Jack Nicholson’s vulnerability and Gary Cooper’s (next slide) feminine sweetness were charms. (ELIOT PRESS/BAUER-GRIFFIN.COM)
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Swoon
Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them
Why Women Love Them
by Betsy Prioleau
W.W. Norton & Company
Legendary ladies’ man Casanova once met a woman named Leonilda who enraptured him. After learning that the object of his passion lived in a sexless relationship with a duke, he told the woman, “This is nonsense, for you are a woman to inspire desire.” They agreed to marry, needing only the permission of her mother — which is where the star-crossed lovers hit a snag.
“The mother took one look at Casanova and fainted,” writes cultural historian Betsy Prioleau. “She was his old mistress, and Leonilda, his daughter.”
Such are the problems of the classic ladies’ man, says Betsy Prioleau, whose previous book, “Seductress,” examined the female side of the equation.
“Swoon” takes a kitchen-sink approach to the subject of men who ravish the world. In exhaustive fashion (there are 65 pages of footnotes), Prioleau outlines the many traits that make classic ladies’ men irresistible; provides copious examples from throughout history, literature and modern culture; and rails against the romance-repelling pick-up scene of recent years as defined by Neil Strauss’ 2005 best-seller, “The Game.”
The perception that some men have an almost transcendental power to charm is supported by more than just anecdotes and experience.
“A few men have garnered the majority of women throughout history,” writes Prioleau, citing a 2004 study that examined the DNA of three distinct populations — the Khoisan of southern Africa, the Khalks of Mongolia and the highlanders of Papua New Guinea — and proved that “certain males passed on the bulk of genes to the next generation” by showing how DNA that followed the female lines held much greater variety than those measured among males lines.
While many of the traits Prioleau attributes to male enchanters are predictable — women apparently love men who dress, cook and dance well, for example, or are talented musically — others are less known (or, at least, less generally acknowledged), like having prominent cracks in their own psychological armor.
Sharp dressed, smooth tongue
One of the more obvious criteria for ladies’ men — a penchant for creativity — is chalked up to “sexual selection.” Prioleau writes that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who “located the center [of the brain] responsible for this artistic activity,” thought that “prehistoric men might have wooed mates by advertising musical, poetic and drawing talents as a ‘visible signature of a giant brain.’ ”
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller agreed, theorizing that “art originated as a courtship display,” since “more than fitness and status, early womankind sought mental excellence — creative intelligence in particular.” (Miller also directly compared the evolution of the brain and the penis, noting that both “reached inside women’s pleasure system.”)
Prioleau shows how the sharp-dressed-man’s advantage in courtship also goes back to the Stone Age, when our ancestors were “adorned rather than clothed.” Early sex gods — the literal kind, not, for example, Ryan Gosling — were “resplendant male specimans” like the Indian Shiva, who wore “a tiger-skin loincloth, a braided conical coiffeur and a snake looped around his blue-tinted neck,” or the Greek god Dionysus, who “flaunted feminine dresses and capes and styled his long hair like a woman’s.”
Prioleau shows how the intoxicating mix of traits that make women swoon often goes deeper than the obvious looks, status and riches, at times bypassing them altogether.
One of her more frequently referenced stud-men is a noted Italian “poet, novelist, politician, war hero and ladykiller” named Gabriele D’Annunzio. In the late 19th/early 20th century, D’Annunzio was so widely desired that “the woman who had not slept with him became a laughing stock.” Women found him “devastating,” following him around Europe “pouring out passionate declarations, abandoning families and twice offering a fortune for his favors.”
Yet for all this admiration, D’Annunzio was hardly the spiritual godfather of Channing Tatum and George Clooney one might expect. “Proof against evolutionary progress,” D’Annunzio was “a sad physical specimen . . . short, bald and ugly, with unhealthy teeth, fat legs, wide hips, hooded eyes, pallid lips and thick mottled skin.” And while it wasn’t his looks that drove women wild, neither was it success or riches, as D’Annunzio was “nearly always in debt and went spectacularly bankrupt midcareer, losing all his possessions.”
So, what was the secret to his erotic success? Simply that “no one could beguile, spoil and transport women like D’Annunzio.”
When he kissed a woman, the poet became “a Michelangelo of oral pleasure” who “fondled eyelids with his tongue” and planted “stinging kisses” on necks and genitals over “long intoxicating nights.” A “flamboyant flatterer,” D’Annunzio bestowed his every new lover with “a new semi-identity” that left them “alone of all the world” the “noblest hearted, most radiant of beings.” Even his speaking style itself, kinetic and expressive, “bewitched women with amorous gestures,” with one mistress confessing that she found his looks “repellent” but said he left her “spellbound” when he spoke by “waving his beautiful white hands in the air.”
‘A fissure of hurt’
In outlining the many traits that bespell women, Prioleau returns often to themes of enchantment and the ability to transport women to another world.
Much of this, for the transporters, emanates from a deceptively simple, but direly uncommon, love of women — not love of sex or of conquest, but the sincere understanding and appreciation, combined with revealing vulnerability, that some surprising superstuds possess.
Warren Beatty, for instance, who’s been said to have an “eighth sense” with women, was “raised in a hothouse of strong, doting women — sister, aunt and mother — where he acquired a lifelong sweetly endearing appreciation for females.” In addition to being handsome, Prioleau notes that Beatty was a great listener who “soaked up women’s conversation,” and quotes Natalie Wood’s sister Lana as saying that Beatty “hangs onto your every word. Everything that comes out of your mouth is [of] the utmost importance to him.”
Another noted seducer, Jack Nicholson, won his reputation with sensitivities that may not have been part of his more frequently referenced lore, but made him a sensation with the ladies nonetheless, as he courted women with “gaga-flattery, exuberance and open lust and vulnerability.”
Nicholson, she writes, had a “fissure of hurt beneath the King of Hollywood persona — insecurity intercut with confidence.” The actor, who was “so fat as a boy that he was nicknamed Chubs,” was “open about his scars and therapy.” One ex-lover, a model-actress named Cynthia Basinet on whom Nicholson “cheated openly,” says she could never leave him because “I saw such a wonderful vulnerable person . . . I vowed never to hurt him.”
Not only is such sensitivity an unsurprisingly helpful trait for a ladies’ man, but in her list of traits that make men irresistible to women, Prioleau includes “flawed manhood” as a major weapon in that arsenal.
Contradicting the notion that “ironclad confidence” is essential in a ladies’ man, Prioleau writes that “a hair line crack in a man’s aplomb, a hint to vulnerability — either physical or psychological — can turn a woman inside out,” and that the very nature of charisma itself involves “the necessary flux of vulnerability and strength.”
Prioleau quotes author Hillary Johnson as saying that “scars and flaws . . . suggest a way to get inside masculine armor,” and novelist Mary Jo Putney says that “the emotionally or physically damaged man . . . is a hero of incredible potency.”
Indeed, many of Prioleau’s examples throughout the book are driven by just these sort of flaws or demons, all, she notes, in great lovers with a “divine defect.” Among her wounded warriors are the “nearly blind” Aldous Huxley and Grigory Potemkin, the club-footed Lord Byron and the “tortured souls” of Richard Burton and Jack London.
Androgyny rules
Another aphrodisiac that many rock fans know but others may not openly embrace is androgyny, which Prioleau considers a key ladies’ man feature. Opening one chapter with the quote, “The more feminine the man . . . the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex,” Prioleau notes that “gender ambiguity is immensely seductive,” and includes some possible reasons why.
She writes that a researcher named Meredith Chivers tested female subjects as they watched erotic films and discovered that “they shared a marked predilection for bisexuality.” Other studies, meanwhile, have demonstrated how women “consistently prefer computerized images of feminized male faces” and choose “more androgynous men in audio interviews.”
Theories on this have evolved over centuries. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed that “both genders posses an inner bisexuality,” and their theories have led to the belief that “we never lose an unconscious striving for a synthesis of male and female.” A religious scholar named Mircea Eliade even posited that blended gender represents “ideal wholeness,” and “the peak of sensual perfection.”
Examples of this in ladies’ men include the great lover Casanova, who had “a penchant for cross-dressing”; Lord Byron, whose “androgyny was so apparent” that one sultan “refused to believe he wasn’t a woman dressed in man’s clothes”; and even actor Gary Cooper, who, while known as a tough guy to movie audiences, appealed to women for reasons different than commonly thought. “Women saw a different side of him,” Prioleau notes. “Six-foot-three and more beautiful than any woman since Garbo, he merged a feminine sweetness, tenderness and artistic sensitivity with his masculine swank.”
Lovers, not killers
Whatever their other qualities, Prioleau drives home throughout the book that true ladies’ men are not ladykillers — that their romantic endeavors are about not conquest, but union.
She shows how great lovers like Casanova — who “specialized in female pleasure” — lacked a misogynistic or victorious aspect to their womanizing, leaving their lovers “often better off afterward, materially and psychologically.”
Ladykillers, meanwhile, “pursue their calling for a host of warped purposes. They loathe their female prey,” she writes of characters such as Don Draper from “Mad Men,” or John Malkovich’s Vicomte de Valmont from “Dangerous Liaisons.” “They aren’t real ladies’ men. An authentic woman-charmer doesn’t despise his conquests or seek their destruction.”
To this end, she saves her harshest rebukes for the past decade’s PUA (pick-up artist) movement, as popularized by “The Game” and by the famous PUA teacher and fur-hatted fashion disaster known as Mystery.
Prioleau holds great contempt for the “lowbrow incarnation of neo-Darwinian machismo” who believe that “a master lover is a top gun who takes down women with a repertoire of paramilitary maneuvers: bravado, flak and precision strikes,” and whose ultimate goal is “not to get loved, but to get laid.”
“Ladies’ men exploit the full force of sensual lures, adjust them to women, and soup them up with ancient spells that work on the deepest recesses of the human psyche,” she writes. “They seduce us out of our skins, and catapult us to another world.”