Seductress (63 page)

287
“As a bull’s . . .”:
Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
700.

287
The chute gates . . . :
Baring and Cashford,
Myth of the Goddess,
265.

287
In spite of unparalled . . . :
Faith Popcorn finds a striking “undercurrent of heaviness and gloom” in contemporary society.
Popcorn Report,
6. Also see Jonathan Eig, “As Good Times Roll What Are Americans Worried About Now?”
Wall Street Journal,
February 8, 2000, A1-B10. Robert H. Frank in
Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) notes that levels of personal satisfaction haven’t kept pace with the soaring prosperity in the West. Great Britain ranks nine in happiness; the United States, with the highest per capita income, thirteenth. Bertrand Russell observed this characteristic in Americans, however, in the fifties. “Nothing in America,” he wrote, “is so painful to the traveler as the lack of joy. Pleasure is frantic and bacchanalian, a matter of momentary oblivion, not of delighted self-expression.”
Marriage and Morals,
200.

287
But as in the Renaissance . . . :
Castiglione,
Book of the Courtier,
211.

287
Passion needs wake-up . . . :
In order to keep love vital, it must be continuously stirred up through creative tension, adventure, and a complex dynamic equilibrium of pain and pleasure, anxiety and security, mystery and certainty, surprise and predictability. This is a given of the
ars amatoria.
See especially Montaigne, “On Some Verses of Virgil,”
Complete Essays,
vol. 3, 55-122; Maurois, “Art of Loving,” 9-32; Ellis, “Art of Love,”
Psychology of Sex,
vol. 2, 507-75; Reik,
Psychology of Sex Relations,
95 and passim; and Baudrillard,
Seduction,
passim.

288
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard . . . :
Baudrillard,
Seduction,
38 and 154.

288
The call to adventure . . . :
David M. Buss, the neo-Darwinist who champions male supremacy and promiscuity and the primacy of nubile beauties in the mating market nevertheless concedes in a new book that men prefer difficult women. Piquing male jealousy and raising the bar, he now claims, improve a woman’s chances in love. See
The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex
(New York: Free Press, 2000).

288
Desocialized by cyberspace, . . . :
For the negative impact on social skills created by CMC (computer-mediated communication), see Michael A. Civin’s fascinating study
Male, Female, E-Mail: The Struggle for Relatedness in a Paranoid Society
(New York: Other Press, 2000).

288
According to Daniel . . . :
Daniel Goleman,
Emotional Intelligence
(New York: Bantam, 1995).

288
A staggering ten . . . :
PR Newswire,
New York, April 12, 2000, 1, and Gregory Mott, “Don’t Be Shy, See Your Doctor,”
Washington Post,
March 7, 2000, WH 7. Both these articles note that after depression and alcoholism, social anxiety disorder ranks as the third most common mental affliction.

288
“Beauty without grace” . . . :
Quoted in Cohen,
Mademoiselle Libertine,
174.

289
“Whenever a woman . . .”:
Key,
Love and Ethics,
102.

289
They’re the “goddess . . .”:
Meador,
Inanna,
21.

289
“Seduction,” predicts Baudrillard . . . :
Baudrillard ends
Seduction
with this prediction: “Anatomy is not destiny, nor is politics: seduction is destiny,” 180.

290
They foresee a . . . :
Francis Fukuyama, “The Politics of Women,”
Predictions,
ed. Sian Griffiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116.

290
Society, they prophesy . . . :
Richard Carlson and Bruce Goldman,
2020 Visions: A Long View of a Changing World
(Stanford, Calif.: Portable Stanford, 1991), 61.

290
The “plague years” . . . :
Grant,
Sexing the Millennium,
6.

290
A hundred years . . . :
Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams,
ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973 [1918]), 385.

290
They’ve unleashed backlash . . . :
See Susan Faludi,
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
(New York: Doubleday, 1991). Defenses of innate male promiscuity and preferences for nubile beauties include Andrew Sullivan, “Why Men Are Different: The Defining Power of Testosterone,”
New York Times Magazine,
April 2, 2000, 46-79. Sullivan mounts a new anatomy-as-destiny defense of men’s testosterone-driven imperative to fight, philander, and lord it over women. Also see the neo-Darwinian defenses of same in the work of David M. Buss,
The Evolution of Desire
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), E. O. Wilson, et al.

291
When it came . . . :
Meador,
Inanna,
19.

291
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey . . . :
Geoffrey E. Miller,
The Mating Mind
(New York: Doubleday, 2000), 258-433 and passim.

291
Recently
Esquire
celebrated . . . :
Ron Rosenbaum, “The Beautiful and the Damned,”
Esquire
(March 1996), 106 and 105.

291
Talk
ran a . . . :
Michael Cunningham, “Women on Top,”
Talk
(April 2000), 172.

291
What “the lover” . . . :
Ross,
What Men Want,
200. Or see Dr. William Moulton Marsten’s comment “Give them [men] an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to be her willing slaves.” Quoted in Suzy Menkes, “Fearless Heroines with Looks to Match,”
New York Times,
June 4, 1995, 51.

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