Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Lose yourself: Swoon has wicked fun answering that age-old query: What do women want?"—Chicago Tribune
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This exhaustive study of the hows, whys, and wherefores of seductive men ranges from ancient to modern, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from literature to real life. Bite-size tidbits from the legends of ancient Greece bump into fantasy story lines from contemporary American romance novels. In addition to her copious research, Prioleau (Seductress) interviews real-life men with reputations as successful seducers in an effort to understand their powers. There's Michael "The King," apparently invincible; Nick the Fireman, "a man who gives off licks of electricity" as a result of his charisma; George Reese, the conversationalist who "conjures enchantment of a prepotent kind"; Gustin, the Darien, Conn., cab driver, who has "more female adulation at sixty-seven than he knows what to do with." Prioleau draws endlessly on the work of experts: evolutionary psychologists, neuropsychiatrists, social anthropologists, sociolinguists, a Harlequin Romance editor, philosophers, sex researchers, the occasional personal trainer and more. She is so committed to her research that on one page alone she breathlessly cites Havelock Ellis, Ortega y Gasset, the Sumerian deity Dmuzi, Dionysus, Milan Kundera, psychologists, popular romance, David Niven, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Queen Elizabeth I. But rather than an engaging romp, the book is set at such a frantic pace as to be charmless, head-spinning, and exhausting. 12 illus. .