Seductress (20 page)

Age just added jewels to the crown. In her view the seductress was always the elder deity, the sex goddess in her ageless, serpentine form. “The fascinating woman,” she wrote, is like a “beautiful serpent” with “a dangerous power, a magnificent power, a fatal power, a blessed power . . . a power before which all others must wane and pale.” Frank Leslie’s carpets were woven with heart designs, and when a guest at one of her latter-day soirees noted that they were right under her feet, she tartly replied, “Quite their proper place.”

Mrs. Frank Leslie dreamed of the day when the fifty-year-old woman would become a sex symbol. Her day has come. With women’s increased longevity, freedom, power, and cosmetic options, the manslayer is just as likely to be sixty as twenty. We’re witnessing, reports the
New York Times,
the “apotheosis of the older woman” in our generation.

Joan Collins posed nude for
Playboy
at fifty, Tina Turner became the first rock sex icon of sixty, and the perennial Elizabeth Taylor and Catherine Deneuve sold more perfume with their faces than any two women in history. Cher staged a rip-it-down comeback in her fifties and, like so many nouvelles Silver Foxes (Madonna, Demi Moore, et al.), seized the male prerogative of the young armpiece.

When does it end? More and more seventy and eighty mean fifty. Graham Greene envisions a boudoir queen on the wrong side of seventy in
Travels with My Aunt,
and the film
Harold and Maud
dramatizes (believably with the bewitching Ruth Gordon) a love affair between a boy and an octogenarian. Surrealist artist Beatrice Wood attributed her 105 years to “chocolate and young men.” “Honey,” said Lena Horne on the cusp of eighty, “sex doesn’t stop until you’re in the grave.”

That’s the good news. Unfortunately not enough are cashing in. Because of poor demographics and cultural bogeys, many, if not most, older women today feel “grayed out,” bitter, and shelved. With a negative sex ratio approaching sixty-five men to a hundred women after age fifty and twenty-five to a hundred after seventy-five, life in sunset villages can be a Darwinian catfight for a few viable geezers. Men, the weaker sex, have an inconvenient way of dying off. A woman’s chances of remarrying after fifty are only 17 percent, compared with 77 percent for men.

Some of course
do
beat the odds; a select few, like the great eldersirens, have always known how to get theirs. The rest, though, have no instruction manuals, except pack-it-in cronehood directives, gray power pep talks, and plastic surgery guides—and no “role models.”

Silver Foxes come along just when we need them most. With their examples and lessons, they show older women how to claim the love lives they deserve. They explode the fallacies and myths that bedevil the Third Age and demystify senior seduction. As we’ve seen, they transcend the tastes and prejudices of specific eras and extend throughout recorded history.

For all their idiosyncrasies they have much in common. Defying the child development primers, they grew up “wrong,” without normal parents, schooling, gender role orientation, social adjustment, or realistic egos. Grandiose mavericks, they broke rank, seized male privilege, and defied convention.

Along the way (or at the start), revolutionary mentors gave them the means and the marching orders to haul out. What these mentors taught them isn’t in
Saving Ophelia—
sass, brass, sexual liberty, and the craft of seduction. If times and marriages were tough, the early Silver Foxes didn’t pick their scabs; they remembered their worth and lessons and muscled up.

Seductresses in their youth, they continued strong as older women. They smashed senior citizen stereotypes and reframed the idea of age. Because they followed futuristic antiaging regimes, they remained physically fit and active and pushed the envelope, pursuing new projects and challenges and living as if there were no tomorrow. They didn’t leave it to the young folks; they blatantly plied their senior charms: vitality, wisdom, money and status, maternal allure, and sexual firepower.

They scored big with men for a reason. They touched a mythic nerve. They reinvoked the archaic first sex goddess in her mature phase, the elder deity whom men cannot forget. Each Silver Fox dramatized a different facet of this divinity, although most contained the full complement of crone
über
charms. What they all had was the magic of metamorphosis and the goddess’s most signal characteristic: complete, manifold, enriched-by-time identities. Jean-Paul Sartre called this ultimate turn-on the “plentitude of absolute being.” Ripeness really is
all,
an all-powerful magnetic field for the hungering male soul.

In addition, vintage vamps play a shrewder hand at love. Time confers the craft and wisdom to excel. They’ve been around the block and realize that with age, strategies shift. While less significant, physical lures gain in symbolic strength. Ornament becomes more important, and settings grow more evocative of prestige, wealth, and myth—walled gardens, plush wombs, and Our Lady of the Animals.

Seduction, they knew well, is the ultimate head game. That explains why they edge out nymphets so easily. With maturity, seductresses ratchet up the psychological appeals: conversation, élan, disinhibition, ego strokes, festivity, and the art of the labyrinth. Past mistresses of the game, they’re adept at stoking desire through circuit, delay, and difficulty and staving off satiety through a thousand and one enchantments.

Traditionally, older women are the official instructors of youth. We’ve heard about them ad nauseam, those sibylline postsexual frumps with their vats of borscht and wise mutterings. Now we need less dated models, sexy guides like those who mentored the seductresses, who’ll teach us what counts—sexual mastery and life mastery until we die. Silver Foxes inhabited no kitchen corners peeling beets. They looked half their age, kept their waistlines, and wore diamonds as big as the Ritz. They mouthed off, cha-chaed through the corridors of power, courted the limelight, celebrated themselves, and refused to follow cultural instructions. Self-created originals, they kicked down the door of convention and of the future. They made a feminist racket, too much for the patriarchs.

The male chauvinist of Ovid’s
Art of Love
lays a curse on one of these senior renegades, the old erotic witch Dipsas, who instructs women in how to get the upper hand in love. “May the gods,” he howls, “give her old age no fire and many long winters.” The pioneer Silver Foxes have lifted the patriarchal curse. The withered Dipsas has metamorphosed (as the elder, shape-shifting sex goddess loves to do) into a fire-eating dame, a twenty-first-century manslayer mama with sexual confidence and smarts and all the mega-allure of the first deity in her prime.

Morgan le Fay, the crone of Celtic legend, has taken back her original identity in the new millennium, that of the elder seductress-queen who lives in a golden palace at the bottom of the sea and grants her favored lovers unimaginable delights, sometimes immortality. Above the entrance to her Fortunate Isles an inscription reads: “Morgan the Goddess is her name and there is never a man so high and proud but she can humble and tame him.”

CHAPTER FIVE

 

 

 

A fair body, if it have not a fair mind to match, is more like a mere image of itself or idol than a human body. However fair it may be, it must needs be seconded by a fair mind.
—SEIGNEUR DE BRANTÔME

 

He who teaches a woman letters feeds more poison to a frightful asp.
—MENANDER

 

Let women not by any means aspire at being women of understanding, because no man can endure a woman of superior sense.
—MARY ASTELL

 

—R. M. MILNES

 

 

 

M
ary Wollstonecraft, eighteenth-century savante and author of
Vindication of the Rights of Women,
raced from home one rainy night in a state of suicidal despair. For a second time she’d caught playboy Gilbert Imlay, the father of her illegitimate child, in bed with another woman. She paced the London streets until her skirts were waterlogged, then jumped from a bridge into the Thames where a stray bystander fished her out.

For women of mind, as they used to be called, romantic misery went with the territory. Women who burned the midnight oil, played the scholar, and “unsex’d” themselves couldn’t expect happy love lives and male adoration. We’ve all heard the nerd stories: how they’ve been two-timed and dumped à la Mary Wollstonecraft or co-opted like Mileva Einstein and recruited into lifelong gofer duty. Some were even martyred. The fifth-century Egyptian philosopher Hypatia was dragged from her chariot by a male mob and hacked to death with oyster shells. Scared off the erotic preserve, others have retreated to Boston marriages and bitter singlehood.

“Men hate intellectual women,” thundered the poet Tennyson. The loathsome stereotype glowers out from every comic strip and lowbrow comedy: the top-knotted schoolmarm with an upraised ruler, staring daggers through her hornrims and breathing the halitosis of too much learning.

But when you scratch the surface, this male hostility to female intelligence turns out to be a hoax, a smoke screen for sexual fear. Our Lady of Learning in fact is too alluring, too erotically potent for masculine comfort. Knowledge is not only power per se; it’s a devastating aphrodisiac. Especially for men. If Carl Jung is right—that the oldest myths reign eternal in the human subpsyche—then men are programmed at the deepest level to turn onto and adore smart women.

In the first creation myths a goddess, a “Perfect Mind,” created the earth and heavens through her stupendous intellect. As the all-inclusive Divine Being she also incarnated holy lust. For that reason the sex divinities of early antiquity were deities of both wisdom and eros.

The Sumerian love goddess, Inanna, possessed the entire corpus of human knowledge, having cozened it from the god of wisdom in a drinking match. According to legend, he drank so much beer during her toasts and challenges that he gave her the
me
’s, which she donated to society. They included erotic arts (“lovemaking, kissing of the phallus,” and female “allure”) along with five kinds of intellectual prowess: persuasive speech, judgment giving, psychological acumen and counseling, logical analysis and record keeping, and philosophic wisdom. Brainpower for Inanna incorporated sexual power and potentiated it.

Even after patriarchy had demoted the original goddesses and subdivided them into specialties, the link between sex appeal and intelligence lingered. The Roman “Lady of Wisdom” Sapientia, for example, poured the wine of enlightenment from her breasts and rose from the sea like crowned Aphrodite. Seduction preeminently is not for dummies.

While none of the seductresses lacked a quick mind and agile tongue, some were avowed intellectuals. They were also among the most devastating heartbreakers in Western history. Being smarter than average, they tended to be “globally gifted” (like the mythic creatrix), but each displayed a different sort of intelligence, roughly equivalent to Inanna’s five types. Their style was early sex deity. Glamorous, gaudy, self-sovereign, sexed up, and footloose, they put their learning in the service of seduction and vice versa. They got it together goddess-wise: sage and siren, queen of smarts and queen of hearts.

In the movie
Dangerous Beauty,
Veronica Franco’s mother, a retired courtesan, tells her daughter the secret of seduction. “Desire begins in the mind,” she says, then explains how to feign emotions, flatter codgers, and provoke imaginations by fellating bananas. Even in the sexist sinkhole of sixteenth-century Venice, no girl—especially Veronica—would have heeded such moronic advice.

Veronica Franco, a brilliant operator, knew to a scudo the aphrodisiacal value of her mind and worked it for all it was worth, becoming “the most famous and gifted courtesan” of her time. Her forte was verbal power, Inanna’s “forthright and adorning speech.”

The ruling elite took pains to keep this high explosive out of most women’s hands, muzzling 80 percent of the population with enforced illiteracy. “Rhetoric in all its forms,” declaimed the authorities, “lies absolutely outside the province of women.” Those who rebelled were forced into marriageless obscurity and social exile. All except the Venetian courtesans. These renegade birds of paradise knew a hot turn-on when they saw one and “cultivated the verbal arts” as assiduously as bedcraft. Men paid separate fees just for their conversation, which was informed, learned, and spiked with lightning repartee.

Of these, Veronica Franco took the palm. She so far outrivaled the competition that she occupied a class by herself, as a peer of the city’s intellectual elite and recognized grandmistress of speech. A polemicist, poet, and rhetorician, she published three breakthrough books of verse and letters, argued down the Inquisition in court, and defeated the reigning literary stars at public sparring matches.