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  —OVID, The Art of Love

  The widow is distraught. She has thrown herself into her husband’s tomb and refused food for five days. One night, in this tale from Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman soldier on guard hears her cries and descends to the crypt to investigate. In his softest voice, he pours out condolences until she at last comes around. She accepts his food offerings and begins to see the attractions of the living, specifically of the soldier before her. Soon they find a better use for the bier, and spend three nights together in the closed tomb.

  Conversation can be at its most seductive in a slow groove. Anthropologists call this phatic speech—the kind that sedates, placates, forges bonds, and supplies romantic comfort food. Male macaque monkeys groom females into a sexy languor before mating with them, just as accomplished ladykillers verbally massage lovers in courtship. Content hardly matters; the object is affiliation, mutual sympathy, and relaxation. It’s grease for the amorous wheels, designed to calm, assure, and lull a lady into that lovin’ feeling.

  Women are particularly partial to grooming talk. Unlike men, say linguists, they speak more for warmth, companionship, and connection. They’re really singing a roundelay of social cohesion, observed essayist J. B. Priestley. In the process, they derive a neural payoff that floods pleasure circuits with peace and composure and assuages anxiety.

  Men might do well to brush up their phatic. In contrast to a man’s, a woman’s sexuality is skittish and complex and easily spooked; hers is wired to the “big brain” where primal fears or imperious commands from the neocortex can shut down the works. For women’s desire to run free, their minds have to be at rest. “If you’re not relaxed, comfortable, warm, and cozy,” writes Louann Brizendine, “it’s not likely to happen.” Few sexual sedatives carry such clout with women as conversational mood music, which anthropologist Helen Fisher traces to our female ancestors who required precoital talk to feel safe.

  Soothing speech is a strong elixir. It takes us back to the delights of an infantile state, to the “voluptuous sleepiness” of the maternal embrace, and “the moment of the enchanted voice.” Sweet nothings also contain bonding magic. Baby talk between lovers swamps the reward center of the brain with feel-good chemicals and promotes romantic attachment. Richard Burton knew what he was doing when he addressed Elizabeth Taylor as “My Lumps,” “Twit Twaddle,” and “Toothache.”

  “Relaxing the Girl” through phatic speech is a classic piece of amorous advice. The Kāma Sūtra devoted a whole chapter to the arts of calming discourse, and Ovid directed men to imitate the cooing, caressing language of doves in their love talks with women. Others counseled hypnotic-like techniques—the repetition of soft, suggestive words. Dumuzi uses this device with the goddess Inanna to put her under his sexual sway: “My sister, I would go with you to my garden,” he intones. “Inanna I would go with you to my garden / I would go with you to my orchard.”

  Thomas Mann’s “god of love,” Felix Krull, speaks fluent phatic and chain-seduces women with his “sympathy” and mastery of the “primordial regions of human intercourse.” While a waiter at a resort, he schmoozes a pretty blonde hotel guest by asking the weary girl if she rested well, and “softly” offering to bring up her breakfast: “It’s so calm and peaceful in the room, in bed . . .”

  A similarly suave groomer is Edwardian sex evangelist Herbert Methley of A. S. Byatt’s Children’s Book. When Olive Wellwood, a married author and mother, meets him for an assignation, she stands terrified at the bedroom door. Anticipating her fear, Methley fastens the latch and croons, Of course, you’re anxious, “but I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.” “Don’t think, stop thinking,” he whispers, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling.” After which, she experiences a seismic orgasm.

  In mass-market romances, men supply a continual loop of erotic Muzak. The Texas heartbreaker of Lisa Kleypas’s Smooth Talking Stranger sweet-talks the heroine into bed, and John Wright, the African American Romeo of Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s Hot Johnny, lullabies all his lady friends. “Aw baby girl,” he chants to one, “don’t cry,” “let me lift you up where you belong.”

  The “Enchanter” of Napoleonic France, François-René Chateaubriand, owed much of his erotic celebrity to his genius for bonding with women. Although a professional wordsmith—a diplomat and author of twenty volumes of prose, including the seminal novels Atala and René—Chateaubriand was a poor public speaker. Alone with women, however, he was in his element. He immersed himself in their joys and sorrows, listened, drew out confidences, and soothed them in his “rich and sympathetic” voice. After these soulful communions, the greatest ladies fell for him “suddenly and forever.”

  Chateaubriand seemed a poor candidate for the Casanova trade. Morose and often “disagreeable,” he was five foot four and bandy-legged, and looked like a “hump-back without a hump.” He rarely took the initiative; women “came to him.” The youngest son of an impoverished, aristocratic Breton family, he returned from exile after the French Revolution to a career in Napoleonic France and an arranged marriage with a titled neighbor, Céleste Buisson.

  It was a fractious, unhappy match. Mistresses soon flocked: first, the salonnière Pauline de Beaumont who doted on his “caressing” talk, and later the “Queen of the Roses,” Madame de Custine, who purchased Henri IV’s castle for his pleasure. “He was prepared to make your life a sweet one,” said one adorer, “save that he shattered [it].”

  Hooked on serial intimacies, Chateaubriand couldn’t be faithful, even after he met his great love, Juliette Récamier, a cultured charmeuse, hymned as “the loveliest woman of her age.” With her he used the same soothe-and-bond philter: “How have you passed the night?” reads a typical letter. “Are you still ill? How I wish I could know all about it! I will come at four o’ clock to find out.” During their thirty-year relationship, ladies besieged him, not just for his fame, but for his conversation that caressed, comprehended, and wove a web of togetherness and entrancement.

  Laughter

  Women need four animals: a mink on their back, a jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bedroom, and a jackass to pay for it all.

  —OLD JOKE

  Two veteran seductresses, Lisa and Carol, are chatting with me over wine spritzers about their old lovers. Lisa brings up a high school flame: “Johnny H!” she says. “He was short and unattractive by traditional standards. My god, though, he was ‘The Man.’ He was funny with that ability to laugh at himself . . .”

  Carol breaks in, “Like Ben! You remember the one I was with for nine years? I wouldn’t call him,” she air-quotes, “ ‘especially attractive.’ But whooza, he had this tremendous sense of humor. Some of the most wonderful times in bed are when you start giggling and laughing over something. And you just lose it.”

  Lisa slaps her hand on the table. “I think laughter is an orgasm.”

  For women the funny bone is a high-volt erogenous zone. A good sense of humor, say researchers, is “the single most effective tactic men can use to attract women,” and a standard request on female dating sites. If a woman laughs at a date’s conversation, the greater her desire to see him again, and if she thinks her husband is witty, the more satisfied she is with her marriage. “Make her laugh at something,” advised thinkers from the Middle Ages on, “women delight in hearing nothing else.”

  There’s logic in women’s desire for mirth: they may get a bigger kick out of verbal humor. In a Stanford University study of humor, researchers found greater activity in the language areas of the female brain than the male brain, as well as higher levels of stimulation in the mesolimbic region, the site of euphoria. Men who amuse women also advertise cognitive fitness. A witty conversationalist exhibits social prowess, self-confidence, adaptability, empathy, energy, and creative intelligence. And he’s less likely to bore a lady, short or long term.

  Humor, too, is just plain sexy. “What is more seductive,” writes philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “than a strok
e of wit?” Or wordplay, jokes, and “linguistic zaniness” in general? A corny one-liner like a mistyped hospital note—“Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized”—will go further with the cute doctor than a black Amex. Comedy weakens inhibitions, excites through incongruity and surprise, releases endorphins, and creates intimacy. When we laugh, we shake off culturally imposed shackles and thumb our noses at civilization and its discontents. Comedy, by nature, notes critic Susanne Langer, is transgressive and erotic—“sensual, impious, and even wicked.”

  Laughter wells up, Langer contends, from ancient fertility rites and the celebration of cosmic vitality. Dionysus, the mythic founder of comedy, was accompanied by a troupe of funnymen: satyrs and assorted pranksters. Hermes was an incorrigible joker whose jests “tricked the mind, even of the wise,” while his Norse counterpart, Loki, clowned through the Eddas, acquiring two wives and numerous mistresses. They’re members of a Trickster brotherhood, fabled for channeling irrational impulses and seducing women with their impious humor. Don Juan, the “burlador” (trickster) of Seville, snared women with his outrageous ruses and wit, and in one version of the story, left them “limp with laughter.”

  Time and again, ladies’ men loot hearts with laughter. Will Ladislaw, the sprite-like artist of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, lures Dorothea away from her husband with his seductive “merriment.” After a dreary dispute with the morose Casaubon, Dorothea encounters Will in Rome, who steals her affections with his humor and hilarious account of their first meeting. Mary Stanger, on the other hand, has the prince of fiancés, a devoted, handsome financier in Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa. But the witty Rowley Flint laughs him off the stage. On a moonlit drive through Tuscany, Rowley mocks the stiff banker with such comic panache that Mary giggles uncontrollably and changes plans.

  A “hero should make the heroine laugh,” commands Leslie Wainger, a Harlequin book editor, “laughter is sexy.” Except for a contingent of tortured viscounts and sullen bikers, popular Romeos show women the funny. Reginald Davenport of The Rake hooks his lovely estate manager, Lady Alys, with humor, spoofing her recommendation for a new crop: “One of nature’s major puzzles,” he grins, “is the mangy mangel-wurzel.” As Alys cracks up, she thinks “how intimate shared laughter could be.”

  Shared, too, in many romances is the comic script. Contrary to the cliché of women as humor appreciators and men as generators, the hero and heroine trade sallies as equals in heated erotic exchanges. In Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Fancy Pants, the protagonists go toe to toe in a battle of wits. The tart-tongued Francesca Day escapes a porn movie set and bums a ride from a droll pro-golfer, Dallie Beaudine. Throughout the Southern golf circuit, they lob wisecracks and gibes, until they end up parked beside a swamp. He ribs her about gators that feed in the night, she sasses him back, then they’re on the trunk of his Riviera, with her foot on the license plate while she cries, “Oh yes . . . Yes. Dallie!”

  Casanova, a noted wit, knew well that Venus is the laughter-loving goddess. Trained in improvisational comedy, he regarded humor as his defense against despair and as his entrée to women. An early starter, he charmed his mother at eleven with a racy aperçu. Asked by a guest why cunnus (vagina) was masculine and mantula (penis) feminine, he replied, “It is because the slave takes his name from his master.” As a teenager, he parlayed his humor into the good graces of a Venetian grandee, Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, who installed him in his palazzo and introduced him to his circle of women. Casanova’s raillery, however, ran away with him. Seated alone once with his patron’s favorite—a voluptuous young adventuress named Teresa Imer—he engaged her in a bit of “innocent gaiety” and sexual peek-a-boo. When Malipiero caught him red-handed, he was caned and banished. But Casanova exited laughing, recycling the story for future comic fodder and seduction.

  With twentieth-century British author Roald Dahl, comedy was king, professionally and romantically. Author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other classics, the tall, handsome Dahl enamored hordes of women with his antic wit. His humor—bizarre, ribald, and often grotesque—wasn’t for the faint-hearted. But women reveled in it. They were “crazy for him,” and he slept, said friends, “with everybody on the east and west coasts.”

  In a Dahl short story, “The Visitor,” his alter ego has a diary that makes Casanova’s read “like a parish magazine.” Dahlesque exaggeration aside, Roald’s life was not dull. Born to Norwegian parents in Wales and raised by a single mother (his father died prematurely), he was a wild child and wiseacre in constant trouble with authorities. Later, as a fighter ace in World War II, his plane crashed in the desert, where he permanently injured his back. Humor became his anodyne thereafter—and aphrodisiac.

  While on assignment as a British agent in America, he was inundated with women. Like his seducer of “The Visitor,” he simply talked to them “more wittily than anyone else had ever done before.” One conquest, French actress Annabella, remembered how he seduced her at an opening-night party with a black comic tale about a rich man who made gruesome bets. He charmed and trysted with the gratin, including such notables as Ginger Rogers, Clare Booth Luce, and journalist Martha Gellhorn.

  In 1952, he met and won over movie star Patricia Neal with his madcap humor. She was entranced, but their marriage, which lasted thirty years, was rocky. They did not get on, and the Furies struck: a son contracted hydrocephalitis in a freak accident; a daughter died at seven; Neal had a stroke in 1962; and Dahl endured a slew of torturous medical procedures. He was not faithful. In 1972, he met the jazzy, imaginative Felicity Crosland, divorced Neal, and married “Liccy” in 1983. They lived in his country home, “Gipsy House,” until he died at seventy-four, side-splittingly funny and endlessly fascinating.

  Today, reports a New York Post feature, comedians are the rock stars of the hour, attended by “chucklefucker” groupies wherever they perform. Many are slapstick buffoons and few are pinups. Standup comic David Spade is short and weasel-faced, but he has a romantic history worthy of Casanova. Another blade, James Corden, the rotund star of BBC comedy shows, said, “My weight was never a concern” with women; I “could always make them laugh, so they tended to overlook my physical imperfections.” The proverb “A maid that laughs is half-taken” still holds. “Finding someone funny,” writes a British columnist, “is the first step to rolling in bed with them. It’s easier to get rich than it is to be truly, charismatically funny.”

  Mental Intercourse

  The act of engaging in intelligent and interesting conversation.

  —Urban Dictionary

  Clare in The Time Traveler’s Wife has a husband who seduced her for twenty years before they met. Henry DeTamble possesses a paranormal faculty that permits him to hitch rides on the space-time continuum, and woo his wife-to-be from age six on. In perhaps the longest foreplay in literature, he courts Clare at every season of her life with razzle-dazzle conversation in three languages. He talks to her eloquently and wittily about the wisdom of the ages (he owns four thousand books) and tells ripping tales of his adventures.

  Next to comedy, and often mingled with it, is conversation that shimmers with intellectual and narrative excitement. The mind is an engine of enchantment; well-turned ideas, learning, and stories pulsate with sex. The female preference for smart, entertaining men is nothing new, but a recent study shows that women want conversational proof. Stimulating talk, they say online and in person, is “always a turn-on.”

  Brilliant dialogue, claims Geoffrey Miller, may be an ingrained courtship strategy. In his “ornamental brain” theory of evolution, alpha females chose suitors who put on the fanciest cerebral show, who flaunted the highest G factor (general intelligence) and largest vocabulary, and told the punchiest narratives. For the flames to really fly, men and women participated together in a reciprocal exchange of stories and ideas.

  Learning and narrative ability are profoundly seductive. Although brainiacs can be tedious bores, men who spin knowledge with verbal aplomb
can charm the pants off women. “All that information streaming back and forth,” writes author Francine Prose, is like some sexual “bodily fluid.” According to philosopher Guy Sircello, we feel “intellectual brilliance,” when it’s finely expressed, in “our most erogenous parts.” The same with narrative drama. Stories, say literary critics, are, in essence, “discourse[s] of desire” that duplicate lovemaking in structure and theme and stir us at profound erotic depths.

  Amorists through the ages have recognized this cerebral spell. Ovid believed love was fueled by intelligent, eloquent conversation. A man, he decreed, should acquire culture, learn two great languages, and avoid boring a lady. To charm women, instructs the Kāma Sūtra, men must master sixty-four branches of knowledge and excel in the art of storytelling. In one exemplum, the author envisions a suitor leading his lover to the rooftop, where he conducts a “pleasant conversation” that ranges from astronomy to spicy love stories. Honoré de Balzac served notice to men in the nineteenth century: unless a lover provides cultured, scintillating talk, a woman will despise him as a creature “destitute of mental vigor.”

  Trilby, the eponymous peasant girl and model of George du Maurier’s novel, doesn’t love the taciturn Svengali who co-opts her but the artist Little Billee, who talks like “the gods in Olympus”—high culture mixed with lively anecdotes.

  Jonathan Franzen’s philosophy professor, Ron, plies his learning for less benign purposes. His highbrow riffs in “Breakup Stories” have granted him his life’s ambition: “to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women.” Even after he meets his intellectual match, Lidia, he can’t resist exercising his brain-to-brain seductions on other women.

  Romance novels play out differently. Here in female fantasyland, heroes fall for their conversational and mental equals and remain true. Dr. Lynn Wyman of Jane Hiller’s Female Intelligence is a renowned linguist, a conversational black belt with a mission: to teach men to talk. But her client with a sexist-language disorder proves every bit her peer. Brandon Brock, a mental giant and CEO of a global company, completes the cure and meets her verbally one-on-one, regaling her with stories, parading his IQ, and seducing her at last into marrying him.