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  Admittedly, Da Ponte had issues; he was vain, quick to take offense, and overanxious to be liked. But a Casanova with a complex he was not. More than symptom-free, he thrived amid hardship and took the high road to a replete, creative identity. He is of a piece with many great lovers—men like Denis Diderot, Prince Grigory Potemkin, and Benjamin Franklin—adored precisely for their expansive selfhood, ability to rebound from tragedy, and raging life spirits.

  The Darwinian Alpha Male

  Displays of power and abundant resources work in any epoch.

  —REUBEN BOLLING “Tom the Dancing Bug,” Salon

  “Surely,” say the mating biologists, “no one has seriously doubted that women desire wealthy, high-status men.” This image of the ladies’ man comes to us courtesy of evolutionary psychology. Since it carries the imprimatur of science, the Darwinian beau ideal has become an established dogma in relationship circles.

  Surprisingly, though, the whole alpha male theory is based on a thought experiment of dubious validity. Projecting into the deeps of prehistory, psychobiologists speculate that the earliest women—vulnerable and beleaguered—sought power males to protect them from the elements, support progeny, and provide superior genes. Over eons, these scientists argue, the preference for such men became soldered into the female libido, creating a permanent sexual “fix.” As a result, women instinctively gravitate to the guy who supplies the best survival benefits and DNA. His qualities vary among scientists, but nearly all agree on the big four. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss sums them up: 1) money and status; 2) stability and fidelity; 3) kindness and compatibility; and 4) physical superiority.

  The first premise of male sex appeal, wealth and prestige, has the widest cultural currency. A ladykiller without rank and riches is practically an oxymoron. Almost every mating authority, from Dr. Helen Fisher to Dr. Phil, subscribes to it. “A high-status male,” writes biobehaviorist Donald Symons, “is both the best choice for a husband and for a sex partner.” Propelled by the sugar-daddy dictate, men battle their way up the social ladder and flash credit cards the way lightning bugs flash photons. It’s “basic”: swells get the babes; they have the adaptive edge—resources and top-of-the-line sperm.

  Security is another article of faith. Women, say neo-Darwinians, want “dependable” men—faithful, committed, and “emotionally stable.” Their dream man, declares Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, is a “good, loyal domestic type.” With infants under foot and saber-toothed tigers at the door, our female ancestors didn’t need mercurial mates and gadabouts on the premises. By Darwinian logic, a woman would be crazy not to put her heart in the service of a homebody, a protector who can be counted on to hold down the fort and stick around.

  Compatibility and decency are equally seductive. In unsettled times—tribal warfare, treks over ice scarps, and the struggle for provisions—the dark stranger signaled potential danger and difficulty. Hence the female preference for a nice man from the same tribe, someone with similar views, customs, tastes, and opinions. Commonality, claim scientists, confers an evolutionary payoff: domestic cooperation, less strife, and longer relationships, all of which accounts for the guy-next-door allure.

  Then there is beauty and brawn, the quintessence of male sex appeal. From an evolutionary perspective, women are predestined to go for taut beefcakes who telegraph protection and beautiful babies. Sociobiologist Bruce Ellis belabors the point: “For women the world over, male attractiveness,” he writes, “is bound up with strength . . . and prowess.” Ladykillers, by selective right, are tall, buff, and handsome with biceps like Smithfield hams and bulging crotches.

  The Real Alpha Male

  Science popularizers never tire of saying that “from a biological standpoint we’re still prehistoric.” If so, ladies’ men hail from another prehistory. The kind of men who consistently enrapt women call the whole Darwinian alpha model into question.

  Gabriele D’Annunzio is typical. One of the most compelling figures of the fin de siècle Europe, he was a noted Italian poet, novelist, politician, war hero, and ladykiller. “The woman who had not slept with him,” said a Parisian salonnière, “became a laughing stock.” Women found him devastating. They trailed him around Europe like frenzied maenads, pouring out passionate declarations, abandoning families, and twice offering a fortune for his favors. The international stage diva “La Duse” never got over her “Apollo.”

  With D’Annunzio, Apollo doesn’t come immediately to mind. Proof against evolutionary progress, he was a sad physical specimen—short, bald, and “ugly,” with “unhealthy” teeth, fat legs, wide hips, hooded eyes, pallid lips, and thick mottled skin.

  Nor did he radiate “strong provider” appeal. He was nearly always in debt and went spectacularly bankrupt midcareer, losing all his possessions, including his thirty greyhounds, in a ten-day auction. When he first arrived in Rome, he was a nonentity without pedigree, reputation, money, or connections. Men of his sort weren’t “received.” Yet due to his impact on women, he breached high society and bore off the daughter of a duchess—three months pregnant. Despite his mistreatment of his aristocratic wife, she loved him to the end and came to look after him in his old age.

  Instability was his middle name. Chronically unfaithful and forever in transit, he lived from caprice to caprice. Women, however, were undeterred. Not only did Eleonora Duse endure his affairs, but she once dispatched him into the arms of a rival. “Look, look, since you love him,” she declaimed to a houseguest, “there he is!” and discreetly closed the door. Another rival refused to go quietly. A Russian marchesa confronted La Duse after a tryst with D’Annunzio, drew a gun, and tossed it “from hand to hand” until the diva packed her bags and left. La Duse tried “in vain to forget her great love” for the rest of her life.

  D’Annunzio was also impulsive and labile, subject to rash moves and buying binges. After one of his sprees, he rhapsodized, “I have a need for the superfluous . . . divans, precious fabrics, Persian carpets, Japanese china, bronzes, ivories, trinkets, all those useless and beautiful things.” Ever undependable in a crisis, he fled from women when illness and tempests struck.

  He was not the brotherly type. D’Annunzio was a man of enigma and exotic otherness with bizarre habits (quill pens and clerical robes), mysterious haunts (a baroque monastic hideaway), and a penchant for remarks such as “green mouths of the sirens suck my voluptuous blood.” Instead of a guy next door, he was the guy from the next galaxy, a self-described “sorcerer.”

  Sorcerers aren’t known for fair play, and D’Annunzio disported above bourgeois morality. Although gentle and generous when he chose, he could misbehave. But no one could beguile, spoil, and transport women like D’Annunzio. He was “the most remarkable lover of [his] time,” “a ladies’ man before whose exploits the most dashing Don Juan must bow his head in admiration.”

  Like D’Annunzio, few ladykillers fit the neo-Darwinian bill. There are, of course, rich, handsome, famous, kind, and stable ladies’ men. But something else accounts for their erotic firepower. Starving artists and working-class nobodies fill the ranks of great lovers. Stolid guardians of the hearth and wholesome, known-forever men also belong but don’t predominate—far from it. Casanovas aren’t always pinups either. A guy can have belt overhang, bat ears, mini-genitals, dewlaps, and bad skin and still be the most desirable man on the planet. It takes more, much more than evolutionary psychology imagines, to enthrall women.

  The Player Seducer

  Women aren’t attracted to wussies.

  —DAVID DE ANGELO, Double Your Dating

  Dating coach and radio host Payton Kane has a promise for all the lonely men out there: his “Makeover Team can turn ANY regular guy into a Ladies Man within 4 hours!” The ladykiller who emerges from this transfiguration is one of the most pervasive versions of the nouveau Casanova. He’s the gamer, the player, the pickup artist—the PUA. Popularized by Neil Strauss in his 2005 bestseller, The Game, and dozens of online dating gurus, he’s a low
brow incarnation of neo-Darwinian machismo. The operating premise is that a master lover is a top gun who takes down women with a repertoire of paramilitary maneuvers: bravado, flak, and precision strikes. By Casanovan standards, the goal is modest: not to get loved (another league) but to get laid.

  The heart of the player system is the dominance display. Unless you’re a “tribal leader,” you won’t get the girl, exhorts high-priest “Mystery,” a goth-boy figure in a shag-carpet hat and black nails. Swagger into a bar, he instructs, act like “the prize,” and let the ladies know who’s boss. This entails a broadside of wisecracks and sarcastic “negs” such as “How do you rate in bed?” followed by “You’re now downgraded from booty call # 1 to # 10.”

  Closing the deal is as scrupulously plotted as Operation Overlord. Often with the help of a “wingman,” a “seductionist” softens the target with “trance words” (sensual triggers like “blow” and “job” and “pleasure”) and an onslaught of praise and scorn. It’s as effective, claims Mystery, as a sharp snap of a dog leash.

  When the mark tosses her hair and smiles, the time comes for “kinos,” strategic touches on the thigh, waist, and breasts. Finally, a “Venusian Artist” isolates the girl, kisses her, gets her number, and leaves as though he has better things to do. Later, he calls with a “sex location” in mind, and goes in for the kill. Boasts “Extramask” in a field report: I “slammed her hard.”

  Throughout this seduce-and-conquer campaign, the ladies’ man keeps his counsel and shuts down emotionally. A PUA learns “to eliminate desire” (as the womanizer Dex advises in the film The Tao of Steve) and to conceal feelings if they do intrude. Seducers stay cool, deflect the L-word, and realize in a pinch “there’s always another woman.” In their case, there is; the “hits” they describe are interchangeable numbers (graded 6 to 10). They are usually a desperate lot—strippers, bored housewives, model wannabees, and stray singletons who haunt dance clubs.

  Gamer convert Neil Strauss says he studied with pickup artists for two years to “become what every woman wants—not what she says she wants, but what she really wants.” But he went to the wrong school. Real-world enchanters provide a different message as well as a different grade of woman from Strauss’s sad assortment of teenage waitresses, exotic dancers, and ladies with “porn star” skills.

  The Real Seducer

  Prince Aly Khan would be the envy of any gamer. Known as the “Golden Prince,” Khan was a marquee name in the 1950s: international playboy, decorated soldier, sportsman, philanthropist, UN vice president, spiritual leader of twenty million Ismaili Muslims, and lover of the crème de la crème. Said one: “You weren’t in the swim and you were really déclassé, démondé, nothing, you hardly counted if you’d not been to bed with Aly.” He famously seduced “Love Goddess” Rita Hayworth away from her husband, and married her at a gala wedding with the swimming pool filled with two hundred gallons of eau de cologne.

  Khan, though, repudiated the player credo. He “threw away the rule book and played the game by instinct.” Instead of cool and cocky, he was gallantry personified and put himself out to please women. He was modest and discreet about his conquests, which outstripped a PUA’s wildest dreams. Unspectacular in dress and looks (a sallow complexion and receding hairline), he radiated “sweetness,” “softness,” and “disarming humility.”

  When he wanted a woman, he disdained battle plans, dominance displays, and feigned indifference. He came on strong. Lovers said he singled them out of the crowd at parties and made a beeline for them. Once at Ascot, he turned his back on the horserace and stared at his soon-to-be mistress in the bleachers the whole time. On another occasion, he said to a dinner partner he had just met, “Darling, will you marry me?” The Honorable Joan Guinness, wife of the brewer mogul, promptly divorced her husband and did.

  Laconic put-downs weren’t his style. French chanteuse and film star Juliette Gréco believed flattery was Khan’s forte. On their first date, she recalled, he ego-massaged her in a “charming, very special way.” He focused exclusively on her, her interests and career, never glancing at the parade of glamour girls who walked past their table. He made her feel like a “queen.” To take a woman down a peg would have struck Khan as gauche and puerile; he invested in the aphrodisiac of applause—compliments, undivided attention, and strokes.

  Although his liaisons were many, Khan was always “madly, deeply” in love—however briefly—and wore his heart on his sleeve. Rather than masking his feelings, he made a pageant of them. As soon as he saw Rita Hayworth, he gasped, “My God! Who is that?” and launched a siege on her affections. He hired a new chef, overhauled his chateau (even down to new table linens), and called her around the clock until she agreed to come for lunch.

  Afterward he sent her three-dozen red roses from Cannes every day. The phone calls accelerated with solicitous inquiries: How did she feel? Did she need anything? Eventually she needed him, and soon they were a couple, off to romantic holidays in Paris, London, and Spain. His hotel rooms, though, weren’t “C3 locations,” as gamers call them; Khan was a sexual artist, intent first and foremost on a woman’s satisfaction. “He made women feel marvelous.”

  Every fascinator worth his women, from antiquity to the present, refutes the player model; he works it another way. Even Jack Nicholson, the mascot of cool, is a “sentimental guy” who courts women with ga-ga flattery, exuberance, and open lust and vulnerability. Great lovers handle women with a velvet touch, not a war manual.

  The Therapy Heartthrob

  Just What the Love Dr. Ordered.

  —VERONICA HARLEY, “Best Relationship Books,” AOL

  Another distortion of the ladies’ man persona is the “Mr. Wonderful” of couples’ therapy—the flip side of the player. Instead of a tough hombre with Machiavellian schemes, this epitome of male sex appeal has been sensitized, civilized, and customized for a postfeminist generation. He’s an Identi-Kit creation, a composite of the therapeutic ideal. Liberated and omni-competent, he’s empathic, housebroken, companionable, mature, and well behaved. And with sufficient counseling, he can be mass-produced.

  On paper, he sounds like every woman’s fantasy. Women, he realizes, are frazzled and overworked and crave sustenance. A one-man support system, he supplies whatever is required: groceries, tile regrouts, car inspections, and shiatsu massage. He ministers to the inner woman as well. At Dr. John Gottman’s “love laboratory” in Seattle, men learn to communicate, express feelings, listen, and validate.

  This love-coached ladies’ man also learns to be a fair fighter. When the fat hits the fire, he is the soul of compassion and calm. Through careful self-monitoring, he avoids “flooding” and responds nondefensively in order to defuse the argument. Rephrase her complaints, counsels Gottman, compromise, conciliate, and never stonewall; “choose to be polite.” As Dr. Phil advises, he works hard, “like you would on any project.”

  In the boudoir he is equally conscientious. Couples’ guides supply copious help with horizontal skills, how-tos as detailed as flight manuals that itemize mechanics from A to Z. Foreplay looms large, beginning with careful preparation of mood—music (playlists included), bubble baths, and candles—followed by at least “twenty-one minutes or more of foreplay.” Sex itself should be minutely choreographed—toys on hand, positions mastered, and a rolling inventory of mattress moves.

  The Real Heartthrob

  The counselors’ Casanova has a lot of things going for him; he checks every box. A woman could do worse than have such a to-spec lover in her life, a hassle-free mate who gets it right and lends a hand. His creators mean well. The only drawback is desire. The therapists’ ladykiller has been built by rational design, without regard for eros, the unruly life force. The men who inspire and keep grand passions aren’t practical, paint-by-the-numbers products from a relationship lab.

  Lord Byron, the British nineteenth-century poet, patriot, and romantic icon, would have been a love coach’s nightmare. Irreverent, moody, and hot-tempere
d, he violated nearly all the therapy sanctities. Yet he was “quite simply, irresistible.” More than a rock-star poet who caused a tsunami of female fans—a Byronmania—he won the undying adoration of innumerable women throughout his life.

  Hardly helpmate material, Byron trailed an aura of wanderlust and foreign adventures, decked out in a wardrobe of Albanian turbans and Turkish pantaloons. And he looked only half-civilized. “Once seen” and never “forgotten,” Byron had the chiseled face of an antique Bacchus, with “wild” blue eyes, a full sensuous underlip, and a high forehead strewn with dark, flyaway curls.

  His club foot and chronic limp played on female sympathies, and women nurtured him instead of the other way around. They copied his poems, lent money, monitored his health, and coddled him like a maharajah. The role of male caretaker left him cold. Three months into his marriage, he informed his wife, “What on earth does your mother mean,” he announced, “by telling me to take care of you? I suppose you can take care of yourself.”

  Communication—couples’ therapy style—wasn’t his strong suit. Although in touch with his feelings (he wept easily) and capable of long intimate talks with beloved women, he had a mixed record as an amorous communicator. He toggled between endearments and sarcasms with his mistress Lady Caroline Lamb, and treated his new wife to a crossfire of tender confidences and cruel outbursts.

  Conversation was another matter. When he chose to, he could be adorable. Talking in a mellow baritone with a lisp, he entranced women with his gay, playful badinage and verbal pyrotechnics. “His laugh is musical,” gushed Lady Blessington in her memoirs, and his manner of speaking “very fascinating.”