The seductress

The author of a new book says if women want to seduce powerful men, their best weapon is brains, not boobs.

By David Bowman

Oct 31, 2003 | Cleopatra is a classic siren. To seduce Julius Caesar, she rolled herself up in a rug and had it delivered to his compound. According to Betsy Prioleau, author of "Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love," "Hollywood got [Cleopatra] all wrong. Short and zaftig, she resembled Elizabeth Taylor only in cup size. She looked more like a 'before' plastic surgery profile: a low beetling brow, a large hooked nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth."

So how did Cleopatra, more dog than woman, seduce the most powerful man in the world?

"She used her brains to seduce," Prioleau says, sitting in my New York kitchen. Prioleau is an attractive woman -- probably around Cybill Shepherd's age. She's dressed in an elegant black skirt and dark hose, and has nice gams. She talks with a slight Southern accent. Most important, Prioleau likes dogs. My English pointer, Snoot, lies at her feet.

"The way Cleopatra got Julius Caesar is totally amazing," she continues. "Here is a guy -- you can imagine Mick Jagger -- he was surrounded by groupies. All the women wanted this guy. Men went into battle singing this little ditty about all the women he'd had. Not only that, he was bisexual -- he had all the beautiful boys too. He had everybody. He was a jaded ladies' man. Here's a guy maybe 56 when Cleopatra saw him. When she rolled out of that rug, she was about 18 and not beautiful at all. Plutarch is clear about that. She rolled out and barraged Caesar with such a stream of charming conversation -- a 'charm offensive' through language. She addressed him in perfect Latin. Then perfect Greek. She told him jokes. Stories. Displayed her magnificent erudition. She was a brilliant women. She wrote a tract on weights and measurements, of all things. She was happiest in a library. It was said she had a 'voluptuous' love of learning. Caesar had never encountered a woman like this. He was so charmed he made her his mistress that night."

Prioleau proves that it is brains, not just boobs, that powerful men crave. "Seductress" is Priouleau's second book. Her first was a scholarly text titled "Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Works of William Dean Howells." Her publisher, Viking, calls "Seductress" "an authoritative, empowering guide to erotic sovereignty that will electrify you." I take this to mean that Prioleau's charged-up history will spark smart unattached women to grab Turkish rugs and hunt down their own Caesars to conquer.

Why did you write this book?

It all started in Manhattan College in 1994. I was teaching a course, The Seductress in Literature. The class was mobbed with both guys and girls. I asked on the first day, "Why are you here?" The girls kept raising their hands, saying, "We are clueless right now. We want to know what these women did." This is just literature, mind you. We deconstructed Aphrodite and her myths. Then we did Becky Sharp [the anti-heroine in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair"]. "Justine," by Lawrence Durrell. "Les liaisons dangereuses," by Choderlos de Laclos. Nadine Gordimer -- I had them read "Sport of Nature." (Marvelous book! The ultimate liberated woman!) It turned out that the seductress defied all the stereotypes even in the fiction.

The most interesting thing is, students flooded my office after class and told me all these horrible stories about what was happening to women on campus. Here was a small Catholic conservative college and the guys had a "Hunters' Club," where they had to screw 100 girls to belong. One girl said that two or three people at the tiny end of her hall had been date-raped. They were road kill for these fraternity guys. I realized that women today were in a real romantic crisis. I thought maybe if I studied the women throughout history who had conquered and kept the men that they wanted, then maybe I could figure out a way of solving this issue. My own daughter was 15 and I thought, I don't want her out in the world just successful in school. I wanted her to have the whole package. Why not?

What year did you come of age?

The 1960s.

Ah, those "free love" days. Are we now in some retro-date-rape culture?

That was maybe the culture of the 1990s. Now I think we're in a hookup-breakup culture.

In a date-rape culture, how does a seductress go after who she wants and not get jumped?

They don't drink. About 90 percent of the time, women are drunk when they get date-raped. They think they have to intrigue college boys with slut-wear and giggles. Girls have been lulled into some sort of Victoria's Secret idea of seduction -- the more cleavage, the more "booty delicious" they look, the hotter the guys are going to be. Today's girls are shy. They don't know how to go about enchanting a guy. This is a lost art. They then drink too much. The next thing they know they're making out with a stranger. Now, this is all right. I'm not being judgmental about that. The difficulty is that 64 percent of college girls think they're going to meet their husband in college, and they want commitment.

How is that different from the wants of the brides in ancient Greece?

In ancient Greece, proper women were absolutely powerless. They were married off at 14 to much older guys, and then they were put into domestic isolation. They weren't even allowed to go out in the agora. These women were just shut up. Then you have the second kind of woman -- professionals. There were six tiers of prostitutes. Those at the bottom of the heap sold themselves for just a drachma, something like that. They just stood naked outside of their houses and took what they could get. But the hetaerae [top whores] got the highest figures and the best men. Aspasia [a famous whore] was actually married to Pericles. But the reason prostitutes were so successful is that they subscribed to this ancient art of love. In Aspasia's case, she taught it. It was called "the Aspasian Path." In ancient Greece they just assumed ordinary woman knew all the physical stuff -- they had to know dozens of sexual positions, putting on oils and dress. But that was elementary.

For "bachelorettes," right? Not for wives.

Right. The wife didn't have to know anything about sex. They were just breeders. Women who were in the trade learned the physical part of sex. You learned it when you were young, and it was pretty simple. But the other part, the intellectual part, the psychological part, was complex. It involved a great deal of learning -- the art of empathy, the arts of conversation. You had to be able to recite poetry and compose your own. So the whole idea is that love is a head trip, and in ancient Greece this was realized. You can't catch a guy by just possessing a perfect 10 [body], because in ancient Greece these women were all terribly gorgeous. They wore these transparent dresses with long dangly earrings. Everyone dyed their hair blond. Heavy, heavy cosmetics.

So the Greeks invented "blondes"?

Right! Right! Except the most successful hetaerae of all, even more successful than Aspasia, was a woman named Phyrne. She was not very pretty. She had completely black hair. She came to Athens when the place was flooded with prostitutes. Phyrne marketed herself with brilliance. She refused to dye her hair. She wrapped herself in this long winding sheet that covered her up completely and put a huge price on her head. She marketed herself like Cartier or something. Men thought, What's she got? So she started reeling in all the top people. Then once a year for the Feast of Aphrodite, she took off all these robes -- she had a perfect body -- and walked from the Temple of Aphrodite into the river and went through the ritual of submersion into the waves. Then she got up and walked naked through the streets. People would come weeks and weeks in advance, as you would for the World Series, to line up to watch her do that. It was brilliant marketing. I think part of seduction is to jump from the pack.

Our modern prejudice is that all the men in Athens were gay.

Oh, no. Not in the least.

But it was a bisexual culture?

Yes, because there was no stigma. [Pause.] But there actually was a stigma. If you engaged in "tergo," you were lower than the low.

What was "tergo"?

Rear entry. You didn't really do that.

For either gender?

I don't know. Well, maybe. But certainly the person on the receiving end was toilet paper. The really distinguished homosexuals did it with their thighs.

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