Some Girls Do. Margaret Leroy
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poem and which are clues to her unnatural purposes, but which innocent Christabel doesn’t recognize. She looks rather than being looked at – always a cross-sex sign; she has a penetrating gaze – ‘her large fair eye ’gan glitter bright’; but sometimes her eyes shrink as small as a snake’s. And she is in total control: she tells Christabel to undress and get into bed, pretends to pray, then gets in too and pulls her to her.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine Thou’st had thy will!
It’s always men who ‘have their will’ of women: this is a way of describing sex that belongs exclusively to male experience.
The voluptuous predator connects with both the bad sexual woman and the man-trapper. Like Alex and Brigit, she is wicked. Like Mata Hari and Sofia the decoy, she has ulterior motives, sometimes of the most extreme kind: she wants blood. Above all, she is not what she seems. Her unfeminine sexual initiatives point to her unnaturalness. But the object of her sexual attentions, dazed by her loveliness, is blind to all the clues.
LIBERTINE WHORES: Those scandalous stages of my life
‘My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor and, I piously believe, extremely honest…’21
These words, from the first page of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure of 1748, inaugurated a new literary genre all about women who initiate and enjoy it. John Cleland’s two-volume story was a blockbuster of its time. This first prostitute confession was followed by a host of others, especially in France. Today’s pornography has its origins here. ‘Pornography’ actually means ‘the writing of prostitutes’.
In these books, the heroine briefly describes her childhood and adolescence, then comes to her main subject matter, her training and progress as a prostitute, depicted in a series of sexual encounters which are always graphically described, and in the case of Fanny Hill, highly colourful: John Cleland invariably describes genitals as roseate, rubied or vermilion. Unlike earlier English prostitute biographies, such as Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, which ended in misery and death, the story ends happily with the prostitute’s worldly success and contented retirement.
The heroine of these stories is always sensible, clever and sensuous. She makes a lot of money. In the French versions, she’s often a proponent of the anti-religious philosophy of the time. And she loves her work.
She is, of course, entirely a male creation. The first-person narrative is a confidence trick; it creates the illusion of a female subjectivity that is entirely absent. Though the woman appears to be speaking for herself, she tells us nothing about female sexuality. The use of the first person is an erotic device; as writer Lynn Hunt puts it, ‘The reader is provided with the vicarious pleasure of an encounter – be it only textual – with a prostitute.’22 Her sexual initiatives are contained within the male imagination: they express male desires. This is what makes her initiatives so very acceptable.
The ultimate libertine whore was created by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette is the heroine of his pornographic novel of 1792, Juliette ou les Prosperités de la Vice, the companion volume to his Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. Juliette and Justine are sisters and polar opposites. Juliette is the archetypal whore, Justine the perfect virtuous courtesan. Juliette enjoys sex, Justine is abused. Juliette is knowing, Justine is innocent and guileless, her innocence a constant incitement to the sadism of others. Juliette is brunette, Justine is blonde: Angela Carter has Juliette as the original bold brunette – like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, and Justine as one of the many put-upon blondes down to Monroe, whose ‘dazzling fair skins are of such a delicate texture that they look as if they will bruise at a touch, carrying the exciting stigmata of sexual violence for a long time’.23 Juliette makes lots of money, Justine has to plead to be given shelter – invariably with dire consequences. And Juliette initiates; she is the subject of her sexual encounters: while Justine is passive, used, done-to. Even among prostitutes, it seems, there are madonnas and whores.
Juliette the sexual initiator has some of the qualities of Fanny Hill or her French counterparts in books like Margot la Ravaudeuse: she’s affluent, clever, materialistic and knowing. But unlike Fanny she is also very wicked. She seduces her father, is impregnated by him, murders him and subsequently aborts his child. She enjoys orgies in churches, poisoning, robbery, murder, castration, necrophilia. As Camille Paglia warns – don’t read de Sade before lunch.
Juliette is the most striking and influential example, but there are many other initiating women in de Sade’s stories. Madame de Clairvil, the Princess Borghese, Catherine the Great of Russia and Charlotte of Naples all have something in common with the bad sexual woman: they lack maternal qualities, their goals are money and power, they enjoy sex but it isn’t an end in itself. Yet these fabulous female initiators go way beyond the bad-woman script. With their cruelty, vast sexual appetites and schemes for world domination, they have a close affinity with the ogresses in the roughly contemporaneous French fairytale tradition – like the prince’s mother in Perrault’s version of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, who was ‘of the ogre race’ and liked eating the fresh meat of little children24.
The female initiators in de Sade’s pantheon are also literally phallic, in that they have masculinized physical attributes and like to reverse roles. They have obstructed vaginas, or enlarged clitorises: they use dildos and are enthusiastic about buggery – which was a capital crime in France at the time. In the phantasmagorical world that de Sade’s characters inhabit, metaphor becomes reality. Here, the idea that the woman who takes sexual initiatives must have some male attributes is given concrete expression, in that she penetrates.
In reality, women rarely penetrate for pleasure: the dildo-wielding lesbian is a myth. But there is one group of women who regularly penetrate with objects – women who abuse children.25 Such abuse involves the expression of cruel or violent impulses, and this equation of female penetration with cruelty is apt, because this is what most interests de Sade about sex – the way it can be used to control, exploit and dominate. De Sade seems to have little interest in gender, in the relationships between men and women: what really fascinates him is the relationship between master and slave.
Pornography today has lots of initiating women. Juliette is the prototype of one kind of pornographic heroine – though since de Sade’s time she’s been very much watered down – just as her sister Juliette is the prototype of the ‘heroine’ or victim of the masochistic scenario.
But all this female initiating is contained in structures that are by and for men: men pay, men say what they want, men write the stories. Or if women write the stories it’s to please their men – like ‘Pauline Reage’ who wrote The Story of O for her lover, or Anaïs Nin who wrote purely for money for an anonymous collector of erotica, and whose erotic style was by her own admission ‘derived from a reading of men’s works’.26
Pornography is one context in which even extreme female initiatives meet with a lot of male approval – because the larger arena is male pleasure. It’s interesting to reflect that today’s pornography originates with a male fantasy about prostitution – a fantasy about women who obey male desires, however extreme, to the letter, and in so doing experience pleasure. No wonder women find pornography so problematic. We’re cut off from it at source. For, whatever the fantasy, prostitution in reality has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s own sexual self-expression. The prostitute is yet another female initiator who isn’t doing it for her own pleasure.
FAT FUNNY WOMEN: Come up sometime and see me
In the most celebrated come-on in cinematic history, Mae West, well past forty, all huge round shoulders, cleavage and diamonds,