Leroy - Some girls do: why women do and dont ask men out

I ASK men out, said Emma. Im doing my bit. I cant understand why more women dont do it. It feels so good to go out with somebody youve chosen.

Emma is a teacher in her early twenties. Shes warm and friendly but not unusually assertive. Shes pretty but not particularly confident about her appearance: like so many women, shes forever struggling to lose weight. She enjoys her sex-life but shes not particularly sexually self-assured. In most ways, shes as full of self-doubt as the rest of us. Yet she asks men out: she finds it easy: and making the first move is a source of real pleasure in her life. She relishes her sense of achievement when she thinks, I chose him.

My conversation with Emma was the genesis of this book. It set me thinking how extraordinary it is that so few women make this move. Why is it still so difficult? What could help us to change?

Since talking to Emma, Ive asked all the women Ive met if theyve ever asked a man out. All of them have wanted to but few have ever done so: most said, I simply couldnt . Some of these women edit glossy magazines or manage social services teams or work in busy casualty departments. They feel strong, autonomous, entitled. In every other area of their lives, theyre in control: they shape what happens to them. But this they wouldnt do. Unlike Emma, they dont think it would feel good, and they can understand why more women dont do it.

Even women in the age-group where its often assumed that sexual patterns are changing most rapidly said the same. Nineteen-year-old Natalie told me: I do leave it up to the lad to make the first move with telephone calls, the first kiss, everything and if they dont do it, well then its tough cheese isnt it? Lucy, aged fifteen, said: Girls could, yeah they dont though Its just that nobody does. I think it would be good but no-one has the courage to.

There are a few Emmas in every age group, of course. Most of the men I talked to had been asked out by a woman but usually only once or twice.

Womens reluctance to ask men out does seem amazing. Over the past few decades, so much has changed in our sexual behaviour. Women have been setting limits and drawing lines in the sand. Weve said no to male sexual violence and attempted to outlaw the darker expressions of male sexual initiative by establishing rape-crisis centres, taking action on child sexual abuse, legislating against sexual harassment. Some women have sought to set the sexual agenda with that effective act of vengeance, the kiss and tell, with its Thats no way to treat a lady subtext. And many of us have been exploring our own sexuality by reading collections of female fantasies, or going to orgasm workshops, or buying Black Lace books, or photographing the male nude, or queuing up to scream at the Chippendales.

Most notably for this book, women have been imposing their own agenda on courtship by highlighting the risk of sexual violence within a dating relationship. This is the sexual change that is causing most controversy. Its been suggested, most notably by Katie Roiphe in her book The Morning After, that awareness of the possibility of date rape creates a climate of fear which makes it harder for men and women to get close. As Martin Amis told an audience at Princeton University, As far as Im concerned, you can change your mind before, even during, but just not after sex.are changing their minds afterwards, and that sometimes the men involved will be wrongfully blamed like Austen Donellan, who was threatened with expulsion from university after a woman hed slept with claimed hed raped her. Wisely he chose to be tried in a public court, and was acquitted.

But there were certainly casualties too under the old dispensation. And by and large it surely makes sense to see the date-rape panic as part of something bigger, and something to be celebrated. Our questioning of the old sexual certainties is part of a general move towards more egalitarian ways of relating, as we strive for gender equality in so many areas of our lives.

Yet the puzzling fact remains that one piece of the new pattern is missing. Few women are like Emma: few women ask men out. This simply doesnt fit with the rest of our sexual behaviour. We no longer see men as creatures who always have to be in control. We know that men like their regular partners to initiate sex: we know that they sometimes prefer to lie back and let us do all the work in bed. Our reticence also seems at odds with other aspects of our social behaviour because once a couple have got together, its usually the woman who makes all the social arrangements. Yet mostly we still believe to the bottom of our hearts that men dont like us to make the social and sexual moves at the very start of courtship.

When I gave women a list of sexual assertions and asked how hard theyd find them, a clear hierarchy emerged. Women find it easy to initiate sex with a man with whom they have a steady relationship whether by dropping hints and touching suggestively, or by asking directly. Telling him what you want in bed is more difficult: some women say I just couldnt, but others are happy to suggest a new position or ask for a different kind of touch. Initiating the first sex in a new relationship deciding when to turn up with a toothbrush is also something many of us manage. But asking a man out comes right at the top of the list: its by far the most problematic assertion. Its during the very first moves that women are at their most tentative and indirect and feminine. Id never do that, we say, or Id love to but I simply wouldnt dare, or even Well, we arent equal, are we?

In the past few years, US close relationships researchers have looked at our courtship scripts the behaviour we expect of ourselves and others when we go on a date. The results of their studies confirm that tradition still shapes our behaviour right at the start of our sexual relationships.

Psychologists Suzanna Rose and Irene Friez asked men and women to list the things theyd expect to do as they prepared for a date with someone new, and through the evening. They found that men and women largely agreed on the scripts. On a first date a woman expects to: tell her friends and family, check her appearance, wait for the man, welcome him to her home and introduce her parents or room-mates, keep the conversation going and control the rate of sexual intimacy. A man expects to: ask the woman for a date, decide what to do, prepare his car and flat, check his money, go to the womans house, meet her parents or room-mates, open the car door, pay, initiate sexual contact, take her home, and tell her hell be in touch. Here, men are making the arrangements and taking the sexual initiatives, while women set the scene and have a right of veto they worry about what to wear and what to say, and they tell him when to stop. In their commentary, Rose and Friez acknowledge that many young women today pay date expenses, and a majority of young men report having been asked for a date by a woman. But the more dating experience the participants had, the more important they felt it was to stick to the time-honoured roles.

Less academic writers reiterate the theme. In her book Hot and Bothered, a guide to sexual etiquette in the 1990s, based on hundreds of interviews with men and women in Canada, Wendy Dennis says shes found that women still arent taking the lead at the start of relationships. Most women realize that many men still find the notion of a sexually assertive woman distasteful, she writes.