On a Friday night my friend Damien got attacked outside a city centre pub. Ho hum, nothing particularly remarkable about that, you might think, except that the perpetrator happened to be a five foot nothing blonde with a penchant for bad spray-tan and peroxide.

The blonde was more than a little drunk and seeing as her weapon of choice was a clutch bag, Damien escaped without a scratch albeit with his dignity somewhat dented. But I suppose on some karmic level that was fair enough – after all, earlier that evening he had dented hers when she tried to kiss him and he’d responded with the not very subtle response: “Would you ever fuck off?”
The playwright William Congreve wrote “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d” and what was true in 1697 seems just as apt in 2009 – no woman likes to be rejected and many of us do not take it at all well.
A glance at the newspapers confirm this: in the last few weeks alone, an American ex-wife accused her husband of being involved with theft from a gun show, landing herself with ninety days in jail and a hundred hours of community service for making false allegations to the police; another angry woman cooked and ate her ex-boyfriend’s goldfish for revenge; and perhaps most bizarrely of all, Cristiano Ronaldo has apparently been cursed by a Spanish sorcerer, hired by someone known to the sports star. Commentators are suggesting that this may be his ex, Nereida Gallardo, who gave a series of interviews slating the footballer after he dumped her by text message.
Being dumped is never a pleasant experience. The only thing that can be said in its favour is that it happens or has happened to everyone, including yours truly, at least once. This means the average woman can turn to her friends, rail against the capriciousness of men and drown her sorrows in wine and ice cream without the need for black magic or pet-cannibalism.
Having your heart broken is well within the normal range of experiences for anyone embarking on a romantic relationship. However, what women are not used to is having our sexual advances turned down. Men, especially drunk or desperate men, rarely look a gift horse in the mouth, unless they have a very good reason to do so.
Perhaps more importantly, women don’t get shot down very often because we rarely make sexual advances in the first place. Behavioural analysts have shown that women initiate the dance of seduction by making eye contact, but by and large, we leave it up to the man to take things out of the pub and into the bedroom.
When they are on the hunt, women it seems prefer subtlety. Men, we are told, can be clueless in this regard and that is where things get tricky – there may be no way of knowing if your hints are being purposely ignored or simply lost in translation. I like to think of myself as a sexually confident woman, but to be honest, unless I was dealing with a particularly shy bloke and was reasonably certain – perhaps somewhere in the region of 95 percent – that my sexual advances would be appreciated, I’d prefer to retreat instead of risking rejection.
But there are among us the women who – whether through extreme self-belief, or copious amounts of vodka – don’t consider the possibility that they may not be irresistible. Turn a woman like this down, and chances are, she’ll make you pay.
My friend Wayne got harangued outside a nightclub by a drunken female friend whose advances he had rejected earlier in the evening. As her attention was occupied by screaming at him as he beat a hasty retreat, she didn’t notice a lamppost and collided head first into it and landed on her ass.
Wayne, being far too nice for his own good, stopped to help her up and she slapped him in the face. Unfortunately for him, the police happened to drive by at that very moment and thought that he was the aggressor. The poor lad spent the night in jail, as his drink-sodden suitor didn’t bother telling the police the truth.
Wayne got off easy compared to Tim, who in his younger years, tried to dissuade an aggressive American exchange student by claiming to be sexually inexperienced. This, unfortunately, had the opposite effect – women are almost as fond of popping cherries as men – and acted like catnip. She told him to stop using his virginity “as a shield” and promptly tried to remove his pants. When he resisted, she didn’t give up. Instead she harassed him for the next six months, even phoning his mother to find out where he would be spending the summer holidays.
Things can get particularly difficult if your suitor is psychologically or psychiatrically unstable. After meeting him a few times, a young lady decided Jonathan was more than all right. In fact so enamoured was she with his charms that she carved a large J into her own chest. This, Jonathan decided, was far too much commitment that early on, and told her he wasn’t all that keen. After that, she called around to the radio station where he worked and left him song lyrics and poetry decorated with her own blood. Nice. It makes a Spanish sorcerer seem restrained by comparison.
Women are used to being sexually pursued – that’s the standard procedure as set down by societal convention. As a result, we have no practise at being refused and therefore if we are somewhat less than gracious in defeat it’s probably to be expected.
Men, on the other hand, have plenty of experience with rejection. You’d think most of them would be used to it by now, but it ain’t so. Maybe Congreve was right, but in my experience men could certainly give women a run for their money in the fury stakes. Tearful midnight calls, stalking, emotional blackmail, name calling, letter campaigns and even a sheep’s heart cleaved in two left outside my front door, I’ve experienced them all – but that’s a whole other column.