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  Spiritual Cultivation

  Eroticism is primarily a religious matter.

  —GEORGES BATAILLE, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

  Peter K. wasn’t the only Episcopal priest to run afoul that year. It was 1974. A General Theological graduate with a Junior League wife and small son, Peter was considered a catch for St. M’s—a small parish in a rural Virginia college town. He had ideas and presence. Blond and lanky with an aquiline profile, he loped down the aisle in his flowing chasuble and gold-brocaded stole, drowning out the choir with his basso “Faith of Our Fathers.” He permitted children to take communion, chanted the litany, and introduced a book club, soup kitchen, shut-in outreach, and spiritual retreats to Mountain Lake.

  The retreats were where it started: sobbed confessions on the trail, a note squeezed into his hand in the prayer circle, and a lay reader who burst into his room one night, nude beneath her parka. He consoled too many. A vestryman’s wife caught him one afternoon on Bald Knob entwined with a parishioner on a blanket, his clerical collar discarded on a boulder beside a bottle of Mateus.

  The man of God is one of the dark seducer’s favorite guises. A literary stereotype for hundreds of years (think of Chaucer’s lecherous Friar) he’s an all-too-real phenomenon in every religion. The testimonials of women sucked in—and at times abused—by a spiritual leader’s aura could fill a dozen holy books. The website “Boundary Violations without Borders” provides over a hundred links to such accounts.

  Male spirituality is powerfully attractive to women, and many slick operators have turned it to sordid ends. Great lovers aren’t among them. On the whole, they’re nonexploitative, sincere, and untraditional in their beliefs. Kurt, a German Casanova and photographer I interviewed, is typical. Deeply pious, he espouses an eclectic Taoist-inspired faith that informs and augments his relationships. “I think you channel a force with a woman,” he says. “Call it God—whatever you like. I don’t go out to break hearts. I view this planet as a divine school.”

  The link between religion and desire is no accident. We ask passionate love to fulfill the same functions as belief: to plug the holes in our soul, sanctify and save us, defeat death, and raise us to seventh heaven. The loved one becomes our deity, our “will-to-meaning.” From a sociobiological perspective, you might argue that spiritually grounded men make fitter mates. The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania lists the “Strength of Transcendence” as one of the six attributes of “character,” and psychiatrists increasingly promote faith for healthy personhood.

  Sex and the sacred also reach back to the dawn of humankind. Led by charismatic shamans, prehistoric peoples danced and drummed themselves into mystical raptures to merge with the vitalizing principle of the universe, divine sexual energy. Dionysian worship resembled a tent revival where celebrants sought redemption and transfiguration through ecstatic fusion with the phallic god. Psychologist Erich Neumann thinks these fertility rites have left a psychic imprint in the unconscious and influence our sexual proclivities today.

  The love-religion meld is ensconced in modern culture. Religious rhetoric infuses the language of romance: ads, greeting cards, and popular songs assure us that we will be transported to “heaven’s door” by angels we’ll “worship and adore” forever. A troupe of Hollywood sex symbols portrayed cinematic holy men: Charlton Heston as Moses; Anthony Quinn as Mohammed; Cary Grant, John Travolta, and Warren Beatty as angels; and Brad Pitt as a Buddhist convert in Seven Years in Tibet.

  Women’s popular romances throng with men of the cloth. In the novella God on a Harley, the love hero is the Deity himself come to earth in jeans and a ponytail to spirit the heroine away on his motorcycle and redeem her. And they don’t get more lovable than the handsome vicar Christy Morrell, of Patricia Gaffeny’s To Love and To Cherish, with his humor, fierce doubts, and “edge of Woo.” A “For the Love of God” romance website lists over forty clerical heartthrobs, not counting a six-book series about the “Rev. Feelgood,” Nate Thicke.

  Nineteenth-century pianist Franz Liszt enraptured women for many reasons, not least of which was his intense spirituality. As much inclined to religion as music, Liszt twice contemplated the priesthood, and at fifty, he took minor orders, donned a cassock, and wrote sacred music. His courtships centered on long conversations about God and eternity. To Countess Marie d’Agoult, who left her husband and children for him, he spoke only of the “destiny of mankind” and “promises of religion.” Later, he captivated a Russian princess (who also abandoned her spouse for him) through spiritual communions in her crucifix-filled bedroom. She called him a “masterpiece of God.”

  The nineteenth-century John Humphrey Noyes is a less orthodox case. An “uncomely” loner from Vermont, Noyes saw the light one day at Yale Divinity School and envisioned a new religion—a perfected order of mankind. The Second Coming had already occurred, he preached, and ushered in a sinless, joyous age. To realize it, men had only to create a utopian society based on economic communism, righteous living, birth control, and free love.

  The result was the Oneida Community in upstate New York, where men and women had sex with whomever they pleased and shared everything in common, creating their own schools, clothes, and cultural programs and supporting themselves with crafts. At its height Oneida contained over three hundred members and lasted thirty years, longer than any other utopian experiment in America.

  During that time, Noyes was the group’s supreme spiritual leader. He was “extraordinarily attractive to women,” said his son, due to sexual “magnetism superadded to intense religious convictions.” All the women were “eager to sleep with him,” and he took hundreds of lovers.

  The nature of his religious convictions may have enhanced Noyes’s allure. God, Noyes professed, wanted women to be happy in bed. To that end, men were instructed to practice sexual pleasure as an art form, learning to court lovers with tenderness and gallantry and to withhold ejaculation so that women could have multiple orgasms.

  Members had sexual freedom of choice so long as a woman held the power of refusal and neither indulged in the “claiming spirit.” Noyes himself nearly fell into that snare. At one point he had a passionate affair with a resident, Mary Cragin, that developed into an “idolatrous attachment.” “Anybody,” he explained, who knew her “found her spirit exceedingly intoxicating—one that will make a man crazy.” Providentially, she died in a shipwreck in the Hudson River, and he became an “exemplary lover” thereafter.

  By his sixties, Noyes had sired at least nine of the fifty-eight children born in Oneida and was still active and virile. But there was dissension within and without. Fractious members lobbied for monogamy and free enterprise, and conservative clergymen in Syracuse banded against him. He fled to Canada, where he ended his days in the company of female loyalists, postulants to their prophet whose face “shone like an angel’s.”

  Knowledge/Intelligence

  The desire to know really is desire.

  —CATHLEEN SCHINE, Rameau’s Niece

  Over vodkatinis in a Manhattan bar tonight, the city’s “great Hungarian lover” is telling yet another woman, “When I make love to you, I will go very slow and you will have multiple orgasms.” What more could a lady want? For a grand passion, she might want something else he provides: brains. As one of his lovers tells me, “You know what his real secret is: he’s very smart. Smart is sexy.” Laszlo speaks five languages, and if you find him on his favorite bench beside the boathouse in Central Park, he’ll be deep into Lacan, Maimonides, or Primo Levi. Intellect even enhances his promised assignations: Tristan and Isolde on the Bose and pillow talk about Modigliani. “The ecstasy,” says this recent conquest, “is unbearable.”

  You don’t see the 1960s bumper stickers and tee shirts anymore that say, “Intelligence is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac.” Now it’s more about chiseled abs, bespoke shirts, tactics, and two-comma incomes. But the brain is the biggest sex organ, and a woman’s second (maybe first) most loved part of
the male anatomy. Studies show women favor intelligence over beauty or wealth, even for one-night stands.

  The fourth-century sex manual Kāma Sūtra alerts men that without knowledge nothing is possible, and assigns an ambitious curriculum for a lover: fourteen sciences, seven religious traditions, the Vedas, and six other tomes. To be loved by a woman, say each of the great amorists, one must acquire “distinction of mind.” It’s easy to see the parallels, writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “between sexual desire and the desire for wisdom.”

  Yes, but. Anyone who has slept through Econ 101 or dated a leaden Proust scholar knows that super-smart doesn’t always mean super-sexy. Women-charmers understand how to make intelligence seductive; they sparkle with mental energy, surprise, amuse, instruct, up the drama, and surf the whole realm of knowledge—high-, middle-, and lowbrow. And they really can look like Woody Allen on a bad day.

  Evolutionary psychologists have several explanations for the sex appeal of male IQ. Ultra-Darwinists believe ancestral women valued intelligence in men because it predicted economic and social success. Geoffrey Miller puts a sexier spin on this. Bigger brains evolved the same way penises did, he theorizes; they “reached inside women’s pleasure system.” Men with the most cerebral bells and whistles gave women a better time and edged out the dim bruisers.

  None of the mythological love gods was slow-witted. Ganesha, the Hindu Lord of Letters and Learning, acquired his elephant’s head because he so enthralled the goddess Pavarti that her husband, Shiva, had to decapitate and deform him. Dionysus brought civilization to the world in his wanderings, and Hermes the Seducer was the “Clever One” and culture hero. The Irish folk hero and sex god Cuchulain was a scholar of Druid lore with gifts of “understanding and calculation.”

  Recently intellectuals haven’t fared well in mainstream fiction. They’re portrayed as sex-driven, debauched scoundrels whose trips to the library are euphemisms for trysts with young lovelies. Scholar-satyrs who exploit the erotic hit of knowledge doubtless exist, but women prefer to see them otherwise in their fantasy literature. Intellectuals proliferate, and professors are one of the eight archetypes of romance novels.

  When they appear, as in Nora Roberts’s Vision in White, they are sober good guys, like Carter whose mojo with the heroine, Mac, is his mind. “He made her think,” she muses, “the man was charming.” In Norman Rush’s Mortals, two pedants in Botswana duel with their learning to gain the affections of the heroine. Ray, her husband, realizes what women want: not “buns or dick size,” but “intellect,” and he wins her back with his brains.

  A number of unlikely ladies’ men used their heads to enchant women. The diminutive eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire—a polymath of immense range—kept the tall, brilliant beauty Émilie du Châtelet interested for thirteen years. He challenged her to scientific competitions, staged plays and poetry readings, debated politics, and traded repartee with her over four-hour dinners.

  And then there’s mathematician Bertrand Russell. Gaunt and small, with a “Mad Hatter’s” features, bad breath, and a high, fluty voice, he disheveled women, accumulating four wives and many lovers. (One was my great aunt Barry Fox, who collared him in New York and gave him “several enjoyable evenings.”) In just one night’s fireside chat, he pitched bird of paradise Ottoline Morrell into a grand amour. “In spite of myself,” she wrote, “I was carried away, but fate sometimes throws a ball of fire into one’s life.”

  Aldous Huxley’s fabulous love life has to have been a case of mind over matter. Nicknamed the “Ogre” as a child, he was over six foot four with coke-bottle glasses and an enormous head atop a spindly frame. Yet women adored him. Of the distinguished Huxleys, Aldous, said his brother Julian, was the “one genius in the family.” The scope of his mind and achievements was astounding; he wrote well-known novels like Point Counterpoint, Brave New World, and Island, as well as poetry, short stories, travel books, screenplays, and twenty-three volumes of essays on subjects from science and politics to parapsychology. His Doors of Perception about his experiments with LSD made him the father of the hippie movement.

  When he arrived at Oxford nearly blind from an incurable eye infection and smarter than anyone, “he made a tremendous impression,” especially on his female peers. Highly sexed, unpuritanical, and fond of women, he was much sought after. One infatuated young playwright remembered how he “threw open a whole world” to her—French poetry and the arts—and how much she wanted to kiss him. His choices were gifted, unconventional women such as violinist Jelly d’Arányi and artist Dora Carrington. With Carrington, he spent nights on the roof talking about books and ideas and singing ragtime tunes.

  In 1919, he married Maria Nye, a cultivated Belgian beauty who devoted herself to his welfare and consented to the most unusual of open unions. Without a touch of rancor, she abetted his extramarital affairs, selecting lovers, arranging rendezvous, and sending books the morning afterward with appropriate risqué French inscriptions. He enjoyed sex and women, she reasoned, and needed escapades as a relief from his mental exertions.

  Included among his lovers were a Romanian princess, the political activist and writer Nancy Cunard, and one of Maria’s bisexual friends, Mary Hutchinson, who lived with them in a ménage à trois for almost a decade. Several had marital designs, but Aldous and Maria had a close—albeit unique—relationship that lasted thirty-five years. At her death Maria handpicked her successor, a violinist and psychoanalyst twenty years Huxley’s junior who gave up music and dedicated herself to him, nonexclusivity and all.

  Pictures of Huxley cannot account for the spell he cast on the female sex. He looked, Virginia Woolf observed, like a “gigantic grasshopper.” But five minutes in his company and the necromancy of his learning put stars in women’s eyes. Said one: when he talked “he was ribald and cynical and brilliant.” As his son’s marriage was breaking up, he told him his secret: “Intelligence,” he wrote, “endows love with effectiveness.”

  Social IQ

  Loving well requires a full social intelligence.

  —DANIEL GOLEMAN, Social Intelligence

  Social circles are full of men who talk shop, blow their own horns, and tune out women. Real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman isn’t one of them. He’s attentive, plugged in, and “one of the best dinner-party companions,” says Barbara Walters, she has “ever known.” He navigates social waters like a sonar-guided submarine, from beach barbecues, business deals, and high-level politics, to black-tie penthouse parties.

  None of this is lost on his romantic life. He’s a swami with women and has dated such A-listers as Betty Rollin, Nora Ephron, Diane von Furstenberg, and Marisa Berenson. He’s “fun to be around” and mind-reads the feminine heart. Gloria Steinem said he wrapped her in an emotional “sheepskin jacket” when she was at a low ebb. Former girlfriend Arianna Huffington cited his “gift of intimacy” and compared him to the god Hermes, “the master of love magic” who is also socially “wise” and knows how to “deal with strangers.”

  In seduction there are two ways to be smart: IQ and EQ. Cognitive brilliance, the light-and-laser show of learning, has potent charms, but so does emotional intelligence. Only recently recognized by academic researchers, social dexterity is now regarded as a crucial life skill, increasingly correlated with success in love and work. What it boils down to is savoir faire: a radar for other people’s feelings, mastery of synchrony, and the practical skill to get the answer yes. Social IQ may or may not make the course of love run smoother, as some advocates claim, but it can release the floodgates. Ladies’ men are master hands.

  Science writer Daniel Goleman says they have to be: the rational brain alone can’t manage romance, which is a subcortical activity and requires the complex coordination of three different brain systems. A great lover needs his social wits about him. None of which is new, Goleman admits; it’s just being ratified by social neuroscience.

  Two millennia ago, Ovid provided a crash course in social competence for lovers-in-trainin
g, prescribing courtesy, tact, and intuition. Every amorous guide since then advises men to shine up people skills. Geoffrey Miller thinks we owe civilized behavior today to women’s preference throughout history for interpersonal finesse—empathy, rapport, and good manners—over brute physical prowess.

  Arch-seducers, though, practice an elite form of erotic intelligence. Whether through talent or practice, they have an “eighth sense” (as they say of Warren Beatty) with women. These experts possess an almost paranormal sense of a woman’s hidden desires and the optimal way to handle the moment. Sexologist Havelock Ellis referred to this as a “fine divination,” and philosopher Ortega y Gasset, as “tacto,” an intuitive grasp of another’s psyche and needs.

  Sex gods had that magic touch. The Sumerian deity Dumuzi intuits the source of love goddess’s Inanna’s anger, and senses how to placate her and bring her around. He promises her heart’s desire: equality, no women’s work, and a husband who will be a father and mother to her. Dionysus soothes the jilted Ariadne with divine delicacy, approaching gently, praising her to the stars, and promising fidelity: “I am here for you a lover,” he says, “faithful.”

  Like Dionysus, romantic heroes lavish heroines with their social gifts. Empathy, attunement, the apt gesture: even the most callous rakes supply them in women’s love stories. Explaining why she’s hooked on a certain guy, the heroine of a popular romance says, “I think he’s just really, really, really good with people. Empathetic.” Czech lothario Tomas of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being has an extra gene for social aptitude, with a knack for “emotional telepathy.”

  Although social savvy, say psychologists, has fallen out of fashion, women-charmers are adroit practitioners. David Niven was a virtuoso. His bonhomie, warmth, and wizardry with people opened all the doors—and bedroom doors—in Hollywood. Inconstant as he was, women excused his defections in exchange for his tuned-in “concern and affection” and interpersonal brilliance.