Seductress (37 page)

Like other seductresses, they prevailed in spite of the “wrong” upbringing. Because of their combined grit and self-grandeur, they grew strong in adversity, acquiring autonomy and bulldog tenacity. They missed out on feminine education, avoiding the good-girl drill with its learned incapacity and inferiority.

No one told them they couldn’t be big or have it all. They shot up nine feet tall, queen of creation size. They didn’t know they were the return of the repressed. But their power and uncanny effect on the public stemmed from the archaic archetype.

Some, like Evita and the autocrats, instinctively played up the association and aureoled themselves with the symbols and images of divinity. The rest benefited on a more subliminal level. All styled their characters on the mythic paradigm: omnicompetence, male/female totality, gusto, and bigger-than-life swish and majesty.

They also evoked the she-deity in management style. Although
femmes fortes
of iron will and decided minds, they ruled via the Seductive Way, not brute force. They used the erotics of réclame like Aphrodite with her drumroll visitations to mortals.

Their public appearances were staged to harpoon hearts and strike fire in the loins. They wore glorious showstopper costumes accompanied by cosmetics, scents, and all the trappings of goddess worship—arts, cuisine, dance, music, pageantry, and break-it-down carnivalesque festivity. With their brains and eloquence, they charmed everyone in their service. Extracting consent without coercion, they sweet-talked people into their way of thinking. Lover-like, they teased, amused, vacillated, confounded, tormented, and ladled out praise and mother love. Old-time feminists used to commend straight-shooter authority on the job, but the greatest leaders (males included) are Teflon managers. They combine the fox and the lion, governing with a mix of guile, direct command, covert deal making, and the sly intoxicants of seduction—the shortest, though most circuitous, route to yes.

According to one school of thought, women make more pacific, competent leaders. In her comprehensive study of the subject, historian Betty Millan says that as a group they “excelled men.” The
Machtweiber
in some ways bear her out. They’re notable for their pragmatism, improvisational flexibility, long-range vision, self-promotional genius, administrative ability, and frequent humanitarian causes.

But they were no kinder, gentler matresfamilias. They did not govern like play school caregivers; they could be preemptory, high-handed, two-faced, self-serving, cruel, and bellicose. They had alpha woman egos, ferocious ambition, and ballsiness. They needed all the flint and devil they could muster in the societies they inhabited—none
Machtweib-
friendly. Some cultures, such as Elizabeth I’s England, were less receptive than others and made a total goddess synthesis tough, if not impossible. The seductress isn’t transhistorical, even if her archetype and art are.

Fortunately the climate is warming toward
Machtweiber,
in the United States and abroad. Yet politicas who want to take back their sexuality have their work cut out for them. As Gloria Steinem’s recent feminist affray demonstrates, many women, through either secret envy or identification with the oppressor, have trouble embracing female leaders with flagrant sexual power. And male recidivists are still afoot. A sizable rear guard continues to crank out either/or agitprop and
Machtweiber
slurs, frightened that she-rulers with working libidos will castrate and subject them.

Both groups need to rest assured. All women rise on the skirts of the privileged, and men stand to profit, not lose, from female authority. Like Inanna, these eight leaders were the goddess’s gift to their male consorts, fostering their talents and raising them to higher levels of maturity. Stateswomen, said the sixteenth-century Brantôme, are the best thing that can happen to a man. They’re the answer, argues Robert Bly in his analysis of “The Maiden King,” to the masculinity crisis today. Under the czarina’s direction, the hero of the Russian fairy tale endures the training—in life and eros—necessary for true male adulthood and self-actualization.

Freud thought great leaders owed their force field to their subconscious appeal; they permitted people to express “forbidden impulses and secret wishes.” If he’d included
Machtweiber
in his theory, he’d have found an explanation for those insoluble historical enigmas—Cleopatra and her walkover conquest of the ancient world; Evita and her subjugation of sexist Argentina; Gloria Steinem and her social revolution in America.

In every case their victories stem from a collective “secret wish” for the mythic Queen of Heaven who ran the ship of state on sexual horsepower and contained everything in the round of her Being: wholeness, rebirth, and intellectual, erotic, creative, spiritual, and political preeminence. It’s our place in the divine plan, the command position. We were born to be “quings” (as one fourth grader called them), to set the world and men on fire.

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

 

—EURIPIDES

 

I hate a woman who gads about and neglects her home.
—THEOGNIS

 

—AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA

 

 

 

 

Life is averb.
—CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMORE

 

 

 

 

 

T
here are the good girls—baby-sitters named Cricket, wives with “Bloom Where You’re Planted” on their mugs, and the moms of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Then there are the bad ones. They act up, leave home, mess around, and walk on the wild side. No mystery how men regard these two. The first they love and marry; the second, fuck, dump, and shuck. Small wonder tramps end up as they do, abandoned on the social ash heap, broken and alone.

The lives of the domestic renegades say it all. Isabella Eberhardt, the early-twentieth-century North African adventuress, came to the predictable end: orgiastic sex with Bedouins, hashish under the desert stars, desertion by her husband, and a sordid death (accidentally on purpose) in a flash flood. World War II spy and tennis celebrity Alice Marble broke her heart over a Nazi sympathizer and never married. And the cat-prowling sex professionals, we know how they fared. Heartlessly screwed over and left for virtuous maids, they died of heartbreak, suicide, or consumption in fetid attics while their lovers waltzed off to wedded bliss.

Unfortunately for cultural moralists, it doesn’t work this way. Never has. Not only do scores of adventurous home deserters prosper and end happily, but men have a weak spot for them. In contrast to the stereotype, they fall, fall hard, for ladies-on-the-loose, to the point of lifelong commitment and abject adoration. The whole good-bad girl propaganda is merely a male defense strike against these ultra-attractive rovers, an overt ploy to curtail runaway female sexual power. Gadders, no better or worse than other women, hold a treacherous allure, enough to topple the patriarchal order.

Their allure goes deep, a megaton aphrodisiac planted in the primitive recesses of the collective unconscious. Stationary angels-of-the-house held no charms for prehistoric man. The mythic first sex goddess was a divine dynamis, the “principle of life-energy,” spinning with perpetual movement and activity. Her successors, from Neolithic Venuses to Aphrodite (
hodites
means “wanderer”), were all action goddesses, home deserters who rambled, explored, and philandered.

Inanna, the first recorded love deity, was a roving adventure queen who toured the firmament in quest of men and excitement and took money for her favors. She love-addled the cosmos. Undomesticated, polygamous, restless, and aggressive, she personified eros itself, the life force and flywheel of existence, and ruled the Sumerian pantheon. The gods “ben[t] and quiver[ed]” in her presence. From her sacred mountain, she commanded the universe, adorned in lapis lazuli, a lion beneath her foot, her wings spread for flight and adventure.

Early womankind, it seems, took its cue from Inanna. As recent studies demonstrate, our female ancestors showed no innate preference for home, stasis, and monogamy but were “promiscuous appetitive roving diplomats,” avidly carousing and glutting their inordinate orgasmic demands. This worked to women’s evolutionary advantage. Through comparison shopping and plural partners, they gained tangible benefits: more and better sperm, social leverage, and increased resources.

With time, dominant males usurped this female advantage. Anxious to ensure paternity and feminine submission, they tethered women at home and denied them freedom of motion. For safekeeping, they imposed infibulation, sequestration, and purdah and enforced Madonna-whore thought control—virtuous inmates versus vicious escapees. Zero tolerance for the disobedient.

Some women nevertheless escaped. They shot the bolt, soared into the wild blue, and recouped their ancient erotic birthright and sovereignty. Inanna’s avatars, they each, while sharing a constellation of qualities, typified one of the goddess’s three adventuress personas:
wasi’at,
the one who roams about;
labbatu,
the fierce lioness; and
kar-kid,
the prostitute. They torpedoed the clichés; life treated them well. It was wide screen, packed with color, drama, steadfast love, and best of fates in the final reel.

 

When she cruised the highways and byways, the unhousebroken Inanna sang a theme song: “As I go out, as I go out/I go around heaven and earth.” Freed of domestic freight, this divine runaround scouted the territory in quest of novelty, action, and romantic escapades. While Sumerian wives veiled themselves in subservience to husbands and were hurled into the river if they strayed from home, Inanna was a law unto herself, exempt from patriarchal rule.

Eventually of course it caught up with her; by 1500 B.C., she had lost her mythic supremacy and suffered the same fate as earthly
wasi’ats.
Hebrew theologians regarded her as the archenemy of male hegemony and demonized her as the Whore of Babylon. Wandering the land on a ten-horned beast and fornicating pell-mell, she epitomized the antitype of the good Jewish housewife, a wicked Dinah who stepped abroad and brought damnation upon herself and Israel.

To medieval lawgivers,
vagatio
(movement beyond home) was the mother of all female sin, and Dinah, the cautionary exemplum. Virtuous women stayed inside, under the custody of men, rooted to the spinning wheel, dressed in hopsack, and haloed in humility, chastity, and silence. The scarlet wretches who left their posts and rambled were “arsonists of sacred places” on a free fall to hell.

One of these evil sisters journeyed in 1438 across the war-torn Loire Valley, beleaguered by real arsonists and
écorcheurs
(flayers), the most brutal cutthroats in Europe. The sixteen-year-old Agnès Sorel miraculously survived the trip and lived to achieve a greater miracle: the position of official mistress to a king (the first in French history) and unprecedented riches, power, and influence.

As Charles VII’s
maîtresse en titre
she prompted the military defeat of Britain and inspired a national cultural and economic renaissance. The virginal Joan of Arc received the credit and laurels, but the nefarious adventuress Agnès Sorel actually saved France.

At the height of her prosperity, Agnès built an altar to Mary Magdalene, the medieval model of female freedom and self-ownership and bête noire of the church fathers. Agnès’s patron saint served her well. Orphaned in early childhood, she was adopted by a beneficent aunt in Touraine who preferred her to her own daughter. Rather than remain there, immured in maidenly virtue, Agnès set out to seek her fortune as a companion to Isabelle of Lorraine, two hundred miles away.

At this lively, sophisticated court with its continual round of fetes, she found an avant-garde culture in which women were revered and expected to shine and master the “grand gesture.” Dress and deportment were competitive. Ladies wore fur-trimmed, decorated gowns, cinched at the waist by pearl- and gem-studded clasps, and vied for the spotlight in conversation, grace, and style.

Agnès soon eclipsed them all. “Her speech,” said a courtier, “was so far beyond other women that she was regarded as a prodigy.” With her “laughing moods” and “gentlest spirit in the world,” she was also regarded as a
ravisseuse.
And she looked like a stained glass Madonna.

When most women were swag-bellied, pockmarked, and seamed with premature aging, Agnès possessed the kind of beauty seen once in a century. Full breasted and svelte, she had a carved-in-ivory face, with heavy-lidded bedroom eyes, a Cupid’s bow mouth, and a pointed chin that protruded gently at the tip. Masses of thick chestnut hair, shot through with golden highlights, spilled over her temples and cascaded down her back.