Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  More on that story in a minute.” I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the shades were down. As I pushed myself upright, lifting my head slowly off the arm of the sofa, the blood drained out of my brain like sand in an hourglass. My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped back into focus. I looked down at my feet. I had on Reva’s dead mother’s shoes, seascapes of salt rounding across the leather toes. Nude fishnet stockings. I undid the belt of my white fur coat and found that all I was wearing underneath was a flesh- colored bustier bodysuit. I looked down at my crotch. My pubic hair had been waxed off recently. A good waxing—my skin was neither red nor bumpy nor itchy. My fingernails, I saw, were French-manicured. I could smell my own sweat. It smelled like gin. It smelled like vinegar. A stamp across my knuckles showed I’d been to a club called Dawn’s Early. I’d never heard of it. I sat back and closed my eyes and tried to remember the previous night. It was all black, empty space. “Let’s take a look at the snowfall forecast for the New York metro area.” I opened my eyes. The meteorologist on TV looked like a black Rick Moranis. He pointed to a swirling white cartoon cloud. “Happy New Year, Reva,” I remember I’d said. That was all I could recall. The coffee table was spread over with empty ice-cube trays and a full gallon jug of distilled water and an empty half-gallon jug of Gordon’s gin and a ripped-out page from a book called The Art of Happiness. Reva had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier, saying I’d “get a lot out of the Dalai Lama. He’s really insightful.” I’d never read the book. On the torn-out page, a single line had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen: “It didn’t happen overnight,” it read. I deduced that I’d been crushing Xanax with the handle of a butcher knife and snorting it with a rolled-up flyer for an open mic night at a club on Hester Street called Portnoy’s Porthole. I’d never heard of it. A few dozen Polaroids splattered between my videotapes and empty cases proved that my blackout activities had not gone undocumented, although I didn’t see my camera anywhere. The photos were of pretty party people—young strangers making sultry, self-serious faces. Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils, some caught unawares by the loud white flash of my camera, others posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles. Some photos appeared to have been taken on a downtown street at night, others in a dark, low- ceilinged interior with Day-Glo fake graffiti on the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody in the photos.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  She did not know how to react to the letters Valmont now began to send her, begging her to forgive him. He praised her beautiful face and her beautiful soul, and claimed she had made him rethink his whole life. These emotional letters produced disturbing emotions, and Tourvel prided herself on her calmness and prudence. She knew she should insist that he leave the château, and wrote him to that effect; he reluctantly agreed, but on one condition—that she allow him to write to her from Paris. She consented, as long as the letters were not offensive. When he told Madame de Rose- monde that he was leaving, the Présidente felt a pang of guilt: his host- ess and aunt would miss him, and he looked so pale. He was obviously suffering. Now the letters from Valmont began to arrive, and Tourvel soon re- gretted allowing him this liberty. He ignored her request that he avoid the subject of love—indeed he vowed to love her forever. He rebuked her for her coldness and insensitivity. He explained his bad path in life—it was not his fault, he had had no direction, had been led astray by others. Without her help he would fall back into that world. Do not be cruel, he said, you are the one who seduced me. I am your slave, the victim of your charms and goodness; since you are strong, and do not feel as I do, you have noth- ing to fear. Indeed the Présidente de Tourvel came to pity Valmont—he seemed so weak, so out of control. How could she help him? And why was she even thinking of him, which she now did more and more? She was a happily married woman. No, she must at least put an end to this tiresome correspondence. No more talk of love, she wrote, or she would not reply. His letters stopped coming. She felt relief. Finally some peace and quiet. One evening, however, as she was seated at the dinner table, she sud- denly heard Valmont's voice from behind her, addressing Madame de Rose- monde. On the spur of the moment, he said, he had decided to return for a short visit. She felt a shiver up and down her spine, her face flushed; he approached and sat down beside her. He looked at her, she looked away, and soon made an excuse to leave the table and go up to her room. But she could not completely avoid him over the next few days, and she saw that he seemed paler than ever. He was polite, and a whole day might pass without her seeing him, but these brief absences had a paradoxical effect: now Tourvel realized what had happened. She missed him, she wanted to see him. This paragon of virtue and goodness had somehow fallen in love with an incorrigible rake. Disgusted with herself and what she had allowed to disguise of a bedraggled cuckoo and tenderly warmed him in her bosom.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  We will go now. We will go at once." And then in one unanimous mass they swept along, and in another moment were clinging fast to the magnet on every side. Then the magnet smiled—for the steel filings had no doubt at all but that they were paying that visit of their own free will. —OSCAR WILDE, AS QUOTED BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE IN HESKETH PEARSON, OSCAR WILDE: HIS LIFE AND WIT Now that the bohort [impromptu joust] was over and the knights were dispersing and each making his way to where his thoughts inclined him, it chanced that Rivalin was heading for where lovely Blancheflor was sitting. Seeing this, he galloped up to her and looking her in the eyes saluted her most pleasantly. • "God save you, lovely woman!" • "Thank you," said the girl, and continued very bashfully, "may God Almighty, who makes all hearts glad, gladden your heart and mind! And my Send Mixed Signals • 191 veyed by his clothes and poses.) But also send out a mixed signal—some sign that you are not what you seem, a paradox. Do not worry if this underquality is a negative one, like danger, cruelty, or amorality; people will be drawn to the enigma anyway, and pure goodness is rarely seductive. Paradox with him was only truth standing on its head to attract attention. —RICHARD LE GALLIENNE, ON HIS FRIEND OSCAR WILDE Keys to Seduction N othing can proceed in seduction unless you can attract and hold your victim's attention, your physical presence becoming a haunting men- tal presence. It is actually quite easy to create that first stir—an alluring style of dress, a suggestive glance, something extreme about you. But what hap- pens next? Our minds are barraged with images—not just from media but from the disorder of daily life. And many of these images are quite striking. You become just one more thing screaming for attention; your attractive- ness will pass unless you spark the more enduring kind of spell that makes people think of you in your absence. That means engaging their imagina- tions, making them think there is more to you than what they see. Once they start embellishing your image with their fantasies, they are hooked. This must, however, be done early on, before your targets know too much and their impressions of you are set. It should occur the moment they lay eyes on you. By sending mixed signals in that first encounter, you create a little surprise, a little tension: you seem to be one thing (innocent, brash, intellectual, witty), but you also throw them a glimpse of something else (devilish, shy, spontaneous, sad). Keep things subtle: if the second quality is too strong, you will seem schizophrenic. But make them wonder why you might be shy or sad underneath your brash intellectual wit, and you will have their attention.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  very cautious, she would based on those of several well-known libertines of the time, masters of not venture to declare her the game of seduction. And the most dangerous of their weapons was love by dispatching a insinuation—the means by which Madame cast her spell on the young man, maidservant or writing him making him seem the aggressor, giving her the night of pleasure she desired, Master the Art of Insinuation • 215 and safeguarding her guiltless reputation, all in one stroke. After all, he was a letter, for fear of the the one who initiated physical contact, or so it seemed. In truth, she was the dangers that this might entail. But having one in control, planting precisely the ideas in his mind that she wanted. That perceived that he was on first physical encounter in the carriage, for instance, that she had set up by very friendly terms with a inviting him closer: she later rebuked him for being forward, but what lin- certain priest, a rotund, gered in his mind was the excitement of the moment. Her talk of the uncouth, individual who was nevertheless regarded countess made him confused and guilty; but then she hinted that his lover as an outstandingly able was unfaithful, planting a different seed in his mind: anger, and the desire for friar on account of his very revenge. Then she asked him to forget what she had said and forgive her saintly way of life, she calculated that this fellow for saying it, a key insinuating tactic: "I am asking you to forget what I have would serve as an ideal go-said, but I know you cannot; the thought will remain in your mind." Pro- between for her and the voked this way, it was inevitable he would grab her in the pavilion. She sev- man she loved. And so, after reflecting on the eral times mentioned the room in the château—of course he insisted on strategy she would adopt, going there. She enveloped the evening in an air of ambiguity. Even her she paid a visit, at an words "If you promise to be good" could be read several ways. The young appropriate hour of the man's head and heart were inflamed with all of the feelings—discontent, day, to the church where he was to be found, and confusion, desire—that she had indirectly instilled in him. having sought him out, she Particularly in the early phases of a seduction, learn to make everything asked him whether he you say and do a kind of insinuation. Insinuate doubt with a comment here would agree to confess her. • Since he could tell at a

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The young officer bowed and took his leave. . . . In his memoirs he revealed in detail what took place after the first meeting with Pauline: • "At the hour agreed on I again proceeded to Neuilly, made my way to the appointed spot in the garden and stood waiting at the rockery. I had not been there very long when a lady made her appearance, greeted me pleasantly and led me through a side door into the interior of the rockery where there were several rooms and galleries and in one splendid salon a luxurious-looking bath. The adventure was beginning to strike me as very romantic, almost like a fairy tale, and just as I was wondering what the outcome might be a woman in a robe of the sheerest cambric entered by a side door, came up to me, and smilingly asked how I liked being there. I at once recognized Napoleon's beautiful sister, whose perfect figure was clearly outlined by every movement of her robe. She held out her hand for me to kiss and told me to sit down on the couch beside her. On this occasion I certainly was not the Confuse Desire and Reality—The Perfect Illusion • 299 of the boy, and he did see some resemblance. Over the next few weeks they managed to meet here and there, and then Bouriscout had an idea: he sym- pathized with the Cultural Revolution, and he wanted to get around the prohibitions that were preventing him from seeing Pei Pu, so he offered to do some spying. The offer was passed along to the right people, and soon Bouriscout was stealing documents for the Communists. The son, named Bertrand, was recalled to Beijing, and Bouriscout finally met him. Now a threefold adventure filled Bouriscout's life: the alluring Pei Pu, the thrill of being a spy, and the illicit child, whom he wanted to bring back to France. In 1972, Bouriscout left Beijing. Over the next few years he tried repeatedly to get Pei Pu and his son to France, and a decade later he fi- nally succeeded; the three became a family In 1983, though, the French authorities grew suspicious of this relationship between a Foreign Office official and a Chinese man, and with a little investigating they uncovered Bouriscout's spying. He was arrested, and soon made a startling confession: the man he was living with was really a woman. Confused, the French or- dered an examination of Pei Pu; as they had thought, he was very much a man. Bouriscout went to prison. Even after Bouriscout had heard his former lover's own confession, he was still convinced that Pei Pu was a woman. Her soft body, their inti- mate relationship—how could he be wrong? Only when Pei Pu, impris- oned in the same jail, showed him the incontrovertible proof of his sex did Bouriscout finally accept it. Interpretation.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The details of a seduction—the subtle ges- tures, the offhand things you do— are often more charming and revealing. You must learn to distract your victims with a myriad of pleasant little rituals—thoughtful gifts tailored just for them, clothes and adornments designed to please them, gestures that show the time and attention you are paying them. All of their senses are engaged in the details you orchestrate. Create spectacles to dazzle their eyes; mesmerized by what they see, they will not notice what you are really up to. Learn to suggest the proper feelings and moods through details. The Mesmerizing Effect I n December 1898, the wives of the seven major Western ambassadors to China received a strange invitation: the sixty-three-year-old Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi was hosting a banquet in their honor in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The ambassadors themselves had been quite displeased with the empress dowager, for several reasons. She was a Manchu, a race of northerners who had conquered China in the early seventeenth century, establishing the Ching Dynasty and ruling the country for nearly three hundred years. By the 1890s, the Western powers had begun to carve up parts of China, a country they considered backward. They wanted China to modernize, but the Manchus were conservative, and resisted all reform. Earlier in 1898, the Chinese Emperor Kuang Hsu, the empress dowager's twenty-seven-year-old nephew, had actually begun a series of reforms, with the blessings of the West. Then, one hundred days into this period of reform, word reached the Western diplomats from the Forbidden City that the emperor was quite ill, and that the empress dowager had taken power. They suspected foul play; the empress had probably acted to stop the re- forms. The emperor was being mistreated, probably poisoned— perhaps he was already dead. When the seven ambassadors' wives were preparing for their unusual visit, their husbands warned them: Do not trust the empress dowager. A wily woman with a cruel streak, she had risen from obscurity to become the concubine of a previous emperor and had man- aged over the years to accumulate great power. Far more than the emperor, she was the most feared person in China. On the appointed day, the women were borne into the Forbidden City in a procession of sedan chairs carried by court eunuchs in dazzling uni- forms. The women themselves, not to be outdone, wore the latest Western fashions—tight corsets, long velvet dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, bil- lowing petticoats, tall plumed hats. The residents of the Forbidden City looked at their clothes in amazement, and particularly at the way their dresses displayed their prominent bosoms.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Of the seven samples using test subjects from remote cultures, the four that used the basic emotion method provided strong evidence for universality, but the remaining three used free labeling and did not show evidence of universality. These three contrary samples were not published in peer-reviewed journals but only as book chapters—a lesser form of publishing in the world of academia—and are rarely cited. As a result, the four samples supporting universality were lauded as a major breakthrough in research on our underlying human nature and set the stage for the research avalanche to come. Hundreds of subsequent studies employed the basic emotion method with forced choice, largely in cultures that had exposure to Western cultural practices and norms, taking a key condition for universality out of the experimental design but still claiming it as fact. This explains why today, many scientists and the public fundamentally misunderstand what is known about “emotional expressions” and “emotion recognition” from a scientific point of view. 2 2 What might the science of emotion look like today had someone drawn different conclusions from those original studies? Consider Ekman’s account of his first visit to the Fore tribe in New Guinea: I asked them to make up a story about each facial expression [photograph]. “Tell me what is happening now, what happened before to make the person show this expression, and what is going to happen next.” It was like pulling teeth. I am not certain whether it was the translation process, or the fact that they have no idea what it was I wanted to hear or why I wanted them to do this. Perhaps making up stories about strangers was just something the Fore didn’t do. Ekman might be right, but it is also possible that the Fore did not understand or accept the concept of a facial “expression,” which implies an internal feeling that seeks release in a set of facial movements. Not all cultures understand emotions as internal mental states. Himba and Hadza emotion concepts, for example, appear to be more focused on actions. This is also true of certain Japanese emotion concepts. The Ifaluk of Micronesia consider emotions as transactions between people. To them, anger is not a feeling of rage, a scowl, a pounding fist, or a loud yelling voice, all within the skin of one person, but a situation in which two people are engaged in a script—a dance, if you will—around a common goal. In the Ifaluk view, anger does not “live” inside either participant. 2 3 When you look at the development and history of the basic emotion method, there’s a surprising amount to criticize from a scientific standpoint. Over twenty years ago, the psychologist James A. Russell catalogued many of the concerns.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  If she asks about me, just say that I am quite all Pay Attention to Detail • 271 suitors, the emperor himself—the more she realized that none could com- pare to Genji. He was supposed to be her protector, yes, that was still true, but was it such a sin to fall in love with him? Confused, she found herself giving in to the caresses and kisses that he began to surprise her with, now that she was too weak to resist. Interpretation. Genji is the protagonist in the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of the Heian court. The character was most likely inspired by the real-life seducer Fujiwara no Korechika. In his seduction of Tamakazura, Genji's strategy was simple: he would make her realize indirectly how charming and irresistible he was by sur- rounding her with unspoken details. He also brought her in contact with his brother; comparison with this drab, stiff figure would make Genji's su- periority clear. The night Hotaru first visited her, Genji set everything up, as if to support Hotaru's seducing—the mysterious scent, then the flash of light by the screen. (The light came from a novel effect: earlier in the eve- ning, Genji had collected hundreds of fireflies in a cloth bag. At the proper moment he let them all go at once.) But when Tamakazura saw Genji en- couraging Hotaru's pursuit of her, her defenses against her protector re- laxed, allowing her senses to be filled by this master of seductive effects. Genji orchestrated every possible detail—the scented paper, the colored robes, the lights in the garden, the wild carnations, the apt poetry, the koto lessons which induced an irresistible feeling of harmony. Tamakazura found herself dragged into a sensual whirlpool. Bypassing the shyness and mistrust that words or actions would only have worsened, Genji surrounded his ward with objects, sights, sounds, and scents that symbolized the pleasure of his company far more than his actual physical presence would have—in fact his presence could only have been threatening. He knew that a young girl's senses are her most vulnerable point. The key to Genji's masterful orchestration of detail was his attention to the target of his seduction. Like Genji, you must attune your own senses to your targets, watching them carefully, adapting to their moods. You sense when they are defensive and retreat. You also sense when they are giving in, and move forward. In between, the details you set up—gifts, entertain- ments, the clothes you wear, the flowers you choose—are aimed precisely at their tastes and predilections.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I don’t think either Ardrey or Lorenz intended what she extracted in their names: a sort of neo-Hobbesianism in which it is proven that life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short; the desire for status and money and power is universal; territoriality is instinctual; and selfishness, therefore, is the cardinal law of life. (“Don’t twist what I’m saying, Isadora; even what people call al truism is selfishness by another name.”) How all this clogged up every avenue of creative and rebellious expression for me is clear: I couldn’t be a hippy because my mother already dressed like a hippy (while believing in territoriality and the universality of war). I couldn’t rebel against Judaism because I hadn’t any to rebel against. I couldn’t rail at my Jewish mother because the problem was deeper than Jewishness or mothers. I couldn’t be an artist on pain of being painted over. I couldn’t be a poet on pain of being crossed out. I couldn’t be anything else because that was ordinary. I couldn’t be a communist because my mother had been there. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate, not ordinary.” What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all. — And yet…I also have another mother. She is tall and thin, but her cheeks are softer than willow tips, and when I nuzzle into her fur coat on the ride home, I feel that no harm can come to me ever. She teaches me the names of flowers. She hugs and kisses me after some bully in the playground (a psychiatrist’s son) grabs my new English tricycle and rolls it down a hill into the playground fence. She sits up nights with me listening to the compositions I have written for school and she thinks I am the greatest writer in history even though I am only eight. She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one. She takes me and Randy and Lalah and Chloe ice-skating on Central Park Lake with ten of our friends, and while all the other mothers sit home and play bridge and send maids to call for their children, she laces up all our skates (with freezing fingers) and then puts on her own skates and glides around the lake with us, pointing out danger spots (thin ice), teaching us figure eights, and laughing and talking and glowing pink with the cold. I am so proud of her!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The word myth has been debased and cheapened in modern usage; it’s often used to refer to something false, a lie. But this use misses the deepest function of myth, which is to lend narrative order to apparently disconnected bits of information, the way constellations group impossibly distant stars into tight, easily recognizable patterns that are simultaneously imaginary and real. Psychologists David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner explain, “Mythology is the loom on which [we] weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story.” This weaving becomes tricky indeed when we mythologize about the daily experience of ancestors separated from us by twenty or thirty thousand years or more. All too often, we inadvertently weave our own experiences into the fabric of prehistory. We call this widespread tendency to project contemporary cultural proclivities into the distant past “Flintstonization.”13 Just as the Flintstones were “the modern stone-age family,” contemporary scientific speculation concerning prehistoric human life is often distorted by assumptions that seem to make perfect sense. But these assumptions can lead us far from the path to truth. Flintstonization has two parents: a lack of solid data and the psychological need to explain, justify, and celebrate one’s own life and times. But for our purposes, Flintstonization has at least three intellectual grandfathers: Hobbes, Rousseau, and Malthus. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), a lonely, frightened war refugee in Paris, was Flintstoned when he looked into the mists of prehistory and conjured miserable human lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” He conjured a prehistory very much like the world he saw around him in seventeenth-century Europe, yet gratifyingly worse in every respect. Propelled by a very different psychological agenda, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) looked at the suffering and filth of European societies and thought he saw the corruption of a pristine human nature. Travelers’ tales of simple savages in the Americas fueled his romantic fantasies. The intellectual pendulum swung back toward the Hobbesian view a few decades later when Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) claimed to mathematically demonstrate that extreme poverty and its attendant desperation typify the eternal human condition. Destitution, he argued, is intrinsic to the calculus of mammalian reproduction. As long as population increases geometrically, doubling each generation (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), and farmers can increase the food supply only by adding acreage arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), there will never—can never—be enough for everyone. Thus, Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain. Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  It is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense even with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished. . . . —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, THE DANDY, QUOTED IN VICE: AN ANTHOLOGY, EDITED BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES In the midst of this display of statesmanship, eloquence, cleverness, and exalted ambition, Alcibiades lived a life of prodigious luxury, drunkenness, debauchery, and insolence. He was effeminate in his dress and would walk through the market-place trailing his long purple robes, and he spent extravagantly. He had the decks of his triremes cut away to allow him to sleep more comfortably, and his bedding was slung on cords, rather than spread on the hard planks. He had a golden shield made for him, which was emblazoned not with any The Dandy • 41 on his overly romantic verse, inspired ideas for new poems. But she was put off by his childish dependence on her, his weakness. Unable to stand weak- ness of any kind, she eventually left him. Consumed by her memory, Rilke long continued to pursue her. In 1926, lying on his deathbed, he begged his doctors, "Ask Lou what is wrong with me. She is the only one who knows." One man wrote of Salomé, "There was something terrifying about her embrace. Looking at you with her radiant blue eyes, she would say, 'The reception of the semen is for me the height of ecstasy.' And she had an in- satiable appetite for it. She was completely amoral ... a vampire." The Swedish psychotherapist Poul Bjerre, one of her later conquests, wrote, "I think Nietzsche was right when he said that Lou was a thoroughly evil woman. Evil however in the Goethean sense: evil that produces good. . . . She may have destroyed lives and marriages but her presence was exciting." The two emotions that almost every male felt in the presence of Lou Andreas-Salomé were confusion and excitement—the two prerequisite feelings for any successful seduction. People were intoxicated by her strange mix of the masculine and the feminine; she was beautiful, with a radiant smile and a graceful, flirtatious manner, but her independence and her in- tensely analytical nature made her seem oddly male. This ambiguity was expressed in her eyes, which were both coquettish and probing. It was con- fusion that kept men interested and curious: no other woman was like this. They wanted to know more. The excitement stemmed from her ability to stir up repressed desires. She was a complete nonconformist, and to be in- volved with her was to break all kinds of taboos.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Experts inadvertently encourage us to confuse the two. Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love, a book referenced earlier, is far more concerned with shared parental responsibility for a child’s first few years than with the love joining the parents to one another. But we can’t blame Fisher, as the language itself works against clarity. We can “sleep with” someone without ever closing our eyes.1 When we read that the politician “made love” with the prostitute, we know love had little to do with it. When we report how many “lovers” we’ve had, are we claiming to have been “in love” with all of them? Similarly, if we “mate” with someone, does that make us “mates”? Show a guy a photo of a hot-looking woman and ask him if he’d like to “mate with her.” Chances are good he’ll say (or think), “Sure!” But chances are also high that marriage, children, and the prospect of a long future together never entered into his decision-making process. Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth. Marriage: The “Fundamental Condition” of the Human Species? The intimate male-female relationship…which zoologists have dubbed a ‘pair bond,’ is bred into our bones. I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else. FRANS DE WAAL2 The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. HONORÉ DE BALZAC The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” The whole point of the discipline is to tease out intrinsically human patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior from those determined on a cultural or personal level: Do you like baseball because you grew up watching games with Dad or because the sight of small groups of men strategizing and working together on a field connects to a primordial module in your brain? That’s the sort of question evolutionary psychologists love to ask and aspire to answer. Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called psychic unity of humankind—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  While her subjects were being buffeted by this onslaught of varied eroticism, they had a keypad where they could indicate how turned on they felt. In addition, their genitals were wired up to plethysmographs. Isn’t that illegal? No, a plethysmograph isn’t a torture device (or a dinosaur, for that matter). It measures blood flow to the genitals, a surefire indicator that the body is getting ready for love. Think of it as an erotic lie detector. What did Chivers find? Gay or straight, the men were predictable. The things that turned them on were what you’d expect. The straight guys responded to anything involving naked women, but were left cold when only men were on display. The gay guys were similarly consistent, though at 180 degrees. And both straight and gay men indicated with the keypad what their genital blood flow was saying. As it turns out, men can think with both heads at once, as long as both are thinking the same thing. The female subjects, on the other hand, were the very picture of inscrutability. Regardless of sexual orientation, most of them had the plethysmograph’s needle twitching over just about everything they saw. Whether they were watching men with men, women with women, the guy on the beach, the woman in the gym, or bonobos in the zoo, their genital blood was pumping. But unlike the men, many of the women reported (via the keypad) that they weren’t turned on. As Daniel Bergner reported on the study in The New York Times, “With the women…mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.”4 Watching both the lesbians and the gay male couple, the straight women’s vaginal blood flow indicated more arousal than they confessed on the keypad. Watching good old-fashioned vanilla heterosexual couplings, everything flipped and they claimed more arousal than their bodies indicated. Straight or gay, the women reported almost no response to the hot bonobo-on-bonobo action, though again, their bodily reactions suggested they kinda liked it. This disconnect between what these women experienced on a physical level and what they consciously registered is precisely what the theory of differential erotic plasticity predicts. It could well be that the price of women’s greater erotic flexibility is more difficulty in knowing—and, depending on what cultural restrictions may be involved, in accepting—what they’re feeling. This is worth keeping in mind when considering why so many women report lack of interest in sex or difficulties in reaching orgasm.*

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They prefer to be dazzled and overwhelmed. The great Belle Epoque cour- tesan known as La Belle Otero would work a complex magic on artists and political figures who fell for her, but in dealing with the more uncompli- cated, sensual male she would astound them with spectacle and beauty. When meeting a woman for the first time, Casanova might dress in the most fantastic outfit, with jewels and brilliant colors to dazzle the eye; he would use the target's reaction to gauge whether or not she would demand a more complicated seduction. Some of his victims, particularly young girls, needed no more than the glittering and spellbinding appearance, which was really what they wanted, and the seduction would stay on that level. Everything depends on your target: do not bother creating depth for people who are insensitive to it, or who may even be put off or disturbed by it. You can recognize such types by their preference for the simpler plea- sures in life, their lack of patience for a more nuanced story. With them, keep it simple. Appear to Be an Object of Desire —Create Triangles Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid or ne- glect; people gather around those who have already at- tracted interest. We want what other people want. To draw your victims closer and make them hungry to possess you, you must create an aura of desirability—of being wanted and courted by many. It will become a point of vanity for them to be the preferred object of your attention, to win you away from a crowd of admirers. Manufacture the illusion of popularity by surrounding yourself with members of the opposite sex—friends, former lovers, present suitors. Create tri- angles that stimulate rivalry and raise your value. Build a reputation that precedes you: if many have succumbed to your charms, there must be a reason. Creating Triangles O ne evening in 1882, the thirty-two-year-old Prussian philosopher Paul Rée, living in Rome at the time, visited the house of an older woman who ran a salon for writers and artists. Rée noticed a newcomer there, a twenty-one-year-old Russian girl named Lou von Salomé, who had come to Rome on holiday with her mother. Rée introduced himself and they began a conversation that lasted well into the night. Her ideas about God and morality were like his own; she talked with such intensity, yet at the same time her eyes seemed to flirt with him. Over the next few days Rée and Salomé took long walks through the city. Intrigued by her mind yet confused by the emotions she aroused, he wanted to spend more time with her.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point. A cornerstone of the standard model of human sexual evolution, the claim for this universal human tendency to marry appears to be beyond question or doubt—“unquestioningly correct” in Malinowski’s words. Though the tendency has been assumed since before Darwin, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers’s now-classic paper Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, published in 1972, consolidated the position of marriage as foundational to most theories of human sexual evolution.3 Recall that marriage, as defined by these theories, represents the fundamental exchange underlying human sexual evolution. In his BBC television series The Human Animal, Desmond Morris flatly declares, “The pair bond is the fundamental condition of the human species.” Michael Ghiglieri, biologist and protégé of Jane Goodall, writes, “Marriage…is the ultimate human contract. Men and women in all societies marry in nearly the same way. Marriage,” continues Ghiglieri, “is normally a ‘permanent’ mating between a man and a woman…with the woman nurturing the infants, while the man supports and defends them. The institution of marriage,” he concludes, “is older than states, churches, and laws.”4 Oh my. The fundamental condition? The ultimate human contract? Hard to argue with that. But let’s try, because slippery use of the word marriage in the anthropological literature has resulted in a huge headache for anyone trying to understand how marriage and the nuclear family really fit into human nature—if at all. The word, we’ll find, is used to refer to a whole slew of different relationships. In Female Choices, her survey of female primate sexuality, primatologist Meredith Small writes of the confusion that resulted when the term consortship drifted away from its original meaning—a striking parallel to the confusion over marriage. Small explains, “The word ‘consortship’ was used initially to define the close male-female sexual bond seen in savannah baboons and then usage of the word spread to the relationship of other mating pairs.” This semantic leap, says Small, was a mistake. “Researchers began to think that all primates form consortships, and they applied the word to any short or long, exclusive or nonexclusive mating.” This is a problem because “what was originally intended to describe a specific male-female association that lasted during the days surrounding ovulation became an all-inclusive word for mating…. Once a female is described as ‘being in consort,’ no one sees the importance of her regular copulations with other males.”5 Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals. She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.”6

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the shades were down. As I pushed myself upright, lifting my head slowly off the arm of the sofa, the blood drained out of my brain like sand in an hourglass. My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped back into focus. I looked down at my feet. I had on Reva’s dead mother’s shoes, seascapes of salt rounding across the leather toes. Nude fishnet stockings. I undid the belt of my white fur coat and found that all I was wearing underneath was a flesh-colored bustier bodysuit. I looked down at my crotch. My pubic hair had been waxed off recently. A good waxing—my skin was neither red nor bumpy nor itchy. My fingernails, I saw, were French-manicured. I could smell my own sweat. It smelled like gin. It smelled like vinegar. A stamp across my knuckles showed I’d been to a club called Dawn’s Early. I’d never heard of it. I sat back and closed my eyes and tried to remember the previous night. It was all black, empty space. “Let’s take a look at the snowfall forecast for the New York metro area.” I opened my eyes. The meteorologist on TV looked like a black Rick Moranis. He pointed to a swirling white cartoon cloud. “Happy New Year, Reva,” I remember I’d said. That was all I could recall. The coffee table was spread over with empty ice-cube trays and a full gallon jug of distilled water and an empty half-gallon jug of Gordon’s gin and a ripped-out page from a book called The Art of Happiness. Reva had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier, saying I’d “get a lot out of the Dalai Lama. He’s really insightful.” I’d never read the book. On the torn-out page, a single line had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen: “It didn’t happen overnight,” it read. I deduced that I’d been crushing Xanax with the handle of a butcher knife and snorting it with a rolled-up flyer for an open mic night at a club on Hester Street called Portnoy’s Porthole. I’d never heard of it. A few dozen Polaroids splattered between my videotapes and empty cases proved that my blackout activities had not gone undocumented, although I didn’t see my camera anywhere.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  tention but not their obsession; they will soon move on to the next striking his precision of speech. The image. To deepen their interest, you must hint at a complexity that cannot first sight of him affected be grasped in a week or two. You are an elusive mystery, an irresistible lure, people in various ways. promising great pleasure if only it can be possessed. Once they begin to Some could hardly restrain their laughter, others felt fantasize about you, they are on the brink of the slippery slope of seduc- hostile, a few were afflicted tion, and will not be able to stop themselves from sliding down. with the "creeps" many were conscious of being uneasy, but except for a small minority who could Artificial and Natural never recover from the first sensation of distaste and so kept out of his way, both The big Broadway hit of 1881 was Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Pa- sexes found him irresistible, tience, a satire on the bohemian world of aesthetes and dandies that had and to the young men of become so fashionable in London. To cash in on this vogue, the operetta's his time, says W. B. Yeats, he was like a triumphant promoters decided to invite one of England's most infamous aesthetes to and audacious figure from America for a lecture tour: Oscar Wilde. Only twenty-seven at the time, another age. Wilde was more famous for his public persona than for his small body of —HESKETH PEARSON, OSCAR work. The American promoters were confident that their public would be WILDE: HIS LIFE AND WIT fascinated by this man, whom they imagined as always walking around with a flower in his hand, but they did not expect it to last; he would do a few lectures, then the novelty would wear off, and they would ship him home. Once upon a time there The money was good and Wilde accepted. On his arrival in New York, a was a magnet, and in its customs man asked him whether he had anything to declare: "I have noth- close neighborhood lived some steel filings. One day ing to declare," he replied, "except my genius." two or three little filings felt The invitations poured in—New York society was curious to meet this a sudden desire to go and oddity. Women found Wilde enchanting, but the newspapers were less visit the magnet, and they kind; The New York Times called him an "aesthetic sham." Then, a week af- began to talk of what a pleasant thing it would be ter his arrival, he gave his first lecture. The hall was packed; more than a to do. Other filings nearby thousand people came, many of them just to see what he looked like. They overheard their were not disappointed. Wilde did not carry a flower, and was taller than conversation, and they, too, became infected with the

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing, and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure. If I had learned how to write, mightn’t I also learn how to live? Adrian, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to live. Bennett, it seemed, wanted to teach me how to die. And I didn’t even know which I wanted. Or maybe I had pegged them wrong. Maybe Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death. Manichean though I was, I couldn’t even tell the players without a score card. If I could tell good from evil, maybe I could choose, but I was more baffled now than I’d ever been. FOUR Near the Black Forest Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work…. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz. —Affidavit of S.S.-Oberstürmführer Rudolph Hoess, April 5, 1946, Nürnberg The 8:29 to Frankfurt Europe is dusty plush, first-class carriages with first-class dust. And the conductor resembles a pink marzipan pig and goose-steps down the corridor. fräulein ! He says it with four umlauts and his red patent-leather chest strap zings the air like a snapped rubber band. And his cap peaks and peaks, a papal crown reaching heavenward to claim an absolute authority, the divine right of Bundesbahn conductors. fräulein ! E pericoloso sporgersi. Nicht hinauslehnen. Il est dangereux… the wheels repeat. But I am not so dumb. I know where the tracks end and the train rolls on into silence. I know the station won’t be marked. My hair’s as Aryan as anything. My name is heather. My passport, eyes bluer than Bavarian skies. But he can see the Star of David in my navel. Bump. Grind. I wear it for the last striptease. fräulein ! Someone nudges me awake. My coward of a hand almost salutes this bristling little uniform of a man. Schönes Wetter heute , he is saying with a nod toward the blurry farms beyond the window.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience…. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific…is simply to delude oneself.”9 On Matrimonial Whoredom Even if we overlook the ubiquitous linguistic confusion, people who consider themselves to be married can have strikingly different notions of what their marriage involves. The Aché of Paraguay say that a man and woman sleeping in the same hut are married. But if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut, they’re not married anymore. That’s it. The original no-fault divorce. Among the !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) of Botswana, most girls marry several times before they settle into a long-term relationship. For the Curripaco of Brazil, marriage is a gradual, undefined process. One scientist who lived with them explains, “When a woman comes to hang her hammock next to her man and cook for him, then some younger Curripaco say they are married (kainukana). But older informants disagree; they say they are married only when they have demonstrated that they can support and sustain each other. Having a baby, and going through the fast together, cements a marriage.”10 In contemporary Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is a form of marriage known as Nikah Misyar (normally translated as “traveler’s marriage”). According to a recent article from Reuters: Misyar appeals to men of reduced means, as well as men looking for a flexible arrangement—the husband can walk away from a misyar and can marry other women without informing his first wife. Wealthy Muslims sometimes contract misyar when on holiday to allow them to have sexual relations without breaching the tenets of their faith. Suhaila Zein al-Abideen, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Medina, said almost 80 percent of misyar marriages end in divorce. “A woman loses all her rights. Even how often she sees her husband is decided by his moods,” she said.11

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  angry with me or bear me This must, however, be done early on, before your targets know too any ill will. So, if what much and their impressions of you are set. It should occur the moment you tell me is true, pronounce sentence on me they lay eyes on you. By sending mixed signals in that first encounter, you yourself: I will do whatever create a little surprise, a little tension: you seem to be one thing (innocent, you command." • "I do brash, intellectual, witty), but you also throw them a glimpse of something not hate you overmuch for what has happened," was else (devilish, shy, spontaneous, sad). Keep things subtle: if the second the sweet girl's answer, quality is too strong, you will seem schizophrenic. But make them wonder "nor do I love you for it. why you might be shy or sad underneath your brash intellectual wit, and But to see what amends you will have their attention. Give them an ambiguity that lets them see you will make for the wrong you have done me, I what they want to see, capture their imagination with little voyeuristic shall test you another glimpses into your dark soul. time." • And so he bowed The Greek philosopher Socrates was one of history's greatest seducers; as if to go, and she, lovely girl, sighed at him most the young men who followed him as students were not just fascinated by secretly and said with his ideas, they fell in love with him. One such youth was Alcibiades, the tender feeling: • "Ah, dear notorious playboy who became a powerful political figure near the end of friend, God bless you!" From this time on the the fifth century B.C. In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates's thoughts of each ran on the seductive powers by comparing him to the little figures of Silenus that were other. • Rivalin turned made back then. In Greek myth, Silenus was quite ugly, but also a wise away, pondering many things. He pondered from prophet. Accordingly the statues of Silenus were hollow, and when you many sides why took them apart, you would find little figures of gods inside them—the in- Blancheflor should be ner truth and beauty under the unappealing exterior. And so, for Alci- vexed, and what lay biades, it was the same with Socrates, who was so ugly as to be repellent but behind it all. He considered her greeting, her whose face radiated inner beauty and contentment. The effect was confus- 192 • The Art of Seduction words; he examined her ing and attractive. Antiquity's other great seducer, Cleopatra, also sent out sigh minutely, her farewell, mixed signals: by all accounts physically alluring, in voice, face, body, and he whole behavior. . . But manner, she also had a brilliantly active mind, which for many writers of since he was uncertain of