Authors: Betsy Prioleau
B007Q6XJAO EBOK (11 page)
Heroines still fall hard for these full-selved heroes. Grace, a poor girl in the Alice Munro story “Passion,” is happily engaged to the wealthy, “sterling” Maury until she meets his complex “deep unfathomable” brother and flees with him into the night. The polymathic doctor Davis Morel has the same effect on the wife of CIA agent Ray Finch in Norman Rush’s
Mortals
. Abundant male personas pervade women’s fantasy fiction, from the mega-versatile Christian Grey of
Fifty Shades of Grey
to history professor Lincoln Blaise in
The Cinderella Deal
. “There were so many layers to Linc,” moons the heroine as she realizes he’s the one.
Although ladies’ men can be loved without this amplitude of being, a number have large, geodesic identities. The sixteenth-century Florentine Filippo Strozzi was a politician and banker, then papal diplomat, and finally, leader of the 1537 rebellion against the Medici stronghold in Rome. Known as the “siren,” he also wrote love sonnets, designed a pleasure palace, and sang “The Passion” at a professional level each Holy Week. After his romance with Camilla Pisana ended, the renowned beauty mourned him until she died.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist and popularizer of such concepts as archetype and the collective unconscious, thought good relationships depended on self-development and a complexity of mind “comparable to a gem with many facets as opposed to the simple cube.” He should know. A man of phenomenal appeal to women, he explored the depths of the psyche, wrote about it (with illustrations), and studied Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, sociology, astrology, literature, and the arts well into old age.
Had Jung searched, he would have found an alter ego in America. Benjamin Franklin was another champion self-actualizer who wore so many hats he has become a national legend and inspiration to millions. One of those hats—recently dusted off by scholars—is that of ladies’ man. He’s an illustration, par excellence, of the sex appeal of an optimized, multifaceted personality. A successful newspaper printer, civic leader, and author, he retired from business at forty-two to devote himself to his studies. He experimented with electricity; invented a stove, bifocals, and the lightning rod (the list goes on); and launched a political and diplomatic career that lasted forty years. Vibrant and brilliant, he “continually reinvented himself.”
But a ladies’ man—with his bald pate, spectacles, and paunch? Yet Franklin was lusty and charming and “surrounded himself with adoring women.” As a young man in Boston and England, he did his share of wenching and fathered an illegitimate son, William, whom his wife Deborah agreed to raise. During their forty-four years of marriage, they spent only eighteen together. The rest of the time, whether in America or England, he entertained young women like Catherine Ray and Polly Stevenson with his élan and conversation, and perhaps slept with Polly’s mother in London for fifteen years.
At seventy and widowed, Franklin was still attractive to women. When he arrived in Paris in 1776 to secure support for the new nation, he created an amorous furor. Women wore cameos with his likeness, fêted him nightly, and stopped him on the street to have their necks kissed. It’s your “gaiety” and “gallantry,” said one admirer, that “cause all the women to love you.” Improbably enough, he became the center of a sex scandal that almost cost him his job. The lady in question was no ingénue but a sparky
salonnière
of sixty-one.
Minette Helvétius, widow of the acclaimed philosopher, held court in a home on the Bois de Boulogne that attracted the intellectual and political elect of the day. Serious discussions took place in an atmosphere of relaxed festivity where Franklin played his harmonica, composed drinking songs, and debated atheism. After seven weeks, he was so in love that he told friends he intended to “capture her and keep her with him for life.” She refused his marriage proposals, but they remained lovers, exchanging notes, visiting regularly, and kissing in public.
The affair grew shocking. Abigail Adams met Helvétius and was horrified; she was a “very bad” hussy, pawing Franklin in public and “showing more than her foot” on the sofa. Future president John Adams was as “disgusted” as his wife and stormed back to America, where he tried (unsuccessfully) to ruin Franklin politically.
Like all national icons, Franklin was cleaned up for posterity and mythologized as an asexual folk hero and statesman. But Franklin was more: he was a darling of women and a total man whose myriad interests, talents, and charms worked both to build a nation and to captivate female hearts.
Character in a New Key
Character is power.
—B
OOKER
T. W
ASHINGTON
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.
—S
OCRATES
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.”
–
Love is the poetry of the senses.
—H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC
,
The Physiology of Marriage
I
n 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.
—J
EAN
B
AUDRILLARD
,
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.
—C
HUCK
B
ERRY
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.
—R
OBERT
B
URTON
,
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