Seductress (45 page)

Beneath the macho facade, they’re shaking in their jackboots. Love doctors admonish women to treat these men-in-crisis with kid gloves, with fifties-style lickspittle and submissive feints. But paradoxically these servile tactics only reinforce men’s chauvinistic defensive strategies and perpetuate the problem.

Only the seductress can repair the shredded male psyche and set men on course again. As a reincarnation of man’s first, sacred love object, she fulfills men’s deepest heart songs and restores the primal, mythic bases of masculine identity. By releasing our sex goddesses, we release men too. “Set me free,” Dumuzi implores the divine Inanna, and she delivers him to true manhood. She incites him to gallantry through her courtship demands, fuels his confidence through her sexpertise and praises, and sensitizes him through an annual maturity journey each year to the underworld. She raises him from shepherd to king, from macho pseudohero to real hero.

Coincidentally, several gender theorists have proposed the Dumuzi model as a solution to the current impasse. The older lunar heroes, they argue, with their expansive, holistic, pacific, and relational masculinity can rescue men from the narrow, brutal virility inherited from the violent solar gods. Some, like Robert Bly, envision a perfected female counterpart for this redeemed man: a seductress, a Kali sex goddess and “Golden Woman.”

But we can’t retrieve this “Golden Woman” until we finish the job and jettison some toxic cultural baggage along with our fears. As the seductresses have shown us, we have to slough off female socialization. We’ve been carefully indoctrinated in erotic disempowerment—raised wrong, maleducated, and media poisoned.

From earliest infancy girls are trained to conform, obey, keep house, sit pretty, and blend in. The entertainment industry and standard education reinforce the process with Strawberry Shortcake heroines and sex-appropriate games, toys, and classroom protocol. Their spirits and libidos are subtly shrink-wrapped for domestic consumption.

By adolescence the socialization is complete. As Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and others document, teenagers lose whatever strut they possessed and cave into a contaminated mass culture. They learn to snag guys the MTV way, through beauty, slutwear, group think, eager-to-please passivity, and sexual compliance. With demolished self-concepts, impoverished personalities, and degraded kneepad skills, they’re setups for romantic disaster. Many never learn to get their hustle on and drift into a midlife limbo of the discarded and desperately alone.

Once we’ve delivered ourselves from these cultural bogies and detoxed our psyches, we can begin to recoup our craft. Since every era requires its own erotic menu (disinhibition, for example, in repressed Victorian times), we’ll need to fine-tune the love arts for the twenty-first century. The basic blueprint of course never changes. Engraved deep in the erotic memory of the race, the Seductive Way maps the sexual drama and subliminally, ineluctably determines how we arouse, heighten, and retain desire. But we have to retrofit it for modern purposes, adjust the
ars amatoria
to serve our special needs and preferences.

In our hyperreal world of surfaces and spin, we’ve gone hog-wild over physical inducements to love. We learn eye locks for love eternal, twist ourselves into tantric tortoises, and furiously tone up, make up, and dress up. But the material onslaught has backfired. Our senses have been anesthetized through overkill. And sex itself has grown banal in the tell-all, show-all carnival of frankness. What’s required now is erotic shock treatment, a way to kick up sensuous turn-ons again.

Amid the media cavalcade of Stepford Barbies and the deluge of mass-marketed, assembly-line sexual stimulants—name-brand body oils, bras, and romantic ballads—we’ve been lost in the crowd. Since the whole point of the “ritual theater of sex” is a one in a million impact, we’ve got to get exceptional and quirky again. Break from the pack. Stamp all our bodily lures, as the seductresses did, with signature me-ness, and hand-tooled extravaganza.

In bed, for example, we need to haul back and heed the cry of our own hot buttons and anatomy. We’ve listened too long to experts who tell us how our equipment works, how we’re programmed for a lower sex drive, monogamy, affection, commitment, a rich provider, and a one-shot orgasm based on the male model.

Unfettered women, like the steamy seductresses, show us our natural, goddess-given heritage—female hypersexuality, rock slide multi-orgasms, and a disposition to philander, often simultaneously with comely studs. Lacking our clutched self-consciousness, the great sex queens laid it down the old way, the Inanna way: Mae West with her muscleman marathons and thousand and one climaxes and La Belle Otero with her eight-a-nighters.

We’ve been terrorized into underperformance. Instead of a female Viagra (an oxymoron if there ever was one), we should tune out the advice fascists and befriend our inner she-savage. Sociologists suggest that the increase in cyberromance and vicarious sex will create a “touch hunger” in this century, a desire for the real, unscripted thing. The seductress will be there with her adorers, riding buck and sating her sacred hypersexuality.

Dance and gesture can be juiced up too. Although we attend swing, funk, and aerobics classes in record numbers, we’re enslaved by regimented, follow-the-leader routines. Or the reverse. We scorn lessons and spastically let it all hang out. Seductresses, by contrast, trained seriously, then copped their own moves.

Kinesthetic shamans, they put steam in their walk, surrendered to the beat, and reinvoked the archaic priestesses who writhed, jived, and pumped their pelvises to summon the Divine Feminine and torch male souls. Modern Afrosirens are on to this: They learn to “roll their body good” as a major “part of the public performance in attracting a partner.” It’s a promise of sexual skill, a show of
self,
and the goddess’s calling card.

We’ve not made the most of music either. Awash in sonic stimulation night and day, we’re flooded by so many formulaic love songs that our aural receptors have dulled. Sensitizing them again may necessitate drastic measures—self-designed sound tracks or live ones. Seductresses routinely played instruments and snake-charmed suitors with bravura songs and melody, right down to Edith Piaf fifty years ago.

Renaissance courtesans excelled on the lute and viol, and the unmusical Isabella Stewart Gardner practiced scales each day for a euphonious speaking voice. An unplugged musical moment, spoken, sung, or played, delivers a direct hit to the libido and induces the divine delirium of the first sexual rituals.

As for our settings, they’d be pronounced impossible—bland and standardized—by the great
sorcières
of interior design. Intimidated by style czars, we’ve been herded into copycat, genteel, color-coordinated milieus. We’re decorator-dependent, afraid to strike out and design offbeat, seductive rooms of our own such as Minette Helvétius’s blue salon athrong with cats in satin coats or Louise de Vilmorin’s mind-altering maze of alcoves full of odd tchotchkes, a stag’s head named Fifi, and a stray refrigerator.

When seductresses dined, they didn’t turn to Martha Stewart. No more by the book about food than anything else, they played fast and loose with recipes and produced dramatic, outré menus of their own: southern soul food mixed with haute cuisine in Wallis Simpson’s case; an exotic pea, lemon, and sherry puree in Ninon de Lenclos’s.

Nor did they indulge to excess. Contrary to Messalina-at-the-orgy stereotypes, the
grandes amoureuses
ate and drank (if at all) in moderation. Cruise and resort advertisements promote a pigout version of romantic dining, Neronian portions and entire bottles of champagne, more designed for Pickwickian syndrome than a hot tussle on a hotel floor. If we want to reap the full sensual return from cuisine, we’ll have to season it up with surprise-me flare and dine again for seduction rather than satiety or displaced lust.

On the fashion front, we’re closer to divine dress than we’ve been in decades. We’re glamming up, piling it on, and personalizing our appearance through a thousand style options. Specialists computer-image our “look” and custom-design our hair color, cosmetics, and wardrobe. Glitz is in: sequined nail extensions, silver slip dresses, diamond Rolexes, and fun furs.

But despite the goddess dazzle, we’ve turned down the applause meter. We’ve fluffed ourselves up by formula and Seventh Avenue diktat and find ourselves replicated like a hall of mirrors at every club and opening. Although the industry peddles the notion of personal self-expression and éclat, clothes are merchandised for “niche conformity”—prefab and predictable. The peel ethos has boomeranged too. Who looks twice at a troupe of coeds in thong bikinis and triangle tops?

Seductresses often faced similar overexposure problems, especially in the high-flash, anything goes cultures of the Second Empire and classical Greece. But they learned to dress with knock-’em-dead originality. During the heyday of harlot regalia in ancient Greece, for example, when courtesans wore see-through bright tunics, pancake makeup, and festoons of jewelry, only Phyrne stopped traffic. Men lined up four deep in the agora each morning to watch her walk past, swathed from head to toe in a dark opaque robe, without ornaments or face paint.

In scent, though, we’ve finally got it right. After a brief infatuation with body odors, we’re back to goddess basics. Like Inanna and her priestesses, we saturate ourselves in perfumes (even custom-mixed) and suffuse our environs with candles, incense, and aphrodisiacal oils when we set our love snares.

But we’ve OD’d on physical enticements, the least potent and most elementary in the Seductive Way. Except for a tweak in the direction of novelty, drama, and individuality, they’ve had enough play. While we’ve been crunching at the gym and buying lingerie, our erotic imaginations have been on vacation, enfeebled by the false promises of a slick consumer culture.

As every seductress knows, the mind is where the action is—the stratospheric passions and soul-singeing enchantments. The ancient Greek seductress and erotic master teacher Aspasia took it for granted that her students were already versed in sexual positions, song, dance, poetry recital, and “the use of oil, cosmetics, and aphrodisiacal drinks and foods.” Her entire
ta erotika
(seductive system) focused on cerebral charms: character development, mind-body integration, and the psychology of the hunt, which included craft, wit, “honest praise,” and “words of enchantment and magic.”

Words today may be our least utilized erotic resource. Everywhere linguists and cultural critics deplore the current low ebb in female conversational skills. Women, trained as listeners and peacemakers, have lost the art of
bel parlare,
of “fascinating speech.” We have trouble telling jokes, clam up in male company, and mouth facile femme-speak like dolls with pullcords. We ratify, concur, question, conciliate, perform the interactional shitwork, and talk about “tedious subject matter.” We’ve cut out our tongues on the false premise that “knowledge is power and the lack of it charmingly feminine.”

By muzzling ourselves, we’ve spiked our best guns. Every seductress worth her stag line had the gift of gab and a trove of quips, quotes, opinions, facts, anecdotes, and sexy zingers. The plainest sirens in the pantheon—the skeletal Catherine Sedley and the prognathic, hooknosed Cleopatra—became fabled enchantresses through their verbal wizardry alone. “As a bull’s horns are bound with ropes,” say the amorists, “so are men’s hearts with pleasant words.” The chute gates are open, the Brahmas loose in the rodeo ring, awaiting “ladies of words of power.”

Another erotic skill to dust off and put back in circulation is festivity. In spite of unparalleled prosperity and post-9/11 solidarity, we’re mired in gloom. We’re a fun-challenged civilization, chronically worried and low-spirited, seeking frantic relief in canned entertainment, mood-altering drugs, and joyless anarchic binges.

The sex goddess by definition commands celebration. Her divine élan requires that mankind frolic, unbend, and ecstatically rejoice at her altar. The seductress therefore incarnates joie de vivre and acts as the iconic Mistress of Revels.

She uncorks the champagne and strikes up the band; she throws private theatricals with potatoes for tickets like Pauline Viardot and serenades the city by gondola like Veronica Franco. Some party mavens are born, not made. But as in the Renaissance, we can learn “how to be festive,” we can study celebration like cuisine or tai chi; check your Prozac at the door.

After festivity comes the labyrinth. In our overmediated age of relationship coaches and conflict management, we’ve settled into a flannel nightgown version of romantic love—comfy, familiar, easy-as-Sunday-morning. We’re not cutting the mustard; we’re cutting
Z
’s, counseling, cuddling, and pair-bonding ourselves into erotic narcolepsy. Passion needs wake-up calls. It needs vital tension and tourbillion to survive: difficulty, challenge, nips of pain, and a journey through the deity’s whorled and tortuous erotic maze.

Lola Montez would be a couples’ therapy nightmare today. With her, men shot the rapids—one minute, pitched to paradise; the next, plunged into an inferno of white water. She played rough. She sent lovers sachets from her vagina and ravished them in bed, then emptied their coffers, threw their possessions out the window, and took them to task with guns and knives. But passion she knew. By far the greatest seductress of the nineteenth century, she was adored to madness by the cognoscenti and never discarded or forgotten.

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard complains that we’re living in a “culture of premature ejaculation” through “too much security.” Seductresses don’t trade in that culture. As avatars of “Our Lady of the Labyrinth,” they’re delay queens who specialize in the longest route home, via corkscrew turns, false doors, dangerous drops, and vanishing perspectives. It’s the archetypic love map, etched for eternity in the male brain, forever beckoning. The call to adventure is the real love call.