Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies. —NINON DE L’ENCLOS

Menelaus, if you are really going to kill her, \ Then my blessing go with you, but you must do it now, \ Before her looks so twist the strings of your heart \ That they turn your mind; for her eyes are like armies, \ And where her glances fall, there cities burn, \ Until the dust of their ashes is blown \ By her sighs. I know her, Menelaus, \ And so do you. And all those who know her suffer. —HECUBA SPEAKING ABOUT HELEN OF TROY IN EURIPIDES, THE TROJAN WOMEN, TRANSLATED BY NEIL CURRY

No man hath it in his power to over-rule the deceitfulness of a woman. —MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE

Only by the circuitous route of the art of love could woman again assert authority, and this she did by asserting herself at the very point at which she would normally be a slave at the man’s mercy. She had discovered the might of lust, the secret of the art of love, the daemonic power of a passion artificially aroused and never satiated.

People are constantly trying to influence us, to tell us what to do, and just as often we tune them out, resisting their attempts at persuasion. There is a moment in our lives, however, when we all act differently—when we are in love. We fall under a kind of spell. Our minds are usually preoccupied with our own concerns; now they become filled with thoughts of the loved one. We grow emotional, lose the ability to think straight, act in foolish ways that we would never do otherwise. If this goes on long enough something inside us gives way: we surrender to the will of the loved one, and to our desire to possess them.

What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. • What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. • What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE ANTI-CHRIST, TRANSLATED BY R.J. HOLLINGDALE

A seducer does not turn the power off and on—every social and personal interaction is seen as a potential seduction. There is never a moment to waste. This is so for several reasons. The power seducers have over a man or woman works in social environments because they have learned how to tone down the sexual element without getting rid of it. We may think we see through them, but they are so pleasant to be around anyway that it does not matter. Trying to divide your life into moments in which you seduce and others in which you hold back will only confuse and constrain you. Erotic desire and love lurk beneath the surface of almost every human encounter; better to give free rein to your skills than to try to use them only in the bedroom. (In fact, the seducer sees the world as his or her bedroom

This attitude creates great seductive momentum, and with each seduction you gain experience and practice. One social or sexual seduction makes the next one easier, your confidence growing and making you more alluring. People are drawn to you in greater numbers as the seducer’s aura descends upon you.

A seducer sees love not as sacred but as warfare, where all is fair.

Psychoanalysis believes it treats the disorder of sex and desire, but in reality it is dealing with the disorders of seduction. . . . The most serious deficiencies always concern charm and not pleasure, enchantment and not some vital or sexual satisfaction. —JEAN BAUDRILLARD. SEDUCTION

Seducers see themselves as providers of pleasure, like bees that gather pollen from some flowers and deliver it to others. As children we mostly devoted our lives to play and pleasure. Adults often have feelings of being cut off from this paradise, of being weighed down by responsibilities. The seducer knows that people are waiting for pleasure—they never get enough of it from friends and lovers, and they cannot get it by themselves. A person who enters their lives offering adventure and romance cannot be resisted.

A seducer sees all of life as theater, everyone an actor. Most people feel they have constricted roles in life, which makes them unhappy. Seducers, on the other hand, can be anyone and can assume many roles. (The archetype here is the god Zeus, insatiable seducer of young maidens, whose main weapon was the ability to assume the form of whatever person or animal would most appeal to his victim.)

What people lack in life is not more reality but illusion, fantasy, play.

The eyes that seduce have no meaning, they end in the gaze, as the face with makeup ends in only pure appearance... , The scent of the panther is also a meaningless message—and behind the message the panther is invisible, as is the woman beneath her makeup.The Sirens too remained unseen. The enchantment lies in what is hidden. —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, DI: L4 SEDUCTION

The call of something dangerous, emotional, unknown is all the more powerful because it is so forbidden. Think of the victims of the great Sirens of history: Paris causes a war for the sake of Helen of Troy, Caesar risks an empire and Antony loses his power and his life for Cleopatra, Napoleon becomes a laughingstock over Josephine, DiMaggio never gets over Marilyn, and Arthur Miller can’t write for years. A man is often ruined by a Siren, yet cannot tear himself away. (Many powerful men have a masochistic streak.) An element of danger is easy to hint at, and will enhance your other Siren characteristics—the touch of madness in Marilyn, for example, that pulled men in.

A woman is often defensive and can sense insincerity or calculation. But if she feels consumed by your attentions, and is confident you will do anything for her, she will notice nothing else about you, or will find a way to forgive your indiscretions. This is the perfect cover for a seducer. The key is to show no hesitation, to abandon all restraint, to let yourself go, to show that you cannot control yourself and are fundamentally weak.

But by nature, the Ardent Rake also has the advantage of an uncontrollable libido. When he pursues a woman, he really is aglow with desire; the victim senses this and is inflamed, even despite herself. How can she imagine that he is a heartless seducer who will abandon her when he so ardently braves all dangers and obstacles to get to her?

D’Annunzio had mastered the art of flattery.

The words that voice spoke were interesting as well—alliterative phrases, charming locutions, poetic images, and a way of offering praise that could melt a woman’s heart. D’Annunzio had mastered the art of flattery. He seemed to know each woman’s weakness: one he would call a goddess of nature, another an incomparable artist in the making, another a romantic figure out of a novel.

The male is traditionally vulnerable to the visual. The Siren who can concoct the right physical appearance will seduce in large numbers. For women the weakness is language and words: as was written by one of D’Annunzio’s victims, the French actress Simone, “How can one explain his conquests except by his extraordinary verbal power, and the musical timbre of his voice, put to the service of exceptional eloquence? For my sex is susceptible to words, bewitched by them, longing to be dominated by them.”

The Rake’s use of language is demonic because it is designed not to communicate or convey information but to persuade, flatter, stir emotional turmoil, much as the serpent in the Garden of Eden used words to lead Eve into temptation.

At first it may seem strange that a man who is clearly dishonest, disloyal, and has no interest in marriage would have any appeal to a woman. But throughout all of history, and in all cultures, this type has had a fatal effect. What the Rake offers is what society normally does not allow women: an affair of pure pleasure, an exciting brush with danger. A woman is often deeply oppressed by the role she is expected to play.

The great seducers do not offer the mild pleasures that society condones. They touch a person’s unconscious, those repressed desires that cry out for liberation.

Do not imagine that women are the tender creatures that some people would like them to be. Like men, they are deeply attracted to the forbidden, the dangerous, even the slightly evil. (Don Juan ends by going to hell, and the word “rake” comes from “rakehell,” a man who rakes the coals of hell; the devilish component, clearly, is an important part of the fantasy) Always remember: if you are to play the Rake, you must convey a sense of risk and darkness, suggesting to your victim that she is participating in something rare and thrilling—a chance to play out her own rakish desires.

Just as a man may fall victim to the Siren through his desire to be free of his sense of masculine responsibility, a woman may succumb to the Rake through her yearning to be free of the constraints of virtue and decency. Indeed it is often the most virtuous woman who falls most deeply in love with the Rake.

Casanova was perhaps the most successful seducer in history; few women could resist him. His method was simple: on meeting a woman, he would study her, go along with her moods, find out what was missing in her life, and provide it. He made himself the Ideal Lover.

Love brings to light a lover’s noble and hidden qualities—his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

For the man, the thrill, the fantasy, was to sleep with a woman who was sexual yet had the ideal qualities of a mother and the spirit and intellect of an artist.

The key to Talleyrand’s power was his ability to fathom Napoleon’s secret ideal: his desire to be an emperor, a dictator. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations like this, which stroke their vanity almost everyone’s weak spot. Hint at something for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand.

If Ideal Lovers are masters at seducing people by appealing to their higher selves, to something lost from their childhood, politicians can benefit by applying this skill on a mass scale, to an entire electorate.

Politicians can gain seductive power by digging into a country’s past, bringing images and ideals that have been abandoned or repressed back to the surface. They only need the symbol; they do not really have to worry about re-creating the reality behind it. The good feelings they stir up are enough to ensure a positive response. Symbol: The Portrait Painter. Under his eye, all of your physical imperfections disappear. He brings out noble qualities in you,, frames you in a myth, makes you godlike, immortalizes you. For his ability to create such fantasies, he is rewarded with great power.

Seduction was and will always remain the female form of power and warfare. It was originally the antidote to rape and violence. The man who uses this form of power on a woman is in essence turning the game around, employing feminine weapons against her; without losing his masculine identity, the more subtly feminine he becomes the more effective the seduction.

The excitement stemmed from her ability to stir up repressed desires.

A man’s apparent independence, his capacity for detachment, often seems to give him the upper hand in the dynamic between men and women.

Follow the path of the Masculine Dandy, however, and you neutralize all a man’s powers. Never give completely of yourself; while you are passionate and sexual, always retain an air of independence and self-possession. You might move on to the next man, or so he will think. You have other, more important matters to concern yourself with, such as your work. Men do not know how to fight women who use their own weapons against them; they are intrigued, aroused, and disarmed.

Society is in a state of constant flux, but there is something that does not change: the vast majority of people conform to whatever is normal for the time. They play the role allotted to them. Conformity is a constant because humans are social creatures who are always imitating one another.

Since most of us are secretly oppressed by our lack of freedom, we are drawn to those who are more fluid and flaunt their difference.

“Dandies please women by displeasing them.”

Dandies may never try to please, but in this one area they have a pleasing effect: by adopting psychological traits of the opposite sex, they appeal to our inherent narcissism.

Do not be misled by the surface disapproval your Dandy pose may elicit. Society may publicize its distrust of androgyny (in Christian theology, Satan is often represented as androgynous), but this conceals its fascination; what is most seductive is often what is most repressed. Learn a playful dandyism and you will become the magnet for people’s dark, unrealized yearnings.

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous.

bohemians, etc. In the work world, you will

Children are not as guileless as we like to imagine. They suffer from feelings of helplessness, and sense early on the power of their natural charm to remedy their weakness in the adult world. They learn to play a game: if their natural innocence can persuade a parent to yield to their desires in one instance, then it is something they can use strategically in another instance, laying it on thick at the right moment to get their way.

Defensiveness is deadly in seduction; act defensive and you’ll bring out defensiveness in other people.

The greatest seducers, those who seduce mass audiences, nations, the world, have a way of playing on people’s unconscious, making them react in a way they can neither understand nor control.

In the early twentieth century, the world was radically and rapidly changing. People were working longer and longer hours at increasingly mechanical jobs; life was becoming steadily more inhuman and heartless, as the ravages of World War I made clear. Caught in the midst of revolutionary change, people yearned for a lost childhood that they imagined as a golden paradise.

Genji takes nothing seriously or personally, and at the age of forty, an age at which most men of the eleventh century were already looking old and worn, he still seems like a boy. His seductive powers never leave him. Human beings are immensely suggestible; their moods will easily spread to the people around them.

If in a key moment you seem indecisive or self-conscious, the other person will sense that you are thinking of yourself, instead of being overwhelmed by his or her charms. The spell will be broken. As an undefensive lover, though, you produce the opposite effect: your victim might be hesitant or worried, but confronted with someone so sure and natural, he or she will be caught up in the mood.

Often people’s resistance is a way of testing you, and if you show any awkwardness or hesitation, you not only will fail the test, but you will risk infecting them with your doubts.

Coquettes know how to please; not how to love, which is why men love them so much. —PIERRE MARIVAUX

revelries. He had made a name for himself as a bright, audacious general who had helped quell rebellion in the provinces, but his ambition was boundless and he burned with desire for new conquests. So when, in October of that year, the infamous thirty-three-year-old widow Josephine de Beauharnais visited his offices, he couldn’t help but be confused. Josephine was so exotic, and everything about her was languorous

An absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. —MARCEL PROUST

People are inherently perverse. An easy conquest has a lower value than a difficult one; we are only really excited by what is denied us, by what we cannot possess in full. Your greatest power in seduction is your ability to turn away, to make others come after you, delaying their satisfaction

[Narcissistic] women have the greatest fascination for men.... The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-sufficiency and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats.... It is as if we envied them their power of retaining a blissful state of mind—an unassailable libido-position which we ourselves have since abandoned. —SIGMUND FREUD

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away. Too much attention can be interesting for a while, but it soon grows cloying and finally becomes claustrophobic and frightening. It signals weakness and neediness, an unseductive combination.

How often we make this mistake, thinking our persistent presence will reassure.

A bout of distance engages the emotions further; instead of making us angry, it makes us insecure. Perhaps they don’t really like us, perhaps we have lost their interest. Once our vanity is at stake, we succumb to the Coquette just to prove we are still desirable.

The less you seem to need other people, the more likely others will be drawn to you.

Coquetry depends on developing a pattern to keep the other person off balance. The strategy is extremely effective. Experiencing a pleasure once, we yearn to repeat it; so the Coquette gives us pleasure, then withdraws it.

Birds are taken with pipes that imitate their own voices, and men with those sayings that are most agreeable to their own opinions. —SAMUEL BUTLER

To be a Charmer you have to learn to listen and observe. Let your targets talk, revealing themselves in the process. As you find out more about them—their strengths, and more important their weaknesses—you can individualize your attention, appealing to their specific desires and needs, tailoring your flatteries to their insecurities.

Be a source of pleasure. No one wants to hear about your problems and troubles. Listen to your targets’ complaints, but more important, distract them from their problems by giving them pleasure. (Do this often enough and they will fall under your spell.)

Being lighthearted and fun is always more charming than being serious and critical.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. —ALBERT CAMUS

Disraeli knew how deceptive appearances can be: people were always judging him by his face and by his clothes, and he had learned never to do the same to them. So he was not deceived by Queen Victoria’s dour, sober exterior. Beneath it, he sensed, was a woman who yearned for a man to appeal to her feminine side, a woman who was affectionate, warm, even sexual. The extent to which this side of Victoria had been repressed merely revealed the strength of the feelings he would stir once he melted her reserve.

Uninhibitedness. Most people are repressed, and have little access to their unconscious—a problem that creates opportunities for the Charismatic, who can become a kind of screen on which others project their secret fantasies and longings.

Her visions were intense; she could describe them in such detail that they had to be real. Details have that effect: they lend a sense of reality to even the most preposterous statements.

The fantasies you bring to the surface do not have to be sexual—any social taboo, anything repressed and yearning for an outlet, will suffice. Make this felt in your recordings, your artwork, your books. Social pressure keeps people so repressed that they will be attracted to your charisma before they have even met you in person.

Charisma is not a mysterious quality that inhabits you outside your control; it is an illusion in the eyes of those who see you as having what they lack.

People are naturally drawn to those who emit happiness; maybe they can catch it from you. The less obvious you are, the better: let people conclude that you are happy, rather than hearing it from you. Let them see it in your unhurried manner, your gentle smile, your ease and comfort. Keep your words vague, letting people imagine what they will. Remember: being aloof and distant only stimulates the effect. People will fight for the slightest sign of your interest. A guru is content and detached—a deadly Charismatic combination.

Most of us live in a semi-somnambulistic state: we do our daily tasks and the days fly by. The two exceptions to this are childhood and those moments when we are in love. In both cases, our emotions are more engaged, more open and active. And we equate feeling emotional with feeling more alive. A public figure who can affect people’s emotions, who can make them feel communal sadness, joy, or hope, has a similar effect. An appeal to the emotions is far more powerful than an appeal to reason.

You feel something more deeply than others, and no emotion is more powerful and more capable of creating a charismatic reaction than hatred, particularly if it comes from deep-rooted feelings of oppression. Express what others are afraid to express and they will see great power in you. Say what they want to say but cannot. Never be afraid of going too far. If you represent a release from oppression, you have the leeway to go still farther.

The only thing that cannot be faked is self-confidence, the key component to charisma since the days of Moses. Should the camera lights betray your insecurity, all the tricks in the world will not put your charisma back together again.

Your opponent, similarly, should be framed not merely as an enemy for reasons of ideology or competition but as a villain, a demon. People are hopelessly susceptible to myth, so make yourself the hero of a great drama. And keep your distance—let people identify with you without being able to touch you. They can only watch and dream.

The savage worships idols of wood and stone; the civilized man, idols of flesh and blood. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Seduction is a form of persuasion that seeks to bypass consciousness, stirring the unconscious mind instead. The reason for this is simple: we are so surrounded by stimuli that compete for our attention, bombarding us with obvious messages, and by people who are overtly political and manipulative, that we are rarely charmed or deceived by them. We have grown increasingly cynical. Try to persuade a person by appealing to their consciousness, by saying outright what you want, by showing all your cards, and what hope do you have? You are just one more irritation to be tuned out.

Dreams obsess us because they mix the real and the unreal. They are filled with real characters, and often deal with real situations, yet they are delightfully irrational, pushing realities to the extremes of delirium. If everything in a dream were realistic, it would have no power over us; if everything were unreal, we would feel less involved in its pleasures and fears. Its fusion of the two is what makes it haunting. This is what Freud called the “uncanny”: something that seems simultaneously strange and familiar

A piece of stone carved into the shape of a god, perhaps glittering with gold and jewels. The eyes of the worshippers fill the stone with life, imagining it to have real powers. Its shape allows them to see what they want to see—a god—but it is actually just a piece of stone. The god lives in their imaginations.

perfidies; she should rack her brains

gallantry. The chevalier and Matta

valiant and bold under arms, so

You will not seduce anyone by simply depending on your engaging personality, or by occasionally doing something noble or alluring. Seduction is a process that occurs over time—the longer you take and the slower you go, the deeper you will penetrate into the mind of your victim. It is an art that requires patience, focus, and strategic thinking.

The perfect victim is the person who stirs you in a way that cannot be explained in words, whose effect on you has nothing to do with superficialities. He or she often has a quality that you yourself lack, and may even secretly envy—the Présidente, for example, has an innocence that Valmont long ago lost or never had.

It is a stroke of good fortune to find one who is worth seducing. . .. Most people rush ahead, become engaged or do other stupid things, and in a turn of the hand everything is over, and they know neither what they have won nor what they have lost. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Ninon de l’Enclos, the seventeenth-century courtesan and strategist of seduction, believed that disguising one’s intentions was not only a necessity, it added to the pleasure of the game. A man should never declare his feelings, she felt, particularly early on. It is irritating and provokes mistrust. “A woman is much better persuaded that she is loved by what she guesses than by what she is told,” Ninon once remarked.

The money was good and Wilde accepted. On his arrival in New York, a customs man asked him whether he had anything to declare: “I have nothing to declare,” he replied, “except my genius.”

They are both enticing and elusive, and people spend lifetimes chasing after such men, trying to shatter their unattainability. (The power of apparently unattainable people is devilishly seductive; we want to be the one to break them down.)

Adults, when they are hungry, are just like children in that they seek out the foods that others take. In their love affairs, they seek out the man or woman whom others find attractive and abandon those who are not sought after. When we say of a man or woman that he or she is desirable, what we really mean is that others desire them.

Our desire for another person almost always involves social considerations: we are attracted to those who are attractive to other people. We want to possess them and steal them away. You can believe all the sentimental nonsense you want to about desire, but in the end, much of it has to do with vanity and greed.

covet. Desire is both imitative (we like what others

Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have).

As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry pervades human desire, repeating throughout our lives. Make people compete for your attention, make them see you as sought after by everyone else. The aura of desirability will envelop you.

We can endure feeling that another person has more talent, or more money, but the sense that a rival is more desirable than we are—that is unbearable.

No one can fall in love if he is even partially satisfied with what he has or who he is. The experience of falling in love originates in an extreme depression, an inability to find something that has value in everyday life. The “symptom” of the predisposition to fall in love is not the conscious desire to do so, the intense desire to enrich our lives; it is the profound sense of being worthless and of having nothing that is valuable and the shame of not having it. . . . For this reason, falling in love occurs more frequently among young people, since they are profoundly uncertain, unsure of their worth, and often ashamed of themselves. The same thing applies to people of other ages when they lose something in their lives—when their youth ends or when they start to grow old. —FRANCESCO ALBERONI, FALLINGIN LOVE, TRANSLATED BY LAWRENCE VENUTI

Anxiety, a feeling of lack and need, is the precursor of all desire.

As the god of love, he knows that love cannot be induced in another person unless they too feel need. And that is what his arrows do: piercing people’s flesh, they make them feel a lack, an ache, a hunger. This is the essence of your task as a seducer. Like Eros, you must create a wound in your victim, aiming at their soft spot, the chink in their self-esteem. If they are stuck in a rut, make them feel it more deeply, “innocently” bringing it up and talking about it.

Make the masses uncertain about their identity and you can help define it for them. It is as true of groups or nations as it is of individuals: they cannot be seduced without being made to feel some lack. Part of John F. Kennedy’s election strategy in 1960 was to make Americans unhappy about the 1950s, and how far the country had strayed from its ideals.

What distinguishes a suggestion from other kinds of psychical influence, such as a command or the giving of a piece of information or instruction, is that in the case of a suggestion an idea is aroused in another person’s brain which is not examined in regard to its origin but is accepted just as though it had arisen spontaneously in that brain. —SIGMUND FREUD

to sow a seductive idea you must engage people’s imaginations, their fantasies, their deepest yearnings. What sets the wheels spinning is suggesting things that people already want to hear—the possibility of pleasure, wealth, health, adventure. In the end, these good things turn out to be precisely what you seem to offer them. They will come to you as if on their own, unaware that you insinuated the idea in their heads.

Glances are the heavy artillery of the flirt: everything can be conveyed in a look, yet that look can always be denied, for it cannot be quoted word for word.

Slips of the tongue, apparently inadvertent “sleep on it” comments, alluring references, statements for which you quickly apologize—all of these have immense insinuating power.

Finally, the reason insinuation works so well is not just that it bypasses people’s natural resistance. It is also the language of pleasure. There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want. We yearn for something enigmatic, for something to feed our fantasies

Of all the seductive tactics, entering someone’s spirit is perhaps the most devilish of all. It gives your victims the feeling that they are seducing you. The fact that you are indulging them, imitating them, entering their spirit, suggests that you are under their spell. You are not a dangerous seducer to be wary of, but someone compliant and unthreatening. The attention you pay to them is intoxicating—since you are mirroring them, everything they see and hear from you reflects their own ego and tastes. What a boost to their vanity. All this sets up the seduction, the series of maneuvers that will turn the dynamic around. Once their defenses are down, they are open to your subtle influence. Soon you will begin to take over the dance, and without even noticing the shift, they will find themselves entering your spirit. This is the endgame.

People truly love themselves, but what they love most of all is to see their ideas and tastes reflected in another person.

The masculine in a woman is as soothing to men as the feminine in a man is to women.

By seeming to mirror someone’s spiritual values you can seem to establish a deep-rooted harmony between the two of you, which can then be transferred to the physical plane.

Chateaubriand would reawaken the fantasy they had had as young girls of being swept off their feet, of fulfilling romantic ideals. This form of entering another’s spirit is perhaps the most effective kind, because it makes people feel better about themselves. In your presence, they live the life of the person they had wanted to be—a great lover, a romantic hero, whatever it is. Discover those crushed ideals and mirror them, bringing them back to life by reflecting them back to your target. Few can resist such a lure.

Lure the target deep into your seduction by creating the proper temptation: a glimpse of the pleasures to come. As the serpent tempted Eve with the promise of forbidden knowledge, you must awaken a desire in your targets that they cannot control. Find that weakness of theirs, that fantasy that has yet to be realized, and hint that you can lead them toward it.

She knew that being unable to have her would make him want her more than ever. It was the only way to seduce a man like him.

What would tempt Don Juan into desiring Cristeta again, into pursuing her, was the sense that she was already taken, that she was forbidden fruit. That was his weakness—that was why he pursued virgins and married women, women he was not supposed to have.

Temptation is a twofold process. First you are coquettish, flirtatious; you stimulate a desire by promising pleasure and distraction from daily life. At the same time, you make it clear to your targets that they cannot have you, at least not right away.

And as with Don Juan and Cristeta, the more you make your targets pursue you, the more they imagine that it is they who are the aggressors. Your seduction is perfectly disguised

As a seducer, you can never mistake people’s appearance for reality. You know that their fight to keep order in their lives is exhausting, and that they are gnawed by doubts and regrets.

What people want is not temptation; temptation happens every day. What people want is to give into temptation, to yield. That is the only way to get rid of the tension in their lives. It costs much more to resist temptation than to surrender.

A child is usually a willful, stubborn creature who will deliberately do the opposite of what we ask. But there is one scenario in which children will happily give up their usual willfulness: when they are promised a surprise.

You will know that your letters are having the proper effect when your targets come to mirror your thoughts, repeating words you wrote, whether in their own letters or in person. This is the time to move to the more physical and erotic. Use language that quivers with sexual connotation, or, better still, suggest sexuality by making your letters shorter, more frequent, and even more disordered than before. There is nothing more erotic than the short abrupt note. Your thoughts are unfinished; they can only be completed by the other person.

The key to seductive language is not the words you utter, or your seductive tone of voice; it is a radical shift in perspective and habit. You have to stop saying the first thing that comes to your mind—you have to control the urge to prattle and vent your opinions. The key is to see words as a tool not for communicating true thoughts and feelings but for confusing, delighting, and intoxicating.

The difference between normal language and seductive language is like the difference between noise and music.

If they have many problems, you can produce the same effect by distracting them, focusing their attention away from themselves by saying things that are witty and entertaining, or that make the future seem bright and hopeful.

Promises and flattery are music to anyone’s ears. This is language designed to move people and lower their resistance. It is language designed for them, not directed at them.

His flattery was aimed precisely at a woman’s weaknesses, the areas where she needed validation. A woman was beautiful, yet lacked confidence in her own wit and intelligence? He made sure to say that he was bewitched not by her beauty but by her mind.

The more you make people focus on your sweet-sounding language, and on the illusions and fantasies it conjures, the more you diminish their contact with reality. You lead them into the clouds, where it is hard to distinguish truth from untruth, real from unreal.

Since time immemorial, women have known that within the most apparently self-possessed man is an animal whom they can lead by filling his senses with the proper physical lures.

What I need is a woman who is something, anything; either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something. —ALFRED DE MUSSET

Falling in love automatically tends toward madness. Left to itself, it goes to utter extremes. This is well known by the “conquistadors” of both sexes. Once a woman’s attention is fixed upon a man, it is very easy for him to dominate her thoughts completely. A simple game of blowing hot and cold, of solicitousness and disdain, of presence and absence is all that is required.

No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem. Besides, in a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be able to fantasize about a person you are involved with.

Should that person be deficient, or worst of all ordinary, then there is something deficient and ordinary about us. No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem. Besides, in a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be able to fantasize about a person you are involved with.

Soon after we fall under a person’s spell, we form an image in our minds of who they are and what pleasures they might offer. Thinking of them when we are alone, we tend to make this image more and more idealized.

if you are easily had, you cannot be worth that much. It is hard to wax poetic about a person who comes so cheaply. If, after the initial interest, you make it clear that you cannot be taken for granted, if you stir a bit of doubt, the target will imagine there is something special, lofty, and unattainable about you. Your image will crystallize in the other person’s mind.

The trick is to associate your image with something mythic, through the clothes you wear, the things you say, the places you go.

Any kind of heightened experience, artistic or spiritual, lingers in the mind much longer than normal experience. You must find a way to share such moments with your targets—a concert, a play, a spiritual encounter, whatever it takes—so that they associate something elevated with you. Shared moments of exuberance have immense seductive pull.

TV commercials appear foolish, clumsy, and ineffectual on purpose. They are made to appear this way at the conscious level in order to be consciously ridiculed and rejected.... Most ad men will confirm that over the years the seemingly worst commercials have sold the best. An effective TV commercial is purposefully designed to insult the viewer’s conscious intelligence, thereby penetrating his defenses. —WILSON BRYAN KEY, SUBLINHNAL SEDUCTION

Marilyn Monroe knew how to give the impression that she depended on a man’s strength to survive. In all of these instances, the women were the ones in control of the dynamic, boosting a man’s sense of masculinity in order to ultimately enslave him. To make this most effective, a woman should seem both in need of protection and sexually excitable, giving the man his ultimate fantasy.

To compensate for the difficulties in their lives, people spend a lot of their time daydreaming, imagining a future full of adventure, success, and romance. If you can create the illusion that through you they can live out their dreams, you will have them at your mercy.

serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite,

No one can resist the pull of a secret desire that has come to life before their eyes. You must first choose targets who have some repression or dream unrealized—always the most likely victims of a seduction.

Dozens of men fell in love with her, for she embodied an image from their childhood, an image of beauty and perfection. The key to this fantasy creation was some shared cultural association—mythology, historical seductresses like Cleopatra. Every culture has a pool of such figures from the distant and not-so-distant past. You hint at a similarity, in spirit and in appearance—but you are flesh and blood. What could be more thrilling than the sense of being in the presence of some fantasy figure going back to your earliest memories?

As we get older and society fixes a role on us, a part of us yearns for the playful approach we once had, the masks we were able to wear. We still want to play that game, to act a different role in life. Indulge your targets in this wish by first making it clear that you are playing a role, then inviting them to join you in a shared fantasy.

Everyone has lost something in life, has felt the pangs of disappointment. The idea that we can get something back, that a mistake can be righted, is immensely seductive. Under the impression that the queen was prepared to forgive some mistake he had made, Rohan hallucinated all kinds of things—nods that did not exist, letters that were the flimsiest of forgeries, a prostitute who became Marie Antoinette. The mind is infinitely vulnerable to suggestion, and even more so when strong desires are involved. And nothing is stronger than the desire to change the past, right a wrong, satisfy a disappointment. Find these desires in your victims and creating a believable fantasy will be simple for you: few have the power to see through an illusion they desperately want to believe in.

fatuous king; / And in the dance

Remember—people secretly yearn to be led astray by someone who knows where they are going. It can be a pleasure to let go, and even to feel isolated and weak, if the seduction is done slowly and gracefully.

The people around you may seem strong, and more or less in control of their lives, but that is merely a facade. Underneath, people are more brittle than they let on. What lets them seem strong is the series of nests and safety nets they envelop themselves in—their friends, their families, their daily routines, which give them a feeling of continuity, safety, and control. Suddenly pull the rug out from under them, drop them alone into some foreign place where the familiar signposts are gone or scrambled, and you will see a very different person.

A target who is strong and settled is hard to seduce. But even the strongest people can be made vulnerable if you can isolate them from their nests and safety nets. Block out their friends and family with your constant presence, alienate them from the world they are used to, and take them to places they do not know Get them to spend time in your environment. Deliberately disturb their habits, get them to do things they have never done. They will grow emotional, making it easier to lead them astray.

In seduction, as in warfare, the isolated target is weak and vulnerable.

Insinuate that they are jealous of your target’s good fortune in finding you, or that they are parental figures who have lost a taste for adventure. The latter argument is extremely effective with young people, whose identities are in flux and who are more than ready to rebel against any authority figure, particularly their parents

only resists this line of reasoning, she abhors

Our past attachments are a barrier to the present.

But if you take them to a place alluring enough to distract them, you will prevent them from focusing on anything banal in your character. Cleopatra lured Julius Caesar into taking a voyage down the Nile. Moving deeper into Egypt, he was further isolated from Rome, and Cleopatra was all the more seductive.

When new adherents joined Mahatma Gandhi’s circle of devoted followers, they were encouraged to cut off their ties with the past—with their family and friends. This kind of renunciation has been a requirement of many religious sects over the centuries

The early-twentieth-century lesbian seductress Natalie Barney had an on-again-off-again affair with the poet Renée Vivien; to regain her affections, she took Renée on a trip to the island of Lesbos, a place Natalie had visited many times. In doing so she not only isolated Renée but disarmed and distracted her with the associations of the place, the home of the legendary lesbian poet Sappho. Vivien even began to imagine that Natalie was Sappho herself. Do not take the target just anywhere; pick the place that will have the most effective associations. The seductive power of isolation goes beyond the sexual realm. When new adherents joined Mahatma Gandhi’s circle of devoted followers, they were encouraged to cut off their ties with the past—with their family and friends. This kind of renunciation has been a requirement of many religious sects over the centuries. People who isolate themselves in this way are much more vulnerable to influence and persuasion.

When new adherents joined Mahatma Gandhi’s circle of devoted followers, they were encouraged to cut off their ties with the past—with their family and friends. This kind of renunciation has been a requirement of many religious sects over the centuries. People who isolate themselves in this way are much more vulnerable to influence and persuasion.

at some point in the seduction there must be a hint of danger in the mix. Your targets should feel that they are gaining a great adventure in following you, but are also losing something—a part of their past, their cherished comfort, Actively encourage these ambivalent feelings. An element of fear is the proper spice; although too much fear is debilitating, in small doses it makes us feel alive.

Everyone has scars, repressed desires, and unfinished business from childhood. Bring these desires and wounds to the surface, make your victims feel they are getting what they never got as a child and you will penetrate deep into their psyche, stir uncontrollable emotions

A fruit picked from one’s own orchard ought to taste sweeter than one obtained from a stranger’s tree, and what has been attained by greater effort is cherished more dearly than what is gained with little trouble.

Resistance is emotional, and can be transformed into its opposite, much as, in jujitsu, the physical resistance of an opponent can be used to make him fall.

If people resist you because they don’t trust you, an apparently selfless deed, showing how far you are willing to go to prove yourself, is a powerful remedy. If they resist because they are virtuous, or because they are loyal to someone else, all the better—virtue and repressed desire are easily overcome by action. As the great seductress Natalie Barney once wrote, “Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”

The hallmarks of a true lover and of a perfect knight were almost identical.

One incontrovertible demonstration of how far you are willing to go will overwhelm all doubts. It will also defeat your rivals, since most people are timid, worried about making fools of themselves, and so rarely risk anything.

If you are lighthearted and playful, if you make the target laugh, proving yourself and amusing them at the same time, it won’t matter if you mess up, or if they see you have employed a little trickery. They will give in to the pleasant mood you have created.

Although the days of the troubadour are long gone, the pattern remains: a man actually loves to be able to prove himself, to be challenged, to compete, to undergo tests and trials and emerge victorious. He has a masochistic streak; a part of him loves pain. And strangely enough, the more a woman asks for, the worthier she seems. A woman who is easy to get cannot be worth much.

People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest childhood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. Bring your targets back to that point by placing yourself in the oedipal triangle and positioning them as the needy child. Unaware of the cause of their emotional response, they will fall in love with you. Alternatively, you too can regress, letting them play the role of the protecting, nursing parent. In either case you are offering the ultimate fantasy: the chance to have an intimate relationship with mommy or daddy, son or daughter.

There is a verb for this in Japanese: amaeru, translated in the dictionary as “to presume upon another’s love; to play the baby.” According to the psychiatrist Doi Takeo this is the main key to understanding the Japanese personality. It goes on in adult life too: juniors do it to seniors in companies, or any other group, women do it to men, men do it to their mothers, and sometimes wives.

Give people a sensation similar to that protected, dependent feeling of childhood and they will project all kinds of fantasies onto you, including feelings of love or sexual attraction that they will attribute to something else. We won’t admit it, but we long to regress, to shed our adult exterior and vent the childish emotions that linger beneath the surface.

I have stressed the fact that the beloved person is a substitute for the ideal ego. Two people who love each other are interchanging their ego-ideals. That they love each other means they love the ideal of themselves in the other one. There would be no love on earth if this phantom were not there. We fall in love because we cannot attain the image that is our better self and the best of our self. From this concept it is obvious that love itself is only possible on a certain cultural level or after a certain phase in the development of the personality has been reached. The creation of an ego-ideal itself marks human progress. When people are entirely satisfied with their actual selves, love is impassible. · The transfer of the ego-ideal to a person is the most characteristic trait of love. —THEODOR REIK, OF LOVE AND LUST

To accomplish this it may be helpful to imagine or visualize them as the children they once were; suddenly, powerful people do not seem so powerful and threatening when you regress them in your imagination.

The key to this kind of regression is to see and treat your targets as children. Nothing about them intimidates you, no matter how much authority or social standing they have. Your manner makes it clear that you feel you are the stronger party. To accomplish this it may be helpful to imagine or visualize them as the children they once were; suddenly, powerful people do not seem so powerful and threatening when you regress them in your imagination.

Get your targets to open up about their past, particularly their former loves and most particularly their first love. Pay attention to any expressions of disappointment, how this or that person did not give them what they wanted. Take them to places that evoke their youth. In this regression you are creating not so much a relationship of dependency and immaturity but rather the adolescent spirit of a first love.

Seduction means realizing certain fantasies. Being a mature and responsible adult is not a fantasy, it is a duty.

There are always social limits on what one can do. Some of these, the most elemental taboos, go back centuries; others are more superficial, simply defining polite and acceptable behavior. Making your targets feel that you are leading them past either kind of limit is immensely seductive. People yearn to explore their dark side.

and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love. This is true both of individuals and of nations. In times during which no obstacles to sexual satisfaction existed, such as, maybe, during the decline of the civilizations of antiquity, love became worthless, life became empty, and strong reaction-formations were necessary before the indispensable emotional value of love could be recovered.

It is easy to show that the value the mind sets on erotic needs instantly sinks as soon as satisfaction becomes readily obtainable.

Women of Byron’s time were longing to play a different role than society allowed them. They were supposed to be the decent, moralizing force in culture; only men had outlets for their darker impulses. Underlying the social restrictions on women, perhaps, was a fear of the more amoral and unbridled part of the female psyche.

Mauclair hears the call of the Devil in this dark passion poetized by Baudelaire. “The prostitute represents the unconscious which enables us to put aside our responsibilities. ”

Since what is forbidden is desired, somehow you must make yourself seem forbidden. The most blatant way to do this is to engage in behavior that gives you a dark and forbidden aura.

Once your targets are drawn by the lure of the forbidden, dare them to match you in transgressive behavior. Any kind of challenge is seductive. Take it slowly, heightening the challenge only after they show signs of yielding to you.

In Renaissance Italy, a prostitute would dress as a lady and go to church. Nothing was more exciting to a man than to exchange glances with a woman whom he knew to be a whore as he was surrounded by his wife, family, peers, and church officials.

Every religion or value system creates a dark side, the shadow realm of everything it prohibits. Tease your targets, get them to flirt with whatever transgresses their family values, which are often emotional yet superficial, since they are imposed from the outside.

The courtesan Lola Montez was known to turn to violence, using a whip now and then, and Lou Andreas-Salomé could be exceptionally cruel to her men, playing coquettish games, turning alternately icy and demanding. Her cruelty only kept her targets coming back for more. A masochistic involvement can represent a great transgressive release.

In seduction, there is absolutely no power in respecting boundaries and limits.

A seducer who focuses too much attention on the physical will stir up self-consciousness, and a residue of disgust. So focus attention on something else. Invite the other person to worship something beautiful in the world. It could be nature, a work of art, even God (or gods—paganism never goes out of fashion); people are dying to believe in something. Add some rituals. If you can make yourself seem to resemble the thing you are worshiping—you are natural, aesthetic, noble, and sublime—your targets will transfer their worship to you.

The idea that we are an infinitesimal part of a vast and indifferent universe is terrifying; religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not animals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent reason, but creatures made in the image of a supreme being.

In a world where too much is controlled and manufactured, the sense that fate, necessity, or some higher power is guiding your relationship is doubly seductive.

If you can make the endgame of your seduction appear as a spiritual experience, you will heighten the physical pleasure and create a seduction with a deep and lasting effect.

This was just what many young women wanted—a temporary diversion from marriage or an oppressive family. Sometimes pleasure is best when we know it is fleeting.

Your seduction should never follow a simple course upward toward pleasure and harmony. The climax will come too soon, and the pleasure will be weak. What makes us intensely appreciate something is previous suffering. A brush with death makes us fall in love with life; a long journey makes a return home that much more pleasurable.

By being harsh you create inner tensions—your targets may be upset with you, but they are also asking themselves questions. What have they done to earn your dislike? When you then are kind, they feel relieved, but also concerned that at any moment they might somehow displease you again.

In the world today, we often feel starved for experience. We crave emotion, even if it is negative. The pain you cause your targets, then, is bracing—it makes them feel more alive.

many of us have masochistic yearnings without realizing it. It takes someone to inflict some pain on us for these deeply repressed desires to come to the surface.

If your targets become too used to you as the aggressor, they will give less of their own energy, and the tension will slacken. You need to wake them up, turn the tables. Once they are under your spell, take a step back and they will start to come after you. Begin with a touch of aloofness, an unexpected nonappearance, a hint that you are growing bored. Stir the pot by seeming interested in someone else. Make none of this explicit; let them only sense it and their imagination will do the rest, creating the doubt you desire. Soon they will want to possess you physically, and restraint will go out the window. The goal is to have them fall into your arms of their own will. Create the illusion that the seducer is being seduced.

But I shall let it remain a secret for ever, since it should not be written of: the most delightful and choicest pleasure is that which is hinted at, but never told. —CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, ARTHURIAN ROMANCES, TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM W. KIBLER

But then, almost invariably, something would come up—she would have to leave town for a while, or would be too busy to see him. It was during her absences that men fell hopelessly in love with her, and vowed to be more aggressive next time they were with her.

The Russian seductress Lou Andreas-Salomé had an intense presence; when a man was with her, he felt her eyes boring into him, and often became entranced with her coquettish ways and spirit. But then, almost invariably, something would come up—she would have to leave town for a while, or would be too busy to see him. It was during her absences that men fell hopelessly in love with her, and vowed to be more aggressive next time they were with her.

You are insinuating not a blatant brush-off but a slight doubt: perhaps you could have found some reason to stay, perhaps you are losing interest, perhaps there is someone else. In your absence, their appreciation of you will grow. They will forget your faults, forgive your sins. The moment you return, they will chase after you as you desire. It will be as if you had come back from the dead.

You are teaching the other person to become a seducer, just as the mother in her own way taught the child to return her love by turning her back.

The greatest obstacle to the physical part of the seduction is the target’s education, the degree to which he or she has been civilized and socialized. Such education conspires to constrain the body, dull the senses, fill the mind with doubts and worries. Flynn had the ability to return a woman to a more natural state, in which desire, pleasure, and sex had nothing negative attached to them.

When the time comes to make the seduction physical, train yourself to let go of your own inhibitions, your doubts, your lingering feelings of guilt and anxiety. Your confidence and ease will have more power to intoxicate the victim than all the alcohol you could apply.

Exhibit a lightness of spirit—nothing bothers you, nothing daunts you, you take nothing personally. You are inviting your targets to shed the burdens of civilization, to follow your lead and drift. Do not talk of work, duty, marriage, the past or future. Plenty of other people will do that. Instead, offer the rare thrill of losing oneself in the moment, where the senses come alive and the mind is left behind.

A hypnotist asks the patient to focus on a watch swinging back and forth. Once the patient focuses, the mind relaxes, the senses awaken, the body becomes prone to all kinds of novel sensations and suggestions. As a seducer, you are a hypnotist, and what you are making the target focus on is you.

Remember: it all starts with you. Be undistracted, present in the moment, and the target will follow suit. The intense gaze of the hypnotist creates a similar reaction in the patient.

The key is to make the look short and to the point, then look away, like a rapier glancing the flesh. Make your eyes reveal desire, and keep the rest of the face still. (A smile will spoil the effect.)

convulsive; she begged him to help her, to leave the

An overt imbalance of power, an overt desire for power, will stir envy and resentment; we learn to be kind and polite, at least on the surface. Even those who have power generally try to act humble and modest—they do not want to offend. In seduction, on the other hand, you can throw all of that out, revel in your dark side, inflict a little pain—in some ways be more yourself. Your naturalness in this respect will prove seductive in itself. The problem is that after years of living in the real world, we lose the ability to be ourselves. We become timid, humble, overpolite. Your task is to regain some of your childhood qualities, to root out all this false humility. And the most important quality to recapture is boldness.

You need to be able to play the humble saint at times; it is a mask you wear. But in seduction, take it off. Boldness is bracing, erotic, and absolutely necessary to bring the seduction to its conclusion.

This is an arena not for politics but for pleasure. It can be by the man or woman, but a bold move is required. If you are so concerned about the other person, console yourself with the thought that the pleasure of the one who surrenders is often greater than that of the aggressor.

The woman, indeed, becomes disgusted with the man if he is timid about his chances and throws them away. Boldness is the rule, for everything is to be gained, and nothing lost.

Maintain mystery. Familiarity is the death of seduction. If the target knows everything about you, the relationship gains a level of comfort but loses the elements of fantasy and anxiety. Without anxiety and a touch of fear, the erotic tension is dissolved.

Remember: comfort and security are the death of seduction. A shared journey with a little bit of hardship will do more to create a deep bond than will expensive gifts and luxuries. The young are right to not care about comfort in matters of love, and when you return to that sentiment, a youthful spark will reignite

Napoleon’s second seduction of France was not a classical seduction, following the usual steps, but a re-seduction. It was built on old emotions and revived an old love. Once you have seduced a person (or a nation) there is almost always a lull, a slight letdown, which sometimes leads to a separation; it is surprisingly easy, though, to re-seduce the same target. The old feelings never go away, they lie dormant, and in a flash you can take your target by surprise.

From here it is but a small step to physical pleasure. Use whatever props are at hand—astrology books, angelic imagery, mystical-sounding music from some far-off culture.

Instead of trying to change people’s ideas, try to change their identity, their perception of reality, and you will have far more control of them in the long run. Tell them who they are, create an image, an identity that they will want to assume. Make them dissatisfied with their current status.

This strategy will infuriate your opponents, who will try to unmask you, reveal the truth behind the myth; but that will only make them seem smug, over serious, defensive, and snobbish. That now becomes part of their image, and it will help sink them.

It is important to give this manufactured event positive associations, as Bernays did in creating a feeling of rebellion, of women banding together. Associations that are patriotic, say, or subtly sexual, or spiritual—anything pleasant and seductive—take on a life of their own. Who can resist? People essentially persuade themselves to join the crowd without even realizing that a sale has taken place. The feeling of active participation is vital to seduction. No one wants to feel left out of a growing movement.

Don’t you know that the pictures are overriding your message because they conflict with your message? The public sees those pictures and they block your message. They didn’t even hear what you said. So, in our minds, it was a four-and-a-half-minute free ad for the Ronald Reagan campaign for reelection.”

Most of the men who worked on communications for Reagan had a background in marketing. They knew the importance of telling a story crisply, sharply, and with good visuals. Each morning they went over what the headline of the day should be, and how they could shape this into a short visual piece, getting the president into a video opportunity.

As one Reagan official said, “What are you going to believe, the facts or your eyes?”

Express confidence not through facts and figures but through colors and positive imagery, appealing to the infant in everyone.

It is not enough, however, to win people’s attention: you need to hold it long enough to hook them. This can always be done by sparking controversy, the way Harry liked to stir up debates about morals. While the media argues about the effect you are having on people’s values, it is broadcasting your name everywhere and inadvertently bestowing upon you the edge that will make you so attractive to the public.