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Evolutionary psychologists argue that the female fondness for male mettle goes back to a physical need for provisions, protection, and status. Prehistoric women sought brave defenders to survive and prosper. Another explanation is more erotic: A woman may have been excited by exhibitions of courage in man-to-man combats because it thrilled her to think she was worth fighting for. Rather than a servile drudge, she became a prize for whom men risked their lives.

There may be a mythic tug on women too. Fertility gods were a staunch lot. The Sumerian “Fearless One,” Dumuzi, descended to the horrors of the underworld and took the “ultimate adventure of the Lover,” seducing the great love goddess Inanna. By nature unwarlike, Dionysus was intrepid in battle and routed the giants with his unholy uproar. He bravely came to Ariadne’s rescue and stood his ground when King Pentheus imprisoned him. “How bold this bacchant is!” marveled the guards at his cool defiance of the king.

Women accord premier status to bold lovers in their fantasies. Romance novels teem with commandos, highland warriors, secret agents, and dukes who duel at ten paces, but their feats of derring-do are paired with psychological fortitude and moral sensitivity. Dr. Zhivago, a top romantic pick for women, is a portrait in courage—physical, psychological, and erotic. He braves the war zone, loves dangerously, and politically defies the Soviet state in the face of crushing odds.

Casanova, whatever his defects, strode out boldly. When the Inquisitorial police arrested him in Venice on trumped-up charges, he dressed in plumes and satin as if for a ball, then managed a daring escape from the impregnable Leads prison over a year later. He was equally valiant in his amours. At twenty, he fell hopelessly in love with a talented beauty of the wrong gender, the castrato singer Bellino. “He” had warded off every suitor, but Casanova persevered and discovered what he suspected: Bellino was a woman named Teresa equipped with a leather six-inch penis. He promptly declared himself, and asked her to marry him. “I am not afraid of misfortune,” he explained to her; he counted courage and a sense of honor among his best qualities.

Though uniformly courageous, ladies’ men range in degrees of physical and psychological valor. Fascinators, like air ace Denys Finch Hatton and bullfighter Juan Belmonte, fall on the action end of the spectrum. Belmonte, Hemingway’s model for the matador-lover in
The Sun Also Rises
, was small, ugly, crippled, and tortured with fear, but he became a master in the bullring and in the bedroom. “The same energy that went into his conquering a bull also went into conquering a woman,” said an unnamed famous actress, “and he was the greatest lover I ever had.” More typical are ladykillers of moral fiber: Enlightenment intellectual Denis Diderot, who challenged the censors, and Albert Camus, whose credo was “courage” and whose underground Resistance work in World War II almost cost him his life.

Robert Louis Stevenson is the last person you might choose for a courage hall of fame. But he’s a prime candidate, in both word and deed, and a man beloved by women. Skeletal, eccentric, and sickly, he is remembered as the avuncular author of the classic novels
Treasure Island
and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. But he was a paladin in full-tilt revolt against Victorian respectability, and a “fanatical lover of women.” Despite poverty, “tatterdemalion” clothes, and a scarecrow appearance, he had enormous warmth, goodness, and charm, and bound “women to him with silken cords.” He racked up scores of inamoratas: an Edinburgh belle; a “dark lady” named Claire; a noted European beauty; sundry mistresses and French
charmeuses
; and finally his wife, Fanny Osbourne.

In his courtship of Fanny, he displayed the high courage that marked everything he did. He was resolute against danger, whether scaling treacherous mountains or combating authority. “Keep your fears to yourself,” he quipped, “but share your courage with others.” He was not blind to the perils of passionate love. We are “unhorsed” by it, he wrote, cast into a hazardous zone which we explore like children “venturing together into a dark room.” And Fanny was not the safest choice. Married with two children and ten years his senior, she suffered from depression and had to leave him mid-affair to settle accounts with her husband in America.

When he got her cable from California, he set sail, steerage class. By the time he reached her in San Francisco, he was penniless and ill, fluctuating between life and death. Fanny divorced her husband in 1880, and she and Stevenson married, after which he produced his best-loved works,
Kidnapped
among others. In deteriorating health, he remained an adventurer, ending up in Samoa, where he wrote, protested colonial injustices, and became revered by the Samoans. His friends envisioned him as “sly Hermes,” the mythic seducer and spirit of fearlessness who stole Apollo’s cattle and Aphrodite’s girdle. “Love,” wrote Stendhal, “is an exquisite flower, but it needs courage to pluck it on the bank of a dreadful precipice.”

Spiritual Cultivation

Eroticism is primarily a religious matter.

—G
EORGES
B
ATAILLE
,
Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

Peter K. wasn’t the only Episcopal priest to run afoul that year. It was 1974. A General Theological graduate with a Junior League wife and small son, Peter was considered a catch for St. M’s—a small parish in a rural Virginia college town. He had ideas and presence. Blond and lanky with an aquiline profile, he loped down the aisle in his flowing chasuble and gold-brocaded stole, drowning out the choir with his basso “Faith of Our Fathers.” He permitted children to take communion, chanted the litany, and introduced a book club, soup kitchen, shut-in outreach, and spiritual retreats to Mountain Lake.

The retreats were where it started: sobbed confessions on the trail, a note squeezed into his hand in the prayer circle, and a lay reader who burst into his room one night, nude beneath her parka. He consoled too many. A vestryman’s wife caught him one afternoon on Bald Knob entwined with a parishioner on a blanket, his clerical collar discarded on a boulder beside a bottle of Mateus.

The man of God is one of the dark seducer’s favorite guises. A literary stereotype for hundreds of years (think of Chaucer’s lecherous Friar) he’s an all-too-real phenomenon in every religion. The testimonials of women sucked in—and at times abused—by a spiritual leader’s aura could fill a dozen holy books. The website “Boundary Violations without Borders” provides over a hundred links to such accounts.

Male spirituality is powerfully attractive to women, and many slick operators have turned it to sordid ends. Great lovers aren’t among them. On the whole, they’re nonexploitative, sincere, and untraditional in their beliefs. Kurt, a German Casanova and photographer I interviewed, is typical. Deeply pious, he espouses an eclectic Taoist-inspired faith that informs and augments his relationships. “I think you channel a force with a woman,” he says. “Call it God—whatever you like. I don’t go out to break hearts. I view this planet as a divine school.”

The link between religion and desire is no accident. We ask passionate love to fulfill the same functions as belief: to plug the holes in our soul, sanctify and save us, defeat death, and raise us to seventh heaven. The loved one becomes our deity, our “will-to-meaning.” From a sociobiological perspective, you might argue that spiritually grounded men make fitter mates. The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania lists the “Strength of Transcendence” as one of the six attributes of “character,” and psychiatrists increasingly promote faith for healthy personhood.

Sex and the sacred also reach back to the dawn of humankind. Led by charismatic shamans, prehistoric peoples danced and drummed themselves into mystical raptures to merge with the vitalizing principle of the universe, divine sexual energy. Dionysian worship resembled a tent revival where celebrants sought redemption and transfiguration through ecstatic fusion with the phallic god. Psychologist Erich Neumann thinks these fertility rites have left a psychic imprint in the unconscious and influence our sexual proclivities today.

The love-religion meld is ensconced in modern culture. Religious rhetoric infuses the language of romance: ads, greeting cards, and popular songs assure us that we will be transported to “heaven’s door” by angels we’ll “worship and adore” forever. A troupe of Hollywood sex symbols portrayed cinematic holy men: Charlton Heston as Moses; Anthony Quinn as Mohammed; Cary Grant, John Travolta, and Warren Beatty as angels; and Brad Pitt as a Buddhist convert in
Seven Years in Tibet
.

Women’s popular romances throng with men of the cloth. In the novella
God on a Harley
, the love hero is the Deity himself come to earth in jeans and a ponytail to spirit the heroine away on his motorcycle and redeem her. And they don’t get more lovable than the handsome vicar Christy Morrell, of Patricia Gaffeny’s
To Love and To Cherish
, with his humor, fierce doubts, and “edge of Woo.” A “For the Love of God” romance website lists over forty clerical heartthrobs, not counting a six-book series about the “Rev. Feelgood,” Nate Thicke.

Nineteenth-century pianist Franz Liszt enraptured women for many reasons, not least of which was his intense spirituality. As much inclined to religion as music, Liszt twice contemplated the priesthood, and at fifty, he took minor orders, donned a cassock, and wrote sacred music. His courtships centered on long conversations about God and eternity. To Countess Marie d’Agoult, who left her husband and children for him, he spoke only of the “destiny of mankind” and “promises of religion.” Later, he captivated a Russian princess (who also abandoned her spouse for him) through spiritual communions in her crucifix-filled bedroom. She called him a “masterpiece of God.”

The nineteenth-century John Humphrey Noyes is a less orthodox case. An “uncomely” loner from Vermont, Noyes saw the light one day at Yale Divinity School and envisioned a new religion—a perfected order of mankind. The Second Coming had already occurred, he preached, and ushered in a sinless, joyous age. To realize it, men had only to create a utopian society based on economic communism, righteous living, birth control, and free love.

The result was the Oneida Community in upstate New York, where men and women had sex with whomever they pleased and shared everything in common, creating their own schools, clothes, and cultural programs and supporting themselves with crafts. At its height Oneida contained over three hundred members and lasted thirty years, longer than any other utopian experiment in America.

During that time, Noyes was the group’s supreme spiritual leader. He was “extraordinarily attractive to women,” said his son, due to sexual “magnetism superadded to intense religious convictions.” All the women were “eager to sleep with him,” and he took hundreds of lovers.

The nature of his religious convictions may have enhanced Noyes’s allure. God, Noyes professed, wanted women to be happy in bed. To that end, men were instructed to practice sexual pleasure as an art form, learning to court lovers with tenderness and gallantry and to withhold ejaculation so that women could have multiple orgasms.

Members had sexual freedom of choice so long as a woman held the power of refusal and neither indulged in the “claiming spirit.” Noyes himself nearly fell into that snare. At one point he had a passionate affair with a resident, Mary Cragin, that developed into an “idolatrous attachment.” “Anybody,” he explained, who knew her “found her spirit exceedingly intoxicating—one that will make a man crazy.” Providentially, she died in a shipwreck in the Hudson River, and he became an “exemplary lover” thereafter.

By his sixties, Noyes had sired at least nine of the fifty-eight children born in Oneida and was still active and virile. But there was dissension within and without. Fractious members lobbied for monogamy and free enterprise, and conservative clergymen in Syracuse banded against him. He fled to Canada, where he ended his days in the company of female loyalists, postulants to their prophet whose face “shone like an angel’s.”

Knowledge/Intelligence