Authors: Betsy Prioleau
Fun and novelty in a technoculture of overstimulation will be another priority. Where the media saturates us with nonstop amusement, and ubiquity has dulled appetites and spirits, women are going to want, as Karen the financier says, “entertainment value.” Seventy-five percent of women in the 2012 “romance” survey complained of boredom with dates or partners. Cultural historian Paul Hollander writes that in his study of thousands of twenty-first-century personals, “the most unexpected” discovery was the desire for fun, ranking first in importance from Alabama to California. We’re ravenous for unplugged, engaged enjoyment. Anne, the psychoanalyst at my gathering, tied this to the secret of lasting excitement: “Habit kills,” she says. “Marvelous lovers keep things interesting, and desire grows and intensifies in that way.”
With ladykillers, “macho,” to quote Zsa Zsa Gabor, has never proved “mucho.” And tomorrow’s Casanovas will have moved beyond machismo and strengthened androgynous appeals. The authors of
The Future of Men
anticipate a swing toward “M-ness,” masculinity that combines the best of traditional manliness, such as courage and honor, with positive female traits—expressivity, nurturance, and communication.
Such “M” heroes have long been a fantasy in romance novels—SEALS with the sensitivity of psychics—and have lately become women’s preferred picks in dating and mating. Zoe reserved her highest praise for a friend whose mother “raised him like a girl” without making him one. “It just turned into an appreciation of women and the finer things,” she says. Adds Karen, “The feminine side of Mac was so much of his charm; he could relate to me; it was an equalizer.”
If gender equality is a given in modern relationships, the ladies’ man will have to be a “worthy sparring partner,” as Stepp’s subjects requested—a man whose character, IQ, and conversation match or outmatch a woman’s. Female medical students in another study sought men at least at their level who, said one, know “art, history, philosophy, and literature.” “If you’re successful,” Karen chips in, “you screen men differently in order to keep the parity thing going.”
Like romance heroines, today’s smart, ambitious women want peers for lovers. In personals and polls, intelligence is one of the most desired traits, and everywhere women clamor for conversation. With good talk on the wane in a tech-addled age, the colloquial arts will become increasingly seductive. Roxie, the journalist of my discussion group, said she liked conversation better than sex.
As women’s horizons and growth opportunities expand, they’ll prize multifaceted, self-potentiators, the H. G. Wells of the world, and be less thrilled with seducers like Porfirio Rubirosa, whose growth stopped at the polo ground. On dating sites, observes Hollander, male “Renaissance characters abound”; men boast of lifelong learning and a Leonardian breath of interests, from sculpture, philosophy, and Matisse to reggae.
They’re targeting a current feminine wish. The medical-school women wanted a man who would “grow at the same rate,” and the female ideal in
The Future of Men
was a “growing type of man” who was “well-rounded.” Anne the analyst defines ladies’ men as “people who are crazy for growth, and want to stay interesting, to shift their lives and ours.”
A great seducer’s most powerful spell now, though, may be the simplest: attention. Roxie calls “concentration” and “focus” the essence of the ladykiller. Amid the population explosion and cyberverse, we compete with billions to be noticed, and after a millisecond, we vanish without a trace. Instead of watching the one we’re with, we’re often watching texts, laptops, game consoles, and flat screens, sometimes all at once, with timers pinging and pots boiling. Everyone is multitasked to distraction. A major female grievance is men’s fixation on smartphones and virtual images.
“Falling in love,” however, is foremost a “phenomenon of attention.” Every romance hero puts the heroine in his cross-hairs and singles out her “specialness” for adoration. Attention is the food of love, and researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss found that “attention-deficit” propels many women into random sex. To be looked at, perceived in her uniqueness, can hit a woman like a voltaic charge.
“The snap of the ladies’ man,” writes poet Molly Peacock in an email, “is the feeling of really being seen. It’s the man’s ability to zero in, erase your sense of invisibility, as if you were a camouflaged animal in a forest being found.” “Such a man,” she continues, “can be downright ugly, but if he’s lovely, trim, and expresses something vulnerable about himself, it’s simply a knockout recipe for falling in love. You’re hooked, you’re sunk, you have to struggle for your last bit of social sanity before you plunge.”
A Neo-Ladies’ Man: The Reality
Women are poised to plunge. “In our post-feminist age,” asks British journalist Glenda Cooper, “what’s so wrong about the seducer; the very word conjures up high-octane sensuality and pleasure.” The “eternal seducer” is “God’s gift to women,” concurs Marina Warner, “only giving them what they want.” Actress Sienna Miller quips, “I’ve met a few Casanovas that I like and some that I haven’t, and I hope to meet a few more.”
One of the Casanovas Miller refers to is Jude Law, her philandering ex-fiancé. Since ladies’ men, in reality, often can’t resist exercising their talents abroad, how’s a liberated woman to cope? For starters, if she wants her man to herself, as the majority do, she has enough seductive chops nowadays to secure him, like Minette Helvétius and Pauline Viardot before her.
On the other hand, libertine lovers may license a woman’s own roving libido, and give her space to sample the goods. Or their magical presence may be worth it. “If Liszt,” said one admirer, “would only love me for a single hour that would be joy enough for life.” Novelist Jane Smiley explains, “Some men are so delightful, so engaged that time with them is valuable no matter what.”
At this point, love-life coaches and counselors cry foul: therapy exists to serve social harmony, and these fantastic ladies’ men—actual and imagined—only exacerbate the erotic crisis, setting women up for disappointment, further alienating men, and destroying homes. Recent research, however, shows that high amorous aspirations lead to higher-quality relationships. It pays to wish.
Most men, philosopher Ortega y Gasset acknowledged sadly, “never succeed in being loved by anyone,” while a select group are universally adored. What is the secret? he asked. Honoré de Balzac compared the average man to “an orang-outang trying to play the violin,” and thought the answer lay in the example of erotic geniuses. As philosophy has its Descartes and war its Napoleons, he wrote, “love has its great men although they be unrecognized.”
These geniuses may be unrecognized, but I discovered that they’re far from extinct. The men I interviewed landed on my doorstep without any deliberate search, and would have doubled in number if I’d had time to follow up leads. They’re undoubtedly a shadow society, but they’re more plentiful than believed, even in this romantic slump, and available for inspiration.
Taking Balzac’s advice, I go to a Paganini of amour for a realistic read on how keen men will be for his inspiration. Bryce Green, the Scottish couturier I had visited in SoHo, greets me with a peck on each cheek, his sandy, frizzled mane spilling over a mandarin tuxedo collar.
“You’ve come to the right place,” he says, loping across the studio in faded jeans and green cowboy boots. “The
men
I hear about!”
“Not red-hot lovers, I’m guessing. Unlike you . . .”
“Completely,” he begins. “I don’t look like their husbands or boyfriends or behave like them. I don’t know how to play it cool. I have Scottish blood in my veins—fire. But I know how to play it charming.”
“Lord, women must be all over you.”
“Well, yes,” he demurs, tapping a tracing wheel on his thigh. “But I’m much happier taking the initiative, romancing a woman and making her feel loved and appreciated. That’s what women like, I think—somebody who puts it out there and gives them unconditional love. Humor is huge too. And stimulation.”
“Back to these other men,” I pursue. “Don’t they want to pick up on this stuff?”
“Well,” he considers, “men are in a crisis. There’s a lot of insecurity, fear, and a serious lack of charm. I hate generalities, but British and European men are more in touch with their feminine side. And being respectful, kind, and romantic doesn’t fit in with the ‘jock’ idea of masculinity.”
“You’d say then, that men aren’t looking to you for enlightenment?”
“Absolutely not!” he exclaims as we part on Broome Street.
That same day, Rick, the fire captain whom Vivien Leigh once compared to Rhett Butler, calls up and vehemently disagrees. “Sure, there are men that aren’t mentally or physically fit for seduction,” he says, “phonies, cowards, porn-addicts, body-count guys, drunks, and moguls who buy women—but the rest? Hey, everyone wants to learn to love and be loved.”
Selling Men on the Ladies’ Man
Could Rick be right—that beneath the armor of swagger and cool—men are just as anxious as women for connection and a grand passion? Although men’s magazines would rather run household tips than love-and-relationship stories, new research has shown that men are closet romantics. They fall in love at first sight more often and fare worse emotionally after breakups than women do. Men prefer romantic over sexual images and yearn equally for children and marriage. Eighty-four percent of men under thirty-five believe they will stay married to the same person forever. Love, wrote Garrison Keillor, “is the mainspring of our lives.”
With traditional definitions of masculinity in tatters, the ladies’ man might be a fresh model of male identity. The Dionysian man hasn’t had a starring role in the Western masculine pantheon, but his pedigree goes to the heart of manhood. Dionysus personified male sexual energy and traced his ancestry to the phallic gods of remote antiquity. If, claim cultural scholars, “we need a new myth of love” for our century, we also need a new guiding myth of the lover that’s vital, holistic, and virile. “Sexual behavior,” romantic success with women, writes psychiatrist Willard Gaylin, “is the ultimate expression” of manhood.
Enamoring and keeping a woman enamored isn’t for boys or sissies. The arts of love demand finesse, brains, ego strength, imagination, and mettle. Romantic love is a “hazardous business,” replete with peril and risk. Poet Robert Bly defines the “lover” as a manly paragon who navigates the dangerous terrain of desire with “strong warrior energy.” To therapists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, the lover constitutes one of the four major archetypes of masculinity, an image of the life force and joyous sensuality that men ignore at their peril. “Archetypes,” these therapists warn, “cannot be banished or washed away; men must integrate them.”
The Making of a Ladies’ Man
The integration of the “lover,” Bly explains, has been a male initiation rite throughout history. During the Renaissance, he points out, a young man was trained in well-bred lovemaking, developing his inner seducer “from seed to flower.” The concept today is virtually unknown. Men get their erotic education from porn, locker rooms, cursory sex-ed classes, the media, and couples’ therapy bromides, none of which address lovecraft.
Perhaps desirability is unteachable, but educators in the past believed a man could improve his chances through cultivation. Aspasia, the hetaerae of third-century BC Greece and erotic philosopher, ran a school for instructing men in the amorous arts. Her teaching, known as “The Aspasian Path,” emphasized continuous self-culture, along with “charming language,” “honest praise,” and an “element of enchantment.” Later in seventeenth-century Paris, the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos opened an academy to turn out love-savvy cavaliers. “It takes a hundred times more skill to make love,” she catechized, “than to command an army.”
Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian
Brave New World
, also wrote a utopian counterpart,
Island
, where men on the mythical Pala learn to become supernatural lovers. Schooled in “Special Techniques,” which enhance female pleasure, they are masters of “the art of loving” and have “the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in Southeast Asia.” Men are freed from the narrow confines of masculinity and develop into full unique human beings who are “two hundred percent male” and “almost fifty percent sensitive-feminine.” Couples make love like Shiva with his goddess in ecstatic unions with the cosmos.
Huxley dreamed large; he was a great lover in his day. Nevertheless, educators unanimously plead for better instruction in romantic love; one of the newest disciplines is “mating intelligence.” If men would spend just “one-tenth” of the time on love they give to work, decreed Dutch sexologist Dr. Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde in the twentieth century, we could re-enchant relationships. How, though, to proceed? The majority of men, says sex researcher Timothy Perper, are at entry level. In a series of tests, he found that nearly all his male subjects were “oblivious” about the “art of seduction”—not to mention the crucial art of ongoing seduction, necessary for durable unions. At the end of the movie
Blue Valentine
, a brutal chronicle of marital breakup, the bereft husband cries, “Tell me what you want! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!”
The Making of a Neo–Ladies’ Man
Suppose such a thing were possible: the training of ladies’ men? What would the process look like? First, we would need to cull candidates, selecting men who love women and aren’t afraid of change. Next we would have to remove roadblocks; men approach the ladies’ man burdened with issues—misinformation, biases, and contradictory emotions. While they high-five a Casanova, they also resent his lion’s share of the erotic spoils. As the “libertine” in a Stephen Jeffrey play says, “The gentlemen will be envious.”
Besides envy, there are prejudices to dispel. Since great seducers menace the social order, men are taught early on that they’re deviants and enemies of the state. Favorites of women are also effeminate in some circles, a stigma that goes back to ancient Greece, where real men extricated themselves “from the domain of the feminine.” They’re “foppish dreamers,” writes sociologist Anthony Giddens, “who have succumbed to female power.” A neo–ladies’ man will have to get beyond all this—the jealousy and indoctrination—and prepare for cultural headwinds. Philosophy professor Irving Singer drives it home: Casanovas “have generally been scorned by men.”