SEDUCTRESS: THE WOMEN AND THE ART

It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce.

VOLTAIRE

We are all seduced and seducing.

ST. AUGUSTINE

A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don’t know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did. 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

This strength of the feminine is that of seduction.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

The seductress. She’s a scarlet inkblot, a Rorschach of our deepest sexual fears and fantasies. She’s the blond bimbette in a string bikini; the stacked vamp in Spandex; the Chanel-suited nymphobitch of Sullivan & Cromwell; the servile artist’s muse and maidservant. But we’ve got it wrong. We’ve been gulled by chimeras—sleazy, bogus stereotypes that need to be dismantled and replaced by the genuine article.

Real seductresses, those incandescent unditchable sirens who spellbind and keep the men of their choice, belie every popular myth. Forget beauty, youth, vacuity, servility, and shark-hearted rapacity.

Seductresses are in fact the liberated woman incarnate. Feminism’s biggest mistake was kicking them out of the club. They’re futuristic models of female entitlement: independent operators, pleasure claimers, terroristas of traditional femininity, and big, classy divas. They recover women’s natural supremacy and achieve what most eludes us today—erotic control and a positive union of work and love.

It’s time to demystify and rehabilitate this lost tribe of sexy potentates and put them to use. Along with their brains, autonomy, integrity, and high swank, they radiate killer charm and practice the arts of erotic conquest like mahatmas. They can rescue us from the current sexual crisis. They can teach us how to get our groove back, retake the field, and finesse seduction, a forgotten and long-misunderstood art.

These love queens have existed throughout recorded history, although seldom celebrated by the official culture. Social mavericks and mold breakers, many have vanished into semiobscurity or been distorted beyond recognition. For generations they’ve been trivialized, demonized, and persecuted by the establishment. They strike terror into the insecure male heart; under their black magic all hell can break loose. A man can be pitched into testosterone storm, driven from home and country, led into love bondage, and zapped from a mogul into a mouse.

Yet paradoxically seductresses are often the best thing to happen to a man. Contrary to fable, they’re usually femmes vitales who put air in a man’s tank, conferring growth, creativity, happiness, and authentic masculinity. (For starters, their speed dial orgasmic capacity allays male performance and penis size anxieties.) Most of all, though, the great charmeuses are a gold mine for women. They’re a secret sorority, never before studied as a group, with a priceless fund of inspiration and seductive wisdom.

In both personality and erotic technique, seductresses show surprising similarities. Although amorous spells vary from woman to woman, with individual mixes brewed for specific times, people, and places, they follow a modus operandi based on an ancient art of love tradition. Their characters, too, tend to conform to a similar pattern, one that flies in the teeth of siren caricatures.

Far from sellouts to patriarchy, for instance, they subvert and sabotage it. They menace male domination. Since antiquity they’ve roiled the waters and upset the hierarchy, reclaiming women’s natural position in love: on top, in command, with swarms of men at their feet. They’re the stealth heroines of history. The first feminists.

They’re a welcome presence at the new millennium. Despite the sexual bravado and record advances in the workplace, women are stalled out in their love lives. Thirty to 50 percent have difficulty climaxing, a majority rate themselves “below average sexually,” and most say they’ve been humped, dumped, harassed, and “hurt by some guy.” We’ve lost our erotic pride, leverage, and winning edge.

Amid this brownout in female sexual power, men seem to hold all the high cards. Exploiting their social prerogatives in the mating game, they philander with impunity, impose the double standard, preserve the initiative, and cut and run at the drop of a diaper. They grow sexier with age. And given half a chance (as now), they binge out on casual infidelity, wife trade-ins, and hit-and-run sex.

The great appeal of the seductress is that she has always reversed the artificial male advantage and recovered women’s innate erotic primacy. “Seduction,” says philosopher Jean Baudrillard, restores “female sovereignty.” Women are the master sex in sex. Their superiority in love, their absolute sway over men, is hardwired into the human DNA. Unless “subverted by deceit or usurped by force,” writes socio-biologist Mary Batten, the female of the species controls the game. Men peacock and petition for her favor while she coolly surveys the competition and picks a mate on the basis of penises, resources, and beauty.

Or mates. To patriarchal dismay, women’s sexual plumbing wasn’t designed for monogamy and single-family dwellings. Sexier by a mile, they outorgasm, outlast, and outpleasure men and, left to their own devices, gallivant like their nearest cousins the bonobos, stud shopping and sating their eternal-climax machine.

Women’s sexual primacy is also rooted in myth. For twenty-five thousand years before there was a male deity, mankind probably worshiped a goddess. More than m

erely a swag-bellied fertility idol, she was a cosmic sexpot, the be-all and end-all who created heaven and earth and reigned supreme over human destiny. She gave and took life, revived the dead, raised the tempest, ripened the grain, conferred civilization, and reduced her servant, man, to fear, lust, and sublime rapture. He propitiated her with gifts and prostrated himself before the divine one and her wonder-working womb.

Memory traces of this ancient female cult could well be scored deep in the male libido. As the construction of sexuality evolved over time, acquiring refinements and cultural preferences, its intrinsic themes may have remained the same, embedded in the collective unconscious. If so, men can never rid themselves of their first love object or her Seductive Way. Secretly, primally, they pine for goddess women who rattle their bones, woo them with ancient ur-spells, and take them to paradise. By divine right men belong on their knees, and women (sorry), back on the pedestal.

The seductresses of this book are avatars of the original sex divinity. Like the goddess, they’re alpha plus women, ladies of strut and accomplishment. They have that numinous shazam we call charisma, combined with the steamy sexuality of the prehistorical deity. In one Neolithic figurine the goddess masturbates with her toes turned up, right hand plunged into her labia and left hand behind her head, Mae West style.

Their erotic siegecraft also mirrors the sexual strategies laid down at the beginning of evolutionary history. They rile, thrill, console, mystify men, and rock their hearts. They deliver the erotic every-person promised by the archaic deity: mother, daughter, mistress, androgyne, and transcendent divinity. “The open palm of desire,” says Paul Simon, “wants everything, everything.” A woman who can tap that buried male hunger and provide even a pale reflection of the great sex goddess and a fraction of her “everything” can name her man.

Six Seductress Myths

Cleopatra

Since the dawn of patriarchal civilization, seductresses have been enveloped in a pall of myth. They’re a little too powerful for patriarchal consumption; hence the campaign to throw women off the scent with a string of siren pretenders.

Each chapter targets a different fallacy and treats a group of seductresses in Western history who shatter the stereotype. They fall into six categories: nonbeauties, seniors, intellectuals, artists (not muses), and two commanda types—governmental leaders and high-octane adventurers.

Nonbeauties

The first and most insidious falsehood is that seductresses must be young and beautiful. Temptresses of song, story, and prime TV always have wolf whistle dimensions and cover girl faces. From evolutionary psychologists to image czars, authorities remind us that if we want men, we have to look sensational: big baby blues, flat abs, bazongas, and a perfect waist-to-hip ratio. When we think seduction, we think of lanky blondes stun-gunning a male lineup; we think of supermodels flying first class with money gods.

We hear the folk adages: “The love thoughts of men have always been a perpetual meditation of beauty,” and “Love is the love of the beautiful.” As a result, women knock themselves out cosmetically. Ten times more women than men (more than a million in 2002 alone) have plastic surgery, desperately tucking, lifting, lipoing, and augmenting in hopes of a romantic lotto, a Mr. Right who keels over at the “perfect look” and supplies the Range Rover and suburban dream.

A survey of the tragic love lives of beauty icons and the current singles scene dispels that fiction. In cities everywhere, number ten glamour girls hole up with videos on Saturday nights, sidelined and manless. Many seductresses of course were fabled beauties, but most of the great enchantresses, like the “very ugly” Pauline Viardot or hooknosed Cleopatra, lacked either looks, youth, or both, and often lived in eras more obsessed with beauty than our own.

Seniors 

Similarly, the ravages of age didn’t deter seductresses from reeling in the most desired men of their times. In popular culture, senior sex appeal is a comedy club oxymoron: the blue-haired granny with dewlaps and stalactite udders in hot pursuit of pool boys. “Hit on a dinosaur,” cracks the standup, “the way you would someone in your age range; ask about her prescriptions; ask if she’s ever done it in a golf cart.”

Contrary to the hag propaganda, however, older women possess some of the most potent erotic weaponry in the book. The goddess in her last phase was an übersiren. For centuries, cognoscenti have recognized and celebrated the huge allure of “old dames.” Anxiety about this amorous megapower in part explains the crone smear campaign. Unface-lifted, unreupholstered, dozens of senior seductresses made conquests that would be the envy of the comeliest nymphet on the man circuit.

Intellectuals 

A third libel that bedevils the seductress involves her stupidity. According to this canard, men want airheads who ask all the right questions, play dumb, and keep their mouths shut. Adorable, vapid chicklets populate romantic comedies, and mothers still advise daughters to dumb

down and let the guy talk and strut his knowledge. Feminists as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer agree that you can’t get a man with a brain.

Yet the real manslayers were smart cookies with big mouths. The peerless Greek courtesan Aspasia taught Socrates, founded a school of philosophy, and wrote her lover Pericles’s speeches. In fact most seductresses talked brilliantly and knew what they were talking about. Tantric scriptures teach that the highest splendor of the yoni is the flame of “intelligence,” and Neolithic goddess cults attributed all known and unknown wisdom to their sex deity.

Artists 

Joined to the mindless sex bomb fallacy is the erroneous view of the seductress as a servile man pleaser, a glorified housekeeper, inspiring men to feats of genius. In this fantasy sequence, a negligeed siren rouses the creative giant on a feather bed with the perfectly appointed breakfast tray. What great artist doesn’t dream of a domestic menial and muse—to coo approval, fetch his paints, turn down his bed, bend to his whims, and shine in reflected glory?

Plenty, in fact. Seductresses, if they wished, easily entrained artists and other creators into lifelong passions. But rather than decorative, passive, compliant muses, they wrote their own books and lit their own creative fires. They repudiated the traditional submissive parasitic model and appropriated an older female role, the divine mistress of spells.

A whole genus of seductress wielded this goddess-given thaumaturgic power both to enravish men and
build major careers. Often they possessed their own covey of male muses, but with typical reciprocity, they delivered as much inspiration as they received. Primordial magic making worked the same way: The goddess’s mana infected and transfigured her votaries.

Governmental Leaders 

A subset of the ornamental muse/homemaker myth is the pom-pom girl in the man’s parade, the politician’s gofer, mouthpiece, and prop. Great leaders, claim psychologists, want eager converts and team players who ratify, follow, and diffuse “nonhostile” karma. This tired cliché of the luscious camp follower and senate groupie went out with Monica Lewinsky, the seductress reduced to wipette.

Real seductresses, by contrast, were shakers and movers and often wore the pants politically. The Machtweiber (German for “vamp-politicas”), a fifth category of siren, led nations and political factions and exercised equal clout in the throne room and bedroom. Instead of downsexing themselves in office, they played up their erotic allure in order to brew charisma, win consensus, consolidate power, and bespell constituents.

Seduction and politics are natural bedfellows. They potentiate each other and work synergistically. Because men have always known and exploited this, they’ve tried to turf women out through intimidation and slander. With classic calumny, they branded the sixth-century Theodora a “new Delilah” and a “citizen of Hell stung by the devil’s fly.” In reality, she governed Byzantium with finesse while putting "forth irresistible powers of fascination.” The Machtweiber demolish the satanic boss lady stereotypes, winning men and governing with equal proficiency.

Adventuresses 

A sixth chapter takes on another deep-dyed fallacy: the Madonna-whore fiction. This old chestnut won’t go away. Biobehaviorist Richard Wright still warns darkly that the dichotomy between the domestic angel and the quick-trick Jezebel is “rooted firmly in the male mind.” Ultrafeminine, virtuous homemakers inspire love everlasting. Hellrakes who invade the male domain of high action and sexual adventure get laid, forgotten, and scorned. Nobody gets serious over a woman on the move and make. She’s the whore-hearted hussy and shark goddess, the one you don’t
marry. Romantically minded women have to be crazy to leave home and hit the high seas of sex, thrills, ill-gotten gains, and fun in the wild zone.

Crazy like a fox. The most fabulous charmeuses of history—idolized and adored to the grave and beyond—were rakish adventurers and sex professionals. Descended from the first prehistoric love goddess, Inanna, the out-for-kicks wanderer and prostitute, they buccaneered through life, fortune hunting, daredeviling, and raiding male hearts. They didn’t, it’s true, win Sunday school medals, but they were neither better nor worse than other women and actually liked men and aided their fortunes.

Patriarchy stigmatized siren-adventurers as vile, unmarriageable tramps for a reason. Their escape from domestic captivity was too seditious; their sexuality, too unbounded; and their siren song of the open road, too  strong. Men can’t resist them; the urge is rooted deeper than the Madonna, in the first roving, roistering sex goddess.

By Betsy Prioleau in "Seductress - Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love", Penguin Books, New York, 2003, excerpts chapter 1. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.