Seduction and Women.

Intro

• Sin City: A Dame to Kill for. Film

The ultimate consequence of pure seduction, platonic, virulent seduction, is self destruction.

Most women lack of the ability for de-structuring seduction. It involves the logical tooling of the brain by the pure forces of the heart and the will. At the peak of seduction, most women burn out, unable to reach the pure state of love. Love requires moral resilience against our attachment to our ego and its Lilliputian hedonistic pursuits. Morality is not a dogma against desire, but a prescription to manage its growth.

Women are biologically and spiritually designed for both, love and seduction, but in women they don’t serve each others like a mean to an end. Women seduce because they love, but love has not agency over seduction even when love inspires them to seduce. Love is the spark not the fuel and for the fuel to set anything in motion the spark needs to keep igniting repeatedly without fire nor internal combustion. Love wants motion, seduction wants fire.

Love is the enemy of seduction only when seduction goes into overdrive in women heads as they put their heart to the service of hijacking the logical functions of men’s minds.

Men don’t have much the ability of seducers as that of seducee, but they can always buy their way into it.

Poor is the woman that let power and money reduce her to a mere object.

Why is seduction such a powerful allure for women even more than for men? She will forever remain untouched and indecipherable even while she surrenders to men as an object of pure desire. This untouchability is either her pure message of love or her total derailment into wickedness.

Women have not mystery. Their true enigma is exposed as their bodies, their hearts and their souls are in the open for all of us to embrace and still wonder if they are just our mere invention.

In a wicked moral truce of the sexes she will measure a man’s worth not based on the strong moral values she has to respect men, but on the weak moral values she made them be possessed by as they disrespect themselves, submit to her whims and fall victims of her as an object of desire.

TAKE 1

• Pierre Klossowski — Roberte in the Evening and Diana at Her Bath.

If you are into eroticism and you thought that it can either be vanilla, hardcore or something in between, you are going to be disappointed with Klossowski.

Sexual desire in his narrative is in every step of its wanton incarnation a sexual desire of the mind. A mind, not just of the brain, but also a mind of the skin, of the gaze, of the limps and of the gestures of the body, which in their predatory nature are constantly anticipating and ejaculating the body relentless eagerness to break free from the anxiety and the pleasure that any unexpected intense excitement alway brings about.

Klossowski, with his law on hospitality, really pushed to paroxysm the most flamboyant level of ecstasy that an open monogamous relationship can ever reach.

- TAKE 2

• Jean Baudrillard — Seduction and Fatal Strategies.

If you have always thought of seduction as an art of deception mastered exclusively by sexual selfish predators (players), cheerfully shredding in the open every lover’s heart, you should think again.

If the first film that comes to your mind when you think of seduction as an intense visceral passion is Dangerous Liaisons, you should think again.

If the film 9½ Weeks made you think that seduction has the shape of Kim Basinger and the feminine is a monopoly of women, you should think again.

If Basic Instinct made you think that seduction truly manifests its worth in the irresistible allures of a femme fatale, you should think again.

If the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith made you think that seduction is expressed in choreographed conventional Sado-Masochist rituals in which women can match or even outrun men’s bravado, you should think again.

If you thought that in Fifty Shades of Grey seductive allure is the masturbatory unfulfilled fantasy of a middle age woman who travel back in time to embody a virgin in her twenties to be seduced by a sugar-coated macho soft-sided billionaire, you shouldn’t think twice.

If you think pick-up artists (PUA) like Neil Strauss, Julien Blanc, Kezia Noble, Dapper Laughs, Derek Cajun, Richard La Ruina or Marni Kinrys are everything you ever wanted to know about seduction, you should read Baudrillard’s Seduction. It is simultaneously an aesthetic, metaphysical and political take on seduction. The feminine has not gender even when it loves to dress up as a woman and nickname itself, the “feminine”.

TAKE 3

• Seducer’s Diary — Soren Kierkegaard.

What is really interesting in this novel and its aesthetic treatment of seduction is that the lead character Johannes, the seducer, is not only a sexual predator of lust and love, but he is fundamentally a prey to his own doings. That is precisely what pick up artists and dating coaches fail to understand about seduction.

Seducers always have an strong narcissistic side to them that often works against their underlying purposes. Since lust without love does not make seduction truly operative or workable for its targets, seducers really have to either sugar-coat their lust with love, use seduction in homeopathic dose under the principle that small doses of what makes you ill also cures you or let the imaginary love that lust creates spiral with certain intensity away from seducees, as seducers try cheerfully and decisively to bring back a little real love into their lust.

Funnily, this little real love was what Kierkegaard had problem giving away in his real life, but not precisely because he was a cold-hearted individual, but because he would rather give more of his love and lust to the free spirit of his imagination than to find in his beloved one the objectification of both, lust and love.

Seduction is a little bit of a tragedy, if not, of a drama for all seducer.

TAKE 4

• Marquis de Sade — Juliette.

Under certain medical/psychological context, the terms sadist is usually associated with a personality disorder. By contrast, the term sadomasochist, even when classified by the World Health Organisation as a disease, is more associated with sexual pleasure derived from inflicting and receiving pain or emotional abuse from others under mutual consent.

Both terms are linked in one way or another to Marquis de Sade, yet, in practice, sadists or sadomasochists rarely are aware of such connection, and more often than not they chose to ignore it. De Sade, meanwhile, has become today a seminal figure in France cultural circles. We see his influence on Flaubert, the Surrealist, Goya, Picasso, Pasolini, Angela Carter and Camille Paglia. His provençal châteaux is owned by Pierre Cardin and one of his mayor books, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been bought for 7 million euros.

You might wonder, why we do not ignore De Sade culturally, while we continue to actively ignore or, at least, distort the complexity of his legacy by using his name in prescribed terms like sadism and sadomasochism ?

Contrary to common beliefs, De Sade was not a hedonist in the strict sense of the word. He was as much a hedonist as he was a stoic. His philosophy suggested both, a reversed hedonism and a reversed stoicism, which in many ways came down to a relentless skepticism.

His characters, page after page reveal a constant exploit of pleasures to infinite exhaustion combined with an endless proactive search of boredom, but simultaneously a constant exploit of pain to infinite numbness.

Deep down De Sade wanted to free the spirit from the flesh under the very prerogatives of the flesh. That, in a way, made him a gnostic if not a sort of reversed buddhist monk possessed by a virulent spiritual obsession with dematerialising his flesh inside out.

However, the most peculiar trait of Sade’s philosophy is its treatment of women, and in particular, Juliette. She is not only celebrated for her endless orgasmic prowess and wit, but raised to a high level of spiritual emancipation unmatched by many of the men around her.

In fact, the female form and the dynamic of the feminine in Juliette tell us of an underlying spiritual energy in women which is unrivalled by men or rather it actively disregards gender altogether through the feminine.

TAKE 5

• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch — Venus in Furs.

With Masoch we have a different story to that of Marquis de Sade. Venus in Furs narrative is almost a mirror of Masoch’s personal life saga.

Additionally, we can’t possibly marry sadism and masochism into sadomasochism without distorting completely what Masoch stood for. The idea of welcoming humiliation and pain in Sade’s lead character, Juliette, is completely different to that of Masoch’s lead character, Severin.

Masoch’s idea of humiliation reached such an extreme that even the Mistress is meant to feel disgusted and degraded by investing time in degrading her slave.

Thus, further degradation is expected to be inflicted upon the slave as he is forced to beg for it as the Mistress ignores him. He might actually not even get it or deserve it.

In contrast, in Sade, humiliation and pain are honourable “rite of passages”, which the dominant lead character is willing to go through over and over again as a proof of strength and worth.

Then, sadomasochism is a perverted portmanteau word that really favour more Sade’s unruling spirit than Masoch’s moronic tale.

A tale that has to be moronic, precisely, to get across the ultimate humiliation: Masoch recognising himself as a moronic writer to his real life Mistress, Fanny Pistor, even when under his slave contract she agreed never to read his correspondence or his literary compositions.

My take on Sado-Masochism? To be submissive takes much more than begging. To be dominant starts with dominating oneself, and this, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman.

TAKE 6

• G. W. F. Hegel- Science of Logic.

If you think that Logic is what you think it is and you have never read Hegel, you might need to think more than twice to “digest” and “metabolise” Science of Logic.

When I talk about Hegel, or anyone who has gained a place in history and has influenced me great deal, I do not do it as if they came from a book to set the tone for an “intellectual” debate that would make me a “connoisseur” of their ideas.

I talk about them as if they were right beside me, as ordinary individuals who might deserve as much to be acknowledge as to be ignored, yet diligently respected.

I do not talk about writers because I am into reading, books or a particular subject for educated individuals.

Writers are to me like butchers, they cut emotions into bloody semi-dried words and into chunks of meaty meanings without ever delivering the whole animal alive, graciously and wildly free.

I would, however, make an exception with Hegel.

With Hegel, surprisingly, we are back to Marquis De Sade and Sacher-Masoch. Three worlds seemingly apart. The two last ones concerned with sex and fetishes, the first one with the pure reign of abstractions, which little by little, ink by ink and in a kind of delayed way show these abstraction as having full life and freedom of movements in the real world.

In my opinion, no one has expressed the Master-Slave or Lordship and Bondage dynamic outside sex and outside social relations as subtly and as thorough as Hegel.

De Sade remained at an incomplete extreme, which he never really fleshed out, the extreme of indifferent Lordship. Sacher-Masoch remained at the other incomplete extreme, which he neither really fleshed out, the extreme of indifferent Servitude.

The internalisation that Hegel does, even without he knowing, of the external and opposed worlds of Sade and Masoch into the dimension of consciousness is really remarkable.

If you want to be a Master or Slave in a sexual setting or in any other area of your life for that matter, you have to finally find the struggle with the oposite element inside you, not De Sade’s way or Masoch’s way, which capitalise overtly on one side of it by externalisation of the struggle, but by letting both free as you leverage slightly more on one side than on the other according to your own personal experience.

Being a full-fledged Master or Slave in a sexual or in any other context, is still practical and operational for the joy of life, but it would be just a fantasy even when it materialises for real through role playing.

The ultimate game is to find the internalised struggle of the Master-Slave inside you as a relevant part of you being internalised outside yourself in another or in many other human beings who shared through struggles such internalisation with you.

You find such patterns over and over again in Hegel’s Science of Logic. We are likely to find those patterns also when we share with a significant other as a “partner in crime”. The “crime” bit disguises the agreed kitsch honeyed violence at the heart of the romantic union.