Seductress (48 page)

13
Archaeologist Timothy Taylor . . . :
Taylor,
Prehistory of Sex,
7.

13
Cerebral lures consequently . . . :
William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
ed. Madeleine Doran (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959), act 5, scene 1, line 8, 98.

14
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard . . . :
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
46.

14
Love goes brackish . . . :
Michael R. Liebowitz explains this natural entropy of passion in terms of the ramp effect. Just as a drug that becomes less and less effective with use, so romantic love tapers off as we become more tolerant to it. “Tolerance,” writes Liebowitz, “is the real problem in romantic relationship, because it leads to people getting bored with each other. The problem becomes worse the longer a relationship lasts, unless one of two things happen. The first is that with time they become more attached and comfortable with each other, and willing to sacrifice excitement for security. The second is that we find ways to put some novelty and change into our love life.” Liebowitz thinks only option two is viable in vital partnerships. See
The Chemistry of Love
(New York: Berkley Books, 1983), 131.

14
Love philosophers belabor . . . :
Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
833; Montaigne, “On Some Verses of Virgil,”
Complete Essays,
vol. 3, 104; Stendhal,
Love,
58; Montaigne, “That Our Desire Is Increased by Difficulty,”
Complete Essays,
vol. 2, 320.

14
The first sex . . . :
Lawrence Durrell,
Justine
(New York: Penguin, 1957), 105. Pain and eros are more closely related than we like to admit. Havelock Ellis devotes a section of his magisterial
Psychology of Sex
to the relationship, and some thinkers define eroticism as an “alliance of pleasure and pain.” Burdach, quoted in Ellis, 67.

Courtly love actually made suffering a precondition for love; Andreas Capellanus, who formulated an
amour courtois
code in the twelfth century encapsulated it: “That love is suffering is easy to see.”
Art of Courtly Love,
2. Fear, anger, humiliation, doubt, disappointment, and anxiety, then, may not be inimical to love (as hug gurus would have us believe), but dark, primal strands in the fabric of eros.

“Primitively,” argues Robert Briffault, “sexual feelings are associated not with tenderness but with delight in the infliction of pain . . . With both sexes, sexual attraction is pre-eminently sadistic, and is gratified by pain.”
The Mothers,
intro. Gordon Rattray Taylor (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, ₍1927₎, 1963), 39.

Two studies bear this out. In the first, men were more attracted to a woman who denigrated them; in the second, more attracted after a frightening passage across a high, shaky bridge. See Liebowitz,
Chemistry of Love,
125 and 27. Apparently we like our passions highly spiced, with a “sting and a smart” in them. Montaigne, “On Some Verses of Virgil,”
Complete Essays,
vol. 3, 72.

14
Anxiety is the . . . :
André Gide,
The Immoralist,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1970), 113.

15
Psychologist Theodor Reik . . . :
See Reik,
Psychology of Sex Relations,
38, 85-89, and passim. Love, he writes, “is related to feelings of satisfied vanity, of fulfilled pride, and realized ambition,” 4.

16
After first applauding . . . :
Quoted in Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
12.

16
The queen of . . . :
Miriam Robbins Dexter,
Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book
(New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 16, and Anne Baring and Jules Cashford,
The Myth of the Goddess
(London: Arkana, 1991), 265.

16
Primitives believed in . . . :
See Taylor,
Prehistory of Sex,
48-49, and Helen Fisher,
Anatomy of Love
(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992), 27.

16
Ever since Scheherazade’s . . . :
Proverbs 6, verse 24.

16
In ancient Greece . . . :
Friedrich,
Meaning of Aphrodite,
143.

16
Renaissance courtesans studied . . . :
Quoted in Seigneur de Brantôme,
Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies,
trans. A. R. Allinson (New York: Liveright, 1933), 166.

16
Before the recent . . . :
Ibid., 164. Other famous aphorisms to this effect include “As bull’s horns are bound with ropes, so are men’s hearts with pleasant words”; “fluency of speech will incline to love.” Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
700, and Capellanus,
Art of Courtly Love,
6.

16
Contrary to the . . . :
Most books on female comedy stress its turnoff for men. See Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave,
Women in Comedy
(Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press); Nancy A. Walker,
A Very Serious Thing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Regina Barreca,
They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted
(New York: Penguin, 1991).

16
“What is more . . .”:
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
102.

17
As Jean-Paul Sartre . . . :
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 456. James Alter recently expanded on this idea. “To speak with clarity, brevity and wit,” he writes, “is like holding a lightning rod. We are drawn to people who know things and are able to express them.” “Once upon a Time, Literature. Now What?,”
New York Times,
September 13, 1999, E1.

17
The goddess Inanna . . . :
Quoted in Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
24.

17
Love guides since . . . :
Baldesar Castiglione,
The Book of the Courtier,
trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), 212, and Ellis,
Psychology of Sex,
vol. 2, 22.

17
In Shere Hite’s . . . :
Hite,
Hite Report on Male Sexuality,
339.

18
The lure of . . . :
Mircea Eliade, quoted in June Singer,
Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977), 19.

18
“The indistinctness of . . .”:
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
12.

18
Venetian courtesans wore . . . :
Lynne Lawner,
Lives of the Courtesans
(New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 20. See boxed quotation, “A Courtesan Dressed as a Man,” accompanied by a letter from Pietro Aretino, 23.

18
As a French . . . :
La Bruyère, quoted in Thérèse Louis Latour,
Princesses, Ladies and Adventuresses of the Reign of Louis XIV
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trabner, 1924), 63.

18
Ninon de Lenclos, the . . . :
Quoted in Cohen,
Mademoiselle Libertine,
118, and in Ishbel Ross,
The Uncrowned Queen: Life of Lola Montez
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 310.

18
This aliveness, if . . . :
Mircea Eliade,
The Sacred and Profane,
trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 97.

18
Sirens have been . . . :
There’s a long tradition of the seductress’s mental imbalance. Sometimes the seductress is a complete lunatic, like Lucy Westenra of
Dracula
or a full-blown schizophrenic like Oliver W. Holmes’s snake woman in
Elsie Venner.
Usually, however, she displays garden-variety psychic disorders: narcissism, sadism, nymphomania, manic depression, exhibitionism, emotional frigidity, and sundry neuroses. A random selection of heroines from such works as
Antony and Cleopatra,
“Dolores,”
Nana, Lulu, Justine, Miss Julie, Damage,
and
Disclosure
could fill a psychiatric clinic.

Feminists Elizabeth Janeway, Jean Baker Miller, and Dr. Avodah Offit all argue that the seductress is a sick soul, a “histrionic” personality, a psychically annihilated wreck, and a messed-up neurotic. See Elizabeth Janeway, “Who Is Sylvia? On the Loss of Sexual Paradigms,”
Women: Sex and Sexuality,
ed. Catherine Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4-20. Also see Miller,
Toward a New Psychology of Women
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1976) and Offit,
The Sexual Self
(New York: Congdon & Weed, 1977).

18
They gave off . . . :
Rollo May, “Introduction,”
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology,
ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri Ellen-berger (New York: Touchstone, 1958), 31. For definitions of mental health that go beyond Freud’s union of love and work, see Abraham H. Maslow’s famous definition of self-actualization,
Toward a Psychology of Being
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968); Carl R. Rogers,
On Becoming a Person
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961); and Roberto Assagioli, M.D.,
Psychosynthesis
(New York: Viking, 1965).

18
Great swaggering queen . . . :
Baring and Cashford,
Myth of the Goddess,
39.

19
“Clothed with the . . .”:
Ibid., 176.

19
It needs vital . . . :
Angier brilliantly discusses this blend of “sedation” and “elation.”
Woman: An Intimate Geography,
318.

19
Too muchness was . . . :
Neumann,
Great Mother,
5.

19
“She is famine . . .”:
Quoted in Kate and Douglas Batting,
Sex Appeal: The Art and Science of Sexual Attraction
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 17.

19
The sex goddess . . . :
Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
41.

20
She’s been villainized . . . :
Neumann,
Great Mother,
172.

20
Athena, Jupiter’s stooge . . . :
Women may be women’s worst enemies when it comes to sexual power. As Dolly Parton, the bombshell of
Nine to Five,
says, women treat her “like the bastard at a family reunion.” Women blackball enchantresses, distrust, shun, and excoriate them. For a survey of the numerous attacks on the seductress, see de Beauvoir,
Second Sex,
who labels seductresses infantile dissemblers engaged in the “pure will to please,” 645; also 178, 340, 512, and passim.

Two other powerful arguments against the siren figure are Jane Gallop’s and Mary Ann Doane’s objections that despite her superficial appearance of strength, she carries male “epistemological baggage” and achieves only “problematic successes.” Mary Ann Doane,
Femmes Fatales
(New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 3, and Jane Gallop, “French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism,” in
Men in Feminism,
ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 114. Psychiatrist Avodah K. Offit believes that the temptress is a quasi-neurotic whose distinguishing traits are her “insatiable and dramatic quest for attention, great demands on others’ resources, and an emotional intensity out of all proportion to the stimulus.”
Sexual Self,
50.

Among the many more objections to this woman are Brownmiller,
Femininity;
Madonna Kolbenschlag,
Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye
(New York: Bantam, 1979); Miller,
Toward a New Psychology of Women;
Carol Cassell,
Swept Away
(New York: Bantam, 1984); Janeway, “Who Is Sylvia?,” 4-20; and Mary Daly,
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism
(Boston: Beacon, ₍1978₎, 1990).

21
They’re stronger than . . . :
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
8.

21
Women from business . . . :
bell hooks, quoted in Tad Friend, “Lock Up Your Sons—The 21st Century Woman Is in the Building,”
Esquire
(February 1994), 56.

21
In her
Bitch . . . :
Elizabeth Wurtzel,
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
(New York: Doubleday, 1998), 30.

21
Summarizing the current . . . :
“Courtney Love,” Interview,
Rolling Stone
(November 13, 1997), 166 and 164.

21
It frees women . . . :
Men persuaded us as part of the sixties’ sexual liberation bargain to drop our traditional defenses. In the past a woman used intricate feints, deceits, and courtship dances to win leverage in a rigged game. She drove up her value with crafty abstentions and laid out elaborate snares. But with shrewd prescience, the macho wing of the sexual revolution conned us into authenticity, a dubious concept peddled by existentialists.

We agreed to honesty, openness, and yeses while they conceded nothing. Betty Friedan marketed their scam with wide-eyed gullibility. “Inauthenticity was bred into women by weakness,” she preached, unaware of the necessary dissimulation that defines all social relations.
The Second Stage
(New York: Summit Books, 1981), 56. See Erving Goffman,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959) and John Lahr’s excellent summation of the issue in his review of
The Misanthrope, New Yorker
(May 8, 1995), 95-96.

Without artifice, society would collapse; personality, which comes from the Latin
persona,
means “mask.” Especially in the realm of sexuality, disingenuousness may be an important survival strategy. Evolutionary psychologists say it thrives in both sexes and observe that “we may teach our children that honesty is the best policy, but natural selection favors the skillful lie. In the context of courtship, a successful deceit carries a protective advantage.” Batten,
Sexual Strategies,
98.

22
“Venus favors the . . .”:
Ovid,
Art of Love,
Book 1, 124.