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philosophers belabor the point: “What’s granted is not wanted”; “Dearness gives value to the meat”; “We scorn too easy a victory in love”; “We still consider that one fairer and more worthy in which more obstacle and risk is [ sic ] offered.”
    The first sex goddesses, after all, were “austere and merciless” taskmistresses and required blood sacrifices at their rites. Anxiety is the “food of love”; pain, its spice. Desire and aggression share the same neurocircuitry; a pinch in the soft place heightens love on a now-and-then, mild-to-moderate basis.
    Compliant, eager-to-please yes girls not only give off the BO of need, they fail men at a gut level. Men may dream of consensus, calm, and peace on the home front, but they long for a little action. They crave intrigue, caprice, the tang of distress and fear—a tortuous treasure hunt, with a numinous, ever-fascinating queen at the end.

Maternal Nurture, Intimacy
    At the same time, men require the primal gratifications of the great goddess strewn along her labyrinthine way. Central to the cult of the goddess was woman the creatrix. She gave birth to the universe, watered the heavens and earth with her life-giving milk, and spawned and nurtured humanity.
    Mother love underpins all desire. The rocking, stroking, sucking, and nuzzling of lovemaking imitate the first caresses of infancy, and the love object—if she answers male prayers—restores the mom to the man.
    With a qualifier. While men yearn for the lost delights of maternal succor and at-oneness (intensified by the forced renunciation of them in boyhood), they’re also skittish, fearing engulfment and annihilation. The great goddess killed her consort-son each year; mermaids sucked men underwater and drowned them in amniotic fluid.
    Seductresses therefore played the mommy card with discretion. They defused the fear by balancing intimacy and TLC with nonmaternal sizzle. The backdrag to mother and her maternal sweets is inherent in eros, a powerful, primordial pull. Yet it coexists with female autonomy and sex appeal and may even depend upon them for peak efficiency. The goddess wasn’t just a magner mater; she was a blowtorch sex queen and mage of a million charms.

Ego Enhancement
    Connected to the maternal draw of seduction is a passion for self-inflation. In love, everyone seeks an ego boost—and not a small one. At the depths of our being, we hanker to be number one, a god, just as our cave ancestors became “divine” in the presence of the deity. Psychologist Theodor Reik thought that the ego drives in love are older and stronger than sexual ones; we’ll crawl over broken glass for the lover who lifts us out of ourselves into a nobler, grander, classier identity. To pull this off, though, the lover must be a winner, which explains why the praises of toadies and errand girls never work as their mothers promised. Only the applause of valued people carries any value.
    The sirens’ Olympian egos made them natural praisers; they instinctively projected their inflated sense of self onto others. After first applauding herself, her “wondrous vulva,” and endless accomplishments, the cocky Inanna trained her accolades on Dumuzi and recited his superhuman virtues. We go for the ego burn, an apotheosis, and no ordinary woman will do. She must have the swish of the first goddess and her divine powers of transfiguration.

Conversation, Comedy
    By tradition, the best way to build men up is to listen, listen, listen. Guys love laugh track girls and loopy ingenues who ask all the right questions. But in truth they’re sent into orbit by silver-tongued talkmeisters. The queen of the cosmos brought the cultural arts to mankind, and her successors were divas of speech: Inanna the “eloquent,” “Aphrodite the Persuasive,” and Isis the “Lady of Words of Power.”
    Primitives believed in the magical power of words, and anthropologists speculate that sexual enchantment might have been one of the