Читать книгу Some Girls Do - Margaret Leroy - Страница 19

One of the most delectable female initiators is a little girl. ‘She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was as rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings …’³² This is Rosie Burdock, who gives her name to Laurie Lee’s autobiography Cider with Rosie, first published in 1959, and celebrated for its explicitness about childhood sexuality.

Rosie is a girl around puberty, her age unspecified – ten or eleven, perhaps, to the narrator’s thirteen. In this encounter, he has the female role. She’s the one who plots and plans, asks, persists, tells him how he feels, makes it happen; he’s the one who says no when he means yes, acquiesces in her schemes, is swept away, has a sexual awakening.

‘I got sommat to show you.’

‘You push off,’ I said.

I felt dry and dripping, icy hot. Her eyes glinted, and I stood rooted.

‘You thirsty?’ she said.

‘I ain’t, so there.’

‘You be,’ she said. ‘C’mon.’

She takes him to the secret place she’s found under the waggon, gets him drunk on cider, and makes her move. ‘Then Rosie, with a remorseless strength, pulled me down from my tottering perch, pulled me down, down into her wide green smile and the deep subaqueous grass.’³³

Many of us have vivid memories of childhood sex play with other children of our own age. Perhaps we undressed and looked, or shared a self-stimulation technique involving blankets or rope-climbing we’d just discovered, or played Doctors and Nurses, or did ‘what grown ups do’. Sometimes there was a sexual thrill, sometimes it was purely play – and it wasn’t abusive, because there was no bullying or power imbalance. And girls suggest and start off these activities just as often as boys; girls also think up sexual games, explore, express curiosity, look and show.

This kind of initiating female behaviour fades at puberty – or perhaps becomes channelled into transient lesbian expression, in that mutual caressing of breasts with a best friend that many women who now feel thoroughly heterosexual recall from adolescence. Rosie probably wouldn’t have made such audacious moves with a lad she fancied a year or two later. With sexual maturity, the adult rules about male/female relationships assert themselves and, while they’re learning how they’re expected to behave, girls tend to be especially traditional – hence the rigidity of the double standard for girls in their early teens. Once the potential is there for conventional heterosexual pairings between almost sexually mature teenagers, girls act by the rules: no more wide green smiles and deep subaqueous grass.

Unless the object of a girl’s affections is a musician in her favourite band – in which case those rules may be flagrantly disregarded. Groupie behaviour can be seen as an extreme form of childhood sex play. The feeling itself may be deeply serious – a girl with a crush, just like a mature adult in the throes of sexual obsession, will think about almost nothing else – but there’s no hope of a response. The best that the boldest and most persistent rock chick could hope for is a one-night stand and a chance to steal his cigarette lighter to show off to her friends. This is a sexual behaviour that’s ‘outside’: it’s not about pair-bonding. And in this context a girl or woman may play extravagantly, taking outrageous initiatives – sending him her knickers, insinuating herself past the security men and hiding under his bed, or like ‘Cynthia Plastercaster’, making intimate casts of her favourite rock stars as a lasting memento of her passions.