Читать книгу Some Girls Do - Margaret Leroy - Страница 7

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 egalitarian than they’d at first implied. It’s all very encouraging for those of us who’d welcome a new kind of courtship. In our heads we’ve invented a whole new world: we’re just not living there yet, because we’re not quite ready to risk it. In courtship the stakes are so high. And when we’re approaching someone we’d love to get into bed with, we do what seems safest – and for now that so often means looking back to the past and taking our lines from the familiar script.