Seductress (5 page)

Compliant, eager-to-please yes girls not only give off the BO of need, they fail men at a gut level. Men may dream of consensus, calm, and peace on the home front, but they long for a little action. They crave intrigue, caprice, the tang of distress and fear—a tortuous treasure hunt, with a numinous, ever-fascinating queen at the end.

At the same time, men require the primal gratifications of the great goddess strewn along her labyrinthine way. Central to the cult of the goddess was woman the creatrix. She gave birth to the universe, watered the heavens and earth with her life-giving milk, and spawned and nurtured humanity.

Mother love underpins all desire. The rocking, stroking, sucking, and nuzzling of lovemaking imitate the first caresses of infancy, and the love object—if she answers male prayers—restores the mom to the man.

With a qualifier. While men yearn for the lost delights of maternal succor and at-oneness (intensified by the forced renunciation of them in boyhood), they’re also skittish, fearing engulfment and annihilation. The great goddess killed her consort-son each year; mermaids sucked men underwater and drowned them in amniotic fluid.

Seductresses therefore played the mommy card with discretion. They defused the fear by balancing intimacy and TLC with nonmaternal sizzle. The backdrag to mother and her maternal sweets is inherent in eros, a powerful, primordial pull. Yet it coexists with female autonomy and sex appeal and may even depend upon them for peak efficiency. The goddess wasn’t just a
magner mater;
she was a blowtorch sex queen and mage of a million charms.

Connected to the maternal draw of seduction is a passion for self-inflation. In love, everyone seeks an ego boost—and not a small one. At the depths of our being, we hanker to be number one, a god, just as our cave ancestors became “divine” in the presence of the deity. Psychologist Theodor Reik thought that the ego drives in love are older and stronger than sexual ones; we’ll crawl over broken glass for the lover who lifts us out of ourselves into a nobler, grander, classier identity. To pull this off, though, the lover must be a winner, which explains why the praises of toadies and errand girls never work as their mothers promised. Only the applause of valued people carries any value.

The sirens’ Olympian egos made them natural praisers; they instinctively projected their inflated sense of self onto others. After first applauding herself, her “wondrous vulva,” and endless accomplishments, the cocky Inanna trained her accolades on Dumuzi and recited his superhuman virtues. We go for the ego burn, an apotheosis, and no ordinary woman will do. She must have the swish of the first goddess and her divine powers of transfiguration.

By tradition, the best way to build men up is to listen, listen, listen. Guys love laugh track girls and loopy ingenues who ask all the right questions. But in truth they’re sent into orbit by silver-tongued talkmeisters. The queen of the cosmos brought the cultural arts to mankind, and her successors were divas of speech: Inanna the “eloquent,” “Aphrodite the Persuasive,” and Isis the “Lady of Words of Power.”

Primitives believed in the magical power of words, and anthropologists speculate that sexual enchantment might have been one of the first functions of language. Ever since Scheherazade’s verbal veil dance in
The Arabian Nights,
men have always been seduced by the “smooth tongue of the adventuress.” All the traditional love texts recommend conversational prowess.

In ancient Greece eloquence was a sine qua non for hetaerae who mastered classical learning and “hundreds or thousands” of “appropriate ways of expressing things.” Renaissance courtesans studied
bel parlare
(seductive speech) as assiduously as lute playing and bedcraft and reviled “dumb of mouth” whores. Before the recent ascent of mute babes, “every woman to be well loved” had to “possess good powers of speech.”

Contrary to the lonely clown propaganda, comedy is a strong aphrodisiac, and the funny bone, a high-explosive erogenous zone. Aphrodite was the “laughter-loving goddess,” and her descendants through the ages joked and quipped their way to men’s hearts. “What is more seductive,” say the love philosophers, “than a stroke of wit?”

In the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” Billy Joel instructs his inamorata not to make “clever conversation,” and the hero of
9½ Weeks
commands the heroine “not to talk.” They’re begging for mercy. Sword without
s
spells “word,” the siren’s sharpest weapon. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, “Seduction
is
fascinating language.”

Men never lose an atavistic appetite for license—the release of social and temporal constraints and ecstatic abandon. Seductresses were mistresses of misrule, carnival queens who cast off repressive shackles and declared a public holiday. The goddess Inanna decreed, “Let all of Uruk be festive!” Once a year at the sacred marriage ceremony she ordained a gala free-for-all of feasting, cross-dressing, game playing, and promiscuous fornicating.

We cannot bear too much reality; bound, gagged, and led in chains by custom and civic authority, we demand that eros set us free. Love guides since antiquity have urged women to loosen up, “be festive,” and provide “moments of organic relief.” The French cocottes at the turn of the century were maestras of disinhibition and unbuttoned frolic. With
Quid nihi
(To hell with it) for their motto, they lit cigarettes with bank notes, talked dirty, threw
transvesti
balls, and danced with pet pigs.

Among the many other tunes in their songbook, sirens sang of parties—of frolic, joy, masquerade, and anything goes abandon. Love jumps the turnstiles. In Shere Hite’s study of male sexuality, men said what they valued most about sex was being allowed to be “totally out of control, to release the pent-up emotions they were taught they ‘should’ repress at all other times.” Here they echo their prehistoric male ancestor
Homo festivus,
who cut loose when he worshiped the sex goddess: cross-dressed, caroused, and let the deity take possession of him.

Since the primordial sex deity personified life energy and totality, including the union of both sexes, seductresses played up their ultravitality, inner plentitude, and androgyny. The lure of gender synthesis, with its “superabundance of erotic possibilities,” exerts a potent fascination on the libido. Feminists have long crusaded for a more androgynous definition of womanhood, without realizing how sexy it is. “The indistinctness of the sexes,” amorist scholars agree, “is seductive.”

Sirens deliberately traded on the appeal of the androgyne. Venetian courtesans wore pants under their overskirts and adopted a “masculine mode” of behavior and lifestyle, while others, like the omnisexual first goddess, engaged in love affairs with both sexes. Androgyny, no secret to these women, amps sex appeal. As a French connoisseur observed in the seventeenth century, “A beautiful woman who has all the good qualities of a man is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Another secret weapon enchantresses deployed was joie de vivre, the goddess’s yes energy that animated heaven and earth. Fictional heroines may be loved for their bovine placidity and gravitas, but the women who inflame men are live wires. Vitality creates an aphrodisiacal whirlpool around a woman. The goddess created out of superabundance, a sacred power surge, and all her avatars radiated the same ultraélan. Ninon de Lenclos, the empress of courtesans, took for her motto “Joy of spirit is the measure of its force,” and Lola Montez careened through life exclaiming, “I must live before I die!”

This aliveness, if genuine, emanates from inner health, a full to brimming psychic wholeness and “plentitude of being” like the deity’s. Sirens have been endlessly typecast as neurotics and sick souls, but they were saner, if anything, than other women. They gave off that “plus-feeling of power,” that assurance, creativity, complexity, and rage to grow we associate with robust egos. Great swaggering queen bees, they had self-concepts to match the deity—the stuck-up mistress of the universe, the life principle, and the “eternal image of the whole.”

Whatever her fascinations, physical or psychological, the seductress pizzazzed them up. Eros is the great stirrer-upper, a mover, shaker, and drama maker. When the sex goddess of ancient Sumer made an entrance, the earth trembled, the kettledrums rolled, and men stood dumbstruck. “Clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars,” she drove in on a chariot drawn by lions, bearing a staff entwined with snakes and brandishing her eagle wings like parasails.

Love that lasts never neglects the old éclat; it needs wake-up calls and limelight to stave off the natural drift to satiety and blahsville. It needs vital tension, a kaleidoscopic play of sedate and elate. The
grandes amoureuses
were doyennes of dazzle, showboaters, and scene stealers. Too muchness was the goddess’s signature, “all that’s fascinating, terrible [and] overpowering.” They kept things in motion and threw off
électricité,
the star power that sends shock waves through a room. When Richard Burton first saw Elizabeth Taylor on a pool chaise, he hyperventilated. “She is famine, fire, destruction and plague, she is the dark lady of the sonnets, she is the only true begetter . . . in short, too bloody much.”

Although we’ve been groomed to supporting roles and self-deprecation, the women who enthralled men and kept them on their toes punched up their style with drama, self-parade, and excitement. The sex goddess didn’t sit out the ball in her all beige personality; she was “shinning bright and dancing.”

These ancient seductive arts are so effective, so fire-powered that they work without a blanket application. Seductresses practiced them piecemeal and selectively and seldom employed the full spectrum of spells. Lou Andreas-Salomé, for instance, hated music and cosmetics, Eva Perón lacked a sense of humor, and Martha Gellhorn and Grace Hartigan refused to mother men. Seduction is an art, not a science, requiring different mixes for different men and a fingertip feel for mood, timing, and hidden tastes.

Then, like any human endeavor, the best-laid assaults can go awry. Some men are just siren-resistant, slow on the sexual uptake, well married, cryptogay, or scared, and would push the snooze button if Cleopatra climbed into bed with them in a G-string and pasties. Similarly, no “right” combination of physical and psychological moves delivers the goods every time.

Nevertheless, the seductresses and their lovecraft provide a premier field guide to sexual empowerment—time-proven, reality-tested, and grounded in ancient wisdom. It’s a liberation front waiting to happen and death to male dominance. Enchantresses blow the hatches. They subvert patrilineal succession, female monogamy and submission, and give women the scepter and throne.

Obviously patriarchy hasn’t taken this minx to its bosom. Throughout recorded history, she’s been stigmatized, ostracized, and persecuted. She’s been villainized as “the terrible goddess [who] rules over desire and seduction,” a bloodthirsty ball breaker like Salome and Circe, and the antithesis of virtuous femininity. Lilith, Eve’s predecessor, is the prototype: a promiscuous jilt who refused to accept the missionary position and dumped Adam for an eternity of revolving door sex with satanic superstuds.

To eradicate this dread specter of female autonomy and power, men have gone to heroic lengths. They’ve hyped female asexuality, inflicted the double standard, broken women on the wheel of domestic servitude, and punished sirens to the limit of the law, mutilating and burning them as witches in cultural panic attacks.

Sadly enough, women have all too often joined the witch-hunt. Like subjugated people everywhere, they’ve internalized the master’s beliefs and colluded in their own oppression. Competition for a Few Good Men has only fueled the hostility. With marriage a woman’s life support system for centuries, the seductress represented a real death threat. At any moment she could break and enter, swipe your guy, and sack your very existence. Athena, Jupiter’s stooge, turned the too sexy Medusa into a revolting monster, and women still demonize and assail fascinators. Often more viciously than men—just as the status quo intended.

But nothing has worked. Seductresses can’t be stomped out. They’re stronger than the law and foil “all systems of power.” Like their divine progenitor, they’re a tough breed with a big sense of Me and serene indifference to criticism and persecution. Mae West mocked the court when she was arrested for corrupting the morals of minors, and Martha Gellhorn drove Ernest Hemingway’s car into a ditch during one of his sexist rampages and let him walk home. Sirens snapped their fingers at authority and went their own way, the Seductive Way.

Women today are better positioned for erotic sovereignty than at any time in memory. Educated and sexually liberated, we have an array of advantages denied to previous generations: money, mobility, independence, leisure, cosmetic options, and feminism’s legacy of equal entitlement. We don’t have to seduce for our supper anymore; now it’s about the perks of choice and romantic success.

The will to seduce is there. Women from business queenpins to rocker chics are demanding a single standard, sexual agency, and the “hard dick” and “tight butt” of their pick. In her
Bitch
manifesto, Elizabeth Wurtzel says she’ll “scream, shout, race the engine . . . and throw tantrums” until she gets a free, fulfilled sex life. Summarizing the current campaign for sexual empowerment, pop diva Courtney Love concludes that “it’s like any frontier, there’s going to be all sorts of doors to kick down and all sorts of people to kick in the head.” Men, however, can’t be brought around by “tantrums” and blows to the skull. For this one, we need charm, cunning, and an operating manual that works.