lie in the early stages of courtship: advice columns in women’s magazines frequently urge us to lie to new lovers about how old we are and how many men we’ve slept with. This advice connects with a long tradition of female sexual pretence – faking orgasms, pretending to be a virgin when you’re not, or – its contemporary version – pretending not to be a virgin when you are. Different theories are brought to bear on the later stages of relationships. We’re always being told that successful marriages are all about openness and honesty: the Relate buzzwords are trust, sharing and communication. But here we’re only on the second date, and covert stratagems are called for. And the highly complicated way of taking the initiative that’s advocated is to pretend our phones don’t work to take away from him the option of ringing us so we have to ring him … .
For the Cosmopolitan writer, too, the answer is to act covertly, and to conceal your true sexual nature – ‘the tigress’ – till you’re sure he feels safe. Family therapists sometimes use paradoxical injunctions, where they try to upset rigid and pathological behaviour patterns by giving clients instructions that contain a contradiction: for instance, a client who can’t control her anger might be told to lose her temper at a specified time each day. Something rather similar and equally complicated is happening here – when women are told only to act on impulse with great caution.
We’ve moved a long way from the clear injunctions and cheerful egalitarianism of the pre-teen and teen magazines. In their later teens and twenties, it seems, women enter a sexual world where female initiatives are much more fraught and have all sorts of complicated meanings – insecurity, repressed hostility, a pathological need to control – and where there are huge discrepancies between male and female interests. In this world women may want one thing and men quite another, and women are urged, for their own good, to be cautious and cunning: to be devious when they yearn to be direct, to fib about their phones.
Articles in women’s magazines help to set the love agenda of the culture, and shape the stories women tell one another about their relationships. But of course it’s two-way traffic: these articles also reflect that culture. And advice to women in magazines, however contradictory or retrograde, does at least accurately mirror the uncertainty and ambivalence that many women feel.
Women react to the idea of female initiatives quite differently from men. ‘I wouldn’t do it, it’s just a thing I’ve got’, they say, or ‘You think if you look too keen they’ll go off you’, or ‘It’s a nice idea – but I really can’t see it working’, or ‘I just think there are all sorts of things in man/woman relationships which sorry to say are true’. Where do all these fears and worries come from?
FEMALE SHAME: Why true love still waits
Charlotte met a man at a party. ‘He was in love with me for the night,’ she said. ‘He was everso gorgeous, and he was going to Scotland the next day, and he gave me his address and said, “You must write” – and I did write, and I got this letter back which was clearly saying, “I had this fantasy about you for one night but I’m not interested.” It was a mistake to hurl myself – I felt I’d crossed some boundary and I shouldn’t have done.’
Charlotte’s letter was actually a response to a male initiative. By writing to him she didn’t really cross a boundary. But she thinks even this was going too far, and what she feels is a time-honoured form of sexual shame that’s clearly marked ‘Women Only’.
‘Shame’, says psychotherapist Susie Orbach, ‘acts as an internal censor, checking our thoughts and desires; sometimes protecting us from transgression, but more often constraining desire. The desire often can’t even be examined because it is fused with a shame that acts as a prohibition, telling us that it is wrong to want.’6 And there are good historical reasons for this vestigial shame about ‘hurling yourself’ that tells us that it is wrong to want. It’s a hangover from a time not so long ago when a woman’s sexual reputation was a practical and financial issue with far-reaching implications.
The system of patrilineal inheritance that is the foundation of any patriarchal system depends on the chastity of women: men have to be sure that their children are indeed their own. The very essence of patriarchy is the notion of sex outside marriage as a property violation. And under patriarchal regimes the risks of unchastity have far outweighed the pleasures of sex outside or before marriage for women. Women have suffered appalling punishments for being unchaste: stoning, clitoridectomy, institutionalization, the loss of their children. Within living memory, unmarried women who fell pregnant were thrown out of the family home and set to scrub floors in grim Church Army hostels.7 When the punishments for a minor sexual misdemeanour were so draconian, it’s no surprise that women drastically suppressed their delight in sexual expression: it simply wasn’t worth it.
The system of male dominance maybe dying, but the thinking that went with it lingers on. The traditional sexual code is still around – but not in its original brutal form. What we have today is a slim-line fat-free version.
We know we won’t be carted off to institutions for delinquent women if we act on our desires – but we may still feel there’s a price to be paid for the pursuit of sexual pleasure.
We don’t think it’s wrong for women to have sex outside a committed relationship, but we may still feel shame about certain kinds of sex – like one-night stands where afterwards the man doesn’t phone.
We don’t believe you’d be wise to wait till the ring is on your finger: today only born-again virgins from the True Love Waits movement believe you should put off sex till marriage. But we do suspect that relationships last longer if you don’t have sex the first time you go out. (Research shows that this belief is false: the Boston Dating Couples Study found that relationships where people made love the first night were just as likely as others to last.8)
We don’t consider it sinful for women to sleep with lots of men, but we do suspect that women who pursue pleasure too avidly will mess up their chances of having lasting love affairs, like those fictional bad women who flash their pubic hair at policemen or have sex in lifts with decent married men, and who come to no good in the end. It’s as though there’s an either/or quality about the sexual persona we project – whore or madonna, sleeping around or long-term committed relationships.
We no longer maintain that nice women don’t enjoy sex – yet much of the discussion about date rape is based on a concept of the female body as something that needs defending, of the penis as a dangerous weapon, of intercourse as something he wants to take and she doesn’t want to give, and of sexual negotiation as a struggle between two parties with opposing interests, a struggle around a possession – the woman’s sexuality. All of this is highly reminiscent of the old discourse about virginity.
We no longer believe that a woman who loses her virginity outside marriage is ‘ruined’, but we do believe that coercive sex usually causes permanent psychological ‘damage’ – today’s version of ‘ruin’. Of course, rape can and often does have devastating psychological consequences; but the idea that this damage is inevitable, is quite different to that caused by other kinds of assault, and cannot be repaired, does surely relate back to an antiquated sexual code.
And we know that men aren’t put off by women who initiate sex within an established relationship, who suggest innovative sexual practices they’d like to try, or who sometimes like the man to lie back while they do everything – yet we still believe men are turned off by women who take the lead at the very start of relationships.
Among the women I talked to, the ones who held most strongly to this slimline version of the old
