Artists, Leaders, and Adventuresses

Besty Prioleau finishes up her tour through seductress history by zeroing in on seductresses of the creative sort, the leader sort, and the adventurer sort.

Seductive Artists. The Goddess of old was a divine creatrix, unleashing her creative powers unto the Universe. Artists (painters, dancers, actresses, writers, etc.) are naturally plugged into this divine creativity, and thus into the Goddess’s great art of seduction.

Take Violet Gordon Woodhouse (1871-1948) for example. She wasn’t a great beauty, but her musical talents led a number of men to fall in love with her. She had so many lovers, in fact, that she lived with four of them at once in a menage a cinq.

Political Seductresses. Powerful women can be quite the aphrodisiac. Cleopatra is often the symbol of the ultimate seductive leader, but there are many others on the list: Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, to name a few.

More modern political seductresses include Eva Peron (Madonna played her in the film Evita) who changed the face of Argentina after she snagged Vice President Juan Peron. And then there’s the even more modern Gloria Steinem.

Yes, Gloria Steinem. Prioleau includes the feminist ground-breaker in her list of political seductresses. Although some of her feminist colleagues looked down upon a feminist that wasn’t afraid to flaunt her beauty and sex appeal, she managed to snag some big names while making strides for women’s rights. And who says you can’t have it all!?

Seductive Adventurers. History has often looked unkindly at women who dared to leave the safe world of home and hearth. Women that dared to forsake marriage and family in order to follow their whims across continents and oceans were viewed as unfeminine and, sometimes, downright evil.

Beryl Markham (1902-1986) stands out in particular. She was as wild in spirit as her native continent (Africa). During her life, she became an expert horse trainer, led safaris, and became the first pilot to fly east to west across the Atlantic in one trip. Oh yeah, and she managed to rack up a number of prize men: Mansfield Markham, a rich aristocrat; Prince Henry, the duke of Gloucester; Denys Finch Hatton, the Casanova of Kenya; and the list goes on.

In today’s culture, we tend to associate great seductresses with Playboy Bunny types and/or Hollywood screen sirens. But, in reality, seduction knows no bounds. You can paint watercolor landscapes, march on Washington, and/or go on safari across Africa and still be a seductress. It’s all just a matter of claiming your Goddess-given sexuality!

Easier said than done, I know…. Now where’s that how-to manual….?

Cougars and Brainiacs

Why is it that as single women age, we start to go into panic mode? As our friends around us start to walk down the matrimonial aisle, we break into a cold sweat and feel the urge to throw ourselves at whatever available groomsmen comes our way?

It’s odd, really. Even after all these years, after all these strides we’ve made, we still suffer from the fear of not getting married. Of ending up alone. And it’s ludicrous. Age really has nothing to do with being marriageable. Or being desirable, for that matter.

Today we call them “cougars” but, in reality, they’re super-seductresses–older women that manage to attract and seduce well into their AARP years. Betsy Prioleau documents some of these “silver foxes” in Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.

Take the infamous Mae West, for example. A witty actress, she was making conquests well into her twilight years. On the verge of 70, she snagged a 33-year-old “muscle man”. And then there’s George Sand and Colette–two literary mavens that weren’t at a loss for men, even in old age.

And age isn’t the only myth that Prioleau busts. Ever heard the little rhyme “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”? It’s the old myth that men don’t like smart women. And it’s wrong. Very wrong.

Veronica Franco was a sixteenth century courtesan. Although beautiful, it was her knowledge that made her one of the most famous courtesans in Europe. Living during a time when education was denied to women, Veronica was determined to educate herself. She used her mind to entertain and intrigue her conquests, adding to conversations and debates. Ninon de Lenclos, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Martha Gellhorn were also “scholar-sirens” that fascinated men with their minds.

So why are we so terrified of growing old alone? Or of being so smart that we’ll scare men away? Why do we subscribe to these ridiculous myths? If history has taught us anything it’s that there are no real “rules” when it comes to love and attraction. All women–regardless of beauty, age, and intellect–can be desirable.

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.