we’d just discovered, or played Doctors and Nurses, or did ‘what grown ups do’. Sometimes there was a sexual thrill, sometimes it was purely play – and it wasn’t abusive, because there was no bullying or power imbalance. And girls suggest and start off these activities just as often as boys; girls also think up sexual games, explore, express curiosity, look and show.
This kind of initiating female behaviour fades at puberty – or perhaps becomes channelled into transient lesbian expression, in that mutual caressing of breasts with a best friend that many women who now feel thoroughly heterosexual recall from adolescence. Rosie probably wouldn’t have made such audacious moves with a lad she fancied a year or two later. With sexual maturity, the adult rules about male/female relationships assert themselves and, while they’re learning how they’re expected to behave, girls tend to be especially traditional – hence the rigidity of the double standard for girls in their early teens. Once the potential is there for conventional heterosexual pairings between almost sexually mature teenagers, girls act by the rules: no more wide green smiles and deep subaqueous grass.
Unless the object of a girl’s affections is a musician in her favourite band – in which case those rules may be flagrantly disregarded. Groupie behaviour can be seen as an extreme form of childhood sex play. The feeling itself may be deeply serious – a girl with a crush, just like a mature adult in the throes of sexual obsession, will think about almost nothing else – but there’s no hope of a response. The best that the boldest and most persistent rock chick could hope for is a one-night stand and a chance to steal his cigarette lighter to show off to her friends. This is a sexual behaviour that’s ‘outside’: it’s not about pair-bonding. And in this context a girl or woman may play extravagantly, taking outrageous initiatives – sending him her knickers, insinuating herself past the security men and hiding under his bed, or like ‘Cynthia Plastercaster’, making intimate casts of her favourite rock stars as a lasting memento of her passions.
PERVERSE WOMEN: I really fancy you and Josh
The older woman and the little girl are unconventional subjects for sexual stories because we don’t think of them as having any sexuality. But women who fit the classic sex object mould may also initiate if they want an unusual kind of sex.
The most baroque perversity in our stories is sex with animals – a kind of copulation that’s necessarily sterile, or in the wilder reaches of the imagination gives birth to monsters – and that can be read as a quest for extreme sexual experience. Titania wakes on her flowery bank to fall in love with Bottom in his donkey’s head. In Greek myth Pasiphaë conceives a passion for Poseidon’s white bull and hides herself in a carving of a beautiful cow in order to be penetrated by him. Catherine the Great, the nymphomaniac Russian empress, was rumoured to have died while attempting to have sex with a horse.
These women all initiate. In real life, too, where women have perverse sexual purposes, they’re more likely to make the first move.
Anna remembered, ‘Cindy just came up to me one night and said, “I really fancy you and Josh, I’d like to go to bed with you both, would that be alright?” I thought, Good grief. Then I thought, Mind you, it sounds quite sexy, I quite like the idea of slightly way-out things – so I told Josh and he said yes and off we went to bed.’
Among my interviewees, sexual arrangements involving two women and one man were always initiated by a woman, and negotiated between the women involved. This makes sense because it reduces competition between the women. Here Cindy initiates from outside the couple. But if it’s one of the couple who asks another woman in, again it makes sense for the woman to make the arrangements. If the man made the move, the two women might be in competition, but when the woman does the asking, the second woman is there for her.
This sexual arrangement may seem wonderfully decadent in fantasy. But, in reality, female-initiated threesomes sometimes have an agenda that isn’t primarily sexual. The threesome can be an attempt to domesticate or make safe a disruptive lesbian desire in a married woman, or a way of defusing sexual jealousy between two women who’ve slept with the same man. These strategies tend not to work, or only to work in the most temporary way. Three is an uncomfortable number, and such an arrangement can never satisfy the deepest needs we bring to our sexual relationships. (As W.H. Auden put it, ‘Not universal love, but to be loved alone’.34) It’s rare for a threesome to meet more than once. But here women are clearly initiating for their own pleasure, though that pleasure may only be of the most transitory kind.
Group sex situations may also be set up by women, or involve bold female moves. And one reason why a woman might be keen to initiate this kind of sexual activity is that it enables her to have sex with another woman without calling her own sexual identity into question. This was clearly one of the attractions of group sex for Ginny, who said, ‘It was with my boyfriend Dave and my best friend Claudette and her bloke and another bloke. We were really quite drunk. Claudette was very flirtatious, we were both flirtatious women, and we were enjoying turning the men on, and we got into playing Strip Jack Naked. We were peeling our clothes off playing this card game and ended up totally naked and there was music playing, and Claudette and I got up and started dancing with each other, very much trying to turn the men on, and enjoying being exhibitionists. It was Dave who came up and put us together physically and Claudette and I just did what was expected really and carried on. The thing that was doing a lot for me was thinking the men were being turned on by it.’
Here the lesbian love-making is carefully placed within a heterosexual frame. Ginny stresses that for her the turn-on was the element of voyeurism and display, rather than the chance to make love to her closest friend.
Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, has a female initiator who sets up group sex, but this time with no lesbian element. Marlene is married to Pyke, the trendy theatre director. Her lust for Karim, the narrator, is the ostensible trigger for group sex involving the two couples – Marlene and Pyke, and Karim and his girlfriend, Eleanor.
Marlene is a comic figure, a little too old to be attractive: ‘… as my mother would have said, she was no spring chicken.’ She initiates with Karim: ‘ “Shall we have a kiss?” she said, after a while, stroking my face lightly.’ She has boundless sexual enthusiasm. ‘When we broke apart and I gulped back more champagne she raised her arms in a sudden dramatic gesture, like someone celebrating an athletics victory, and pulled off her dress.’ But towards the end of the session her libidinousness becomes pathetic as she gets drunk. Even her sexual skills are for laughs. ‘When she wanted to stop my moving inside her she merely flexed her cunt muscles and I was secured for life.’35
In the end, as so often in male fictions, conventional and male-centred sexual values assert themselves. The group sex ends with the disruption of both relationships involved. At first Marlene seems rather splendid – but she’s revealed as a woman past her sell-by date. Her initiatives are comic, and she loses out in the end. It’s Pyke rather than Marlene who gets what he wants.
So who are the women who make the first move? Bad women, predators, prostitutes, and women with ulterior motives. Fat women, older women, little girls, and women who want threesomes or group sex.
Meredith Johnson, the Wicked Queen, Mrs Robinson and Mae West may entertain us delightfully. But they’re also profoundly influential and their influence is of the most retrograde kind.
They teach us that women only make the first move if they are exceptional, or want something exceptional, and that this isn’t something an ordinary woman might do with an ordinary man she likes. And they teach us that men are right to be wary of women who ask them out. As Kevin said, when I asked him how he’d feel about being approached by a woman, ‘I’d just always
