Betsy Prioleau - Swoon : Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them

To Philip

The Inspiration and The Man

Contents

A man without loves service is no better than a wretched ear of corn.

P EIRE D A LVERNHE, troubadour song

Almost all women have dreamed of the great love.

S IMONE DE B EAUVOIR , The Second Sex

P embroke, a hamlet once known as Scuffletown (population 2,800), sits in the southeastern flatlands of North Carolina on Highway 711home to the University of North Carolina Braves, the Lumbee Indians, the Berea Baptist Church, Dollar Tree, Papa Bills Ribs, a nearby drag strip with wheelstanding contests, and one of todays hottest ladies men. Jack Harris is a psychology professor at the university in his forties, with a buzz cut, Tidewater slur, and a vocation you dont see much anymore: women-charming. As early as I can remember, he says over a beer, there have always been womenin the attic, on Trailways, on Amtrakwho come on to me. What is it? Let me think... well, I kind of intuit what they need. I love them, I want to please them.

There are names for a man like Jack: rou, rake, ladykiller, Casanova, Don Juan, seducer, mack, babe magnet, and heartfucker. In French hes called a tombeur ; in Japanese, ikemen ; in Russian, krasavchik ; in Chinese, color wolf; in Spanish, mujeriego ; in Portuguese, mulherengo ; in German, a Frauenjger . But hes a mystery man in any language, enveloped in a pall of myths, prejudices, and armchair theories. Who is this ladies man, this sexy devil?

Theres really no good name for him. A man who lights up women, adores them, and love-addles them for life defies all the familiar models: smooth players, hunks with big hoses, money lords, or any of the scientific/therapeutic versions of the alpha romancer. He baffles every ingrained image; hes the lover nobody knows.

Jack, for instance, fits no paradigm. Ive always found myself extremely average, he tells me. And its true. He has a long, El Greco face and dresses in boondocks casual: short-sleeved shirt, no-brand jeans, rigger boots, and a gold crucifix around his neck. Hes without rank, riches, power, resources, or the appeals of security and stability. (He left a tenured job in south Texas on a whim and admits hes pretty volatile.)

As for seduction techniques: I dont try to do it. I think its instinctive. Im just very comfortable around women. And, he drains his beer and crushes the can for emphasis, I cannot make love to someone unless I have emotional feelings for them; Im not the type to make a conquest and move on. I mean, the women who have broken my heart...

This is the Mr. Irresistible of such renown? The man women chase down, covet, and cant forget decades later? Nothing computes. By all rights, Jack shouldnt be in the running, much less reeling in women right and left and fending off coeds with mash notes in their trembling hands.

For centuries, ladies men like Jack have been locked in a stereotype, distorted and stigmatized beyond recognition. But feelings about them are deeply divided; theyre both denounced and admired, censored and secretly cherished. Theyre walking projections of the forbiddenan amalgam of envy, suppressed wishes, and stifled passions.

Theyve also been silenced. If we let them have their say, though, well see a different man altogethera complex, out-of-box charmer who smashes the seducer templates and redefines male allure. Despite the concept of an individual love map, a unique Jack for every Jill, a few men have garnered the majority of women throughout history. In a 2004 cross-cultural DNA study, Dr. Michael Hammer and his colleagues at the University of Arizona found that certain males passed on the bulk of genes to the next generation. Women, he concluded, seem to have similar tastes; some men are consistently chosen over otherstheyre sexier, more fascinating, more something . A recent critic proclaimed that theres no more to be said about [Don Juan]. But weve just begun.

What, for example, is that something ? Where do such men get that voltage, that touch with women? How do they manufacture the magicthe spells to enamor and keep enamored whomever they fancy, whenever, wherever? Who are these enigmatic characters? For starters, we need to scrape off the accumulated layers of cultural debris from the canvasthe inherited superstitions, the mildewed myths and caricatures, the scientific biases and iffy theoriesand see the real picture.

Ladykillers, be advised, come with a PG warning. Theyre not moral guardians, straight arrows, or docile house cats. They take us into X-rated territory and the dark corners of our psyche, and they arent always politically correct. But theyre a select fraternity who love women and enchant them. And they have some valuable wisdom; theyre not only insanely attractive, charismatic, and forever lovable, they know one of the most fire-powered secrets: what women really want and how to deliver it.

First, lets cut through the myths.

The Satanic Seducer

Forbear, foul ravisher! Libidinous swine!

B EN J ONSON , Volpone

The evil ladykiller is the most familiar face of the seducer. With his sinister leer and lethal charm, he stalks through endless novels, poems, plays, and films, bringing ruin to the female sex. He is the prototype, writes critic Juliet Mitchell, for the most unspeakable type of masculinity. A cold, calculating sexual profiteer whose goal is conquest and digits.

Hes John Malkovich with his malefic drawl, the wicked lord who despoils hapless victims in French hotels and disappears into the night. Hes the continental lover named Carlo your mother warned you about, a reptilian smoothie with dark designs and sadistic ploys. He comes in three colors: black, blacker, and blackest.

Historian Denis de Rougemont thinks there is something demonic about the ladies man, an idea that goes back millennia. In 2400 BC Sumer, the seducer took the form of Lilu, a night hellion who preyed on women in their beds and left them pregnant. Hes the ancestor of the incubus, a nocturnal spirit of Western folklore, fond of sleeping beauties and neglected wives. Dante put the seducer in the eighth circle of hell, and John Milton portrayed him as Satan incarnate in Paradise Lost , snaking his way into Eden, ravishing Eve, and damning her to eternity.

The malevolent Don Juan has remained a fixture in the cultural imagination. From Lothario of the eighteenth-century play The Fair Penitent , who defiles the pure Calista, to the Romantic fatal man, to Jacqueline Susanns Love Machine and televisions Don Draper of Mad Men , this scourge of the female sex is everywhere. In Francesca Stanfills modern novel Shadows and Light , a sophisticated socialite-artist is undone by a rous perfidious machinations. Rap star 50 Cent is a recent spawn-of-Satan impersonator: Im into having sex, I aint into making love /, he sings,... the hoes they wanna fuck / But homie wont be held down.

These reprobates pursue their calling for a host of warped purposes: power, domination, thwarted military ambition, lechery, and most of all, sheer misogyny. They loathe their female prey. Lovelace, the dissolute cavalier of Samuel Richardsons Clarissa , takes his hatred of women to the logical extreme and savagely rapes the heroine. Incapable of love, the licentious fiends view their kills as ciphers, nonpersons, and interchangeable objects in an endless carousel of partners.

Women dont stand a chance against the satanic rake. Sucked in by his stealth arts of deceit and trickery, they come to tragic ends. Their psyches shred and they spiral into illness, madness, and catatonia. Usually they go to an untimely grave or wind up, like Anna Karenina, in the path of an advancing train.