FLIRTING: AN OBSESSION
March 2015
“The lane of love is narrow—there is room for only one.” Kabir
Simeon Solomon ‘Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene’ 1864 Tate Gallery, London UK During World War II, anthropologist Margaret Mead was working in Britain for the British Ministry of Information and later for the U.S. Office of War Information, delivering speeches and writing articles to help the American soldiers better understand the British civilians, and vice versa. She observed in the flirtations between the American soldiers and British women a pattern of misunderstandings regarding who is supposed to take which initiative. She wrote of the Americans, "The boy learns to make advances and rely upon the girl to repulse them whenever they are inappropriate to the state of feeling between the pair", as contrasted to the British, where "the girl is reared to depend upon a slight barrier of chilliness... which the boys learn to respect, and for the rest to rely upon the men to approach or advance, as warranted by the situation." This resulted, for example, in British women interpreting an American soldier's gregariousness as something more intimate or serious than he had intended.1
1 Mead, Margaret; William O. Beeman (ed.) (2004). Studying Contemporary Western Society: Method aAnd Theory. New York: Berghahn Books. pp. 145, 149. ISBN 1-‐57181-‐816-‐2.