Maggie's Farm

(The idea for this post grew out of a conversation with a colleague, who thought that Obama - and occasionally other politicians - successfully apply these techniques. She suspects that Obama has read Greene's best-seller because of his stated awareness of the effectiveness of his mirroring role, but that's not my motive for this post.)

Robert Greene's book, The Art of Seduction, is the sort-of sequel to his The 48 Laws of Power. Greene is a student of the dark arts. Both books are applicable to politics, business, relationships, and daily life - especially by those with sociopathic inclinations. However, reading these books can help one understand how some people approach their lives.

(This has nothing at all to do with Freud's seduction theory, by the way.)

The game, or art, of seduction is, at its core, not mainly about physical sex. It is not about earnest courtship, nor is it plain old trying to get laid. In its most artful form, sex doesn't occur (although it is indeed generally difficult for guys to refuse an appealing offer). The art of seduction is a game of deception and subtle psychological manipulation.  Here's a bit from Ovid on "Promise and Deceive" from The Art of Love:

Don’t be shy of promising: promises entice girls:
add any gods you like as witness to what you swear.
Jupiter on high laughs at lovers’ perjuries,
and orders Aeolus’s winds to carry them into the void.
Jupiter used to swear by the Styx, falsely, to Juno:
now he looks favourably on his own example.
Gods are useful: as they’re useful, let’s think they’re there:
take wine and incense to the ancient altars:
indifferent calm and it’s like, apathy, don’t chain them:
live innocently: the divine is close at hand:
pay what you owe, hold dutifully to agreements:
commit no fraud: let your hands be free from blood.
Delude only women, if you’re wise, with impunity:
where truth’s more to be guarded against than fraud.
Deceive deceivers: for the most part an impious tribe:
let them fall themselves into the traps they’ve set.

As I understand it, the art of seduction in its most evolved form involves becoming a mirror to an innocent or vulnerable female, to engage her narcissism. The mirror is the seducer's tool. The innocent fills in the blank with her own hopes and dreams and fantasies. She cannot know that she - or part of her her unconscious self - is being mirrored: the trick is to engage her into entering an exciting false reality consisting mostly of her own projections and fantasies, and the seducer dances to that music. That mirror becomes the stage for her narcissistic, grandiose, and regressive self. This game is slick, slimy, and rather evil, but it can work.

When the game is played in its purest form there is no consummation: the seducer disappears in victory, leaving the innocent in despair, holding nothing but a cracked mirror. If the seducer falls in love with his mirrored creation, as in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the seducer has failed in his game by entering the looking glass world rather than remaining a disengaged puppeteer. 

The chosen victim must be either innocent or vulnerable in some way, because a sophisticated victim might very well be playing her own game - and beat you at it.

The art of seduction, when done "right," is about the enactment of a subtly homoerotic dynamic wherein the seducer guy reflects back an image of the female as she wants to be, or as she regressively is. Thus the best seducers can be those men with "sensitive," "feminine" sides - "metrosexuals," or even the sexually ambivalent, because they are the best at reflecting the feminine.

The classic writings on the art of seduction, besides Ovid, must include Les Liasons Dangereuses, written in 1782 by Pierre LaClos, to which the expression "revenge is a dish best served cold" has been often erroneously attributed.

They must also include Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer. That review begins:

His preparatory remarks follow Ovid, the most famous of his literary precursors, when Johannes writes, "the fishing is always best in troubled waters. When a young miss is agitated, one can successfully risk much that otherwise would miscarry." One could also see thematic parallels between this and Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons', although it is uncertain Kierkegaard had opportunity to read that work. He also strikes a major theme of Ovid's Amores' when he writes, "A rendezvous is usually regarded by lovers as the most beautiful moment."

There are even internet communities that teach and practice the seductive arts. Here's one such site. A cursory view of their sites makes the accurate point that success in seduction has nothing to do with a fellow's appearance or background - just his skill at the game. However, for these people online, unlike the classic form of the game, consummation seems to be the trophy. Scoring, but not stupid drunk scoring - deftly engaging the lady emotionally first with the "bold move" carefully planned and timed.

Greene's book goes through the essential tactics of the art, which he lists as the following:

Choose your victim well
Create a false sense of security
Send mixed signals
Appear to be an object of desire - create triangles
Create a need by stirring anxiety and discontent
Master the art of insinuation
Enter their spirit
Create temptation
Keep them in suspense
Use the demonic power of words to sow confusion
Pay attention to detail
Poeticize your presence
Disarm through strategic weakness and vulnerability
Confuse desire and reality - the perfect illusion
Isolate your victim
Prove yourself
Effect a regression
Stir up the transgressive and the taboo - they are exciting
Use spiritual lures
Mix pleasure with pain
Give them space to fall - the pursuer is pursued
Use physical lures
Master the art of the bold move
and
Beware the aftereffects...

Image: Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, 1932.