MARY WAKEFIELD
Why women fantasise about sheikhs
Just imagine that in a 21st-century court:
‘And what made you think Dr Smithson had
consented, Mr Xenakis?’ ‘Well, Your Hon-
our, I didn’t. I was simply chastising her.’
(His dark eyes flashed.)
All in all, it’s easy to see why Mills &
Boon might keep its head down this birth-
day, and it’s easy to see why the fact of its
continued success might make thoughtful
feminists like Julie Bindel see red. They’re
simply rape fantasies, she says, ‘misogy-
nistic hate speech’. Bindel describes your
classic M&B plot as an outdated ‘gender
dance’: ‘man chases woman, woman resists,and finally woman submits in a blaze of
passion.’ Well, yes. That’s a fair summing
up. But I’ll keep my glass raised to Mills
& Boon, because its feminist critics might
have missed the point. I think that for all the
gender dancing — because of it, in fact —
there are actually some useful lessons here
for modern girls.
The first is a reality check. Underlying
each bestselling genre — Greek tycoons,
haughty sheikhs, troubled millionaires — is a
fact that the #MeToo era likes to forget: rich
and successful men are attractive to women.
Just as men feel a pull towards good-looking
young women, so some women feel genuine-
ly drawn to power. I say this in defence ofwomen, and I think of it as a feminist point.
Too often we sneer and cry ‘gold-digger’
when we see a gaggle of beauties draped
over the likes of Sir Philip Green. But they’re
not just in it to cadge a ride on his yacht. They
probably actually fancy him.
And at the end of every Mills & Boon, it’s
the alpha male who’s tamed, not the heroine.
He simply can’t resist her. He has to marry
her. That’s how the story ends. ‘I should warn
you that I want you pretty much all the time,
latria mou,’ Aristandros admitted, bending
down to press his mouth to hers. ‘And I don’t
believe in long engagements.’ Here again is
a Mills & Boon lesson that millennial girls
would do well to learn, one that might save
a lot of time on Tinder: if a man is half-
hearted about you, if he’s texting other girls,
there’s (usually) no point pursuing him. Dr
Ella Smithson is flattered when Aristandros
Xenakis pursues her halfway round the
world. A woman who behaved the same way
would be a bunny boiler.
As for the rest — well, it’s fantasy isn’t
it? Both the readers and the writers of Mills
& Boon are happy to admit that what they
want from escapist fiction is absolutely not
what they seek out in reality. Have any of
the hundreds of millions of semi-consensual
kisses in Mills & Boon encouraged a single
act of real coercion? I doubt it. That ‘pun-
ishment kiss’ so beloved of Aristandros and
friends has absolutely no application in real
life. One author from the 1960s, a Hilary
Wilde, once said: ‘The odd thing is that if I
met one of my heroes, I’d probably bash him
over the head with an empty whisky bottle.’
Feminists think that we’re only attracted
to the standard Mills & Boon fantasy
because of centuries of patriarchal oppres-
sion. My own feeling is a little different.
Back in the cacophonous real world there
are meetings to go to, nappies to buy, bills
to pay, meals to cook, emails to send, friends
to see. Sometimes it takes a sheikh to shut
out reality. I remember the first Mills &
Boon I ever stole; the first love scene I read
behind the sofa. Some dark-haired narcissist
comes up behind our housewife heroine and
unplugs her hoover before snogging her. In
real life that would be enraging. As a meta-
phor, it’s perfect.I
n celebration of its 110th birthday, I
downloaded a Mills & Boon — The
Greek Tycoon’s Blackmailed Mistress
— and plan this coming weekend to settle
down for an evening in the company of Dr
Ella Smithson and Aristandros Xenakis, ‘an
arrestingly handsome man... the epitome of
lithe, masculine grace teamed with the high-
voltage buzz of raw sexual energy’.
I’m fond of Mills & Boon. In the mid-
1980s, they provided me with the sex edu-
cation my otherwise excellent mother must
have thought school would sort out. I stole
them from my older cousins’ bookshelves,
hid them under my jumper and ran home
to read them behind the sofa, agog at what
grown-ups got up to. Three decades later,
I’ll raise a glass to them on their birthday,
because I suspect no one else will.
Back in the autumn of 2008 there was
a great Mills & Boon birthday fanfare. The
papers were full of nostalgic pieces and the
BBC commissioned a raunchy special —
Consuming Passion — set in the original
Mills & Boon office. But a lot has changed
in ten years, and even if this was its centenary
year, I don’t expect there’d be much fuss. The
Mills & Boon phenomenon is just too dis-
turbing for 2018. The Greek Tycoon’s Black-
mailed Mistress is an all-time bestseller but
hot on its heels comes The Millionaire’s Mis-
behaving Mistress, The Sheikh’s Love-Child
and the ‘Desert Rogues’ collection, which
includes The Sheikh and the Bride Who
Said No. At a time in which Mohammed
bin Salman and The Donald are the West’s
arch-baddies, it’s just too weird that women
fantasise about tycoons and desert rogues.
And nothing runs counter to the age of
consent like a Mills & Boon. It’s not just
that sheikh’s bride who says no. More than
200 million books sold a year; that’s two
hundred billion kisses at a conservative esti-
mate, and if my pre-teen memory is anything
to go by, almost all at least partially uncon-
senting. Even now: ‘Aristandros closed his
hands over Ella’s fists to hold her entrapped.
He bent his proud, dark head and ...’
Even more disconcerting than the near-
compulsory snog-attack in chapter two or
three is the inevitable ‘punishment kiss’ after
some misunderstanding towards the middle.
Underlying each genre is a fact the
#MeToo era likes to forget: successful,
rich men are attractive to women‘Truth be told, I’m struggling to keep
up with this gender-fluid business.’