B007Q6XJAO EBOK (6 page)

The more feminine the man . . . the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex.

—
“The Evolution of Homosexuality,”
The Economist

In the swinging sixties, Essex Junction, Vermont, was the “in” place—a hippie enclave full of pony-tailed hunks and braless lovelies in search of sexual liberation. In that department, one man got all the action. Women trooped miles to his house in the woods for sleepovers—as did men. Clay’s uncanny sexual magnetism was the talk of the communes. As frail and thin as the Little Match Girl, he had bad teeth, a Fu Manchu mustache, and a whispery alto voice. But he had a mantra: “Bi or Bye-Bye.” In that hive of counterculture machismo, Clay cast one of the oldest sexual spells in the book: androgyny.

Counterintuitive as it seems, gender ambiguity is immensely seductive. In theory, the Darwinian he-man ought to get the valentines, but oddly enough, a man in touch with his inner femininity frequently has the romantic edge with women. As cultural critic Camille Paglia says, the androgynous person “
is
the charismatic personality.” Why though? Why do gender-benders throw off such erotic magic and entice women as they do?

Scientists have located some clues. Researcher Meredith Chivers has found that women differ from men in their sexual tastes. When she attached female subjects to a photoplethysmograph while they watched erotic movies, she discovered that they shared a marked predilection for bisexuality. Other studies show women consistently preferring computerized images of feminized male faces and choosing more androgynous men in audio interviews.

This is not news to the psychiatric profession. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought both genders posses an inner bisexuality in the repressed depths of the psyche. Later thinkers conjectured that we never lose an unconscious striving for a synthesis of male and female. This amalgam, writes religious scholar Mircea Eliade, represents ideal wholeness, the peak of “sensual perfection.”

It’s embedded in our cultural mythology. In many creation stories, the “great He-She” created life on earth, and the Hindu fertility god, Shiva, assumed both sexes to attain “divine sensual delight.” Often shamans achieved their “mana” (air of sacred authority) by assuming a double-sexed persona. The “Man-Woman” Dionysus perfumed his curls and wore women’s saffron robes tied with a flowery sash.

Erotic fantasies are replete with androgynes. Just when we expect a hulking warrior to carry off the heroine, we find the effeminate Paris abducting Helen in
The Iliad
and gentle Lanval of Marie de France’s twelfth-century tale infatuating the queen of the fairies.

In a recent shift, romance idols have begun to blur gender. The “Woman Whisperer” Cash Hunter in Maureen Child’s
Turn My World Upside Down
is a soul sister in the body of a linebacker. When his love interest suffers, he cradles her cheek, extracts her story, and bleeds for her: “Ah God. Empathy washed over him.” Daniel of Anne Lamott’s
Blue Shoe
not only behaves like a best girlfriend—baking, gardening, and church going—but he looks like one. He wears green silk shirts, sandals, and scented dreadlocks.

Whether subtle or pronounced, many great lovers have a distinct feminine streak. The Athenian
homme fatal
Alcibiades showcased his femininity, wearing his hair long and braiding it with flowers before battles. Casanova, too, had an overt distaff side—an aesthetic sensibility, a sentimentality, and a penchant for cross-dressing. Byron’s androgyny was so apparent that the sultan Mahmud refused to believe he wasn’t “a woman dressed in man’s clothes.” Emotional and epicene in dress and speech, Byron resembled a Renaissance blend of Greek god and goddess.

Ironically, the icon of tough, cool-guy masculinity, Gary Cooper, owed his fame as a ladies’ man to his “ravishing androgyny.” In more than a hundred movies over thirty-five years, he cemented the twentieth-century ideal of a “real man,” the slow-talking honcho with quick fists and nerves of steel. But women saw a different side of him. Six foot three and “more beautiful than any woman except Garbo,” he merged a feminine sweetness, tenderness, and artistic sensitivity with his masculine swank.

The hybrid proved knee-buckling. “Coop” was set upon by women the moment he arrived in Hollywood in 1925. Said director Stuart Heisler, they “fell over themselves to get him to take them to bed.” And he complied. He slept with nearly every leading lady, from Carole Lombard to Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, and moonstruck each of them. Helen Hayes said that if “Gary had crooked a finger I would have left Charlie and my child and the whole thing.”

He was seriously loved. After their affair ended, twenties film star Clara Bow continued to come if he whistled, and actress Lupe Velez stabbed him with a kitchen knife when he tried to break up with her. He married socialite Veronica “Rocky” Balfe in 1933, who adored him so unconditionally that she endured his countless affairs, even a serious one with Patricia Neal. Attempting to explain his “hypnotic” effect on women, movie and TV personality Arlene Dahl referred to his “combination of unusual traits.” The secret of that “combination,” said actor-writer Simon Callow, was “the perfect balance between his masculine and feminine elements.”

Creativity

Creative types have increased sex appeal.

—R
USTY
R
OCKETS
,
Science a GoGo

Adam Levy, a painter of dark, surreal canvases in the movie
Love & Sex
, looks like a date-challenged dork: he wears camp shirts over baggy cargo pants and has the face of an overfed hamster. But women engulf him, and he snaps up the smartest and prettiest of the pack. “That’s why I started painting,” he explains, “to get the girls in high school.”

What is it about artists, those “unfit” creative guys who have all the luck with women? They may lack the right biomarkers—money, looks, and solidity—but they have sexual charisma to burn. As poet Rainer Rilke observed, art lies “incredibly close” to sex. Creativity is a knockout aphrodisiac, seductive at a gut level. Professional artists and poets, studies report, “have more sex appeal than other people and twice as many sexual partners.”

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller chalks it up to sexual selection. Art, he theorizes, originated as a courtship display. More than fitness and status, early womankind sought mental excellence, says Miller, creative intelligence in particular. The suitor who produced the best creations and delivered the greatest aesthetic pleasure won the prize females. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has located the center responsible for this artistic ability, the angular gyrus, and thinks prehistoric men may have wooed mates by advertising musical, poetic, and drawing talents as a “visible signature of a giant brain.”

Primitive mythological and religious figures may factor in too. The shaman, “an archaic prototype of the artist,” beamed with sexual charisma. It was his job to draw down the sex force of creation through magical song, drama, dance, and visual art. The cave paintings are thought to have been his handiwork, his inseminations “in the womb of the earth.” The business of the sex gods was creation—new shapes and forms ad infinitum. Greek god Dionysus founded tragedy and comedy, choreographed dances, and composed “the songs of the night.”

Artist-lovers seem always to have haunted the romantic imagination. Like the legendary Greek Orpheus, who charmed man, woman, and beast with his lyre, Chaucer’s “Nicholas the Gallant” of “The Miller’s Tale” seduces maidens by singing and playing his harp. Bob Hampton, the painter of
The Handyman
, barely has time to clean his brushes amid the pile-on of lust-crazed housewives. Creative heartthrobs fill movies, from
Titanic
sketch-artist Jack to the dishy novelist in
Purple Violets
, to Bleek the trombone-playing ladykiller of
Mo’ Better Blues
.

A disproportionate number of ladykillers trade on the sexual charisma of creativity. History is chocked with poets, musicians, painters, dancers, actors, and “creatives” who prospered with women. A quick once-over reveals a list of banner names: Lord Byron, Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, Gustav Klimt, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Casanova owed no small amount of his luster to his artistic achievements as a violinist, inventor, and author of poems, plays, and books.

Rock star “Mick the Magic Jagger” has made spectacular capital on this appeal. A throwback to the total theater of shamanistic rites, he admits that sex is at the center of his Rolling Stones’ performances. He puts a sock in his crotch to simulate an erection, undulates like a “strip-tease[r],” and chants and rocks the audience to “mass orgasm.”

He’s an all-caps ladies’ man, impossibly magnetic, lovable, and unleavable. Despite his nonstellar looks (the raddled features of a very old chimp), he has been bathed in adoration by a long line of superior women, including his wife, Bianca, Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Carly Simon, Jerry Hall, Carla Bruni, and his current girlfriend of eight years, designer L’Wren Scott. He’s neither mature, sober, nor faithful, and he would catch hell from a relationship counselor. But he has hundred-proof charisma on his side; as Marianne Faithfull put it, she felt as if she had “her very own Dionysus.”

Artist Lucian Freud’s draw, like Jagger’s, was primeval. Poet Stephen Spender compared him to the “male opposite [of a] witch,” and Freud himself equated his creativity with “phallic energy.” Dubbed “the greatest living realist painter,” by
New York Times
art critic John Russell, Freud did not paint canvases for calm contemplation. Warts-and-all portraits of nudes from odd angles, they are designed to “astonish, disturb, [and] seduce.”

Seduction he knew. The British Freud, who died in 2011 at eighty-nine, had the career of a supernova lover. Married twice (once to siren Caroline Blackwood), he fathered at least nine children and was passionately involved with “umpteen” women. At seventy-nine, he shocked the nation by taking up with a waifish twenty-nine-year-old and later moving on to Alexandra Williams-Wynn, fifty years his junior. In a 2005 painting,
The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer
, she sits nude at his feet clutching his leg and caressing his thigh.

Every woman cited the same allure: his “intense sexual charisma.” Being with him, said a lover, is like “being wired up to the national grid.” Freud was an amorous master. He quoted poetry to his models, served champagne and delicacies between sittings, and gave “the best hugs.” He was also an elegant figure, with a fine, hawk-like profile, a cockade of gray hair, and a rakish scarf looped around his neck. But it was Freud the artist who slayed women; it was his work, they said, that was the “potent aphrodisiac.” To sit for him, said a girlfriend, “felt like being an apple in the Garden of Eden. When it was over, [she] felt as if [she] had been cast out of paradise.” This was the work of an ur-artist, the sexual sorcerer with “the most primitive form of charisma.”

Quicksilver Man

Don’t Fence Me In.

—C
OLE
P
ORTER

Kurt is a thirtyish German photographer and downtown Casanova who looks like a dancer in an avant-garde ballet troupe. He’s a study in fluidity, with his loose jeans, ruffled dark bob, and feline stride. Asked about the charisma for which he’s famous, he throws up his hands: “It’s just part of you and you radiate that in a certain way.”

What he’s radiating is the foxfire of free, unbound manhood. Like many ladykillers, Kurt is a mover and quester, indifferent to social constraints. At twenty-five, he gave up a banking career, left home, built a photography career on pioneer techniques, and now goes where the wind blows him. “I’m a boat-rocker,” he laughs.

Charismatic men are laws unto themselves, renegade souls who give the raspberry to the rule book. A zing of transgression defines charisma. People with that “irresistible magnetic mana” flout authority and live on their own terms, unfettered in mind and body. There’s an intangible “apartness” about them. Women, to official dismay, don’t necessarily fall for providers and staid nest-builders; they’re often swept off their feet by free-souled nonconformists.