The Art of Seduction (87 page)

Appendix A

Seductive Environment/Seductive Time

In se-

duction, your vic-

tims must slowly come

to feel an inner change.

Under your influence, they

lower their defenses, feeling free to

act differently, to be a different per-

son. Certain places, environments,

and experiences will greatly aid you in

your quest to change and transform the

seduced. Spaces with a theatrical,

heightened quality
—
opulence, glittering

surfaces, a playful spirit
—
create a buoy-

ant, childlike feeling that make it hard

for the victim to think straight. The cre-

ation of an altered sense of time has a

similar effect
—
memorable, dizzying

moments that stand out, a mood of

festival and play. You must make

your victims feel that being

with you gives them a dif-

ferent experience from

being in the real

world.

Festival Time and Place

Centuries ago, life in most cultures was filled with work and routine. But at certain moments in the year, this life was interrupted by festival. During these festivals—saturnalias of ancient Rome, the maypole festivals of Europe, the great potlatches of the Chinook Indians—work in the fields or marketplace stopped. The entire tribe or town gathered in a sacred space set apart for the festival. Temporarily relieved of duty and responsibility, people were granted license to run amok; they would wear masks or costumes, which gave them other identities, sometimes those of powerful figures reenacting the great myths of their culture. The festival was a tremendous release from the burdens of daily life. It altered people's sense of time, bringing moments in which they stepped outside of themselves. Time seemed to stand still. Something like this experience can still be found in the world's great surviving carnivals.

The festival represented a break in a person's daily life, a radically different experience from routine. On a more intimate level, that is how you must envision your seductions. As the process advances, your targets experience a radical difference from daily life—a freedom from work or responsibility. Plunged into pleasure and play, they can act differently, can become someone else, as if they were wearing a mask. The time you spend with them is devoted to them and nothing else. Instead of the usual rotation of work and rest, you are giving them grand, dramatic moments that stand out. You bring them to places unlike the places they see in daily life—

heightened, theatrical places. Physical environment strongly affects people's moods; a place dedicated to pleasure and play insinuates thoughts of pleasure and play. When your victims return to their duties and to the real world, they feel the contrast strongly and they will start to crave that other place into which you have drawn them. What you are essentially creating is festival time and place, moments when the real world stops and fantasy takes over. Our culture no longer supplies such experiences, and people yearn for them. That is why almost everyone is waiting to be seduced and why they will fall into your arms if you play this right.

The following are key components to reproducing festival time and place:
Create theatrical effects.
Theater creates a sense of a separate, magical world. The actors' makeup, the fake but alluring sets, the slightly unreal
433

434 • Appendix A: Seductive Environment /Seductive Time

costumes—these heightened visuals, along with the story of the play, create illusion. To produce this effect in real life, you must fashion your clothes, makeup, and attitude to have a playful, artificial, edge—a feeling that you have dressed for the pleasure of your audience. This is the goddesslike effect of a Marlene Dietrich, or the fascinating effect of a dandy like Beau Brummel. Your encounters with your targets should also have a sense of drama, achieved through the settings you choose and through your actions. The target should not know what will happen next. Create suspense through twists and turns that lead to the happy ending; you are performing. Whenever your targets meet you, they are returned to this vague feeling of being in a play. You both have the thrill of wearing masks, of playing a different role from the one your life has allotted you.

Use the visual language of pleasure.
Certain kinds of visual stimuli signal that you are not in the real world. You want to avoid images that have depth, which might provoke thought, or guilt; instead, you should work in environments that are all surface, full of glittering objects, mirrors, pools of water, a constant play of light. The sensory overload of these spaces creates an intoxicating, buoyant feeling. The more artificial, the better. Show your targets a playful world, full of the sights and sounds that excite the baby or child within them. Luxury—the sense that money has been spent or even wasted—adds to the feeling that the real world of duty and morality has been banished. Call it the brothel effect.

Keep it crowded or close.
People crowding together raise the psychological temperature to hothouse levels. Festivals and carnivals depend on the contagious feeling a crowd creates. Bring your target to such environments sometimes, to lower their normal defensiveness. Similarly, any kind of situation that brings people together in a small space for a long period of time is extremely conducive to seduction. For years, Sigmund Freud had a small, tight-knit stable of disciples who attended his private lectures and who engaged in an astonishing number of love affairs. Either lead the seduced into a crowded, festivallike environment or go trolling for targets in a closed world.

Manufacture mystical effects.
Spiritual or mystical effects distract people's minds from reality, making them feel elevated and euphoric. From here it is but a small step to physical pleasure. Use whatever props are at hand—

astrology books, angelic imagery, mystical-sounding music from some faroff culture. The great eighteenth-century Austrian charlatan Franz Mesmer filled his salons with harp music, the perfume of exotic incense, and a female voice singing in a distant room. On the walls he put stained glass and
Appendix A: Seductive Environment/Seductive Time • 435

mirrors. His dupes would feel relaxed, uplifted, and as they sat in the room where he used magnets for their healing powers, they would feel a kind of spiritual tingling pass from body to body. Anything vaguely mystical helps block out the real world, and it is easy to move from the spiritual to the sexual.

Distort their sense of time
—
speed and youth.
Festival time has a kind of speed and frenzy that make people feel more alive. Seduction should make the heart beat faster, so that the seduced loses track of time passing. Take them to places of constant activity and movement. Embark with them on some kind of journey together, distracting their minds with new sights. Youth may fade and disappear, but seduction brings the feeling of being young, no matter the age of those involved. And youth is mostly energy. The pace of the seduction must pick up at a certain moment, creating a whirling effect in the mind. It is no wonder that Casanova did much of his seducing at balls, or that the waltz was the preferred tool of many a nineteenth-century rake.

Create moments.
Everyday life is a drudgery in which the same actions endlessly repeat. The festival, on the other hand, we remember as a moment when everything was transformed—when a little bit of eternity and myth entered our lives. Your seduction must have such peaks, moments when something dramatic happens and time is experienced differently. You must give your targets such moments, whether by staging the seduction in a place—a carnival, a theater—where they naturally occur or by creating them yourself, with dramatic actions that stir up strong emotions. Those moments should be pure leisure and pleasure—no thoughts of work or morality can intrude. Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV, had to re-seduce her easily bored lover every few months; intensely creative, she devised parties, balls, games, a little theater at Versailles. The seduced revels in affairs like this, sensing the effort you have expended to divert and enchant them. Scenes from Seductive Time and Place

1.
Around the year 1710, a young man whose father was a prosperous wine dealer in Osaka, Japan, found himself daydreaming more and more. He worked night and day for his father, and the burden of family life and all of its duties was oppressive. Like every young man, he had heard of the pleasure districts of the city—the quarters where the normally strict laws of the shogunate could be violated. It was here that you would find the
ukiyo,
the "floating world" of transient pleasures, a place where actors and courte-
436 • Appendix A: Seductive Environment/Seductive Time
sans ruled. This was what the young man was daydreaming about. Biding his time, he managed to find an evening when he could slip out unnoticed. He headed straight for the pleasure quarters.

This was a cluster of buildings—restaurants, exclusive clubs, teahouses—that stood out from the rest of the city by their magnificence and color. The moment the young man stepped into it, he knew he was in

a different world. Actors wandered the streets in elaborately dyed kimonos. They had such manners and attitudes, as if they were still on stage. The streets bustled with energy; the pace was fast. Bright lanterns stood out against the night, as did the colorful posters for the nearby kabuki theater. The women had a completely different air about them. They stared at him brazenly, acting with the freedom of a man. He caught sight of an
onnagata,
one of the men who played female roles in the theater—a man more beautiful than most women he had seen and whom the passersby treated like royalty.

The young man saw other young men like himself entering a teahouse, so he followed them in. Here the highest class of courtesans, the great
tayus,
plied their trade. A few minutes after the young man sat down, he heard a noise and bustle, and down the stairs came a few of the
tayus,
followed by musicians and jesters. The women's eyebrows were shaved, replaced by a thick black painted line. Their hair was swept up in a perfect fold, and he had never seen such beautiful kimonos. The
tayus
seemed to float across the floor, using different kinds of steps (suggestive, creeping, cautious, etc.), depending on whom they were approaching and what they wanted to communicate to him. They ignored the young man; he had no idea how to invite them over, but he noticed that some of the older men had a way of bantering with them that was a language all its own. The wine began to flow, music was played, and finally some lower-level courtesans came in. By then the young man's tongue was loosened. These courtesans were much friendlier and the young man began to lose all track of time. Later he managed to stagger home, and only the next morning did he realize how much money he had spent. If father ever found out . . . Yet a few weeks later he was back. Like hundreds of such sons in Japan whose stories filled the literature of the period, he was on the path toward squandering his father's wealth on the "floating world."

Seduction is another world into which you initiate your victims. Like the
ukiyo,
it depends on a strict separation from the day-to-day world. When your victims are in your presence, the outside world—with its morality, its codes, its responsibilities—is banished. Anything is allowed, particularly anything normally repressed. The conversation is lighter and more suggestive. Clothes and places have a touch of theatricality. The license exists to act differently, to be someone else, without any heaviness or judging. It is a kind of concentrated psychological "floating world" that you create for the others, and it becomes addictive. When they leave you and return to their routines, they are doubly aware of what they are missing. The moment
Appendix A: Seductive Environment/Seductive Time • 437

they crave the atmosphere you have created, the seduction is complete. As in the floating world, money is to be wasted. Generosity and luxury go hand in hand with a seductive environment.

2.
It began in the early 1960s: people would come to Andy Warhol's New York studio, soak up the atmosphere, and stay awhile. Then in 1963, the artist moved into a new Manhattan space and a member of his entourage covered some of the walls and pillars in tin foil and spray-painted a brick wall and other things silver. A red quilted couch in the center, some fivefoot-high plastic candy bars, a turntable that glittered with tiny mirrors, and helium-filled silver pillows that floated in the air completed the set. Now the L-shaped space became known as The Factory, and a scene began to develop. More and more people started showing up—why not just leave the door open, Andy reasoned, and come what may. During the day, while Andy would work on his paintings and films, people would gather—actors, hustlers, drug dealers, other artists. And the elevator would keep groaning all night as the beautiful people began to make the place their home. Here might be Montgomery Clift, nursing a drink by himself; over there, a beautiful young socialite chatting with a drag queen and a museum curator. They kept pouring in, all of them young and glamorously dressed. It was like one of those children's shows on TV, Andy once said to a friend, where guests keep dropping in on the endless party and there's always some new bit of entertainment. And that was indeed what it seemed like—with nothing serious happening, just lots of talk and flirting and flashbulbs popping and endless posing, as if everyone were in a film. The museum curator would begin to giggle like a teenager and the socialite would flounce about like a hooker.

By midnight everyone would be packed together. You could hardly

move. The band would arrive, the light show would begin, and it would all careen in a new direction, wilder and wilder. Somehow the crowd would disperse at some point, then in the afternoon it would all start up again as the entourage trickled back. Hardly anyone went to The Factory just once.