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  A woman at the end of a double-shift day doesn’t always want an exciting partner. But as a rule, women like their lovers, real and imaginary, charged up. Sometimes that includes a spritz of danger. After all, Dionysus was a two-sided god, like eros itself, with a potential for discord and violence. His appearances were awesome, “disquieting” events; he revealed himself with a numinous bang, often masked and swathed in ivy.

  Fantasy erotic heroes are impassioned creatures who seethe, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, with teeth-gritting desire. Balzac’s ingénue in The Memoirs of Two Brides has her pick of the Parisian beau monde, but she chooses an ugly, mono-browed Spaniard because of his ferocity. Which is why Colette’s heroine of The Other One junks her husband; he’s lost his fire. “God, how slow he is!” she rails; at the least, he should show “passionate violence.” To qualify for the romance leagues, the hero must be “deeply intense,” a model of coiled manhood, whether a count or a carpenter.

  A number of ladies’ men are high-strung powerhouses. Nineteenth-century pianist Franz Liszt was “demoniac” in his fervor. Tightly wound and “aggressively ardent,” Liszt targeted women with one of his fiery looks, and they went down like sacks of sand. A century later, conductor Leopold Stokowski was an equally fortissimo phenomenon, as were Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Sinatra.

  No one, though, surpassed the fifth-century BC Alcibiades for charismatic intensity. A renowned Athenian politician and general in the Peloponnesian War, he was a byword for sex appeal. “His personal magnetism,” wrote Plutarch, “was such that no disposition could wholly resist it.”

  In a culture that enshrined moderation, Alcibiades was an emotional extremist, “man of many strong passions,” who riveted men and women alike when he stepped into the agora. Aptly, his shield depicted Eros armed with a thunderbolt. Handsome and showy, he dressed in fancy sandals and long purple cloaks instead of demure white togas. He drove chariots too fast, caroused with flute girls, and was so intense in his affections that he frightened his friend Socrates. Women, his wife included, worshipped him in spite of his excesses and infidelities.

  This “second Dionysus,” however, imitated his patron deity once too often. On the night before he was to lead a Sicilian expedition against Sparta, he defaced the sacred phallic totems, a crime punishable by death. He fled to the enemy and lived in Sparta for two and a half years, where he enchanted the populace with his “rare and incomparable presence.” The king’s wife numbered among them and was so unrepentant about their affair that she called their son “Alcibiades” in public.

  Driven to flight a second time, he took refuge in Persia, only to be recalled, then exiled once more from Athens after he lost a key sea battle. Finally, his enemies hunted him down. They found him on the frontier in Thrace in the arms of a courtesan and felled him with javelins. Afterward, the heartbroken courtesan wrote a poem to commemorate her lover—a charismatic dynamo whose name became synonymous with the seducer for millennia.

  Sex Drive

  The subject of this treatise does not concern men who lack a sexual temperament.

  —Kāma Sūtra

  Women in Trenton, New Jersey, prowled the streets and committed crimes in hopes of meeting this man. Joe Morelli, the strapping cop in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum mystery series, is a smoking ladykiller with a string of conquests and a one-track mind. Whenever he greets Stephanie, he hooks a finger inside her tank top, and it’s off to big O’s in the bedroom or the shower, where he does her favorite thing. On “fierceromance blogspot” readers put Joe at the top, not just for his sexy wisecracks and rescue instincts, but for his “hot Italian libido.”

  Sexual energy is the heartbeat of sexual charisma. As sexologists point out, sex drive lies on a continuum from take-it-or-leave-it to can’t-get-enough. Ladies’ men occupy the lusty end of the spectrum. According to Søren Keirkegaard, that’s the essence of their magnetism—pure “sensuality” and carnal appetite.

  Primeval religion and myth may help explain this magnetism. Throughout deep history, ancient peoples worshipped the virile principle and fashioned penis-shaped relics capable of miracle cures and spells. At Dionysian festivals men filed through the streets brandishing huge phalluses to celebrate the divine force of male sex-energy. This is sexual charisma at its most primal; the root meaning of fascinating is “fascinum,” Latin for “phallus.”

  Women’s dream lovers are more sexed up than usually believed. These fantasy studs are so stoked they get hard at the sight of the heroine’s hand and singe the sheets. The “walking orgasm” in one novella is up and at ’em minutes after a cupboard-rattling session on a kitchen counter. “It’s bath time,” he announces. “Watch me.” Vadinho, the Brazilian satyr of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, dies at Carnival waving a cassava tuber, but he returns to life, like the deathless phallic principle, to sexually satisfy his wife again.

  Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authorities claimed women cared little for such gross satisfactions; they didn’t like sex as much as men, preferring soul unions and evenings à deux with a good book. Two great lovers of the 1950s proved them wrong. Aly Khan and Porfirio Rubirosa won their romantic renown on the strength of their prodigious sex drives.

  “Don Juan Khan,” as Aly Khan was known, had “charm in neon lights.” The last of the post–World War II playboys, he transcended the breed. More than a jaded womanizer, he combined old-world courtliness, fondness for his lovers, and skill with a strong libido. Trained as a boy in the esoteric techniques of the Middle East, he was endowed with a sensitive touch and such “physical fortitude” that he could bed and sate three women in a day.

  Like Aly Khan, Porfirio Rubirosa stood above the crowd. A Dominican diplomat, sportsman, and cosmopolite, he had an illustrious career as a lover and cocksman, with the emphasis on cock. (Large pepper grinders have been named for him.) He married five times, most famously to heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, and was embroiled with Zsa Zsa Gabor in a tabloid romance for years. But he added supreme “class” and romance to his high sexual gear, not to mention expert swordsmanship. Said a blissed-out girlfriend, “Rubi is so virile his sex glands will go on functioning even after the rest of his body is dead.”

  The eighteenth-century duc de Richelieu, however, got there first. A precursor to the playboy, he was a distinguished figure in French history—diplomat, marshal of France, confidant to Louis XV, and the general behind important victories against the British, such as the brilliant capture of Minorca. He was also a “hero of the boudoir.” “Profligate,” adorable, and hypersexed, he lived so long and lustily, people thought he might be immortal. He sired a child in his eighties and died, still virile, at ninety-two.

  He was no more handsome or clever than anyone else at the courts of Louis XIV and XV, but he had a sensual oomph, an “unbridled animal magnetism.” With his sweetness, charm, and wolfish grin, he “could ruin a woman with a smile.” Even as a boy at Versailles, his sexual precocity drew admirers, and at fifteen he was thrown into the Bastille for hiding in the Dauphine’s bedroom. Afterward, women swarmed. He received ten to twelve love letters a day and made the rounds, romancing two princesses, tradeswomen, courtesans, and nearly every noblewoman in Paris. Women were “wild” for him.

  So “wild” that Richelieu generated one of the most colorful scandals of the day. Two grandes dames who were competing for his favors decided to settle the matter with a predawn duel. On March 14, 1719, the contesse de Polignac and the marquise de Nesle arrived at the Bois de Boulogne “clothed as Amazons,” leveled pistols at each other, and fired. As the marquise toppled to the ground drenched in blood, she cried that her lover “was well worth it.” “Now,” she shouted, “my love will make him wholly mine.” She survived, but like his countless conquests, she was to be disappointed. This vainqueur de dames was too charismatic, too monumental a sexual force, to belong wholly to anyone.

  Love of Women

  Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!

  �
��THOMAS OTWAY, The Orphan

  Ashton Kutcher is more than just another Hollywood hottie with a toned physique. Smart and multi-gifted, he has created and produced popular television shows (among them Punk’d and Beauty and the Geek), launched a most-visited Twitter site, and acted in over twenty movies. At the same time, he’s—in fanzine-speak—“a honey-dripping chick magnet.” Linked to many coveted women and once married to megastar Demi Moore, he has a unique brand of charisma: he “love[s] the company of women” as pals, equals, and lovers. Like many ladykillers, he has his mother and their close relationship to thank for it. She told him to “treat women right, to take care of them, to respect them.”

  Men who appreciate and enjoy women aren’t that common. Boys are raised to boycott the girls’ club and bond with each other. The “bromance” tradition is ancient and deep-dyed, a devotion to male friends that can be “wonderful, passing the love of women.” In the extreme, it tips over into misogyny, as the “player” movement and movies like Carnal Knowledge and Roger Dodger attest. By contrast, ladies’ men like women inside and out and seek their companionship.

  Such gynephilia makes a man hum with charisma. Scientists track it to the mystery of connectivity. When someone empathizes and synchronizes with us, the effect is galvanic. Mirror neurons light up, explains MIT psychologist Alex Pentland, and our bodies kick off opiate-like endorphins. We endow rapport artists with “chemistry”—incandescent sexiness.

  Mythology’s premier ladies’ man Dionysus was the one god who treasured women. Unlike the macho deities in the Greek pantheon, he grew up “surrounded by women”—flocks of foster mothers, mermaids, and sea goddesses. He was so fond of his mother, Semele, that he restored her to life and made her immortal. His traveling companions were throngs of female votaries.

  Women-friendly seducers inevitably triumph in fiction. Anton Chekov’s rake in “The Lady with the Dog” is gray and faded, but he enamors a spirited young married woman because he’s a female aficionado; he’s at ease and knows “what to say.” Rowley Flint of Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa is another unlikely ladykiller—ill-favored and slovenly—who profoundly “like[s] women” and lures a glamorous guest at a Florentine estate away from her rich, handsome fiancé. “Women are more important than baseball,” says the hero of Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me, as he walks off with the pick of the town.

  Casanova was never a man’s man, although he excelled in daredevil masculine pursuits like spying and dueling. Coddled by his grandmother and other ministering angels as a boy, he was “madly in love with the eternal feminine,” and preferred the society of women. Prince Grigory Potemkin was one of Russian history’s most dashing figures—general, statesman, lover/advisor to Catherine the Great—and a sultan of seduction. Deluged by devotees all his life, “he loved women passionately” and was at home with them, having been pampered since infancy by his mother and six sisters.

  Warren Beatty has the same pedigree. He was raised in a hothouse of strong, doting women—sister, aunt, and mother—where he acquired a lifelong “sweetly endearing appreciation for females.” “He’s just wonderful to women,” said Lana Wood, Natalie’s’ sister, “just wonderful. He genuinely likes them, all of them.”

  Jazz composer and orchestra leader Duke Ellington soared over the racial divide of his time, not only professionally but also romantically. An African American born in 1899 at the high tide of segregation and prejudice, he became a national celebrity, honored by the White House and the musical establishment. He became the ultimate “sweet man” in the process. Six foot one and deadly sexy, he enchanted women of all colors. “Spoiled rotten” by his mother and aunts, he “liked women as well as loved them,” and drew them “like flies to sugar.”

  His love life was robust. Married once at eighteen and separated, he had three long-term mistresses over a lifetime: Mildred “Sweet Bebe” Dixon, a dancer at the Harlem Cotton Club; Beatrice “Evie” Ellis, a half-black, half-Spanish model; and white nightclub singer Fernandae Castro Monte, christened “The Countess.” Then there were road ladies, colleagues, and squads of besotted fans, including two Chicago debutantes who got their hands on him. Women “absolutely adored him.”

  Throughout the high-volume sex, though, Ellington always revered and valued women. He regarded them “as flowers, each one lovely in her own way.” Flirtatious and captivating, he would say to a secretary on the phone, “Is this the beautiful department?” or tell an actress, “Does your contract stipulate that you must be this pretty?” He played the piano for women; he pinioned them with his bedroom eyes. But perhaps the greatest part of his “charismatic presence” was something less usual: he truly appreciated and honored women and was “marvelous” with them.

  Androgyny

  The more feminine the man . . . the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex.

  —“The Evolution of Homosexuality,” The Economist

  In the swinging sixties, Essex Junction, Vermont, was the “in” place—a hippie enclave full of pony-tailed hunks and braless lovelies in search of sexual liberation. In that department, one man got all the action. Women trooped miles to his house in the woods for sleepovers—as did men. Clay’s uncanny sexual magnetism was the talk of the communes. As frail and thin as the Little Match Girl, he had bad teeth, a Fu Manchu mustache, and a whispery alto voice. But he had a mantra: “Bi or Bye-Bye.” In that hive of counterculture machismo, Clay cast one of the oldest sexual spells in the book: androgyny.

  Counterintuitive as it seems, gender ambiguity is immensely seductive. In theory, the Darwinian he-man ought to get the valentines, but oddly enough, a man in touch with his inner femininity frequently has the romantic edge with women. As cultural critic Camille Paglia says, the androgynous person “is the charismatic personality.” Why though? Why do gender-benders throw off such erotic magic and entice women as they do?

  Scientists have located some clues. Researcher Meredith Chivers has found that women differ from men in their sexual tastes. When she attached female subjects to a photoplethysmograph while they watched erotic movies, she discovered that they shared a marked predilection for bisexuality. Other studies show women consistently preferring computerized images of feminized male faces and choosing more androgynous men in audio interviews.

  This is not news to the psychiatric profession. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought both genders posses an inner bisexuality in the repressed depths of the psyche. Later thinkers conjectured that we never lose an unconscious striving for a synthesis of male and female. This amalgam, writes religious scholar Mircea Eliade, represents ideal wholeness, the peak of “sensual perfection.”

  It’s embedded in our cultural mythology. In many creation stories, the “great He-She” created life on earth, and the Hindu fertility god, Shiva, assumed both sexes to attain “divine sensual delight.” Often shamans achieved their “mana” (air of sacred authority) by assuming a double-sexed persona. The “Man-Woman” Dionysus perfumed his curls and wore women’s saffron robes tied with a flowery sash.

  Erotic fantasies are replete with androgynes. Just when we expect a hulking warrior to carry off the heroine, we find the effeminate Paris abducting Helen in The Iliad and gentle Lanval of Marie de France’s twelfth-century tale infatuating the queen of the fairies.

  In a recent shift, romance idols have begun to blur gender. The “Woman Whisperer” Cash Hunter in Maureen Child’s Turn My World Upside Down is a soul sister in the body of a linebacker. When his love interest suffers, he cradles her cheek, extracts her story, and bleeds for her: “Ah God. Empathy washed over him.” Daniel of Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe not only behaves like a best girlfriend—baking, gardening, and church going—but he looks like one. He wears green silk shirts, sandals, and scented dreadlocks.

  Whether subtle or pronounced, many great lovers have a distinct feminine streak. The Athenian homme fatal Alcibiades showcased his femininity, wearing his hair long and braiding it with flowers before battles. Casanova, too, had an overt distaff side�
�an aesthetic sensibility, a sentimentality, and a penchant for cross-dressing. Byron’s androgyny was so apparent that the sultan Mahmud refused to believe he wasn’t “a woman dressed in man’s clothes.” Emotional and epicene in dress and speech, Byron resembled a Renaissance blend of Greek god and goddess.

  Ironically, the icon of tough, cool-guy masculinity, Gary Cooper, owed his fame as a ladies’ man to his “ravishing androgyny.” In more than a hundred movies over thirty-five years, he cemented the twentieth-century ideal of a “real man,” the slow-talking honcho with quick fists and nerves of steel. But women saw a different side of him. Six foot three and “more beautiful than any woman except Garbo,” he merged a feminine sweetness, tenderness, and artistic sensitivity with his masculine swank.

  The hybrid proved knee-buckling. “Coop” was set upon by women the moment he arrived in Hollywood in 1925. Said director Stuart Heisler, they “fell over themselves to get him to take them to bed.” And he complied. He slept with nearly every leading lady, from Carole Lombard to Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, and moonstruck each of them. Helen Hayes said that if “Gary had crooked a finger I would have left Charlie and my child and the whole thing.”

  He was seriously loved. After their affair ended, twenties film star Clara Bow continued to come if he whistled, and actress Lupe Velez stabbed him with a kitchen knife when he tried to break up with her. He married socialite Veronica “Rocky” Balfe in 1933, who adored him so unconditionally that she endured his countless affairs, even a serious one with Patricia Neal. Attempting to explain his “hypnotic” effect on women, movie and TV personality Arlene Dahl referred to his “combination of unusual traits.” The secret of that “combination,” said actor-writer Simon Callow, was “the perfect balance between his masculine and feminine elements.”