Seductress (46 page)

If seductresses stirred men up and put them through labyrinthine paces, they also massaged them. Accomplished smoothies, they clairvoyantly intuited their lovers’ needs and wounds and salved them with ego strokes and TLC. They had Ph.D.’s in people skills—another lost twenty-first-century art. Desocialized by cyberspace, television, the demise of manners, and feminism’s anticharm legacy, we’ve forgotten the winning ways of the enchantresses.

According to Daniel Goleman, we’ve spiraled into terminal social ineptitude, unable to interpret others’ emotions or address them adequately. A staggering ten million suffer from social anxiety disorder and lack the necessary know-how to navigate a dinner date without a sex depressant like Paxil.

Sirens weren’t born with an extra gene for politesse; they acquired it through observation, practice, and help from wise elders. Françoise de Maintenon, for instance, was such a klutz when she first entered society that she cowered speechless in the corner of her husband’s drawing room.

But she apprenticed herself to the grand swami of couth Ninon de Lenclos and developed into the suavest operator at Versailles. “Beauty without grace,” quipped the sage Ninon, “is a hook without bait.” With savoir-faire sweetening our postmillennial brains, glamour, and shiv, we’re baited, as they say in fishing, for the honey hole.

Ultimately, though, the biggest draw on the market will be strong, self-complete supremas. With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible. We were born for plentitude and inner fulfillment. Abraham Maslow thought self-actualization an innate drive. Nature intended us to grow, burgeon, and maximize our individual potential, to be world-class achievers like Lou Andreas-Salomé, Émilie du Châtelet, and Catherine the Great.

Nature also intended us to win the best men this way. “Whenever a woman has captivated a man with a lifelong fascination,” writes erotic philosopher Ellen Key, “the secret has been that he never exhausted her; that she ‘has not been one, but a thousand.’ ”

As heiresses of the first omninatured deity, seductresses are replete and contain multitudes: male/female dualities, contradictions, protean identities, and myriad dimensions. Like the self-glorifying divinities, they have giant, unladylike egos and vaunt their charms without apologies. (Who says a little saving grandiosity isn’t good for women?)

They’re also Inanna the “lioness.” Whether blessed with iconoclastic backgrounds or cursed with hardship, they muscle their way to the top, seizing the right mentors and lovers and kicking obstacles to the curb. They’re the “goddess unbound by social order,” norm smashers who live by a different law, the divine right of sex queens.

All this may be old news for today’s sirens. More entitled, confident, educated, mobile, and sexually liberated than previous generations, they’ve moved beyond yesterday’s constricting fears and complexes. Intuitively they’ve mastered psychological arts and rejiggered the mix for postmodern susceptibilities.

It’s instinctive. The Seductive Way is our ancestral inheritance, implanted in the collective unconscious, to be accessed and repossessed. The wisdom will find us out. “Seduction,” predicts Baudrillard, “is destiny.” The seductress may have petered out at the fin de millénium, but she’s roaring back.

Futurists forecast a whole new sexual order on the horizon, a swing of the cosmic pendulum. They foresee a culture-wide period of “feminization,” in which sex and reproduction are separated; women’s characters, more self-integrated and androgynous; and “global equality,” even female “primacy,” is institutionalized. Society, they prophesy, will be forced to “accede to what women en masse want to do.”

It’s just a question of what we want to do. Although the stage is set and the cast assembled for a seductress revival, most women haven’t heeded the call. Conflicted and browbeaten, they’re marking time, afraid of change. Yet we’ve come to a crossroads. The “plague years” have bottomed out. With the promises of the sexual revolution in tatters and female sexual pride on life support, we’ve been pushed, willy-nilly, to a breaking point, to action.

As in the past, it may not be all smooth sailing. Seduction riles and dismantles patriarchal domination. Since Phyrne and Aspasia first came downwind of Greek patriarchal vengeance, enchantresses have been sand in the social machinery, ostracized, vilified, and persecuted.

America, with its puritanical, masculinist heritage, has been especially hard on freewheeling
charmeuses.
In Salem they were burned as witches; in Hollywood, pulped and recycled as noir hellcats or sick hoochies. A hundred years ago Henry Adams warned that the powers that be would never tolerate an “American Venus.”

Some guys out there want to make sure it never does. Bruised and battered by the gender revolution, these macho diehards are not going to take this lying down. They’ve unleashed backlash campaigns (of the kind chronicled by Susan Faludi), pseudo-Darwinian defenses of male sexual superiority, and a slew of defensive shenanigans: commitment phobia, date rapes, and dominance games.

So we may have to brace for resistance. A beleaguered male minority isn’t about to cheer our parade. But the seductresses, no strangers to sniper fire, can show us how to deal. Premier operators, they circumvented the flak, ignoring criticism and disporting above the machinations of half men with heroes of their own rank. When it came to the pass, they put on Inanna’s armor—her “mighty love clothes,” and “fiendish wings”—and hid scorpions under their beds. But, then, love has never been a game for cowards.

Most men, though, are all too ready for the seductress. They’re tired of copping tough guy postures and shouldering the globe like Atlas. Their sensibilities are tuned up for outsize, magisterial love goddesses. At base men have never lost their prehistoric preference for the great goddess, the mistress of the universe and plenum of being. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller believes they’ve always preferred magnificas over mere lookers with low waist-to-hip ratios.

Recently
Esquire
celebrated “dangerous” sex queens who take charge, pulsate with “chthonic forces,” and pitch men into “fatal ecstasy.”
Talk
ran a similar tribute to men’s “private goddess”—the “butch and femme,” “potent and tenacious” action heroine.

Psychologist John Munder Ross thinks alpha women of this mold attract men today because they permit an opportunity for male heroism and a genuine display of
cojones.
What “the lover” most craves, he writes, is to “pay homage to Aphrodite.” The root meaning of “hero” is “to serve.” Men yearn, as the Mexican film
Esmeralda Comes by Night
dramatizes, for their predestined place in the cosmic scheme of things: at the feet of the Almighty Feminine.

Esmeralda, the heroine of this movie, based on a novel by Elena Poniatowska, is an Inanna redux. A health professional of independent means, she’s a lusty life force and rambling rose who’s married to five men simultaneously. Unfazed by moral convention, she rotates merrily among husbands until she’s arrested at the altar on the verge of acquiring number six.

In the trial that follows she seduces everyone, including the chief prosecuting officer. While the court deliberates, her husbands and placard-waving protesters descend on the prison and demand her release. Freed by popular acclaim, she’s feted at the end by all her lovers and spouses.

Each dances with her in turn to a slow salsa, “Lady Traveler Who Goes by Sky and Sea,” after which her poet-husband recites a fulsome encomium. “You are a dream!” he exclaims. As the film fades out, rain sweeps over the parched town and the prosecuting officer picks up an umbrella and dances in the downpour like Gene Kelly.

As in the ancient mythic drama, the sex goddess reanimates the arid earth. Her male votaries celebrate their renewed virility and carouse in sacred ecstasy. That the film comes from the heartland of machismo suggests the crushing modern burden of hypermasculinity and the accompanying fantasy of release. None of which means that men welcome polygamous “Lady Travelers” for their wives. But Esmeralda embodies an atavistic wish for women nearer the first divinity: autonomous, self-contained, polymorphous, prepotent, adventurous, fascinating, and so hypersexed she needs five men—at least. As her husband’s poem underscores, she is a “dream.”

But in dreams begin responsibilities, a directive to speed the day. Full erotic empowerment, the last feminist frontier, is there for the taking. Like Esmeralda, we can walk away with all the chips, success at work and love and the men of our choice. We can recover our divine sexual primacy—orgasmic megapleasure, va-va-voom charisma, and our role as arbiter in the mating game. With our lovecraft, we can twist a man’s heart like a pretzel. And we don’t have to compromise our brains, abilities, and principles. The higher we climb, the greater the sex appeal.

Not that sexual sovereignty will solve all our problems. It won’t banish conflicts, incompatibilities, wailing children, shattered careers, and betrayals of the flesh and spirit. It doesn’t guarantee faithful lovers or happy ever after. But it helps our chances and torches up our lives so that they’re more vital, interesting, integrated—and sexier. We’re ready for this. A third sexual revolution, if we wish, is on the horizon. The pieces are in place: a crack operating manual, inspirational heroines, talismanic stories, and perfect timing.

“Revolution,” by definition, means “new things,”
res novae.
A seductress uprising, for a change, won’t desolate and ravage the old order. It benefits both sexes. The 2050 temptress will also be something new, a goddess-trippin’ siren with technocharms we can only imagine.

Yet in essence nothing about her will be really new. Her core identity and Seductive Way will be as they were forty thousand years ago when they were fused into the human libido, when the Divine Feminine catwalked through the cosmos and laid down the law in love: women on top, on the move, aureoled in satiety, and trailed by squadrons of lunar heroes—happy at last—in her labyrinthine toils.

p.
xi
Across the culture . . . :
Linda Grant,
Sexing the Millennium
(New York: Grove Press, 1994), 6.

xi
The population of . . . :
Quoted in Candace Bushnell, Ariel Levy, “The Blonde Who’s Had More Fun,”
New York
(February 11, 2002), 48. “The number of never married American women more than tripled over the past two decades,” Sarah Bernard, “Success and the Single Girl,”
New York
(April 26, 1999), 34.

xi
We say we’re . . . :
Susan Quilliam,
Women on Sex
(New York: Barricade Books, 1994), 2, and Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller, eds.,
Bust Guide to the New Girl Order
(New York: Penguin, 1999), front pages.

xi
“No one disputes . . .”:
Gina Kolata,
New York Times,
June 21, 1998, 3, and Daphne Merkin, “The Marriage Mystique,”
New Yorker
(August 3, 1998), 74.

xiii
Whether consciously or . . . :
Ovid,
The Art of Love,
trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), Book 3, 155.

xiv
Lola Montez lectured . . . :
Sixteen of the sixty or so
charmeuses
in this book shared their seductive wisdom, either directly in nonfiction guides or indirectly in fiction and poetry, and focused on psychological siegecraft. See the work of Cleopatra, Aspasia, Louise Labé, Veronica Franco, Émilie du Châtelet, Ninon de Lenclos, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Martha Gellhorn, Louise de Vilmorin, Lola Montez, Victoria Woodhull Claflin, Frank Leslie, Mae West, and Colette.

xiv
It’s no coincidence . . . :
Rollo May,
Love and Will
(New York: Dell, 1969), 146.

xiv
“Venus favors the . . .”:
Ovid,
Art of Love,
Book 1, 124.

xiv
They’d impress on . . . :
Guy de Maupassant,
Bel-Ami,
trans. Douglas Parmee (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 317.

xv
Second-wave feminists . . . :
Germaine Greer,
The Madwoman’s Underclothes
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 152-68, and Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex,
trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1952), 645.

xv
“Seduction,” notes philosopher . . . :
Jean Baudrillard,
Seduction,
trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 8.

xvi
Nancy Friday said . . . :
Nancy Friday,
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies
(New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 64.

2
They strike terror . . . :
Men, when it comes to the sexually autonomous woman, are prey to a witch’s brew of terrors. They’re afraid, first, of her biological superiority. Sexually insatiable, the progenitor of life, she holds the trump cards, seeming to incarnate nature itself. As the personification of nature she contains the destructive, anarchic currents of sexuality—impulses to violence, cruelty, mayhem, and emotional chaos. She also embodies sexual mystery. To encounter women in the erogenous zone is to trespass upon that irrational no-man’s-land, meet the enigmatic sphinx, and confront the riddle.

A loss of power perhaps frightens men most of all. Despite their sexual strut and bravado, they are “inescapably at [women’s] mercy” in the bedroom. Inadequacy threatens a man at every boudoir threshold, and when he leaves it, after witnessing a woman’s orgasmic inexhaustibility, he faces another rejection anxiety: cuckoldry. Then another one looms: a horror of engulfment, of being sucked into women’s sexual valence, of losing selfhood and consciousness and drowning. At a primitive level, men are terrified that women will devour, imprison, and annihilate them, draw them to the ocean floor like Lorelei and wrap them in seaweed.