Seductress (44 page)

To be sure, they weren’t paragons. In their itch for excitement and velocity, they erred into excess: temper tantrums, gunslinging, gambling, vain posturing, and biographical fabrications. They usually made a hash of motherhood and female friendships. But they weren’t mean bitches either.

As morally mixed as the housewife next door, they had moments of piety, generosity, and kindness and didn’t always destroy men. In many cases they spurred them to action and achievement, and when they found their true loves, heroes of their own venturesome caliber, they rewarded them with loyalty and the goddess-mate of every man’s dreams, the one who never bores.

“Progress,” said one of the second-wave feminists of the 1980s “depends on adventure.” Perhaps more than any seductress group, siren-adventurers presage and plot the future. Generations ahead of their time, they invaded the masculine preserves of action and exploration and took their sexual power with them. They dissolved the categories. They proved that men were right. When the mate-guard bars come down, women run roughshod over everything: labels, limits, and hierarchies.

The twenty-first-century postfeminists have caught up with the adventuresses. They’ve hit the go button, entered the male domain, discovered their tongues, minds, and hot genitals, and swept away boundaries and good/bad girl distinctions. They want identities and genders as fluid as Lola’s and Hortense Mancini’s; they want free-form erotic relationships and new home lives, with elbowroom and sabbaticals. They want—maybe more than men—to gad. The action queens were there first and know the territory. They have the courage, tools, bulletproof egos, and erotic Baedekers we need for full empowerment on the frontier.

“Everybody is an explorer,” says a well-known adventurer. How, he asks, can “you live your life looking at a door and not go open it”? Maybe we can’t; maybe like Inanna and our nearest primate cousins, we were born to lark and ramble and philander.

Yet most women for most of civilized history had no choice. The outlaw who broke the latch and bolted knew the same thrill of the opened door as men—only more so. The stakes were higher, the risks greater, and she had no cheering section.

But once she spread her wings, she soared. She recovered her mythic birthright as Queen of the Mountain, the almighty sex goddess who sings the “unencumbered song,” as she cruises the cosmos for loot, kicks, and love slaves. This is the sacred rambler, lioness, and whore, whom no power can cuff and corral.

Whenever society thinks they’ve got her padlocked, she is out on the loose again. She’s everywhere, even deep in macho country. She’s the “little girl who lives on the hill” of the R & B classic who “rustles and tussles like Buffalo Bill,” storms a rock star’s seraglio, and throws her mojo on the master. The women flee and Bo Diddley cries, oh, how he cries, for mercy.

CHAPTER NINE

Women all want to be sirens but don’t know their trade.
—FEDERICO FELLINI

 

 

 

What destroyed them [women] all? Nothing but ignorant loving/ They were unversed in the art: love requires art to survive.
—OVID

 

’Tis Woman that seduces all mankind.
—JOHN GAY

 

—SHEIKH NEFZAWI

 

 

 

A
t first glance the seductress seems a vanishing species. Caricatured, debased, and trivialized, she’s dwindled into a Eurotart, gold digger, fellatrix, groupie, cupcake, and ho. She’s lost her swerve and sovereignty. Cultural commentators say her glory days are over: Our age is simply “incapable of generating the great myths or figures of seduction.” Men, they argue, have numbed out on sexual hype and erotic glut. Swamped by a surplus of party girls and easy pieces, they’re inured to love queens. One blond babe is as good as another, easily exchanged for a newer, sleeker model next year. “Nobody,” writes columnist Maureen Dowd, “really believes in romance any more.”

Many should-be seductresses, it’s true, have gone belly up. Sex goddess Jennifer Lopez admits she’s an “idiot when she falls in love” and can’t win for losing with men. Another glamorous self-made multimillionaire, Leslie Friedman, sank a fortune and three bitter years into an ignominious campaign for a husband. She bought décolleté designer dresses, stalked charity benefits, and talked “like a bimbo”—all for seventy-three dates without a bite. In 2004 Amy E., an attractive PR executive, offered a trip for two anywhere in the world to the person who referred her to a man to marry.

Other high achievers, beyond such base ploys, aren’t faring much better. Memoirs, novels, and sitcoms recount their abject maneuvers and serial humiliations at the hands of crude bruisers and slick Lotharios. The younger generation of college coeds is worse off still, subjected to a “brutal” hookup scene that reduces them to interchangeable sex toys and fraternity roadkill. Small wonder so many female leaders abdicate romantically (à la Hillary Clinton), and critics pronounce the death of the seductress in modern times.

But a seductress comeback is afoot, both imaginatively and literally. Nancy Friday foreshadowed her return in
Women in Love
when she discovered that a significant sampling of women fantasized about “The Great Seductress.” Now power sirens are everywhere: fiction, films, comic books, Internet, and television.

Sexy commandas pilot complex warships through intergalactic space in sci-fi pulps; “superhero babes,” like
Witchblade
’s Sara seduce and clobber recreants on prime TV; brassy manizers of the old Barbara Stanwyck mold inundate feature films; and full-blown seductresses, such as Pezzini Vina in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
wreak heartbreak in serious literature. Popular video games, “Cy Girl,” “Nightshade,” and others feature action vamps, and Everquest logs on dozens of women each night who play virtual seductresses in its popular computer game.

Life is catching up with fantasy. In every category, curl-of-the-wave women are recovering their seductive birthright. They’re taking their sexual power with them to the top, to boardrooms, playing fields, and concert halls. Lionel Jospin’s administration in France produced a swanky cadre of “thinking [men’s] Kim Basingers,” cabinet officials, who sailed into top-level conferences with “a retinue of meek male attendants in their wake.”

Increasingly they’re recouping the seductive arts “to persuade, win favor, and gain power” and intergrate their lives. Among the many who’ve prospered professionally and erotically are Shelly Lazarus, CEO of Ogilvy and Mather, nonprofit leader Eleanor Elliott, entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, and Internet mogul Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

Prominent intellectuals like the “high wattage” Dr. Jaqueline K. Bar-ton make their male colleagues “jealous,” both of their achievements and of the men who marry them. Shattering the schoolmarm stereotype, professors in “pink cowboy boots and short, dyed-platinum hair” teach “by means of seduction,” and brandish their sexual authority without apology. The ravishing bookstore sparkplug and polymath, Jeannette Watson Sanger, has reinvented the salonière for the twenty-first century.

Gone too is yesterday’s girl-jock in do-rags and baggy sweats. Olympic medalists, drag racers, triathletes, and tennis players like Anna Kournikova break hearts
and
records. Boxer Laila Ali, Muhammad’s daughter, packs as much punch outside as inside the ring. Married to her uxorious trainer, she pairs an unbroken boxing record with knockout sex appeal, appearing in a recent sports magazine as an Afro-femme Rita Hayworth: propped on a bed in a red sheath, one hand on a cocked hip, with attitude, in-yo-face sensuality, and drop-dead curves.

Siren pioneers also populate the arts.
Sorcières
again, they’re throwing the old black magic of music, song, dance, poetry, theater, and pictures and putting men at their mercy. Movie stars who once lived on their knees are running the show in public and private. Catherine Zeta-Jones, neosouthern belle Reese Witherspoon, and Jennifer Aniston belong to this new breed. Pianist Helen Mercier spellbound Bernard Arnault, head of the LVMH fashion empire, at one of her concerts. He hunted her down, married her, and has remained transfixed, calling her “beautiful and fantastic” ten years and three children later. Poets Mary Karr and Jorie Graham are fabled mancharmers.

Pop music divas have channeled the sex goddess too. Bold, brash, and bedizened like rhinestone Sheenas of the Jungle, these hip-hop sistas refer to themselves as “Lady Devastator” and “Miss Thang” and rip it down with divine attitude. They’re sex empresses—no mistake—who turn men into housecats and demand queen bee treatment. If a guy can’t give her “twenty-one orgasms,” raps Lil’ Kim, then bye-bye. “You can’t stop a chick from ballin’.”

In the visual arts there’s another siren morph in progress. Female artists have scrapped their grungewear and one-of-the-boys affect for “seductress” makeovers. A mascot of this movement, the British bombshell Cecily Brown paints “swashbuckling” canvases that throb with raw, assertive, gynocentric sexuality—“luscious” oils of penises, yonis, and “explosive couplings.” She wears designer boots and mascara and makes a killing on the man market. In a throwback to the days of the suicide sirens, one lover cut his throat and leaped (nonfatally) from her second-story window in February 2000.

Belles laides
and Silver Foxes likewise are dialing up their allure and sexual clout. With the surge in weight gain and multiculturalism and the inevitable ennui caused by beauty inflation, “nonbeauties” have started to claim their place in the sun.

Larger women have their own fashion magazines,
Mode
and
Radiance,
and for the first time queen-size actresses, Camryn Manheim and Patrika Darbo, play heroines with a love interest on prime TV. Runways, fashion spreads, and television commercials teem with a mosaic of physical types: wide-bodied, beak-nosed, and every ethnic variation on earth. As trend spotter Faith Popcorn observes, “character,” not looks, “will count” in the future. The Barbra Streisand/Bette Midler effect, so anomalous in the last century, is going mainstream.

The same holds true for senior sirens. As age is revised steadily upward, seductresses clock in older and older. Cher, with her entourage of paladins, refuses to pack up her toys and go home, and Elizabeth Taylor will not quit. This veteran of eight marriages and seventeen-plus romances, alleycats with the same lech-hearted zest of a decade ago and dates not one but four beaux.
Charmeuses
like ninety-three-year-old Kitty Carlisle Hart, with an adoring suitor and booked social calendar, are plotting the curve of the future, pushing the siren frontier to whatever year we choose.

With the new millennium, we’re poised for takeoff. We’ve got an open freeway, pacesetters at the fore, and a twin-turbo engine in our chassis. So why are we fumbling with the keys and locked in the garage? Most of us haven’t been as lucky as the neoseductresses. Through centuries of conditioning, we’ve been palsied by a swarm of sexual fears and bad habits.

Until we can purge them, we can’t peel out. First, we’ve gone soft in love, debilitated by millennia of enforced passivity and learned incapacity. We harbor an unnatural dread of erotic initiative and would rather suffer slow death with Saturday reruns than risk gaffes, rejections, and mistakes with serious consequences. But you have to play to win, to put it out there. And armed with lovesmarts, we can hedge our risks, spread our bets, and break the bank.

Along with erotic inertia, we’re hounded by rivalry qualms. Afraid of opening the sluices of female competition, we downsex and damp our fires. If we snake all the guys, the girls will claw us to ribbons and cast us into social nowheresville.

Actual sirens, though, belie these social exile terrors. Although no favorite of women en masse, seductresses made friends at their own high watermark, shared a freemasonry among themselves, aided young protégées, and shrugged off feminine hostility. They didn’t need the ladies’ club; they had one of their own, a secret order of the goddess sorority.

Another spoke in our wheel is the fear of male emasculation and revenge. We’re scared we’ll deliver the deathblow to an already enfeebled masculine ego with our unbounded sexual power. It’ll be a hollow victory if we win the battle and lose the war and wind up with a pack of spineless schlubs and vindictive malcontents.

Men, as we’ve seen, are already the weaker sex in sex, prey to a thousand performance bugbears. Now, however, they’re in the throes of a massive crisis of confidence and gender identity. Because of feminist inroads and upheavals in the workplace, they’re in a parlous state, shorn of their pride and ancient prerogatives. With women’s increased erotic independence and rising expectations, they are especially nervous in the bedroom, the traditional proving ground of manhood. Studies show them more erotically vulnerable than women in general, more romantic and more attached to home, hearth, and mate. They place “all their emotional eggs in the basket of the woman [they] love.”