‘When Gilgamesh had put on the crown, glorious Ishtar lifted her eyes, seeing the beauty of Gilgamesh. She said, “Come to me, Gilgamesh, and be my bridegroom; grant me seed of your body, let me be your bride and you shall be my husband …” ’
(Epic of Gilgamesh, 3000 BC)
A WOMAN writes erotic letters to a man. In a sexual initiative rare even between the most intimate partners, she shares her highly transgressive fantasies.
She says her imagination runs riot. She hopes he has the same unusual dreams as her. Sometimes, she says, she scares herself with what she really wants. She finds his inner violence a turn-on. She wants to know all about him, to learn his inner secrets.
She urges him to greater and greater intimacies, to an exposure of the depths of his psyche, of the most secret parts of himself. She wants to feel overwhelmed by him, so she’s completely in his power. She urges him to show less control. In fact, she says, she wouldn’t be scared if he’d committed acts of extreme violence. The revelation that he has this potential is something she longs for. ‘In certain ways,’ she writes, ‘I wish you had because it would make things easier for me … That’s the kind of man I want … .’
The woman was the policewoman known as ‘Lizzie James’. The man was Colin Stagg, who was under suspicion for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. The sexual letters were an elaborate entrapment technique devised by a forensic psychologist.1
‘Lizzie James’s’ use of a sexuality that has been invented for her in an attempt to elicit a confession from a man suspected of a sex crime is an extreme example of a time-honoured use of female initiative, where women make the first move in order to get men to confess to crimes or to give up their secrets. Mata Hari, the Belgian spy executed by the Germans in the First World War, was perhaps the most celebrated exponent of the art. During the Cold War, both sides recruited women who specialized in seduction and blackmail. Today, in Russia, there are the ‘swallows’ – well-educated women fluent in foreign languages who are trained by the Russian security services to set honey-traps for foreign businessmen.2
This initiative has absolutely nothing to do with the woman’s pleasure. She is initiating as part of her work, and for decidedly ulterior and covert motives.
These women make good fiction, because of the tension generated by our uncertainty about them. They are stock characters in thrillers and spy stories. They are sexually exciting and they always mean trouble. When, in John Grisham’s The Firm, Mitch, the clever but naive lawyer, encounters a beautiful woman with a twisted ankle on a beach in the dark, a woman who unbuttons her blouse and tenderly pulls his hand towards her, we know there will be trouble ahead. Sure enough, someone is busily clicking away with a long-range lens. Eve Kendall, the blonde agent in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, only has to start making direct sexual suggestions to Roger Thornhill and we know she’s up to no good – though in the end, like most of the fictional entrappers, she falls in love with the man she’s seeking to ensnare: perhaps we couldn’t quite tolerate the idea that this highly appealing woman might have ulterior motives for going through her seduction routine.
The last few years have seen the emergence of a new group of initiating women with secret motives for their seductions. According to a recent Sunday Times article, these women can be found hanging out in New York bars and cafés.
Sofia is dressing for work. She has ‘shimmied into a figure-hugging, moss-green power suit that accentuates her peachy skin and has tucked her cleavage into a low-cut silk teddy.’3 She goes into a bar, picks out a man, sits down beside him and crosses her legs seductively and starts chatting him up. He loves it and makes a date with her. What he doesn’t know is that she is a decoy from the Check-a-Mate agency: his wife has paid $65 an hour to have a ‘fidelity check’ done on him.
This is women’s work. Eighty per cent of the agency’s clients are women checking up on their partners, so most of the decoys are female. Given that there’s apparently only a one in ten chance that your man will resist a Sofia-style overture, that $65 could surely be better spent.
Unsurprisingly, given her choice of work, Sofia is deeply contemptuous of men. Her appearance speaks of seduction – but her talk is full of contempt and hatred. To her, men are ‘scumbags’. The contrast between her appearance and behaviour – that seductively feminine persona – and her covert purposes and perceptions makes her deeply alarming.
Women like Sofia – who initiate to show men up in all their weakness, to take some act of delicious revenge, to punish men for some crime or misdemeanour, or just to have a good laugh at men’s expense – have always been around in comic fictions. In Twelfth Night, the pompous steward Malvolio is the butt of a cruel joke. Maria, the serving-maid, writes him a love letter purporting to be from the beautiful Olivia and leaves it for him to find: he promptly appears in yellow cross-garters as specified in the letter and everyone falls about. And in the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, there are a number of comic stories of women who make the first move.4 Al-Haddar, the Barber’s Second Brother, is seduced by a beautiful and wealthy young woman who plies him with wine, then takes off all her clothes. She urges him to undress, too, and to chase her through the house. She entices him into a darkened room where he falls through a trap door into the market of the leather merchants who laugh at him, beat him up and take him to the Governor of Baghdad to be publicly disgraced.
The women’s strategies in these stories are predicated on beliefs about male sexual weakness. The men succumb to the women’s overtures because they’re such dupes: they’re so easy to pull. The laugh is on men for their willingness to be persuaded that such marvellous dazzling women – so far out of their class – might actually want them. As Sofia says, ‘Men think with the wrong head.’
ALTRUISTIC WOMEN: Kissing the frog
Another classic story-line concerns a female sexual initiative that is essentially altruistic. The motive here is perhaps too noble to be described as ulterior – but these women do have something in common with women who seduce for laughs or to show men up, in that their motives for making a move are hidden, and have nothing to do with their own pleasure. In these stories, women take sexual initiatives to save somebody.
One of the most widely found folk or fairytale themes is the ‘animal groom’, in which a woman is married to an animal or monster. Here a kiss or act of love initiated by a woman effects a magical metamorphosis. In ‘Hans My Hedgehog’, ‘The Frog Prince’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the heroine kisses or shares her bed with some physically unprepossessing creature, often in response to a request from her father – perhaps in order to set her father free, or to fulfil a pledge made by him. She does it with a sense of repulsion but is pleasantly surprised how it all turns out: the frog becomes a prince and the beast beautiful.
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim reads a deeper meaning into these stories. For Bettelheim, the animal represents children’s feelings about adult sexuality and adult genitals – the frog, which blows itself out when excited, is a particularly vivid symbol – and the transformation of frog, hedgehog or beast into prince is a metaphor for a psychosexual transformation that must be accomplished if sexual maturity is to be achieved. The story shows that, in order to enjoy sex, ‘the female has to overcome her view of sex as loathsome and animal-like’, so that what was once repellent becomes desirable.5 In the story,
