B007Q6XJAO EBOK (3 page)

The Player Seducer

Women aren’t attracted to wussies.

—D
AVID DE
A
NGELO
,
Double Your Dating

Dating coach and radio host Payton Kane has a promise for all the lonely men out there: his “Makeover Team can turn ANY regular guy into a Ladies Man within 4 hours!” The ladykiller who emerges from this transfiguration is one of the most pervasive versions of the nouveau Casanova. He’s the gamer, the player, the pickup artist—the PUA. Popularized by Neil Strauss in his 2005 bestseller,
The Game
, and dozens of online dating gurus, he’s a lowbrow incarnation of neo-Darwinian machismo. The operating premise is that a master lover is a top gun who takes down women with a repertoire of paramilitary maneuvers: bravado, flak, and precision strikes. By Casanovan standards, the goal is modest: not to get loved (another league) but to get laid.

The heart of the player system is the dominance display. Unless you’re a “tribal leader,” you won’t get the girl, exhorts high-priest “Mystery,” a goth-boy figure in a shag-carpet hat and black nails. Swagger into a bar, he instructs, act like “the prize,” and let the ladies know who’s boss. This entails a broadside of wisecracks and sarcastic “negs” such as “How do you rate in bed?” followed by “You’re now downgraded from booty call # 1 to # 10.”

Closing the deal is as scrupulously plotted as Operation Overlord. Often with the help of a “wingman,” a “seductionist” softens the target with “trance words” (sensual triggers like “blow” and “job” and “pleasure”) and an onslaught of praise and scorn. It’s as effective, claims Mystery, as a sharp snap of a dog leash.

When the mark tosses her hair and smiles, the time comes for “kinos,” strategic touches on the thigh, waist, and breasts. Finally, a “Venusian Artist” isolates the girl, kisses her, gets her number, and leaves as though he has better things to do. Later, he calls with a “sex location” in mind, and goes in for the kill. Boasts “Extramask” in a field report: I “slammed her hard.”

Throughout this seduce-and-conquer campaign, the ladies’ man keeps his counsel and shuts down emotionally. A PUA learns “to eliminate desire” (as the womanizer Dex advises in the film
The Tao of Steve
) and to conceal feelings if they do intrude. Seducers stay cool, deflect the L-word, and realize in a pinch “there’s always another woman.” In their case, there
is
; the “hits” they describe are interchangeable numbers (graded 6 to 10). They are usually a desperate lot—strippers, bored housewives, model wannabees, and stray singletons who haunt dance clubs.

Gamer convert Neil Strauss says he studied with pickup artists for two years to “become what every woman wants—not what she says she wants, but what she really wants.” But he went to the wrong school. Real-world enchanters provide a different message as well as a different grade of woman from Strauss’s sad assortment of teenage waitresses, exotic dancers, and ladies with “porn star” skills.

The Real Seducer

Prince Aly Khan would be the envy of any gamer. Known as the “Golden Prince,” Khan was a marquee name in the 1950s: international playboy, decorated soldier, sportsman, philanthropist, UN vice president, spiritual leader of twenty million Ismaili Muslims, and lover of the
crème de la crème
. Said one: “You weren’t in the swim and you were really
déclassé, démondé
, nothing, you hardly counted if you’d not been to bed with Aly.” He famously seduced “Love Goddess” Rita Hayworth away from her husband, and married her at a gala wedding with the swimming pool filled with two hundred gallons of eau de cologne.

Khan, though, repudiated the player credo. He “threw away the rule book and played the game by instinct.” Instead of cool and cocky, he was gallantry personified and put himself out to please women. He was modest and discreet about his conquests, which outstripped a PUA’s wildest dreams. Unspectacular in dress and looks (a sallow complexion and receding hairline), he radiated “sweetness,” “softness,” and “disarming humility.”

When he wanted a woman, he disdained battle plans, dominance displays, and feigned indifference. He came on strong. Lovers said he singled them out of the crowd at parties and made a beeline for them. Once at Ascot, he turned his back on the horserace and stared at his soon-to-be mistress in the bleachers the whole time. On another occasion, he said to a dinner partner he had just met, “Darling, will you marry me?” The Honorable Joan Guinness, wife of the brewer mogul, promptly divorced her husband and did.

Laconic put-downs weren’t his style. French chanteuse and film star Juliette Gréco believed flattery was Khan’s forte. On their first date, she recalled, he ego-massaged her in a “charming, very special way.” He focused exclusively on her, her interests and career, never glancing at the parade of glamour girls who walked past their table. He made her feel like a “queen.” To take a woman down a peg would have struck Khan as gauche and puerile; he invested in the aphrodisiac of applause—compliments, undivided attention, and strokes.

Although his liaisons were many, Khan was always “madly, deeply” in love—however briefly—and wore his heart on his sleeve. Rather than masking his feelings, he made a pageant of them. As soon as he saw Rita Hayworth, he gasped, “My God! Who is that?” and launched a siege on her affections. He hired a new chef, overhauled his chateau (even down to new table linens), and called her around the clock until she agreed to come for lunch.

Afterward he sent her three-dozen red roses from Cannes every day. The phone calls accelerated with solicitous inquiries: How did she feel? Did she need anything? Eventually she needed
him
, and soon they were a couple, off to romantic holidays in Paris, London, and Spain. His hotel rooms, though, weren’t “C3 locations,” as gamers call them; Khan was a sexual artist, intent first and foremost on a woman’s satisfaction. “He made women feel marvelous.”

Every fascinator worth his women, from antiquity to the present, refutes the player model; he works it another way. Even Jack Nicholson, the mascot of cool, is a “sentimental guy” who courts women with ga-ga flattery, exuberance, and open lust and vulnerability. Great lovers handle women with a velvet touch, not a war manual.

The Therapy Heartthrob

Just What the Love Dr. Ordered.

—V
ERONICA
H
ARLEY
,
“Best Relationship Books,” AOL

Another distortion of the ladies’ man persona is the “Mr. Wonderful” of couples’ therapy—the flip side of the player. Instead of a tough hombre with Machiavellian schemes, this epitome of male sex appeal has been sensitized, civilized, and customized for a postfeminist generation. He’s an Identi-Kit creation, a composite of the therapeutic ideal. Liberated and omni-competent, he’s empathic, housebroken, companionable, mature, and well behaved. And with sufficient counseling, he can be mass-produced.

On paper, he sounds like every woman’s fantasy. Women, he realizes, are frazzled and overworked and crave sustenance. A one-man support system, he supplies whatever is required: groceries, tile regrouts, car inspections, and shiatsu massage. He ministers to the inner woman as well. At Dr. John Gottman’s “love laboratory” in Seattle, men learn to communicate, express feelings, listen, and validate.

This love-coached ladies’ man also learns to be a fair fighter. When the fat hits the fire, he is the soul of compassion and calm. Through careful self-monitoring, he avoids “flooding” and responds nondefensively in order to defuse the argument. Rephrase her complaints, counsels Gottman, compromise, conciliate, and never stonewall; “choose to be polite.” As Dr. Phil advises, he works hard, “like you would on any project.”

In the boudoir he is equally conscientious. Couples’ guides supply copious help with horizontal skills, how-tos as detailed as flight manuals that itemize mechanics from A to Z. Foreplay looms large, beginning with careful preparation of mood—music (playlists included), bubble baths, and candles—followed by at least “twenty-one minutes or more of foreplay.” Sex itself should be minutely choreographed—toys on hand, positions mastered, and a rolling inventory of mattress moves.

The Real Heartthrob

The counselors’ Casanova has a lot of things going for him; he checks every box. A woman could do worse than have such a to-spec lover in her life, a hassle-free mate who gets it right and lends a hand. His creators mean well. The only drawback is desire. The therapists’ ladykiller has been built by rational design, without regard for eros, the unruly life force. The men who inspire and keep grand passions aren’t practical, paint-by-the-numbers products from a relationship lab.

Lord Byron, the British nineteenth-century poet, patriot, and romantic icon, would have been a love coach’s nightmare. Irreverent, moody, and hot-tempered, he violated nearly all the therapy sanctities. Yet he was “quite simply, irresistible.” More than a rock-star poet who caused a tsunami of female fans—a Byronmania—he won the undying adoration of innumerable women throughout his life.

Hardly helpmate material, Byron trailed an aura of wanderlust and foreign adventures, decked out in a wardrobe of Albanian turbans and Turkish pantaloons. And he looked only half-civilized. “Once seen” and never “forgotten,” Byron had the chiseled face of an antique Bacchus, with “wild” blue eyes, a full sensuous underlip, and a high forehead strewn with dark, flyaway curls.

His club foot and chronic limp played on female sympathies, and women nurtured
him
instead of the other way around. They copied his poems, lent money, monitored his health, and coddled him like a maharajah. The role of male caretaker left him cold. Three months into his marriage, he informed his wife, “What on earth does your mother mean,” he announced, “by telling me to take care of you? I suppose you can take care of yourself.”

Communication—couples’ therapy style—wasn’t his strong suit. Although in touch with his feelings (he wept easily) and capable of long intimate talks with beloved women, he had a mixed record as an amorous communicator. He toggled between endearments and sarcasms with his mistress Lady Caroline Lamb, and treated his new wife to a crossfire of tender confidences and cruel outbursts.

Conversation was another matter. When he chose to, he could be adorable. Talking in a mellow baritone with a lisp, he entranced women with his gay, playful badinage and verbal pyrotechnics. “His laugh is musical,” gushed Lady Blessington in her memoirs, and his manner of speaking “very fascinating.”

A fight with Byron, though, was a bad idea. There was no hearing the other side, no dousing the flames with the balm of understanding and sober restraint. He once handled a spat with his wife by hurling a clock to the floor and smashing it to bits with a poker. Lady Caroline Lamb was driven to such desperation by his silent treatment in a quarrel that she threatened him with a dinner knife at a London ball, then stabbed her hand and dashed bleeding from the room.

He may not have always been a sexual standout either. Stories abound of his exploits and of the women unable to stay out of his bed, like Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who begged to spend the night with him, succeeded, and followed him to Italy for more. But he treated his wife on occasion with a lack of finesse—deflowering her without ceremony on the sofa before the wedding and taking her
a tergo
by surprise one night.

Despite all this—his therapeutically incorrect behavior and complex, uncooperative nature—Byron was a “loveable man,” swamped by women and cherished by them. His wife rolled hysterically on the floor in an “agony of regret” when they parted; Caroline Lamb never fully recovered and grew ill after he died at thirty-six. His last mistress of five years, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, made a pilgrimage to pray at his grave, and as a Parisian hostess in her fifties she placed a portrait of Byron in her salon before which she said to anyone who would listen, “How beautiful he was! Heavens, how beautiful!”

Ladies’ men rarely meet relationship doctors’ standards. They are off the therapeutic drawing board. Modernist painter Willem de Kooning, for example, was uncommunicative and wrapped up in himself and his work—a “little boy” who required a succession of female nurturers. Yet he was a sex-meteor of the art scene, a delicious lover who “let women come to him.”