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  Character in a New Key

  Character is power.

  —BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

  In none of the standard character instruction is there a word on how to be lovable and sexually fascinating. (Franklin kept his charm secrets under tight wraps, concealed beneath a Poor Richard facade.) But the ladykillers’ qualities deserve equal time. Great lovers are undeniably shot through with flaws—infidelity, vanity, intemperance, irresponsibility, and more. Their personalities, though, are custom-crafted to gain and sustain female desire. It’s just a question of a perspective shift and a broader definition of character.

  Casanova, ever ahead of the curve, was an ardent advocate of cultivating desirability. His “character,” he asserts in his memoirs, was the product of his own efforts “to make himself loved by [women]”—and was nothing to be ashamed of. He freely admits his shortcomings, then spends the next twelve volumes documenting the qualities he acquired to be adored: intelligence, bravery, “honorable” behavior, spirituality (he always “worship[ed] God”), hedonistic artistry, social wizardry, and optimal selfhood. With his acute insight into women’s “fears, hopes, and desires,” he ingratiated himself with every class, from servant girls to Catherine the Great, who became “sweet and affable” in his presence and granted him four interviews.

  “If you want her to love you,” Ovid advised, “be a loveable man.” That, insists Brian the banker, can be learned. He has groomed his personality to the height of charm through deliberate self-cultivation. “And it wasn’t because I was a knight or anything like that,” he says. “It was just fun.” Renaissance man and social maven that he is, he admits he doesn’t have it all. He’s not as bold as he would like to be or as spiritual or as advanced in the arts of pleasure. But, he adds, “the quiver doesn’t have to be fully stocked. If you have eight out of ten characteristics, you’re already about seven steps ahead.” He cuts me a sly smile: “It’s a wide open field.”

  Lassoing Love

  You must not imagine it is such a simple matter to catch that noble animal, a lover.

  —SOCRATES

  As a rule, a ladies’ man can’t just radiate charisma and character and expect women to flock. Only half of erotic conquest is who you are; the other half is what you do. “The man,” decrees Havelock Ellis, “must necessarily take the initiative.” In Part Two, we’ll watch the great seducers in action, practicing a lovecraft that doesn’t come from how-to or gamer playbooks. They handle passion as an art, “a creation of the human imagination,” and draw on principles from a long, sophisticated erotic tradition.

  First, there’s the “catch”—landing the loved one. Inspiring desire entails more than checklist skills: pat lines, the right look and approach. Passionate love is a “violence of the soul,” hyperbole, and theater. Amorous artists supply that excitement and snag women with a nuanced array of erotic lures: sensuous charms, grand overtures, praise, intimacy, and the strongest spell of all, conversation.

  Conversation is the endless turn-on. The real test in love is the ability to retain passion. Left to its own devices, desire devolves through familiarity and habit into blah togetherness. Master lovers don’t let that happen. They keep the sparks flying and maintain the ecstasy, using techniques of an uncommon, creative variety. After deconstructing the process, we’ll place the ladykiller in the here and now. Does he have a future? Can this be taught, and does anyone care? We’ll canvas critics, talk to some twenty-first-century Casanovas, and “hot choosers,” and ask if French philosopher Jean Baudrillard is right: “Seduction is destiny.”

  PART TWO

  —

  The Seducer’s Way

  CHAPTER 3

  Lassoing Love:

  THE SENSES

  –

  Love is the poetry of the senses.

  —HONORÉ DE BALZAC, The Physiology of Marriage

  In desire the senses claim us first. A touch, a scent, a gaze, a hoarse vibrato can make our hearts do handsprings. Later, cerebral charms take over and summon the serious passions. Luke, a Baltimore computer jock referred to me by four ex-girlfriends, is a master of both mental and physical spells, but he leads with sensuous appeals—and in a unique, often counterintuitive, fashion.

  His looks aren’t in his favor. A thirty-one-year-old British transplant, Luke is a too tall six foot seven, with chipmunk cheeks, a receding hairline, and rectangular geek glasses. Yet he’s an erotic mage with a flair for the pleasures of the flesh. His appearance is soon beside the point, or rather it is the point. “When I first meet someone for coffee,” he explains, “I arrive a little scruffed up in my biker shorts so they see me at my worst; then everything else is kaboom—a bonus.”

  His bonuses are good. On a second date, he turns up in a Savile Row jacket and jeans and delivers what he calls “the big throwdown,” a sensual blitz. Rather than a routine restaurant dinner, he mounts road trips—say, to the Maryland shore for boiled crabs eaten under a tent.

  Later, he takes dates to his place, the unlikeliest of seduction lairs. Luke’s home is a fixer-upper in a derelict Baltimore neighborhood that he stripped to the studs and emptied of everything except a yoga mat, a file cabinet, and color swatches on the mantel. “It’s a fantastic lure, believe it or not,” he says. “I ask their opinion and ideas, and after that it’s . . .”

  At this point, his dates get lucky. Sincerely fond of women—their minds and bodies—Luke is a passionate, generous, and dextrous lover. His motto is “Make sure she has double before you have a single,” and he makes a production of it: foreplay in the bathtub, laughter, “touching every part of a woman,” and handholding before and after. At almost any time of day or night, there’s a car at Luke’s curb with yet another woman bearing armloads of “food parcels” and hoping to find him alone. “They’re intelligent women,” he concludes, “and the best part is seeing their smiling faces as they drive away waving.”

  Luke would be the last person to claim, like some scientific materialists, that love can be reduced to “the physical part”—a neurochemical perfect storm. “You have to have some depth,” he cautions, “or that bubble bursts very quickly.” The big guns of seduction are 90 percent psychological. Nevertheless, physical allures are powerful enticers, particularly for women, whose senses are generally more attuned and acute than men’s.

  Ladies’ men are artists at this. Like Luke, they avoid standard-issue male ploys and add imagination, originality, and style to their sensual seductions. They may not be as radical as Luke with their lovecraft, but they can alchemize sensory charms into transcendent desire, an out-of-body rapture.

  Appearance

  Appearances belong to seduction.

  —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Seduction

  He’s a feast for female eyes. Although slight by Darwinian standards and without a “manly” jawline, movie superstar Johnny Depp is the idol of women. They voted him the best-looking man in America in 2010 and the celebrity they would most like to sleep with the year before. Twice selected as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” he doesn’t come packaged as usual—in tees and board shorts with beefcake bulges.

  Instead, Depp ornaments himself for maximum erotic impact. Playing to the nostalgia for male plumage, he embellishes his body with tattoos and invents traffic-stopping ensembles: fedoras, blue glasses, bracelets, rings, and layered shirts festooned with beads, chains, and scarves. Raves a fan, “I luve [sic] the way he dresses.” His own stylist, he designs the looks in his movies, such as the bespangled pirate Jack Sparrow in his flowing sashes, rakish tricorne, and bucket boots. His outfits, say critics, are “mysterious—always—and magical.” One costar, Missi Pyle, said that at the first sight of him on set, “a party [went] off inside” of her; and another, Leelee Sobieski, said, “He really is as sexy as he’s cracked up to be.”

  The Body Beautiful

  He was a brown eyed handsome man.

  —CHUCK BERRY

  Ladies’ men don’t have to be pretty; some are eyesores, like the
“disproportioned” one-eyed Russian general Potemkin or the unsightly Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauty, though, factors in. Contrary to myth, women may be just as turned on by visual stimuli as men. Their vision is keener than men’s, and their eyes and cervixes dilate when they see an attractive man. Hooked up to a lie detector, they pick the best-looking guys regardless of other factors.

  Handsome has curb appeal: average height, pleasing proportions (a waist-to-shoulder ratio of .60), and symmetrical features in which the right and left sides match. A hero, instructs a Harlequin book editor, should be “incredibly good looking,” with a sleek build and impressive “thunderstick.” As Nancy Friday discovered, “Women do look,” covertly fly-watching and sizing up faces and physiques.

  Fashion and Grooming

  The greatest provocations of lust are from our apparel.

  —ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  Clothes, however, can remake the man. Psychologists have long argued that you can transform a toad into a prince with a simple makeover. If you take a non-looker, groom and clothe him in pinstripes and a Rolex, most female subjects will choose him over a male model in a fast-food uniform. This suggests that nothing does it for women like dark, staid success suits, which signal solidity, power, and status.

  But it isn’t necessarily so. The repressed male peacock has a perverse way of erupting into the gray-flannel status quo and staking its ancient claim on the female libido. Ladies’ men are fashion plates; they glam up to steam the sexual imagination. Aware of women’s more astute sense of smell and scent’s erotic importance to them (ranked number one in choosing a mate), ladykillers pay attention to fragrance. And they dress for sensuosity and show.

  Masculine embellishment is too entrenched in human history to be easily suppressed. Our Stone Age ancestors, anthropologists tell us, “were adorned rather than clothed.” One 25,000 BC alpha man was found in a robe garnished with almost three thousand beads, a fox-tooth-encrusted cap, and twenty-five ivory bracelets. Sumerian kings bedizened themselves for sex. At fertility festivals, they arrived in tufted sheepskin skirts and perfumed headdresses studded with jewels. In most cultures throughout time, “men ornament themselves more than women” to attract mates.

  The first deities of sexuality were resplendent male specimens. The Indian Shiva wore a tiger-skin loincloth, a braided conical coiffeur, and a snake looped around his blue-tinted neck. In godlike fashion, each adornment stood for one of his cosmic attributes. Dionysus also adopted symbolic dress, adding another aspect of eros—sexual ambiguity. Swathed in phallic totems, he flaunted feminine dresses and capes and styled his long hair like a woman’s.

  Fantasy ladies’ men dress to kill. Before Odysseus courts Princess Nausicaa and later, his wife, the goddess Athena whisks him off to the wardrobe room. She bathes him with aromatic oils, clothes him in shapely tunics, and coifs his hair so that his curls tumble to his shoulders “like a hyacinth in bloom.” Emma Bovary may never have gone astray if she hadn’t seen Rodolphe from her window caparisoned in a green velvet coat and yellow gloves. When woman-slayer Bobby Tom Denton enters the scene in the romance novel Heaven, Texas, he’s turned out to a fare-thee-well: showered, shaved, and poured into butt-hugging jeans, a silk shirt, and purple cowboy boots.

  Great lovers hone and work their fashion sense. Casanova, an amateur costume designer, turned heads wherever he went. Decked in suits of taffeta and lace-trimmed velvet and scented with “secret perfumes which controlled love,” he wore gold watches, medallions, and rings on every finger.

  Regency romancer Lord Byron was as much a poet of attire as of verse who carefully crafted his ensembles for evocative effects and multiple messages. His auburn curls in artful disarray, he garbed himself in white pantaloons (instead of black breeches) and embroidered shirts garnished with chains and “swashbuckling accessories.” He exuded sartorial sex: a mysterious foreignness, combined with mixed gender-and-class signals. Women wilted over the ambiguous “wild originality” of his look.

  Military men have a long tradition of self-adornment, which many ladies’ men parlayed into seduction, from the feathered and pearl-encrusted Sir Walter Raleigh to the theatrically kitted-out Gabriele D’Annunzio in the First World War. One of the great commanders of the ancient world, Julius Caesar, was both a flagrant dandy and a celebrated ladykiller.

  A plain-featured man with a comb-over and too full face, Caesar compensated with a wardrobe of standout glamour and singularity. Rather than the customary short-sleeved senator’s tunic, he swanned around in a long frock, belted loosely at the waist, with fringed sleeves that reached his wrists. He was oiled, scented, and fastidiously close shaven—even down to his nethers. Everything about him advertised exceptionality and erotic mystique, including a tang of androgyny.

  Men aped his look, and women orbited around him. His love affairs were prolific and notorious, and usually with smart, aristocratic married women. During the Gallic Wars, soldiers sang of him as they marched: “Romans, lock your wives away!” Liaisons continued throughout his three marriages and culminated in his most famous one with Cleopatra.

  During her four years with him (three in Rome), the Egyptian queen exercised a strong influence on Caesar, which perhaps extended to her talent for costume drama. While she was his mistress, he made his fateful entrance at the Lupercalia fertility festival. He appeared like Cleopatra in one of her operatic goddess moments, accoutered in a golden wreath, the purple robes of a conquering general, and the high red boots of Italy’s legendary kings through whom he traced his descent from Venus. His rivals saw the threat of despotism in this regalia and murdered him the same year, in 44 BC.

  Male appearance may have entered a new epoch. More and more men “rock cool threads,” indulging in cosmetic surgery, fragrance, and guyliner, and following the lead of metrosexuals like soccer star David Beckham with his sarongs and pink toenails. New York Times clothing maven Bill Cunningham speculates that we may see a “return of the peacock” in the future, men who become “the sex and fashion objects of women.”

  Setting

  Location, location, location

  —REAL ESTATE SLOGAN

  Weeks before her wedding to a prominent lawyer, Allie Nelson, the heroine of Nicholas Sparks’ Notebook, sees a photograph of an old boyfriend’s house in the paper and can’t help herself. She drives off to the North Carolina boondocks, where the power of place overcomes her. The low-country landscape brings back a “flood of memories,” and once she steps on Noah’s front porch, the setting works its magic and delivers her back to his arms. He serves her seasoned crabs in his cozy kitchen, and takes her the next day to a secret lagoon, where they’re drenched by a thunderstorm. They dry off before a fire and resist until they can resist no longer. She unbuttons his shirt and it’s all over, her marriage to the lawyer and her respectable life in Raleigh.

  Ladies’ men are poets of what Roland Barthes calls “amorous space.” They shun clichés—romantic suites with rose-petal turndowns—and go for impact, a sensual skylift. “Passion,” writes critic Jeff Turrentine, “is catalyzed by the erotic pull of place,” such venues as a curio-filled “office” atop London with a bed concealed in the wall, or an abandoned bench in a garden maze, or an “otherworldly” castle of high-tech surprises. Passionate love sweeps us out of the mundane into a magical, exalted elsewhere, and location—artfully arranged—can help spirit us there.

  Both genders are erotically susceptible to space, but women are especially sensitive to location. Biologist Richard Dawkins attributes this to a “domestic bliss” strategy in which our female ancestors sought secure nests and solid resources from mates. Women, though, may have been somewhat pickier. Geoffrey Miller thinks they also looked for beauty, prompting men to adorn the premises, “be they caves, huts, or palaces.” The embellishment of place in seduction is called “priming,” and it can be eerily effective. Psychiatrist Cynthia Watson tells of a patient who followed an unattractive man back to his apartment, where the elegant “highl
y charged environment” made her see him anew; by the end of the evening, she was smitten.

  The erotic diablerie of setting may also well from the collective unconscious. We may retain memories of space as sacred and yearn for the time when cave-chapels served as shrines suffused with erotic images and the mysterium tremendum of divine lust. In 4000 BC Sumer, the king and priestess performed their ritual copulation in the holy of holies of the ziggurat, and the acolytes of Dionysus coupled each year in a secret sanctum, the “Bull House.” The mythological Adonis and Psyche wed in an alpine love temple filled with rare treasures and conceived with the “cunning of a god.”

  Since tales were told, women have been transported by aphrodisiacal milieus. In Paradise Lost, Eve beds Adam in a “blissful bow’r” walled around with fragrant roses, jasmine, and irises. And Emma Bovary yields to Leon in a voluptuous hotel room softly lit “for the intimacies of passion.” Romance heroines have amorous sensors for settings and take in details like estate appraisers. When Ann Verlaine first sees Christy Morrell’s bedroom in Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and To Cherish, she catalogues the layout—the handsome fittings, flock wallpaper, and crochet-draped tester bed—and wonders, “Why was it, again, that she wasn’t marrying him?”

  Gabriele D’Annunzio was a “born interior decorator” who mined poetry, myth, and drama for his settings and believed “love was nothing without the scenery.” When asked why he never went to “their place,” he replied, “[And] sacrifice my privileged position of sorcerer, surrounded by my philters and incantations?”

  His apartments were calculated to intoxicate and levitate the senses. Tuberoses scented the rooms, shades muted the light, and the décor was late Djinn Palace: velvet cushions, arcane bibelots, and a red-brocaded boudoir furnished with silk kimonos and a wrought-iron bedstead. Later he dialed up the drama to elicit an “excitation transfer,” the erotic frisson of fear. At Lake Garda he built a villa designed to unnerve the boldest lady friends: warrens of claustral parlors, pillows stuffed with lovers’ hair, lugubrious war souvenirs, and a “Leper’s Room” lit by an oil lamp.