Love Love Love this book…

The driving force behind seduction, Prioleau says, is the seductress archetype, a mythic figure “incised in the human collective unconscious and resistant to change, despite fluctuations in sexual tastes and mores.” This archetype established itself very early in human history, during the 25,000 years in which our forebears channeled their religious impulses into goddess cults. Stone-age Venus figures, the snake goddesses of Crete, the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, and the Greek goddess Aphrodite are all incarnations of this archetype. And when a real-life seductress has her way with a man, it is often because the man is beguiled by the ancient archetypal figure embodied in the living woman.

Although the idea for this book, Prioleau says, came out of a college course on the “Seductress in Fiction,” it is not a fusty work of scholarship. She has positioned it as a how-to for aspiring mantraps, less crude than, say, The Rules, but informed by a similar ethos. For those who want “beaux at their bidding and the upper hand in sex,” she counsels, the “know-how is there for the taking.” You just have to analyze the female masters’ methods.

Prioleau is a funny writer and a thorough researcher, and I enjoyed her deft recounting of these exemplars’ lives. She divides her seductresses into six categories: “Belles Laides” (homely sirens), “Silver Foxes” (old sirens), “Machweiber” (sirens in politics), scholar-sirens, siren-artists, and siren-adventurers. I was most impressed by the Belles Laides, who, despite frightful looks, managed to rack up admirable conquests without assistance from a plastic surgeon. These notables include American philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardener (with her “fisted-up simian face”), Second Empire courtesan La Pavia (“thick waisted and grim visaged), and early-twentieth-century French writer Colette (who “barreled around Paris in Grecian sandals like Hagar the Horrible with a bad perm”).

For Prioleau, seduction is about power, of which women, despite feminist breakthroughs, still don’t have enough. Men, she points out, continue to “hold the whip hand: They have numbers on their side (48 percent women to 43 percent men nationwide); they age better and cling like crotch crabs to their historic prerogatives of the initiative, double standard, promiscuity, mate trade-ins, domination, and domestic copouts.”

Seduction, however, is a way to even the score; it “riles and dismantles patriarchal domination.” In the thrall of seductresses, men can be made to do stupid things–such as, in the case of the Duke of Windsor, abdicating one’s throne for the cunning likes of Wallis Simpson. Often, men do even worse things when a seductress jilts them. Ernest Hemingway, for example, never recovered from being ditched by the sexually voracious, scholar-siren Martha Gellhorn. “He stalked and harassed her throughout Europe, once hysterically breaking into her bedroom with a bucket on his head,” Prioleau writes.

Prioleau has no patience with vamps who allow themselves to be mistreated by the men they have seduced. She calls such women “pseudoseductresses,” and has pointedly excluded them from her book. They include “the eaten and colonized Marilyn Monroe, the oft-dumped flunky Pamela Harriman, and such gofers to male geniuses as Alma Mahler.”

Despite the cleverness of Prioleau’s prose, and her positioning of the seductress as a figure of strength, her thesis was irksome. It was difficult to get beyond certain retrograde assumptions that she brought to her writing. She takes for granted that the whole world is heterosexual and that heterosexual liaisons come about through feminine conniving. Men who don’t respond to feminine wiles are somehow lesser; she calls them “siren-resistant, cryptogay, or scared.” She also shrugs off the bisexuality of some seductresses because the only relationships that matter are those between men and women. Colette’s significant six-year relationship with the Marquise de Belboeuf (known as Missy), for example, is not mentioned in the book; Prioleau dismisses it as an episode during which the French writer “experimented sexually and bisexually.”

Yet if one isn’t offended by Prioleau’s thesis–and doesn’t mind that her subjects’ lives are cut to fit that thesis–the book can be a lively read. And for aspiring manslayers, it will also be a source, no doubt, for some useful techniques.