Q: When did you first become interested in the seductress as a female role model? A: I've been fascinated by man charmers since childhood—women with that mysterious allure who could catch and captivate the best men. I grew up in a southern belle culture. My mother was the Miss Valentine of Richmond, Virginia, and girls in those days, without real career options, had to seduce for their supper. Later as a feminist I found that female sexual empowerment got lost in the revolution. I saw liberated women rendered clueless and housebound, while their boyfriends cruised the territory and cheated on their "old ladies." Dismayed by the women's movement silence on the subject, I began a search in graduate school for feminine role models who succeeded in love and work. First I studied fictional seductresses. Then I read hundreds of biographies, and discovered to my surprise that history was full of enchantresses who fulfilled the highest ideals of feminism—autonomy, self-identity, and achievement—while burning up the track with men. They're the first feminists! They provide a template for full female entitlement, erotic and professional, and as a bonus, resolved my southern belle-feminist conflict. Q: Why write a book about seductresses? What did you hope to show the world that it did not already know? A: I wrote about seductresses because they're one of the most misunderstood, neglected, maligned groups of women in history. For millennia, men demonized sexually powerful women as witches or worse, and in the last century, leading feminists condemned them as slavish man-pleasers and cut them from the club. I thought it was high time to peel back the myths and show the world that seductresses are the opposite of what we think: mature, strong, sane, smart, talented, often plain and quintessentially "liberated." Also, they possess a lost love art that's virtually unknown, and one that women need to hear about now amid the current slump in female erotic confidence and power. Q: How did the seductress get such a negative reputation if she's really an empowering, positive figure? A: Seductresses have been given a bum rap because they imperiled patriarchy. Their dangerous payload of power subverted male dominance, so they had to be bad-mouthed, marginalized and sometimes persecuted. They were renegades who torched submissive feminine norms and usurped the prerogatives of men. Women, through the self-sabotage of the oppressed, tended to join the witch-hunt. I think we forget the incredible potency of women in the male psyche. The whole campaign of female subjection can even be seen as an attempt to put a lid on this tremendous power. Seductresses blow the hatches. The irony, of course, is that these breakout women prove not to be the man-eaters men fear, but the best thing that can happen to them. Q: The seductresses you talk about in your book are all exceptional women--Catherine the Great, Josephine Baker, and the like. Is there any hope for the average woman to become a seductress? How can she pull it off? A: My belief is that all women rise on the skirts of the privileged. Every admired "great woman" of history is exceptional-taller, stronger, bolder than the rest of us. That's inspirational! It revs our confidence and courage. Seductresses, those disobedient heroines, show average women that they can be more original, outrageous, sexy, magnificent and themselves without suffering any of the fabled consequences. Women can flout the norms, live large, and plunder male hearts and have the best of fates: self-fulfillment and across-the-board happiness. Also, their love potion—rooted as it is in an erotic artistry thousands of years old—is such a potent cocktail, we can use it half strength and still knock men out. We don't have to be as smart as Cleopatra, as daring as Lola Montez, or as ravishing a conversationalist as Germaine de Stael; we just need the recipe. Q: How can women today seduce men like those amazing women in the past? What are the key skills and techniques? A: Today's women are poorly schooled in seduction, taught to enamor men the Victoria's Secret way through physical charms alone. Sold on the false promises of a slick consumer culture, we sink all our resources into gyms, boutiques and beauty salons. The great love queens didn't neglect these physical arts and neither should we. We should kick them up as they did: invest dress, ornament, cosmetics, movement, and music with over-the-top drama. Most importantly, we should tune into our souped-up sexual anatomy and go for broke in bed. Deep in their loins, that's what men want—a pleasure claimer. But to really inspire and maintain passion like grand prix seductresses we have to use our heads. We have to learn to invade men's minds again and set them spinning. Women now need the courage to be less accommodating: to surprise and baffle men and lead them on a magical mystery tour. Beyond that, seductresses wielded a potent assortment of forgotten psychological spells. At the top of the list is fascinating conversation, an art that modern women have virtually lost in the barrage of "listening" and "communication" advice. Others include festivity and secret social skills such as deep ego massage and maternal nurture. But the biggest mental charm was (and is) the allure of a swaggering, all-complete, scintillating personality. That's the good news for contemporary women: the higher we climb, the greater our sex appeal. With our big 21st century characters and a little help from the seductresses and their love craft, we can sweep the field in love and life. Q: Are you, yourself, a seductress? Do you practice what you preach? A: Everybody asks me that. Put it this way: I'm a seductress wannabe. I admire the strength, oomph, courage, and stature of my seductresses and draw strength and wisdom from their example, but I'm 100% average. I've made mistakes and don't have a perfect track record. (In my twenties I had my share of cads and feckless duds.) That said I've never been dumped. I've always been sexually confident and have a marriage of 31 years to a prince that's still on high flame. And I can't say the seductresses and what I've learned from them didn't juice up my marriage and help me keep my swerve on. Q: You have a college-aged daughter. How does she feel about all this seductress talk? Does she put your advice into practice? A: While I was writing Seductress, my daughter was in high school buried in books. Though she's a cutie, she was a carrel rat who preferred libraries to parties and dates. On the plane to college, though, she asked to look at my manuscript and came up with a plan: she'd put the Seductive Way into practice and see what happened. Two months later she reported back. Eleven guys, she said, were in love with her, one of whom—the darling of the sophomore class—became her boyfriend of four months. When she discarded him for more variety, he wept under her window and filled her room with flowers. Since I wrote the book to help remedy the pitiable romantic plight of the college women I taught for so many years, I was overjoyed by her experiment. (Their predicament has since been confirmed as a nationwide problem in a 2001 Independent Women's Forum survey.) I'm also thrilled to see the fist-pumping reaction to the book among her friends. First and foremost, I wanted to empower, free and inspire the next generation of women. Q: Which seductress stories from your book are your favorites? A: Oh, there's an embarrassment of riches. The biographies of these enchantresses are so colorful it's hard to choose. My personal preferences, though, are the stereotype-smashing, bootstrap stories. Of course, you can't beat Hortense Mancini's or Lola Montez's careers for wide screen action and adventure. They seduced and ditched kings, fomented battles, and bedded every grandee on the continent. But I love Violet Gordon Woodhouse's and Pauline Viardot's lives the best—both the plainest of plain Janes. Violet, a great keyboard artist of the early twentieth century, had no bust line and a heavy-browed sallow face. But she lived in a ménage all her life with four besotted men who called her their "little queen" and waited on her hand and foot. Then there's Pauline Viardot, the 19th-century opera diva. Everyone who saw this unsightly woman pronounced her "strikingly ugly." She had a receding chin, heavy underlip, and an H-shaped figure. Yet nearly every great name of her age adored her: Alfred Musset, Hector Berlioz, Charles Gonoud, artist Arly Shaeffer, George Sand's son, and most notoriously, Ivan Turgenev—the literary Brad Pitt of his day. Turgenev heard Pauline sing in St. Petersburg in 1843 and fell so irrevocably in love that he abandoned his Russian estates and lived with her and her husband in a 40-year ménage à trois. Until he died he loved her "like an eighteen-year old," and lavished her with devotion "such as few women have had the fortune to inspire." Q: What do you want readers to take away from this book? What's the biggest lesson seductresses have for us today? A: This is an uplifting book. I want women to deprogram—shuck all the toxic feminine conditioning and media propaganda—and reclaim our birthright as natural love sovereigns. The message is to haul out: get proud, bold, and sexed up, and grow to our full height as people. At the same time, I want to give women a roadmap to erotic supremacy. This is something new; an authoritative art of love with a set of principles that's 99% psychological. Instead of pretty power and bed tricks, we need learn to invade men's minds again. That means dusting off forgotten skills, such as conversation, and using our heads as well as our bodies to ravish men and recoup our command position in love.