Читать книгу Some Girls Do - Margaret Leroy - Страница 12

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, the woman – usually a pubescent girl – initiates without any hope or expectation of pleasure, and has a delightful surprise. Here is one female initiative that has a happy ending – though it wasn’t embarked on with that intent and the woman’s motives are purely altruistic.

Feminist writer Robin Norwood, in her self-help book, Women Who Love Too Much, has a different take on these stories.⁶ She sees them as terribly misleading lessons for women, with their implicit promise that women can save and reform unlovely men through the power of their sexual love. She suggests that whenever a woman says, ‘I thought I could save him’, she’s been taken in by the patriarchal propaganda that urges us to love addicted or disturbed or needy men – that urges Beauty to ‘stand by’ the Beast. Intriguingly, the suspicion that there’s some dreadful patriarchal kernel to these stories seems to be shared by today’s canny little girls, who find stories like ‘The Frog Prince’ unacceptably wimpish and favour the Babette Cole version in which the princess’s kiss works the other way round, and the unappealing prince that the princess doesn’t want to marry is turned into a frog.

Here then is our first category of initiating women. These sexual initiatives are purposeful and direct, but the motive has nothing to do with the woman’s own pleasure: she is doing her job, serving her country, setting her father free, exposing a man’s weakness, saving someone, doing her bit for the Russian industrial complex. And, except in the fairytale where her move breaks the spell that bound him or kept him beastly, the men who succumb to the women’s advances come to regret it; they find themselves recruited as spies, in prison, blackmailed, rejected by their women, or made a laughing stock.