preface Its wonderful what a little determined charm can do. noel coward
He that doth play the game best is best loved. seigneur de brantôme
Love despises the lazy. ovid
Love must be sought, cultivated, and developed by people if we are to make a better world. anthony walsh
Search seductress on the Internet, and youll find more than twelve thousand sites, hundreds of starlet and how-to Web pages, and an avalanche of ads for clothes, cosmetics, films, CDs, and escort services. Is there really anything left to say? Havent we overworked and commercialized this word into an anachronism and tired daytime TV cliché? A whore of all work?
Almost, but not quite. If you scrape off the cultural debrissuperstitions, myths, and media cant youll see a woman to be reckoned with. The seductress is one of the most potent female personas in existence. Though long misunderstood and ignored, shes the paradigmatic liberated woman, empowered with men and empowered in life. Shes a threshold role model who can reinstate feminine sexual sovereignty and holistic happiness and remap the future. And shes not the least as weor the Internet imagine.
I came to the seductress, like most people, through the imagination. Raised in a southern belle culture, with a mother who was the Miss Valentine of Richmond, Virginia, I gravitated as a child to stories of man charmers in fiction and fairy tales. Much later I taught a college course on the topic The Seductress in Literature that changed everything. First I discovered the dearth of researchfew unbiased or comprehensive studiesand second a ravenous appetite among young people for knowledge. In my class, students of both sexes avidly analyzed fabled sirens and tried to scope out their secrets. Afterward, the women flooded my office. Over and over I heard the same laments: elusive bad boys, soulless hookups, sapped confidence, wrecked pride, and total mystification about how to prevail in love.
As I looked around, I realized my students reflected a larger crisis in society. Across the culture, women seemed to have lost the plot erotically and entered the plague years. Despite equal opportunity sex and babe feminism, guys still hold the whip hand: They have numbers on their side (48 percent women to 43 percent men nationwide); they age better and cling like crotch crabs to their historic prerogatives of the initiative, double standard, promiscuity, mate trade-ins, domination, and domestic copouts. The population of single women, especially middle-aged professionals and first wives, has swelled to one in four, with most wanting and failing to get married.
In surveys, women en masse report epic demoralization and erotic despair. We say were increasingly loved and left, prey to low self-esteem, and really lonely and really afraid. The orgasm gapthe 15 to 30 percent female success rate during intercoursecontinues to widen, as women clamor for a Viagra equivalent and numb themselves with antidepressants. No one disputes the evidence, writes a New York Times reporter, that many women are unhappy with their sex lives or that were engaged in a frantic search for a role model.
By the end of the semester I began investigating actual seductresses in hopes of finding role models to pull us out of this funk. I cast my nets wide. I read hundreds of biographies; I pumped friends and colleagues; I followed up leads dropped at parties, here and abroad. The list burgeoned; notebooks bulged until at last I narrowed the field to the top players. I defined the seductress as a powerful fascinator able to get and keep the men of her choice, men who are good for her. Rarely discarded or two-timed, she successfully combines erotic supremacy with personal and vocational achievement. That automatically eliminated a number of pseudoseductresses: the eaten and colonized Marilyn Monroe, the oft-dumped flunky Pamela Harriman, and such gofers to male genius as Alma Mahler.
Still, I was left with more charmeuses than I could handle, some famous like Cleopatra; others obscure and forgotten, like Pauline Viardot, the strikingly ugly soprano who seduced the world: Berlioz, Gounod, and most notoriously, Ivan Turgenev (the literary Brad Pitt of his day), who lived with her and her husband in a forty-year ménage