LITMIR.BIZ

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‘Get down to business,’ she says. In Presumed Innocent, Carolyn Polhemus pulls Rusty Sabich by his tie into a dark office: ‘You’re going to be so good,’ she says as she meaningfully removes her earrings. In The Last Seduction, Brigit sticks her hand down the trousers of the man she’s just met in a bar. When she first meets Nick, Catherine Tremell in Basic Instinct says, ‘Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice …’: she also famously flashes her pubic hair at a group of policemen – which is about as direct as an indirect initiative can get. Alex in Fatal Attraction doesn’t make the first move: she is asked to dinner by Dan. But she does signal her interest in an affair by saying, ‘I can be very discreet’. And then, when he doesn’t ring after their weekend together, she takes a whole range of follow-up initiatives that might be more typical of men – she rings him at work, rings him at home, buys opera tickets, turns up at his office. Later her initiatives become still less conventional.

      These women have all entered the public world on their own terms. They power-dress, they carry briefcases, they understand financial markets and make lots of money. They are also all bad. It isn’t just a question of breaking a few rules and wearing fuck-me shoes. These aren’t just Gutsy Girls who Get Ahead. They are seriously wicked. Catherine Tremell is a serial murderess. Carolyn Polhemus takes bribes, and loses interest in Rusty when she finds he’s less ambitious than she’d like. When Meredith Johnson’s attempt to have sex with Tom backfires, she takes out a sexual harassment suit against him, and the attempt at seduction turns out to have an ulterior motive – to frame him and have him fired for a mistake she’d made. Alex abducts Dan’s child, has a close affinity with Cruella de Vil in her propensity for doing horrible things to cuddly animals – the emotional climax of the film is her boiling of the pet rabbit – and turns up in Dan’s bathroom with a carving knife. And Brigit, by far the most stylish of the bunch, makes off with the money from her husband’s drug deal, kills off a few philandering partners along the way, and then – in a neat inversion of notions of women’s vulnerability to male violence – murders her husband with her Mace spray.

      The role sex plays in these stories is the mirror image of its role in the traditional woman’s romance. In Mills and Boon, the heroine doesn’t always enjoy sex – she may well have her first orgasm in bed with the hero – but her whole life is about love, and love is the motor and climax of the plot. In the bad woman stories, it’s the other way round: the women enjoy sex effortlessly – they certainly don’t need hours of delicate fingerwork – but it isn’t the main event. Catherine Tremell may be ‘the fuck of the century’, but what really turns her on is writing books and sticking ice-picks into people. Often a sexual encounter is about something else, a means to an end – as it was for the women with ulterior motives at the start of this chapter. Through sex, the women in these films further their career ambitions, get material for their next book, or find someone to take the rap for their crimes. They are using the men.

      When these stories are aimed at women, they’re funny. We laugh – and we want her to win. The story taps into that part of every woman that makes her grin when she says ‘Lorena Bobbitt’. The Last Seduction is a woman’s film. And we identify with Brigit: we long to smoke with her kind of style, to speak with that husky rasp, to be so coolly unburdened by conscience. And Brigit gets away with it triumphantly in the end: the final shot in the film shows her reclining in her stretch limo as she languidly burns the last piece of evidence incriminating her.

      But when the story is aimed at men, it is horror, and the woman is punished. Fatal Attraction is a male fantasy – and here the initiating woman meets a bloody death.

      These stories are powerful: they shape our thinking. Fatal Attraction, in particular, has been a stunningly successful piece of modern myth-making. It’s as fantastic as 101 Dalmatians – but people talk about it as though it were real. Sara told me, ‘Quite honestly I think women who ask men out are punished. It’s like Fatal Attraction – I think that’s what happens.’ Geoff said, ‘If you have an affair, you need to be sure you can trust the girl – you don’t want to end up like Fatal Attraction’. Sara and Geoff don’t question the film’s veracity; Alex seems plausible to them. As Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, apparently remarked, ‘Everybody knows a girl like Alex.’¹²

      The notion that Alexes are everywhere involves two distortions of thinking – an over-reaction to women’s new assertiveness, and an over-valuation of sexuality as the key to personality.

      There’s often a ludicrous over-reaction to small gains for women. As Susan Brownmiller comments, ‘ “The women are taking over” is a refrain many working women hear from their male colleagues – after one or two women are promoted at their company, but while top management is still solidly male. In newsrooms, white male reporters routinely complain that only women and minorities can get jobs – often at publications where women’s and minorities’ numbers are actually shrinking …’¹³ So, too, the fact that women are asserting themselves a bit more sexually gives rise to fantasies that the world is full of glossy and alarming women who help themselves to the sex they want without regard for the destructive consequences.

      In every system of oppression, what is kept down is fantasized about and feared. Studies of colonization have looked at the way the qualities of the oppressed group or race, especially their sexuality and aggression, are exaggerated and then feared: hence, for instance, notions about the super-potency of black men. So, in the fantasies that underlie these films, the kind of sexual initiative that women might be taking – asking for the touches they want, perhaps – becomes a shocking or destructive sexual assertion: Meredith sexually harassing Tom, Brigit putting her hand down a man’s trousers in a public place.

      The second distortion that drives these fantasies is the over-valuation of sexual behaviour as a true litmus test of personality – especially for women. In the films, the women’s sexual behaviour is part of a gestalt. Their assertiveness in bed is one manifestation of their assertiveness in every area of their lives. The woman who makes the first move in her sexual relationships puts herself first in other areas too, and the woman who disregards the traditional sexual script is deficient in other traditional female qualities. Like Hallgerd in the old Icelandic saga with her ‘thief’s eyes’, she takes things that rightfully belong to others.

      Sex is sometimes seen as the key to personality for men as well. Hence the demands for the resignations of adulterous politicians: if they cheat on their wives, runs the argument, they surely can’t be trusted to govern the country well. But it’s also recognized that for men sex isn’t the whole story. Oskar Schindler, for instance, is venerated as one of the great altruists of the twentieth century, for the hundreds of lives he saved during the Holocaust. He treated women badly: he was openly unfaithful to his wife, seduced his secretaries, and doubtless created a lot of misery all round. He fascinates us as a flawed human being who was also capable of startling love and courage.

      But a woman’s sexuality is never seen as a thing apart. It’s impossible to imagine a female Oskar Schindler – a woman who was thoughtless and promiscuous in her sexual life, but also revered for doing great good.

      The bad woman script takes it as axiomatic that a woman’s sexual assertiveness is part of a wider assertiveness or even aggressiveness in her psychological make-up. But this is a distortion. A woman’s courtship behaviour doesn’t essentially correlate with the rest of her personality. When I talked to women about their courtship styles, I simply didn’t find that the more assertive women were more likely to ask men out.

      Certainly there may be connections between a woman’s willingness to take direct initiatives and other aspects of her sexuality. Among the women I talked to, the few women who sometimes made the first move tended to be good at asking for what they wanted in bed, turned on by visual sexual imagery, and attracted to younger, less affluent, less powerful men. And women with a very indirect style at the start of courtship tended to be attracted to powerful or older men, to be turned on by masochistic fantasies and to find it hard to ask for what they wanted in bed. Indirect women were also more likely than women who sometimes made the

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