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  Evolutionary psychologists interpret this ritual as a sex-resource exchange. Men barter for brides by proffering financial protection and superior resources. Just as female scorpion flies pick mates by the size of their nuptial gifts, women choose men on the basis of largesse. Generosity pays. According to Amotz Zahavi’s “handicap principle,” the man who shows how much he can afford to squander has the courtship advantage. As philosopher Julia Kristeva points out, profligacy is the seducer’s calling card; “he spends extravagantly.”

  Romantic gift giving, however, isn’t a clear-cut transaction. Presents, noted Ovid, are “quite an art.” They’re hard to get right, easy to botch, and spring-loaded with signifiers. A man’s gifts give him away—who he is and who he thinks she is. Implicit in trinkets, too, is a delicate power dynamic of creditor and debtor. Gracie Snow of Heaven, Texas ditches her wealthy beau when she discovers he’s ruined their erotic parity by secretly paying her boutique bills.

  Practicality is also a no-no in presents; hold the smoke alarms and robo-cleaners. Gifts must fulfill their primal, first function, when they were objects of magic and enchantment in the past. “At its finest, the true gift is transcendent,” wrote author Stuart Jacobson, it “lights up the other person.” And to really shoot the works, it’s an object of beauty as well. In essence, says one scholar, a gift is an “emanation of Eros.” And like eros, an ideal gift carries a kick—a ta-dah! of theater that proclaims pleasure, passion, novelty, creativity, male effort, and extravagance.

  Mythic givers were lords of magnificence. Phallic deities embodied the spendthrift extravagance of nature, “the tumultuous surge to spill forth” and gave like gods. Dionysus, the “giver of riches,” conferred bounty on the earth each spring and pulled out the celestial stops when he courted Ariadne. He anointed her queen of the skies and placed her crown among the stars as a constellation. Odysseus bestowed a ravishing wedding present on Penelope—an exquisite, hand-hewn bed that concealed a mystery known only to them.

  Courtly love in the Middle Ages encoded gift giving into romance. The lady had to be propitiated with bibelots, bouquets, and poems to her taste, and the transaction, kept secret. Claudius in John Updike’s “Hamlet” novel deploys this convention with a twist. Surreptitiously, he sends the queen an emblem of their blind, savage (and suppressed) passion: a falcon with “lethal talons” and “sewn-shut eyes.” She capitulates. No romance hero comes courting empty-handed. Cal Morrisey of Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me divines the heroine’s pet fancy—bunny slippers with French heels—and delivers them with fanfare, in private.

  Master lovers have a genius for presents. Julius Caesar gave Cleopatra a gold statue of herself, which he placed in the Temple of Venus, raising her to the ranks of the gods. Casanova, who spent money on women like a drunken sailor, regarded gifts as an art form. He presented one lover with a spaniel, another with an ode, and another with a made-to-measure dress of the “best Valenciennes lace.”

  White game-hunter Denys Finch Hatton brought Isak Dinesen a trove of treasures each time he landed on her African farm: cheetah pelts, marabou feathers, snakeskins, records, books, and a rare Abyssinian gold ring so soft that it could be molded to the finger. The “absolutely irresistible” nineteenth-century poet Alfred de Musset produced customized poems. After he read George Sand’s novel Indiana, de Musset sent her verses that made romantic history. He pictures her “in her attic, smoking a cigarette,” while her secretary “still drunk from yesterday / is cleaning out his ear / in the most meticulous way.” Within days they were a couple.

  Riches raise the stakes; “wealth creates obligations”—for more enthralling effects to be pulled out of gift boxes. Women didn’t fall in love with Aly Khan because of his fortune, but because of the spells he spun with it. Instead of minks and diamonds, he gave women two a.m. boat rides and all-expense-paid trips to parts unknown, leaving the city and reality behind. “It was like a flight aboard a magic carpet,” a mistress effused, “a woman’s gyroscope went out of whack.”

  Fiat titan Gianni Agnelli was cut from the same iridescent cloth. Unlike run-of-the-mill moguls, Agnelli was less interested in business and profit than in creating transcendence—of the amorous kind. Women were crazy about him (both Jackie Kennedy and Pamela Harriman wanted to marry him), and “there was no one he couldn’t seduce.” He furnished total theater that took women away from “mere existence” into “a world of pure pyrotechnics”—picnics on his black racing yacht and cocktails on a sun-drenched roof, his tappeto volante (flying carpet), overlooking Turin.

  The Edible Gift

  The loves of most people are but the results of good dinners.

  —SÉBASTIEN-ROCH NICOLAS DE CHAMFORT

  George Duroy, the ladies’ man-on-the-make of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, nabs his first society lady at a post dinner party in the private room of a restaurant. Sensual dishes follow one after another—oysters like “dainty little ears,” trout “as pink-fleshed as a young girl”—and Duroy turns the talk to love and sex as he homes in on the rich matron, Madame de Marelle. She hands him the bill, and by the time they are in the cab he has her in a deep clinch and at his bidding.

  Food for sex—almost no courtship gift can rival its libidinal appeal. “After a perfect meal,” says German scholar Dr. Balzi, we are most “susceptible to the ecstasy of love.” Taste is the multisensory sense that incorporates vision, scent, hearing, and touch and is hyperresponsive to social and psychological cues. (The wrong word can wreck an homard flambé.) Although men have the same number of tongue receptors, women are finer tasters. They distinguish flavors better and are more sensitive to strong doses of sugar, salt, and spices. They also long to be romanced over meals. Eating is intrinsically sexual. The language of desire is steeped in food metaphors (melons, nuts, buns, and jellyrolls), and aphrodisiacal food lore has thrived for eons.

  Wining and dining women also goes back to our primate past: courtship feeding. Just as animal species entice females with tasty morsels, proto-humans, according to social anthropologists, wooed prospective mates with shares of the kill. Fertility gods did erotic business the same way. Dionysus gave honey (his invention) and the “gift of wine” to his female votaries, and Dumuzi plied Inanna with “rich cream” and produce from his garden. In rural Peru, a suitor typically brought his sweetheart panniers loaded with food and “amber chichi,” a sweet national drink.

  Love stories are storehouses of gastronomic seductions. Drouet captures Sister Carrie of Theodore Dreiser’s novel with a mushroom and steak dinner, and Robert beguiles Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s Awakening over a shared roast chicken on an excursion to Grand Isle. Steve, the motorcycle stud of Wilde Thing, dispatches the heroine by finger-spooning a caramel Frappuccino into her mouth. “Definitely rich, creamy, and seductive,” she sighs. “I think I just discovered a new aphrodisiac.”

  Casanova was a gourmet who relished “highly seasoned dishes”—gamey meats and overripe cheeses. But for amorous repasts, he catered to the more refined feminine tastes and laid in delicacies such as smoked tongue, oysters, Cyprus wine, bread, fresh fruit, and ice cream. He was also a master of culinary theater. To seduce the burgomaster of Cologne’s wife, Casanova staged a Lucullan banquet, designed to whet the palate and the imagination. He set the table for twenty-four with damask linen covered with vermeil and porcelain, and served a three-star menu from truffle ragout to a dessert buffet “representing portraits of the sovereigns of Europe.” The next day she promised to be his.

  Casanova’s romantic dinners downplayed drunken excess. Aware that alcohol lowers inhibitions but impairs performance, he drank sparingly. Warren Beatty, with an alcoholic for a father and a sexual reputation to preserve, “was never inclined to drink.” Even a gourmand like Prince Grigory Potemkin didn’t overdo it. His fabulous fêtes of champagne and “exquisite and rare dishes” were dramatic preludes for the “lover’s hour” afterward.

  When a ladykiller also cooks, it’s culinary courtship on high flame. A ma
n can tailor the cuisine and ambiance and trade on the ur-appeal of the male hunter-provider. Dirk, a twenty-six-year-old law student I met recently, tells me that his walk-up apartment is a sorcerer’s kitchen. “I adore cooking,” he says over coffee at Starbucks. He’s a wiry John Cusack look-alike, with blue eyes that flare as he warms to the topic. “I’m a great cook! I mean, this Valentine’s I’m going to surprise my girlfriend with an amazing chicken tagine my mother taught me. Along with . . . hey! I was a drama major.”

  Dirk is surfing a trend. Television chefs are the new sex gods, and movies like No Reservations feature fetching young men in white aprons who can rock a stove and a woman’s heart with the flip of a spatula. Food researchers point to a growing breed of male “gastrosexuals” who “pursue cooking as a way to attract women.” Writer Isabel Allende argues that for women few things are “more erotic than culinary skill” in a man.

  THAT SAID, WOULDN’T a woman rather have a kitchen staff, compliments of a rich provider, than a guy with a frying pan? After all, a magnate can afford serious pleasures of the senses: designer wardrobes, opulent sets, concert tickets, haute dinners, exclusive dance clubs, and expensive spas and therapy, if required. Then there’s the added charm of security in a harsh, uncertain world. Money, says book and magazine editor Hilary Black, “symbolizes so much for so many people.”

  But money doesn’t always fill the symbolic bill. In Pedro Almodóvar’s movie Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz’s character, a poor secretary, succumbs to a sugar daddy for safety, status, and the good life. The luxury rush, however, wears off quickly as the “hedonic treadmill,” the tendency for material upgrades to wane over time, takes hold. Her mogul lover proves dull, cruel, and physically revolting. At the price of her life, she escapes with a filmmaker, an artist and dramatist of the world of the senses.

  Romantic passion, by definition, is a heist to a higher state of being. The senses are potent and can vault us there. But they can be damped by false creeds and consumerist promises, and the corrosive effects of habit, satiety, and overload. Ladies’ men exploit the full force of sensual lures, adjust them to women, and soup them up with ancient spells that work on the deepest recesses of the human psyche. They seduce us out of our skins, and catapult us to another world.

  CHAPTER 4

  Lassoing Love:

  THE MIND

  —

  Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  A Casanova can go far with sensory artistry, but to cinch the lasso, cerebral skills are key. Vance, a gourmet-store owner and ladykiller who earlier credited his charisma to “just passion,” agrees to expand further on his appeal to women. This time we meet at a local coffee bar, and as before, he seems more vestryman than ladies’ man, with his Leslie Howard features and oxford button-down. “You’ve got to feel it,” he begins, sipping an espresso ristretto. “It really stems from within.”

  Which does not mean he neglects sensual allures. Recalling his heyday in the sixties and seventies, he tells me he put a premium on seductions of the senses. He danced “very, very well,” dressed in fringed shirts and opera capes, flew dates to Jamaica for dinner, produced aha! gifts, and always made women’s sexual pleasure his priority. “Only the clothes have changed,” he laughs.

  But he attributes something less tangible to his numerous “catches.” “I don’t shilly-shally,” he says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve.” By way of illustration, he recounts a story that sounds like a Hollywood set piece. At an art gallery, he chatted with a Norwegian model, forgot her name, then ran down six flights of stairs to meet her as she walked off the elevator. Taking her hand, he said, “Tell me who you are. I’ve got to be with you!” She followed him, and they were a couple for two years.

  Vance adores women and wants to make them feel fabulous. But flattery, he points out, has to be done with a difference; “you have to take the edge off.” When he first met the love of his life (and partner until her recent death) at a Nassau party, he opened with, “Anyone tell you you have a Darwin’s tubercle? That little quirk on the tip of your ear? It’s pretty rare—legacy from the raunchy apes.” What grabbed her, though, and made her leave her husband was Vance’s flair for intimacy. He’s a connector, emotionally plugged in. “We struck a mutual chord,” he explains. “We were woven together. An artist could not have created a bonding like ours.” How does he do it? “I’m interested in what makes people tick. Forging ties. That’s how I run my store and my love life.”

  In a post-romantic age of sex friends, practical partnerships, and polyamorism, Vance may sound as outdated as his fringed disco shirts. Who needs to expend all this mental effort—hot pursuits, compliments, and intimacy—to get a woman? You don’t have to for casual or practical purposes, but igniting passionate desire requires cognitive craft. The mind is the body’s most erogenous zone. Romantic love is a psychological takeover, which cannot, as philosopher Irving Singer observes, “be fully explained in terms of sight or touch or any other sense.”

  Women may be particularly susceptible to mind spells. Meredith Chivers, a leading figure in female sexual research, notes that women are more aroused by mental stimuli than men. In desire, their brains are busier, sussing out streams of cultural, social, situational, and emotional data. The conscious part of the female mind that inhibits action and appraises feelings (the anterior cingulated cortex and insular cortex) is larger, and the amygdala in the unconscious subcortex “remembers” amorous events in detail, as opposed to men, who pick up only the gist. From a woman’s perspective, the heroine of the film Juliet of the Spirits has a point: “The powers of seduction,” she says, “are all inside.”

  Certain cerebral charms are especially lethal to the female libido. They transcend time, trends, and culture and target women’s deepest desires. Ladies’ men, even when it’s unfashionable, have been roping women this way forever. Unlike amateurs, though, they don’t practice these “throws”—passionate approaches, praise, and connection—by the book. They enlist imagination, drama, ardor, novelty, originality, brains, and a sixth-sense sensitivity about what each woman wants.

  The Royal Rush

  Who loves, raves.

  —LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  Sebastian D. knows a thing or two about love and seduction. He has written novels and made movies on the subject, and at age forty, he has the reputation of one of the “really exceptional ladies’ men” of today. At the moment, he’s busy promoting his new indie film, but he accepts a lunch date to chat about Casanovas, himself in particular. True, he is stunning—a fine-boned British version of Javier Bardem in a Brioni suit and vintage swing coat. But he exudes something else: a sexy, nervy energy. “I’m not sure what it is,” he says in a cut-glass Cambridge accent. “I mean, I’m fascinated by women constantly, and if you want to get that girl, of course, there are tactics . . .”

  The more he talks, though, the more “tactics” recede. Instead, he riffs on Freud and “fascination,” and reminisces about girlfriends past and present. By dessert, his main strategy is out of the bag: a full-on frontal assault when he “fancies” someone. For instance, he once met a Persian woman at an LA nightclub, and at the end of the evening, turned to her and whispered in Farsi, “Esh-ghe-mani”—You touch my soul. They were together for almost a year. “The important thing,” he writes later, “is that it’s sincerely expressed. We Casanovas fear the wrath of Eros should we misuse that word for cynical, seductive means.” He told the woman, with whom he now has a daughter, on their first date, “I want us to be lovers; I want to make you sigh like no man has made you sigh before.”

  What woman is going to buy this? More than you might expect. Although women prize their right to the sexual initiative and accept erotic “cool” as the new normal, most secretly like a man who floors it. Romantic love, by nature, is a “furious passion,” and women want to be furiously desired and pursued. High-mettled lovers who throw ca
ution to the wind impress them more than they like to admit. My own father won my mother with a proposal on day one: “My hat’s in the ring,” he announced.

  Scientists speculate that women’s sex drive may need displays of avid desire for peak efficiency. It takes a greater jolt to “switch on a woman’s libido,” writes University of Nevada psychologist Marta Meana. “Being desired is very arousing to women.” Over half of female fantasies reveal a wish to be sexually irresistible and, in some cases, “ravished.” What a woman craves, explains Meredith Chivers, is a passion so intense that it shatters constraints, fires desire, and allows her to be “all in the midbrain.” An ardent advance is also a “woman’s moment of power,” giving her the high ground of erotic choice.

  For millennia men have been hectored to haul out. “Let the man be first to make the approach and entreaty,” Ovid enjoined. “Ask her outright!” The Hindu author of the Kāma Sūtra directed suitors to take command and confess endless devotion. In the Middle Ages, courtly lovers were expected to storm “the door of love’s palace.” Robert Louis Stevenson, a ladies’ man himself, berated “anaemic and tailorish” men who dithered in desire; a man should be so overcome by passion that he runs out “with open arms” and declares himself. People feel only aversion, wrote psychologist Henry Finck, for lovers who hang fire and are “neither hot nor cold.”

  Women may be intrinsically repelled by tepid Romeos. According to cultural psychologist Matt Ridley and others, males are the seducers in 99 percent of animal species and are genetically programmed to take the initiative: “Women may flirt, but men pounce.” Anthropologist Helen Fisher traces this to deep history when a man had to go the distance to persuade a woman he was worth the investment. Evolutionary psychologists see the male courtship offensive as a commitment ploy; persistence and passion telegraphed a “faithful nester” to our female forebears. Whatever the motive, argues neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, the fervent male suitor isn’t an outmoded stereotype; it’s built into the “brain architecture of love.”