Notes from Seductress, Part Two

As a culture, we seem to equate a great seductress with a great beauty. The two, however, are not interchangeable. There are great beauties whose love lives are more pitiful than mine, and great seductresses who would never stop traffic.

Betsy Prioleau devotes an entire chapter to dispelling the myth that to be a seductress, one must be beautiful. Women today should take note of this. All too often we’re bombarded with images of scantily-clad bombshells and told that that is what men want. But, like most other things in this world, taste varies widely and belles laides (a French phrase meaning ”homely women whose charisma, fire, and charms of character transform them into beautiful sirens”) might just be what some men want.

Take, for instance, Wallis Windsor (1895-1986). Wallis is described as having “an Aztec nose, hatchet jaw, bushy eyebrows, and a ‘masculine figure’.” Yet, she managed to snag David Windsor, international heartthrob who abdicated the throne to marry her.

Or go back even further and learn from Therese Lachmann (1819-1884), a “thick-waisted”, “hawk-like”, vulgar woman who became one of the most sought-after courtesans in Europe. Her many admirers included famed pianist Henri Herz, a Portuguese marquis, and Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck.

And then there’s “squat, pint-size Edith Piaf” (1915-1963). In her own words, she was “ugly,” with “sagging breasts, a low-slung ass, and little drooping buttocks.” Far from the image of the tall, lithe Hollywood sex goddess, yet she never lacked admirers.

Other belles laides include Pauline Viardot, Catherine Sedley, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. These were women who were lacking in the looks department but didn’t let that stop them from embodying the power of the archetypic sex goddess. And all of us “ordinary” women can learn a lot from them.

We may bemoan our bulging bellies, thunder thighs, and freckled faces but can still be skilled seductresses. We can still snag the heartthrobs, still enjoy fulfilling love lives. All it takes is some confidence, some character, and few more skills that we’ll learn about later in Prioleau’s book.

Notes from Seductress, Part One

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love by Betsy Prioleau has sat on my bookshelf for at least the past five years. I kept meaning to read it, but I have literary ADD–I start reading a gazillion books and seem to finish only a few. But recently, as more friends get engaged and others sign up for various online dating services, I picked it up once again.

Prioleau, the author, takes on the daunting task of finding out just what makes a woman a “seductress”. She leaves out some names that you would expect to be in there (such as Marilyn Monroe) because they don’t fit her definition of a seductress. For Prioleau, a seductress is “a powerful fascinator able to get and keep the men of her choice, men who are good for her. Rarely discarded or two-timed, she successfully combines erotic supremacy with personal and vocational achievement.” By this definition, a lot of today’s Hollywood beauties wouldn’t fit the bill.

But that’s not all that shocking, really. As Prioleau points out, “seduction is 99 percent mental sorcery.” Physical beauty really doesn’t play that much of a role. Rather, there are far more complex traits at work–traits that Prioleau theorizes go far into the history of the human race, right back into the ages of Goddess worship.

Once upon a time, cultures the world over worshipped goddesses in various forms. These goddess religions lasted nearly 25,000 years–far longer than any male-centered religion. That gave the goddess archetype plenty of time to get nestled deep in the psyche of the human race. It’s an archetype that has many layers and facets–creative, destructive, maternal, loving, angry, and sexual, to name just a few. Prioleau theorizes that the great seductresses of history embodied one or more of these goddess traits.

She starts off the journey into the history of the seductresses by delving back into prehistoric times and bringing forth the goddesses of old: the Snake Goddess of Minoan Crete, Venus, Ariadne, Inanna, Ishtar, and Aphrodite. She then goes on to break the great seductresses of history into groups: seductresses that defied the beauty myth, those who continued to be seductresses well into old age, scholarly seductresses, seductresses in the arts, political seductresses, and adventurer seductresses.

Over the next couple of blog posts, I’m going to highlight a couple of eye-opening (and confidence-boosting) facts about these groups seductresses in hopes of reclaiming some of that seductive feminine power for myself and others.