Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them
Betsy Prioleau
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0393068374
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Swoon is a glittering pageant of charismatic ladies’ men from Casanova to Lord Byron to Camus to Ashton Kutcher. It challenges every preconceived idea about great lovers and answers one of history’s most vexing questions: what do women want?
Contrary to popular myth and dogma, the men who consistently beguile women belie the familiar stereotypes: satanic rake, alpha stud, slick player, Mr. Nice, or big-money mogul. As Betsy Prioleau, author of Seductress, points out in this surprising, insightful study, legendary ladies’ men are a different, complex species altogether, often without looks or money. They fit no known template and possess a cache of powerful erotic secrets.
With wit and erudition, Prioleau cuts through the cultural lore and reveals who these master lovers really are and the arts they practice to enswoon women. What she discovers is revolutionary. Using evidence from science, popular culture, fiction, anthropology, and history, and from interviews with colorful real-world ladykillers, Prioleau finds that great seducers share a constellation of unusual traits.
While these men run the gamut, they radiate joie de vivre, intensity, and sex appeal; above all, they adore women. They listen, praise, amuse, and delight, and they know their way around the bedroom. And they’ve finessed the hardest part: locking in and revving desire. Women never tire of these fascinators and often, like Casanova’s conquests, remain besotted for life.
Finally, Prioleau takes stock of the contemporary culture and asks: where are the Casanovas of today? After a critique of the twenty-first-century sexual malaise―the gulf between the sexes and women’s record discontent―she compellingly argues that society needs ladies’ men more than ever. Groundbreaking and provocative, Swoon is underpinned with sharp analysis, brilliant research, and served up with seductive verve.
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NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 39. 217 While drifting apart: Quoted in Myers, Reluctant Expatriate, 87. 217 “a man of power”: Quoted in ibid., 87. 217 He was not, however: Ibid., 44. 217 “sex at every pore”: Quoted in ibid., 93. 218 “the frankest man”: Scott Donaldson, “Introduction,” in Stanton Garner and Scott Donaldson, eds., The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or the Illumination (New York: Penguin, 1986), ix. 218 “great amorist”: From H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934,
full-throated: no other woman has ever attained such heights of female perfection, and he says he’ll be her “sex slave” if she’ll have him. Real ladies’ men are brilliant praisers who make much of women. Like Casanova, they’re creative and code-read the female heart. As a young apprentice priest, Casanova romanced an advocate’s wife in a public carriage during a trip to Rome. He first said in the presence of her husband that she had destroyed his wish to be a monk, then addressed her alone.
stable of mistresses during their thirty-five years together. He never saw an attractive woman he didn’t want to ego-fan into an affair. Actress Catherine Nesbitt, another great beauty, was classic. Cooper dexterously enumerated her best performances, pronounced his passion for her, and begged to kiss her feet, which he had seen nude on the stage. She rolled down her stockings and obliged. When he campaigned for the princesse de Broglie, he focused on her hands. He kissed them as they drove
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
[more actualized people] experience love more passionately than do individuals with low self-esteem.” 87 souls that are “overfull”: This is a paraphrase of Nietzsche from “Thus Spake Zarathustra”: “I love him whose soul is . . . overfull,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 128. 87 women in surveys express a preference: See John Marshall Townsend, What Women Want—What Men Want: Why the Sexes Still See Love and Commitment So Differently (New York: