Seductress (62 page)

275
“Progress,” said one . . . :
Figes,
Patriarchal Attitudes,
145.

276
They want identities . . . :
See Stacey D’Erasmo, “Polymorphous Normal,”
New York Times Magazine,
October 14, 2001, 104-07. These new “cultural explorers” with fluid sexual lives and identities envisage a future that the siren-adventurers would have endorsed: “a utopia where all the species run free,” 106 and 107.

276
They want—maybe . . . :
Evidence suggests that women are inherently the more nomadic sex. According to a recent archaeological study, women’s rates of “intercontinental migrations” have been eight times that of men. Rather than an instinctive masculine impulse to wander, women, it seems, might possess the wayfarer gene. See Natalie Angier, “Man vs. Woman: In History’s Travel Olympics, There’s No Contest,”
New York Times,
October 27, 1998, F5.

276
“Everybody is an . . .”:
Quoted in Pritt J. Vesilind, “Why Explore?,”
National Geographic
(February 1998), 41.

276
She recovered her mythic . . . :
Quoted in Frymer-Kensky,
Wake of the Goddesses,
28.

277
Cultural commentators say . . . :
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
95.

277
“Nobody,” writes columnist . . . :
“Pretty Mean Woman,”
New York Times,
August 1, 1999, 15. The valentine card industry has adapted accordingly, slanting messages away from desire to noncommittal sentiments or suck-me invitations.
277-78
Sex goddess Jennifer . . . :
Bob Morris, “Could This Be Love,”
Talk
(March 2000), 149.

278
She bought décolleté . . . :
See this front-page story of the travails of multimillion-dollar lawyer Leslie Friedman. Robert McGough, “If You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun, Big Bucks Might Work,”
Wall Street Journal,
December 16, 1998, A1-A6.

278
In 2004 Amy E. . . . :
Marki Becker, “Find Me a Hubby,”
Daily News,
April 9, 2004, 3.

278
Memoirs, novels, and . . . :
See Ruth La Ferla, who discusses a recent spate of nonfiction dumpee books and lists them. “The Lovelorn Learn to Lash Out,”
New York Times,
March 7, 1999, 1-5. Among the other summaries of feminine romantic defeat is Daphne Merkin’s account of the “man-crazed helplessness” felt by Everywoman and the pervasive “fear of ending up manless and alone,” “Bridget Jones Is Me!,”
New Yorker
(August 3, 1998), 74.

Additional nonfiction books include Mary Cantwell,
Speaking with Strangers
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Sallie Tisdale,
Talk Dirty to Me
(New York: Doubleday, 1994); Candace Bushnell,
Sex and the City
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996); Wurtzel,
Bitch;
Marcelle Clements,
The Improvised Woman
(New York: Norton, 1998); Anka Radakokvich,
The Wild Girls’ Club
(New York: Crown, 1994); Katie Roiphe,
The Morning After
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); Linda Grant,
Sexing the Millennium
(New York: Grove Press, 1994); Karen Lehrman,
The Lipstick Proviso
(New York: Doubleday, 1997); Danielle Crittenden,
What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); and Vivian Gornick,
Approaching Eye Level
(Boston: Beacon, 1996), and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead,
Why There are No Good Men Lef
t (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).

Fiction is not far behind. Witness the chick lit boom in novels of romantically challenged women. See for example Meredith Broussard,
The Dictionary of Failed Relationships: 26 Tales of Love Gone Wrong
(New York: Crown, 2003), Laurie Graff,
You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs
(New York: Red Dress, 2004), Cindy Chupack,
Between Boyfriends Book
(New York: Orion, 2003), Anna Maxted,
Behaving Like Adults
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003), Sarah Webb,
Always the Bridesmaid
(New York; Avon Trade, 2001) The prototypes of this genre include Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(New York: Penguin, 1996), Melissa Bank’s
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing
(New York: Viking, 1999); Sister Souljah’s
The Coldest Winter Ever
(New York: Pocket Books, 1999); Karin Goodwin’s
Sleeping with Random Beasts
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998); Amy Sohn’s
Run Catch Kiss
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); and Tama Janowitz’s
The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1992) and
A Certain Age
(New York: Doubleday, 1999). The one-woman show
Bad Sex with Bud Kemp
had a long run several years ago.

Susan Minot, Mary Gaitskill, and Anita Brookner are three prominent authors who specialize in doormats and losers in love. For sad-sack stories of older women, see Doris Lessing,
Love, Again
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1996) and Marilyn French,
My Summer with George
(New York: Ballantine, 1996).

Kathy Acker in
Don Quixote
(London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1986) writes the ultimate castoffs’ lacrimosa. The pathetic narrator says, “About once a year, I see a man whom I actually want and then . . . the usual happens: Either he walks away or, after a day or two he walks away. For me sexuality is rejection,” 128.

278
The younger generation . . . :
Student quoted in Crittenden,
What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us,
33. Supporting Crittenden’s findings at Georgetown, Princeton, etc., see Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert A. Hummer, “Fraternities and Rape on Campus,”
Feminist Frontiers III,
ed. Laurel Richardson and Verta Taylor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 392-402. Also see Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt, “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right—College Women on Dating and Mating Today,” 2001, Available from Independent Women’s Forum, Org/news/010727.shtml, 1-74.

My own interviews at Manhattan College in spring 1995 yielded these responses. Most women on campus, said students, “have very low self-esteem,” sleep with guys without desire or purpose (beyond a vague hope of snagging them that way), and “are dumped on.” One informant told me of a “100 Club” on campus for high-scoring Romeos.

278
Nancy Friday foreshadowed . . . :
Nancy Friday,
Women on Top
(New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 67.

278
Lionel Jospin’s administration . . . :
Julie Street, “Women: Ooh La La on Saturday Night,”
Guardian,
December 6, 1999, 6.

279
Increasingly they’re recouping . . . :
Patricia Sellers, “Women, Sex and Power,”
Fortune
(August 5, 1996), 44.

279
Prominent intellectuals like . . . :
Natalie Angier, “Constantly in Motion, Like DNA Itself,”
The New York Times
, March 2, 2004, 4.

279
Shattering the schoolmarm stereotype . . . :
Jennifer Maher, “Hot for Teacher: Rewriting the Erotics of Pedagogy,”
Bitch
, Spring 2004, 46 and 45.

279
He hunted her . . . :
Quoted in Jean Bond Rafferty, “La Belle Helene,”
Town and Country
(September 1998), 176.

279
They’re sex empresses . . . :
Unfortunately their private lives haven’t caught up with the public braggadocio. Although they give as good as they get in “trade snaps” (rhyming contests reminiscent of Veronica Franco’s poetic combats with men during the Italian Renaissance), they tend to sing a different tune in private.

Because of an eight-to-one ratio of African American professional women to men and a gaping disparity of sexual goals—recreational for 42 percent black men and relational for 91 percent women—even the sassiest hip-hop honey may end up, like Lil’ Kim, in a humiliating ménage à trois or alone with her girl crew on Saturday night. Also their bluster often just flips the script on black machismo, duplicating an adolescent glamorization of violence, money, status brands, and belt-notching promiscuity.

279
Female artists have . . . :
Elizabeth Hayt, “The Artist Is a Glamour Puss,”
New York Times,
April 18, 1999, section 9, 1.

279
A mascot of this . . . :
“Cecily Brown Whispers of Eros,”
Time
, March 29, 2004, 64.

280
As trend spotter Faith . . . :
Faith Popcorn,
The Popcorn Report
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 58.

281
They place “all . . .”:
Warren Farrell,
The Myth of Male Power
(New York: Berkley Books, 1993), xxv. The needier, more fragile sex, men are “in thrall to women” and their awesome powers. In bed they must surmount primordial womb terrors, stand and deliver, and meet women’s rising expectations and voracious orgasmic demands. They know they’ll be compared and graded, and they dread an F in sackcraft. On top of these performance fears, men are more emotionally vulnerable. Although they’d swallow hot coals before they’d admit it, the myth of the lone Romeo on a perpetual journey from kicks to kicks is just that, a myth. Secretly they want the opposite: an anchored existence in perpetual attendance on a beloved Lady Superior. R. William Betcher, Ph.D, M.D., and William S. Pollack,
In a Time of Fallen Heroes
(New York: Atheneum, 1993), 199. For more on this male vulnerability, see the discussion in chapter 1. The best surveys are Lederer,
Fear of Women,
Gaylin,
Male Ego,
and Stephen Frosh,
Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis
(New York: Routledge, 1994).

Discussions of heightened male romantic susceptibility can be found in Fisher,
First Sex,
275, and Friday,
Men in Love,
14-16. Both Friday and Robert Bly, among many others, treat the idealization impulse, and Todd Shackleford, in a famous study, found that men suffer more from separation anxiety than women, loving partners more the longer the absence.
Iron John
(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 135, and see a summary of Shackleford’s work in
Psychology Today
(January- February 2000), 12.

Betcher and Pollack have a particularly fine discussion of the deep male longing for home that they call
querencia,
an affection for place and the womblike embrace of the domestic haven, 258. The myth of man the loner appears to be a counterphobic ploy against this powerful urge.

282
“Set me free” . . . :
Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna,
48.

282
Some, like Robert . . . :
In their search for new metaphors of manhood, many writers on the male role confusion and crisis of confidence recur to older, prepatriarchal mythic figures. See E. Anthony Rotundo,
American Manhood
(New York: Basic Books, 1993); Betcher and Pollack,
Fallen Heroes;
William G. Doty,
Myths of Masculinity
(New York: Crossroads, 1993); Bly,
Iron John,
135; and Bly and Woodman,
Maiden King.

282
The entertainment industry . . . :
See Marie Richmond-Abbot, “Early Socialization into Sex Roles: Language, Media and the Schools,”
Masculine and Feminine: Gender Roles over the Life Cycle
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 91-117, and Linda Tschirhart Sanford and Mary Ellen Donovan,
Women and Self-Esteem
(New York: Penguin, 1984), 177-96.

282
As Carol Gilligan . . . :
Richmond-Abbott, “Socialization in the Teenage Years,” 119-77; Gilligan,
In a Different Voice,
and Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown,
Meeting at the Crossroads
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Pipher,
Raising Ophelia;
and Ellyn Kaschak,
Engendered Lives
(New York: Basic Books, 1992).

283
Since the whole point . . . :
Paglia,
Sexual Personae,
91.

284
Sociologists suggest that . . . :
Asra Q. Nomani, “Stay in Touch,”
Wall Street Journal,
January 1, 2000, R53.

284
Modern Afrosirens are . . . :
Janis Faye Hutchinson, “The Hip Hop Generation African American Male-Female Relationships in a Nightclub Setting,”
Journal of Black Studies
(September 1999), 65.

285
Although the industry . . . :
Luc Sante, “Different! Be Like Everyone Else!”
New York Times Magazine,
October 17, 1999, 140.

286
The ancient Greek . . . :
Friedrich,
Meaning of Aphrodite,
143-44.

286
Her entire
ta erotika . . . :
Henry,
Prisoner of History,
47 and 49.

286
Everywhere linguists and . . . :
Bertrand Russell’s complaint fifty years ago that women were “kept artificially stupid and uninteresting” still holds true, as Deborah Tannen, Robin Lakoff, and other linguists discovered.
Marriage and Morals
(New York: Bantam, 1959), 17. See Tannen,
That’s Not What I Meant
(New York: Ballantine, 1986); Robin Tolmach Lakoff,
Talking Power: The Politics of Language in Our Lives
(New York: Basic Books, 1990) and
Language and Woman’s Place
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and Laurie P. Arliss and Deborah J. Borisoff,
Women and Men Communicating
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993).

286
Women, trained as . . . :
Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
699.

287
We ratify, demur . . . :
Janet Stone and Jane Bachner,
Speaking Up
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 19.

287
We’ve cut out . . . :
Brownmiller,
Femininity,
110.

287
By muzzling ourselves . . . :
See Ernest Becker’s analysis of the power inherent in well-mastered speech: “The proper word or phrase, properly delivered, is the highest attainment of human interpersonal power. The easy handling of the verbal context of action gives the only possibility of direct exercise of control of others.” And he doesn’t even mention the seductive charge of fascinating language!
Birth and Death of Meaning,
94.