to write in with their own love stories. Classic FM for instance has ‘Classic Romance, sponsored by Black Magic chocolates’. Here the climax to the narrative is invariably the couple’s realization that they’re in love – a realization that only comes after many weeks of looking into one another’s eyes to the accompaniment of music from the popular classical repertoire: ‘As we listened to “The Lark Ascending” in the beautiful setting at Kenwood we knew we were deeply in love …’.
On ITV’s ‘Blind Date’, the public and private spheres are entangled in a thoroughly post-modernist way. Though these are real people having a real relationship, the viewers share in the narrative tension. We guess who’ll be chosen, we’re there at the moment of revelation, we speculate on what will happen – and we’re there, too, when they come back and say how it all went, to see how the actual narrative matches up to our imagined one. The programme is set up on principles of scrupulous equality: a man chooses one of three women, and a woman one of three men. But when the couple return from their date, the real world breaks through the egalitarian veneer, and the carefully scripted innuendo of the earlier dialogue – ‘If I were a beer and you pulled me, I’d certainly make your legs wobble’ – is replaced by the clichés of our unequal courtship rituals – ‘He respected me’, ‘I told him I had a stop button’, or, from a man, ‘I came away with nothing’.
And then there are the stories that are purely public and shared – our novels and films. These public stories reflect collective preoccupations – but they also shape those preoccupations. And our public stories tend to take the same line as many of the people I interviewed: they may question male initiative but in the end they always sanction it. The plot dénouements – like the things that people do, as opposed to what they say they do – reaffirm men in their traditional role.
Recently, some of our favourite films have explored male sexual initiative in the context of a renewed interest in the erotic and narrative possibilities of lengthy courtship. Dangerous Liaisons, The Piano, Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral are all love stories that investigate the possibilities and limits of male sexual power. These films show where we are now – what is open to question and what is taken as read.
To make a story of courtship, it has to be protracted – and within the traditional script that will depend on the woman’s continuing lack of compliance: she has to be difficult to woo. One way to achieve this is to set the story in the past. Dangerous Liaisons takes place in eighteenth-century France, where the grotesque physical displays of the period – the pushed-up breasts, powdered hair, hips in cages – mirror the artifice of the manners; both appearance and behaviour involve a fabulous exaggeration of notions of sexual difference. The plot centres on two seductions. The Marquise de Merteuil begs her friend the Vicomte to seduce and corrupt Cécile, the convent-educated innocent her former lover wants to marry; this is seduction as an act of revenge. The Vicomte then sets out to seduce a pious married woman – Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel, seething with delicately suppressed sexuality. The sadistic thrill comes from the clash between the male and female agendas; for the Vicomte, seduction is an elaborate game, but for the women who are the objects of his sexual interest, it’s a deadly serious thing.
Jane Campion’s film The Piano is also set in the past. Ada, the mute heroine, enters into a sexual bargain with George Baines, her taciturn neighbour: in order to buy her beloved piano back, she’ll do just what he says. He tells her to take off her stockings, then her dress to reveal her marvellously authentic whalebone petticoat, then all her clothes. It’s a formalization of a traditional courtship process that proceeds in stages dictated by the man, in which he gradually undresses and exposes her and learns her secrets; she’s there to be revealed and it’s his initiative that makes that happen. This is a film that strives for authenticity, not just in its relishing of the textures of the period – the lisle stockings with holes in, the greasy unwashed hair – but also in its recognition of the potential cruelty inherent in the gender roles of the time.
As with Dangerous Liaisons, the film’s erotic charge comes from its sadism: it’s the eroticism of male control. Once the bargain has been agreed, the man has all the power. The sadism is only tolerable because we know the outcome – that she’ll come to desire him, too. A lot of women loved it.
Where protracted courtship has a contemporary setting, the goal of courtship can’t simply be the sex. Today people make love too early in the process to allow space for much of a story. To make a narrative of it, the significance of making love has to be changed: there has to be a different consummation.
Pretty Woman gives the courtship theme a clever twist, restoring the kiss to its climactic place in the narrative. This is a Mills and Boon story from a decade or two ago: ‘and then he kissed her …’. Julia Roberts is a hooker whom Richard Gere pays to spend a week with him. She’s fallen for him; will he fall for her? As she’s a prostitute they have lots of sex anyway, but kissing is defined as more intimate than sex – something she doesn’t let her clients do. It’s only when she lets him kiss her that their relationship changes and becomes something more than a business arrangement.
Four Weddings and a Funeral is also about a courtship that proceeds beyond sex. Superficially, the film might seem to challenge gender stereotypes. Charles is a type of the new hesitant masculinity, all fluttering self-deprecation, and his story is a female one – the story of a search for a spouse, while Carrie is quite sexually assertive. But it’s his definition that matters: though they’ve made love twice, it’s only when he asks her to have a relationship with him that the courtship is completed. It all looks quite fresh and contemporary – but it’s really highly traditional. Men define what a relationship is about, men make the arrangements, and women are blameless whatever they do, so long as they remain indirect – however much pain they may cause by their failure to be clear about what they want. Carrie behaves very badly, and her sin is a failure of initiative: when her marriage breaks up, she doesn’t get in touch with Charles, though she knows he adores her: she simply turns up at his wedding.
In each of these films, the end of the courtship process isn’t sex but a re-definition. In Pretty Woman and Four Weddings and a Funeral, a private sexual arrangement becomes a publicly recognized love affair. In The Piano and Dangerous Liaisons, the courtship ends with the person who entered coldly into a sexual arrangement or contract falling in love. So the Vicomte, who seduced the virtuous Madame de Tourvel for the sheer pleasure of making her unvirtuous, falls in love with her, and in The Piano, Ada, as in all the best patriarchal fairytales, falls in love with her oppressor.
These films all supply intriguing glosses to the traditional narrative movement. Yet for all their variety, they only deviate within the conventional parameters. They explore different kinds of male sexual power: the cynical and sadistic power of the seducer, the financial power of the man who uses a prostitute, the erotically explicit control of the man who strikes a sexual bargain that allows him to make all the moves, and, in Four Weddings, the highly tentative and self-conscious instrumentality of Charles the New Man, who finds it such a struggle to do what a man’s gotta do. In all these love stories, it’s still the man who sets the terms of the bargain, makes the arrangements, defines, pursues, seduces. We’re playing around with the script, we’re self-conscious about it – but we aren’t yet going beyond it.
The seeds of change are there – in public and in private. Our favourite public love stories – the films we all go to see – are questioning the traditional roles, yet they rarely transcend them. And when people talk about their own courtship behaviour, they emphasize their deviations from the classic script, as though hungry for things to be different. But mostly it’s still men who make the initial moves. Yet, of course, there are women who initiate and there always have been. Who are these women and what can we learn from them?
