, she’d been strongly attracted to a sixteen-year-old boy in her class. ‘I wormed and wheedled and went out of my way to be near him and with him,’ she said, ‘and I asked him out and I took him out. He was desperately shy. I finally got him out, I thought, God, I’ve put this boy in a situation that he doesn’t really want to be in for the time being – so I kind of left it – there was no need to be in contact because I was causing the contact – and then I used to get messages from his sister saying, “Oh, Kyle said, give him a ring for a game of tennis if you ever feel like it.” But I never did – I moved on to someone else and the excitement had faded into the past.’
Is she a loving teacher or a scheming seductress? She doesn’t know what to think of herself. She’s in love and wants to be with him: she worries he’ll feel abused. Kyle, too, is ambivalent. He seems shy and out of his depth. But then he sends messages hinting he might still be interested.
This theme of older women initiating with younger men will crop up again and again in this book. In our stories, older women do sometimes seduce younger men – but not very often because as a culture we don’t have much interest in older women as subjects of fiction. In the real world, though, being older than the man she wants is the kind of unconventionality that most frequently encourages a woman to make the first move.
Tina decided not to pursue the relationship with Kyle, but is now living with a man twelve years younger than her, a relationship she initiated.
LITTLE GIRLS: I got sommat to show you
One of the most delectable female initiators is a little girl. ‘She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was as rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings …’32 This is Rosie Burdock, who gives her name to Laurie Lee’s autobiography Cider with Rosie, first published in 1959, and celebrated for its explicitness about childhood sexuality.
Rosie is a girl around puberty, her age unspecified – ten or eleven, perhaps, to the narrator’s thirteen. In this encounter, he has the female role. She’s the one who plots and plans, asks, persists, tells him how he feels, makes it happen; he’s the one who says no when he means yes, acquiesces in her schemes, is swept away, has a sexual awakening.
‘I got sommat to show you.’
‘You push off,’ I said. I felt dry and dripping, icy hot. Her eyes glinted, and I stood rooted. ‘You thirsty?’ she said. ‘I ain’t, so there.’ ‘You be,’ she said. ‘C’mon.’
She takes him to the secret place she’s found under the waggon, gets him drunk on cider, and makes her move. ‘Then Rosie, with a remorseless strength, pulled me down from my tottering perch, pulled me down, down into her wide green smile and the deep subaqueous grass.’33
Many of us have vivid memories of childhood sex play with other children
