Some Girls Do. Margaret Leroy
bigger, and something to be celebrated. Our questioning of the old sexual certainties is part of a general move towards more egalitarian ways of relating, as we strive for gender equality in so many areas of our lives.
Yet the puzzling fact remains that one piece of the new pattern is missing. Few women are like Emma: few women ask men out. This simply doesn’t fit with the rest of our sexual behaviour. We no longer see men as creatures who always have to be in control. We know that men like their regular partners to initiate sex: we know that they sometimes prefer to lie back and let us do all the work in bed. Our reticence also seems at odds with other aspects of our social behaviour – because once a couple have got together, it’s usually the woman who makes all the social arrangements. Yet mostly we still believe to the bottom of our hearts that men don’t like us to make the social and sexual moves at the very start of courtship.
When I gave women a list of sexual assertions and asked how hard they’d find them, a clear hierarchy emerged. Women find it easy to initiate sex with a man with whom they have a steady relationship – whether by dropping hints and touching suggestively, or by asking directly. Telling him what you want in bed is more difficult: some women say ‘I just couldn’t’, but others are happy to suggest a new position or ask for a different kind of touch. Initiating the first sex in a new relationship – deciding when to turn up with a toothbrush – is also something many of us manage. But asking a man out comes right at the top of the list: it’s by far the most problematic assertion. It’s during the very first moves that women are at their most tentative and indirect and feminine. ‘I’d never do that’, we say, or ‘I’d love to but I simply wouldn’t dare’, or even ‘Well, we aren’t equal, are we?’
COURTSHIP SCRIPTS: The hundred and fifty initiatives
In the past few years, US ‘close relationships researchers’ have looked at our courtship scripts – the behaviour we expect of ourselves and others when we go on a date. The results of their studies confirm that tradition still shapes our behaviour right at the start of our sexual relationships.
Psychologists Suzanna Rose and Irene Friez asked men and women to list the things they’d expect to do as they prepared for a date with someone new, and through the evening.2 They found that men and women largely agreed on the scripts. On a first date a woman expects to: tell her friends and family, check her appearance, wait for the man, welcome him to her home and introduce her parents or room-mates, keep the conversation going and control the rate of sexual intimacy. A man expects to: ask the woman for a date, decide what to do, prepare his car and flat, check his money, go to the woman’s house, meet her parents or room-mates, open the car door, pay, initiate sexual contact, take her home, and tell her he’ll be in touch. Here, men are making the arrangements and taking the sexual initiatives, while women set the scene and have a right of veto – they worry about what to wear and what to say, and they tell him when to stop. In their commentary, Rose and Friez acknowledge that ‘many young women today pay date expenses, and a majority of young men report having been asked for a date by a woman’. But the more dating experience the participants had, the more important they felt it was to stick to the time-honoured roles.
Other researchers have found the same. According to psychologist Susan Sprecher, men are still much more likely than women to take direct steps – to ask the other out, plan what to do on the first date, pay, and initiate the second date.3 Susan Green and Philip Sandos found that both men and women feel it’s more acceptable for the man to take the initiative – whether he’s simply starting a conversation or asking a person out.4
Less academic writers reiterate the theme. In her book Hot and Bothered, a ‘guide to sexual etiquette in the 1990s’, based on hundreds of interviews with men and women in Canada, Wendy Dennis says she’s found that women still aren’t taking the lead at the start of relationships. ‘Most women realize that many men still find the notion of a sexually assertive woman distasteful,’ she writes.5
US writer and researcher Warren Farrell runs mixed workshops on gender issues. In his book, Why Men Are The Way They Are, he describes how he asks people to simulate meeting at a party. He says, ‘That’s how I discovered how rare it is for a woman ever to take the hand of a man who had never before taken her hand, or to kiss a man for the very first time, or to take any of the hundred and fifty initiatives between eye contact and sexual contact I found are typically expected of a man if the relationship is ever to be sexual.’6
COURTSHIP LIBERALS: Passive – moi?
Men still make the arrangements. Women still wait to be asked. Yet many of us would like things to be different. There were hints of this hunger for change in the way both men and women described their dating behaviour to me. Almost invariably, they played down the gender differences.
When women talk about the moves they do make, they strive to show that they have some control over what happens. A woman will emphasize the potency of her glances, gestures, smiles. She’ll claim her signals are crystal clear. She’ll describe how she’ll cross a crowded room to talk to an appealing stranger, and how she’ll touch the man before he touches her, or put her arm round him.
The behaviours that women present as examples of making the first move usually fall within the parameters of the traditional script. For instance, touching first – a light touch on the shoulder or arm – has tended to be the woman’s prerogative. Initiatives like this that women do take are often open to interpretation. She goes up to him and starts talking. Is it flirtation or friendship? She puts her arm round his shoulders. A sexual move – or a warm affectionate hug? These initiatives are indirect: it’s not obvious what they mean. And because they’re ambiguous, they’re a lot less risky than the traditional male initiatives – an invitation to dinner, a kiss on the lips. This distinction was clearly recognized by Rowena, who said, ‘If you open your eyes wide at someone, you can pretend it wasn’t really happening if it all goes wrong. But if you went and said, “Can you come to the cinema with me on Friday?” and he said no, you’d feel pathetic.’
Yet the fact that women highlight the moves that we do make shows how ready we are to move on. Women today are well aware of the rewards for sexual assertion. ‘Passive’ is a dirty word: no woman wants to be seen as passive in her sexual behaviour, and many of us would love to be more confident and innovative in our sex lives. I suspect that we put such stress on the active parts of our courtship behaviour because we yearn for more control at the start of our sexual relationships.
Men also tended to present themselves as thoroughly egalitarian. Men told me that yes, of course, it was fine for women to ask them out, it was a thoroughly good thing, they didn’t go in for this man-the-hunter act anyway. They said they were sure it was happening a lot, because it had happened to them – though, on probing, I usually found that they’d been approached only once or twice, while they’d approached large numbers of women themselves. They also stressed how tentative they were in their traditional male role and how difficult they found it: they told me how few risks they took, how shy they were, how they waited till they were sure.
Younger men in particular played down the amount of planning they did. Geoff, twenty-six, said, ‘I think planning spoils it. I take it as it comes, play it by ear according to the situation. With some girls you genuinely just want to have a coffee and a chat and see what happens … .’ He mused on this, then added, ‘Subconsciously I probably do plan what’s the best way to go about it.’
Our attitudes to courtship are Janus-faced. Like Geoff, we look to both the past and the future. People talk first about how things should be – women should initiate, men should welcome women’s initiatives, we should all be as clear as day in our sexual dealings, no-one should scheme. It’s only later in the conversation that they reveal, like Geoff, what they actually do – which may well be less open and