Some Girls Do. Margaret Leroy
or in other parts of their lives – no connections between how they’d rate on sexual assertiveness and the rest of their personality and functioning. I met women with high-status careers and an air of great self-assurance who had the most reticent and evasive courtship styles – and quiet women with conventional views and unremarkable jobs who were married to men they’d asked out.
Female sexual initiatives are not part of a gestalt – and the fact that a woman makes the first move doesn’t reveal anything about other aspects of her personality. And it certainly doesn’t mean she is more likely to assert herself to accomplish evil ends.
The bad sexual woman may be great entertainment – but there’s no psychological truth in her. Adrian Lyne is wrong. None of us knows any girls like Alex.
BEAUTIFUL PREDATORS: She took me to her faery grot
There is a sub-class of bad sexual women who are scarcely women at all – women who, in a more profound way than Sofia the man-trapper or ‘Lizzie James’, are not what they seem.
These women are exquisite. They are quintessentially feminine, scarcely made of solid flesh, almost translucent, with the perfect facial features of beautiful children – yet the enchanting surface is pure illusion.
The romantic poets – Keats, for instance – adored the beautiful predator.
I met a Lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light And her eyes were wild. She took me to her faery grot And there she wept and sighed full sore …14
She takes the initiative; she takes him back to her place. There she weeps and sighs, moving the man with some hint of sorrow beyond words – but it’s all just part of her seduction technique. She leaves him spent and desolate, enslaved or vampirized amid a barren landscape – ‘The sedge is withered from the lake.’
Lady Arabella March in Bram Stoker’s psychotic last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, is another beautiful predator.15 In Ken Russell’s film version, luscious Amanda Donohoe entices a marvelling young man back to her house, where she strips to her black suspenders, grows a splendid set of fangs and kills him with a venomous bite. Bob Dylan also seems to know about these women and their beauty, their initiatives and their supernatural erasures and thefts: his Melinda ‘invites you up into her room’ – but then she ‘takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon’.
One of the most delectable predators can be found in Angela Carter’s short story, ‘The Lady in the House of Love’. Some of Keats’s themes re-surface in Carter’s thoroughly camp postmodernist telling. This Lady hides her lust for blood behind an air of exquisite vulnerability. She is so delicate she is almost transparent, her hair ‘falls down as straight as if it were soaking wet’, she has ‘the fragility of the skeleton of a moth’, her nails and teeth are ‘as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar …’, and she seems weighed down with some hidden sorrow: ‘A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates that she is inconsolable … When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.’16 Later the unvampirized parts are buried under her roses, which grow obscenely lush. She is saved from her undead torment by a man on a bicycle who, totally oblivious to all the clues, sees only a nice girl who needs looking after, and undoes the enchantment by sucking the blood from a cut on her hand.
The predator has feminine qualities to excess – she is almost too beautiful, too fragile, too difficult to console. The one thing that doesn’t fit is her taking of initiatives. The men should have suspected: why would so lovely a creature need to make the moves? She takes him back to her place, she invites him into her bed – but the consummation is not at all what he had in mind.
These stories hint at archetypal fears about women’s sexual attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the biological purpose of female beauty is to publicize good genes and good health and so to suggest that this woman is a good reproductive bet; apparently, for instance, symmetry of feature, which is one of our criteria of beauty, is only found in an organism that has been well-nourished while developing.17 If this is what female beauty is for, then the male fear must be that this is all illusion. (As indeed it often is – given women’s struggles to re-make themselves with all the money and skill at their disposal.) So in Keats’s poem the landscape is barren and withered; for all those signifiers of health and youth – the woman’s childlikeness and loveliness – there is no fertility here.
In these stories, essential feminine qualities are subverted. The female fragility which evolutionary psychologists suggest appeals to men because it suggests youth and implies that the woman is not carrying another man’s child is in fact a hint that all is not well: here, she is so thin because her unnatural appetites need appeasing. And the nameless sorrow with which she moves the man, stressing her vulnerability, allowing him to take on the role of protector – as strong women still do around men they desire – is just one of her courtship ploys.
The very imagery of vampirism itself – or of the Knight left ‘so haggard and so woebegone’ – suggests the capacity of female beauty to drain the male body. Camille Paglia writes of the temporary impotence that follows desire and its consummation, ‘That women can drain and paralyze is part of the latent vampirism in female physiology.’18 And on the psychological level, this imagery of greedy women who drink the man’s lifeblood perhaps hints at the male fear that women want just that little bit more than men are willing to give.
Among the romantic poets Coleridge, in particular, seems to have been preoccupied with women’s capacity to ‘drain and paralyze’. In his notebooks he describes dreams in which he was pursued by ghastly female figures who attempted to mutilate or abuse him.
… was followed up and down by a frightful pale woman, who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, and had the property of giving me a shameful Disease by breathing in the face.
…the most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye and attempting to pull it out.19
Coleridge’s dreams of ‘frightful’ women are reminiscent of delusions sometimes experienced by men suffering from psychotic illness, when feelings of arousal are associated with the delusional presence of a woman – and the man’s response is felt as something dragged out of him, as an assault. The fantasy of the succubus, the medieval female demon who arouses men in the night against their will, probably had its origins in such delusions.
The purest expression of these fears of unnatural initiating women in Coleridge’s work can be found in his unfinished poem, ‘Christabel’, which Camille Paglia describes as ‘blatant lesbian pornography’.20
Geraldine is a beautiful witch or vampire, dressed in white silk, ‘surpassingly fair’ – the original lipstick lesbian, perhaps. She’s literally glamorous (glamour means magic or spell), and Christabel, the sweet and guileless heroine of the poem, is completely taken in by her enchanting surface. Christabel finds Geraldine moaning in the moonlight outside her castle, invites her in, and unwisely lets her share her bed. Geraldine undresses – revealing an unspecified witch-like deformity – ‘a sight to dream of, not to tell …’ and some vague and terrible sexual assault takes place.
Like the other voluptuous predators, Geraldine has a sob story – in her case, a tale of gang rape:
Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn, They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white.
But as with everything else about her, this is a fabrication: Geraldine herself is the