The Art of Seduction: An Indispensible Primer on the Ultimate Form of Power

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 1-15

Part 2, Chapter 16-Appendix B

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Seduction Is About Power

Content Warning: The source material includes references to suicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, and incest.

Power is an underlying component of both romantic and political seduction. Seducers seek and gain power by using love to manipulate, implementing psychological tactics, and capitalizing on imbalanced relationships.

Greene’s initial discussion of seduction involves comparisons between men and women’s power, historically. He claims that women’s only power in the ancient world was sex and argues that seduction was “the ultimate form of power and persuasion” (xx) because women used psychological tactics to seduce men, gaining power through manipulation.

Manipulation is about power because manipulators center their own goals and ignore the feelings of the people they want to manipulate. This creates imbalanced relationships with dependency and victimization: “The manipulator has strong needs to attain feelings of power and superiority in relationships with other people” (Braiker, Harriet B. Who’s Pulling Your Strings?: How to Break the Cycle of Manipulation and Regain Control of Your Life. McGraw-Hill, 2004). Greene’s techniques involve manipulation, such as creating insecurity and anxiety, isolation, and causing confusion—all tactics that create an imbalance of power, dysfunction, and dependency between the seducer and their interest. Both the Coquette and the Charmer aim to make their interest dependent and create an imbalance of power in the relationship.

Part of understanding seduction is understanding the powerful nature of love, Greene contends. Because most people have experienced this feeling, a seducer can recognize its power and use it to seduce another. When people have attraction to or feelings for a seducer, they can capitalize on that power to lead them through the seduction process and finalize the seduction. Greene shows potential seducers how to use love to get others to have sex with them. This love, however, is an illusion and a ploy; it is constructed love by the seducer, who is never mentioned as feeling love. The focus is on making someone fall in love with the seducer, not a mutual feeling of love between two people. This imbalance demonstrates the nature of power in a seduction.

Seduction can also be used to gain political power. John F. Kennedy, Vladimir Lenin, Napoleon, Charles de Gaulle, Malcolm X, and Benjamin Disraeli used their power, particularly charisma and language, to seduce the public and gain more power. They made the masses fall in love with them, similar to romantic seductions.

Seduction is about power in which one person wants to gain the upper hand, based on wanting, or using, power through manipulating someone into love or using charisma to gain political power.

Seduction Is Adversarial

The concept of seduction itself is imbalanced. Seduction implies that one person is doing the seducing and the other is the one seduced, rather than two people making a mutual decision. From the outset, Greene presents seduction as an adversarial process. He compares seduction to warfare throughout the book and uses the language of war. The process of seduction is adversarial because it breaks down a romantic interest’s barriers and resistance. Rather than portraying a romantic or sexual interaction between two people as equal participants, he focuses on the adversarial nature.

Connecting with the adversarial nature of seduction are the book’s comparisons between seduction and war and its use of war language. Greene calls a seducer’s romantic interest a “target” throughout the book, alternating with the term “victim,” which is also adversarial. Both “target” and “victim” imply an imbalanced relationship between the seducer and seduced, as the seduced is an object of attack or a person to be tricked. Greene uses the language “penetrate their defenses” in reference to “targets” (xxiv), implying war, and likens seduction to “an art of war” (xxiv). His use of language like “weapons” and “surrender” reinforces the idea that a seducer is an adversary to their interest and must use weapons to win the battle of seduction. The title of Phase 4, “Moving In for the Kill,” illustrates how the final phase of the seduction moves toward a “kill,” or end to the war, after the romantic interest has been weakened during the other phases. The use of the term “surrender” parallels the end of a war when an opponent gives in: “seducers are people who understand the tremendous power contained in such moments of surrender” (xxi).

In Chapter 15, Greene describes the tactic of isolating one’s interest as like a war strategy: “In seduction, as in warfare, the isolated target is weak and vulnerable” (315). Isolation in war creates a state of vulnerability where the enemy can take over, capture the target, and win the battle. It works similarly in seduction.

Greene paints sex as war, a game, a process involving two opponents and focuses on seduction as the method for winning at that game. His use of war language and comparisons makes this adversarial nature clear throughout the book.

Seduction Is Psychological

Although seduction results in a physical encounter (or gain of political power), Greene emphasizes the psychological nature of seduction, a process of making the interest fall in love, with the endgame being sex. Greene’s discussion of seduction techniques addresses psychological elements and concepts, as well as the psychological characteristics of each seducer and victim type.

Greene illustrates the book’s emphasis on seduction as a psychological process, rather than the seducer’s qualities or physical appearance, by arguing that they should use psychological analysis to make a person fall in love with them. Seducers “analyze what happens when people are in love, study the psychological components of the process…By instinct and through practice they master the art of making people fall in love” (xxi). Greene also details the psychological characteristics of each seducer and victim type, as well as noting how the Anti-Seducer does not understand the psychology of other people and therefore fails at seduction. Seducers use their analysis of an interest’s mind and the psychology behind seduction techniques to implement the process.

The book makes frequent references to Sigmund Freud’s theories, particularly in the chapter on creating a regression in the love interest. Its description of four types of regression draws heavily on Freud, most notably the Oedipal Regression and Ego Ideal Regression. This connects with Greene’s emphasis on the psychology of the seduction, rather than physical aspects.

Greene also suggests other ways of connecting with an interest’s childhood to seduce them, such as finding their childhood insecurities to root out their weaknesses and tempt them to fulfill these weaknesses or figure out their unfulfilled ideals or goals as youth. He cites the arguments of Theodore Reik about childhood rejection as a reason why people avoid it as adults, again illustrating the importance of understanding the psychology of rejection.

Adults also repress their desires, often stemming from childhood, and Greene shows seducers how to access those desires. He claims that “people are yearning to play out the repressed sides of their personality” (410) and that seducers can exploit this yearning. This is also based on Freudian psychoanalysis, and like Freud, Greene suggests uncovering a person’s repressed desires and fulfilling them.

The book weaves the psychology of seduction throughout chapters by focusing on psychological techniques, the psychology of seducer and victim types, and psychoanalytic ideas. Rather than physical elements, at its core, seduction is about psychology.