It’s hard to navigate flirtation’s fuzzy edges
Even as a victim of rape, it’s difficult to desire a world where verbal consent must be given for a first kiss
Well this is a pretty pickle, isn’t it? What started with nearuniversal outrage at the Harvey Weinstein revelations has, like the proverbial pebble tossed into a pond, rippled out in wider and wider circles, becoming more confused and controversial every day. The subject of sexual harassment now fills every newspaper and dominates every dinner table, encompassing everything from rape to the rules of flirtation.
Many of us – male and female – have been rooting around in our mental archives, dusting off memories once carefully filed away under “Best Forgotten”. When #Metoo took off on social media, encouraging people to share their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse, I wrote a Facebook post listing some of my own unpleasant encounters. Even as I wrote it, I began to feel a fury that had somehow eluded me up to then.
The sheer scale of it shocked me. Between the ages of 12 and 18, I was flashed at almost every day on the way to school, goosed by old men at parties, repeatedly groped and frotted on public transport. When I was 17, and staying at a friend’s house, her parents’ lodger crept into bed with me while I was sleeping and had sex with me. I was too shocked and embarrassed to shout for help or make a fuss, so I never felt it was rape. I just felt ashamed that I had been too feeble to say no.
My Facebook friends, however, were having none of it. They assured me, with the indignant clarity that I so woefully lacked 29 years ago, that I had been raped.
Perhaps they are right, at least by the revised standards of our time. Attitudes are hardening, and a good thing too. As a child of the Seventies – even one who had learnt feminism at her mother’s knee – I was far too indulgent of the men who felt entitled to lay their hands on my young flesh.
The new generation of feminists, although often dismissed as snowflakes, are more of a warrior breed. They patrol the boundaries of consent armed with keener certainties.
When anxious men (and women) worry aloud about where all this will end – will the current mood of zero-tolerance make it impossible to flirt, or ask for a date, or fall in love with a work colleague? – young feminists roll their eyes in despair.
“It’s not that hard,” they shoot back. “Just don’t touch anyone without their consent.”
For many people of my age and older, though, that does actually sound quite hard. When we were coming of age sexually, the rules of flirtation were far more opaque (sometimes to the point of invisibility).
American-style dating, with its relatively clear lines of communication – he asks you out, you say yes or no – had yet to cross the pond. Nor did we have the option of swiping right on Tinder: an app specifically designed to solve the problem of not knowing whether someone fancies you before you make a move.
Mostly, we just got drunk or high until we were sufficiently disinhibited to fall on to each other’s lips. Sometimes this was the culmination of a long flirtation with someone from school, university or work; sometimes it was just a spontaneous fling. Either way, at the moment of first contact you could never be 100 per cent sure whether the attraction was mutual. Indeed, the uncertainty was (and surely still is) part of the thrill.
Back then, responsibility for taking the plunge fell entirely to men. Every kiss, every arm casually extended across the back of the cinema seat, was a throw of the dice: would it lead to rapture, or to disgust and humiliation?
Like a gambler who chooses to ignore the risk of losing, generations of men have been trained, or trained themselves, to chance the odds.
Those without good social antennae, or with a horribly inflamed sense of entitlement, sometimes made terrible bets – and it was women who paid the price.
I find it difficult (and dispiriting) to imagine a world in which verbal consent must be given before a first kiss. I don’t believe there is any simple way to navigate the fuzzy boundaries of flirtation. But I applaud the desire to do better. I hope that my daughter will find it easier than I did to know what she wants and doesn’t want, and to say it without fear. That much, at least, shouldn’t be so hard.