This opposition between mothering and sexual initiating is one of the fundamental principles of sexual behaviour in the natural world. There are some species in which courtship roles are reversed: the female initiates and the male responds.10 And in all these cases where the female makes the first move in courtship, the male does most of the childcare: he guards the eggs and the young as well, as in some species of birds, or, like some fish, he carries the eggs with him, brooding them in the mouth. Sea-horses reverse roles in a startlingly complete way. The female has a sort of penis, a ‘prehensile ovipositor’, which she uses to inject eggs into the male’s body where they develop: and the female sea-horse actively courts the male. In the 1920s, a biologist observed a courtship in the Crypturellus variegatus, a species of bird in which the male alone incubates the egg and raises the young. He wrote that when the two sexes saw one another, the female ‘gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling’ – while the male gave only ‘a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion’.11
This broad pattern can also be traced out in human courtship. Just as, in the natural world, female animals which don’t rear the young are more likely to initiate so, too, in human society, it is those women who aren’t looking to bear and rear children as a result of the courtship who are most likely to make the first move.
Maybe the badness of female sexual initiators seems so natural because it hooks into a genuine conflict in the female psyche. Maybe the fairytale villainesses hint at dilemmas that are built into the female sexual life-cycle.
BAD WOMEN TODAY: Get down to business
But this notion of a perennial conflict between our sexuality and our feelings for our children – and specifically between sexual initiating and mothering behaviour – is only part of the story. There must also be something peculiar to our own time about the appeal of wicked female initiators for, recently, in our most popular public fictions, there’s been a positive efflorescence of wicked women who make the first move. The bad sexual woman whose story goes back to Sumer is still doing her stuff down at the multiplex – being a bitch, wickedly scheming, having great sex and, in the end, getting her just deserts. The tremendous commercial success of the films in which these women feature suggests they have something special to say to us today.
In stories for children, the sexual initiative-taking of the bad woman can only be hinted at. In films for adults, we’re left in no doubt as to what she does.
Meredith Johnson in Disclosure attempts to seduce Tom Sanders in her office. She grabs him when he’s making a phone call, snatches the phone away and presses herself against him. ‘Get down to business,’ she says. In Presumed Innocent, Carolyn Polhemus pulls Rusty Sabich by his tie into a dark office: ‘You’re going to be so good,’ she says as she meaningfully removes her earrings. In The Last Seduction, Brigit sticks her hand down the trousers of the man she’s just met in a bar. When she first meets Nick, Catherine Tremell in Basic Instinct says, ‘Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice …’: she also famously flashes her pubic hair at a group of policemen – which is about as direct as an indirect initiative can get. Alex in Fatal Attraction doesn’t make the first move: she is asked to dinner by Dan. But she does signal her interest in an affair by saying, ‘I can be very discreet’. And then, when he doesn’t ring after their weekend together, she takes a whole range of follow-up initiatives that might be more typical of men – she rings him at work, rings him at home, buys opera tickets, turns up at his office. Later her initiatives become still less conventional.
These women have all entered the public world on their own terms. They power-dress, they carry briefcases, they understand financial markets and make lots of money. They are also all bad. It isn’t just a question of breaking a few rules and wearing fuck-me shoes. These aren’t just Gutsy Girls who Get Ahead. They are seriously wicked. Catherine Tremell is a serial murderess. Carolyn Polhemus takes bribes, and loses interest in Rusty when she finds he’s less ambitious than she’d like. When Meredith Johnson’s attempt to have sex with Tom backfires, she takes out a sexual harassment suit against him, and the attempt at seduction turns out to have an ulterior motive – to frame him and have him fired for a mistake she’d made. Alex abducts Dan’s child, has a close affinity with Cruella de Vil in her propensity for doing horrible things to cuddly animals – the emotional climax of the film is her boiling of the pet rabbit – and turns up in Dan’s bathroom with a carving knife. And Brigit, by far the most stylish of the bunch, makes off with the money from her husband’s drug deal, kills off a few philandering partners along the way, and then – in a neat inversion of notions of women’s vulnerability to male violence – murders her husband with her Mace spray.
The role sex plays in these stories is the mirror image of its role in the traditional woman’s romance. In Mills and Boon, the heroine doesn’t always enjoy sex – she may well have her first orgasm in bed with the hero – but her whole life is about love, and love is the motor and climax of the plot. In the bad woman stories, it’s the other way round: the women enjoy sex effortlessly – they certainly don’t need hours of delicate fingerwork – but it isn’t the main event. Catherine Tremell may be ‘the fuck of the century’, but what really turns her on is writing books and sticking ice-picks into people. Often a sexual encounter is about something else, a means to an end – as it was for the women with ulterior motives at the start of this chapter. Through sex, the women in these films further their career ambitions, get material for their next book, or find someone to take the rap for their crimes. They are using the men.
When these stories are aimed at women, they’re funny. We laugh – and we want her to win. The story taps into that part of every woman that makes her grin when she says ‘Lorena Bobbitt’. The Last Seduction is a woman’s film. And we identify with Brigit: we long to smoke with her kind of style, to speak with that husky rasp, to be so coolly unburdened by conscience. And Brigit gets away with it triumphantly in the end: the final shot in the film shows her reclining in her stretch limo as she languidly burns the last piece of evidence incriminating her.
But when the story is aimed at men, it is horror, and the woman is punished. Fatal Attraction is a male fantasy – and here the initiating woman meets a bloody death.
These stories are powerful: they shape our thinking. Fatal Attraction, in particular, has been a stunningly successful piece of modern myth-making. It’s as fantastic as 101 Dalmatians – but people talk about it as though it were real. Sara told me, ‘Quite honestly I think women who ask men out are punished. It’s like Fatal Attraction – I think that’s what happens.’ Geoff said, ‘If you have an affair, you need to be sure you can trust the girl – you don’t want to end up like Fatal Attraction’. Sara and Geoff don’t question the film’s veracity; Alex seems plausible to them. As Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, apparently remarked, ‘Everybody knows a girl like Alex.’12
The notion that Alexes are everywhere involves two distortions of thinking – an over-reaction to women’s new assertiveness, and an over-valuation of sexuality as the key to personality.
There’s often a ludicrous over-reaction to small gains for women. As Susan Brownmiller comments, ‘ “The women are taking over” is a refrain many working women hear from their male colleagues – after one or two women are promoted at their company, but while top management is still solidly male. In newsrooms, white male reporters routinely complain that only women and minorities can get jobs – often at publications where women’s and minorities’ numbers are actually shrinking …’13 So, too, the fact that women are asserting themselves a bit more sexually gives rise to fantasies that the world
