Southern Flirting

Brays Island Croquet Tournament: Flirty Lady collects prize as best-dressed

I. Adolescent Flirts

When I was about twelve and on a passenger train in Virginia heading west towards such unromantic places as Covington and Clifton Forge, a girl about my age got on the train, plunked herself down across from me and started flirting seriously, batting her eyelashes, adjusting her dress, squirming in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, fluffing her hair, and staring at me. I didn’t know what in the hell was happening. At that time, I barely knew that girls were different from boys. She was a flibbertigibbet.

Within about ten minutes she had had a private discussion with the conductor which resulted in her being moved to the vacant seat next to mine. She immediately started talking to me and wiggling around so that our legs touched. I should say that she seemed to want to get things done in a hurry, because she must have known she was getting off at a stop coming up soon.

Anyway, at one point in our conversation, she hauled off with one hand back along side her face but aimed at my face. "Oh, you’re so exasperating [I wasn’t, really], I could just slap you!" she said, and then she quickly added, "but that would mean I loved you."

I was dumbfounded and blasted at the same time, as only an insecure teenaged boy could be. But I was also flattered. When she got up to get off, I think she may have kissed me on the cheek. Of course I have never forgotten her. She was, even as a teenager, the consummate southern flirt.

It is supposed to have started with Eve talking to the Serpent, the act of flirting. According to Milton, she is supposed to have said something like "You might have spared bringing me to this fruit, Serpent," after the Serpent, or Satan in the Serpent, a great flatterer and flirt himself, has called her a goddess. Eve’s reply is flirtatious, and eventually she falls for the Devil. That’s the danger in flirting.

Here is expert advice from a champion flirt, whom I will call Julia:
Something important to remember. Flirting comes in many forms. If it’s done right, the gentleman does not feel like the lady is flirting. Rather he feels that she finds him fascinating.

This is a higher form of flirting.

My flirty friend Julia adds:

Men with slow Southern voices are ahead of the game in flirting. Most women need to pitch their voices lower, esp. in the south. My friend who flirts the best rarely says anything. She listens.
So, according to a champion southern flirt, the man doesn’t know what happens to him when the woman flirts with him undetected; he just thinks he deserves the compliment or is all that she says he is. But at least southern men with a drawl have some advantage over women, because they can sound sultrier and sexier through a deep-pitched voice. Southern women just have to practice talking like Talullah Bankhead, lowering their register and slurring their words a little.

II. Historical Flirt

One of the great flirts of all time was Anne Boleyn. She teased poor Henry until he just had to marry her to bed her, then she could not produce a living male heir, so Henry blamed her for all her earlier flirtations. One of those was with the poet Thomas Wyatt, who wrote brilliantly about being flirted with by Anne Boleyn:

THEY flee from me, that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking within my chamber.

I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better ; but once in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown did from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewithal sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.

But all is turn’d, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go, of her goodness;

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindely am served,

I fain would know what hath she now deserved.

Wyatt pictures the scene of Anne Boleyn with her doe’s eyes and her deer body, flirting, showing off her slender arms after her gown has fallen seductively off her shoulders, giving him a spontaneous kiss, and then boldly asking the rhetorical question, "How like you this?" He pictures the event so skillfully that the reader can’t help falling in love with that fickle woman Anne Boleyn, even as Wyatt tells you that she dumped him, presumably for the King. She dumped him because he was a gentleman and let her get away with it. That sounds like the South to me.

The example of Anne Boleyn, who got her head chopped off (a neat sidelong slice by a skilled French swordsman hired specifically to do a good clean job), shows again how dangerous flirting can be. I wanted to say something about the connection between flirtation and teasing, and teasing and seduction. Of course flirtation leads to teasing, and teasing can often lead to seduction. That is what makes the game of flirtation dangerous.

III. Clothes Make the Flirt

Flirting hasn’t changed much since 1515. My friend the mature flirt writes,

This dress (find the dress on http://www.barriepace.com) is used for flirting. One can’t flirt in ugly, oversized clothes in muddy colors unless only is 20 yrs old and beautiful. The rest of us need beautiful clothes.

So, like Anne Boleyn, modern flirts are still wearing flirty, flimsy dresses in order to show off their good legs and handsome bust-lines and soft shoulders. Even the twenty-somethings in the South are apt to wear flirty, preppy Lily Pullitzer dresses with flower prints or Versace (if they have the money) dresses with darker spiderweb patterns to emphasize the dark-lady seductiveness of a brunette.

Julia adds: I think that an accomplished flirt has more control over seduction than a serious innocent female. Often the flirt knows exactly what she wants........

Well yes, of course she does, and a good flirt remains in control of the situation (unless, like Anne Boleyn, she loses her head).

IV. Gross seduction vs. subtle flirting

Flirting is different from outright seduction or just blatant, brazen, or, to put it less delicately, slutty behavior. One of my attractive male college students told a story of a 55-year-old recent divorcee, more than a little tipsy, who was seated amongst others in the back seat of his car. I don’t know what the occasion was, but the car or SUV was full of people. He had called to her, "You are welcome to come up front," and she had answered in a way he had heard but no one else had listened to, "I’ll ride with you as far as you want to go," which makes her sound as if she should be a candidate for the Country Music Hall of Fame (or Shame). I could write a dark country music hit based on her words.

There was nothing subtle about what she did, except for her wording. The other passengers did not notice her pass at or coming on to the young man. Her behavior was outrageous, even it if was colorful and tipsy. It wasn’t flirtation; it was invitation, or solicitation.

The best flirts are not just seductresses like the drunken divorcee or the sweet airhead on the train, who haven’t much of a clue where their behavior might lead. The best flirts, like Julia, are quite level-headed, and they know exactly what they want.

Flirty behavior at Harold's Country Club:

Cowboy and Country Girl