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first functions of language. Ever since Scheherazade’s verbal veil dance in The Arabian Nights, men have always been seduced by the “smooth tongue of the adventuress.” All the traditional love texts recommend conversational prowess.
    In ancient Greece eloquence was a sine qua non for hetaerae who mastered classical learning and “hundreds or thousands” of “appropriate ways of expressing things.” Renaissance courtesans studied bel parlare (seductive speech) as assiduously as lute playing and bedcraft and reviled “dumb of mouth” whores. Before the recent ascent of mute babes, “every woman to be well loved” had to “possess good powers of speech.”
    Contrary to the lonely clown propaganda, comedy is a strong aphrodisiac, and the funny bone, a high-explosive erogenous zone. Aphrodite was the “laughter-loving goddess,” and her descendants through the ages joked and quipped their way to men’s hearts. “What is more seductive,” say the love philosophers, “than a stroke of wit?”
    In the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” Billy Joel instructs his inamorata not to make “clever conversation,” and the hero of 9½ Weeks commands the heroine “not to talk.” They’re begging for mercy. Sword without s spells “word,” the siren’s sharpest weapon. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed, “Seduction is fascinating language.”

Festivity, Nonrepression
    Men never lose an atavistic appetite for license—the release of social and temporal constraints and ecstatic abandon. Seductresses were mistresses of misrule, carnival queens who cast off repressive shackles and declared a public holiday. The goddess Inanna decreed, “Let all of Uruk be festive!” Once a year at the sacred marriage ceremony she ordained a gala free-for-all of feasting, cross-dressing, game playing, and promiscuous fornicating.
    We cannot bear too much reality; bound, gagged, and led in chains by custom and civic authority, we demand that eros set us free. Love guides since antiquity have urged women to loosen up, “be festive,” and provide “moments of organic relief.” The French cocottes at the turn of the century were maestras of disinhibition and unbuttoned frolic. With Quid nihi (To hell with it) for their motto, they lit cigarettes with bank notes, talked dirty, threw transvesti balls, and danced with pet pigs.
    Among the many other tunes in their songbook, sirens sang of parties—of frolic, joy, masquerade, and anything goes abandon. Love jumps the turnstiles. In Shere Hite’s study of male sexuality, men said what they valued most about sex was being allowed to be “totally out of control, to release the pent-up emotions they were taught they ‘should’ repress at all other times.” Here they echo their prehistoric male ancestor Homo festivus, who cut loose when he worshiped the sex goddess: cross-dressed, caroused, and let the deity take possession of him.

Vitality, Plentitude, Androgyny
    Since the primordial sex deity personified life energy and totality, including the union of both sexes, seductresses played up their ultravitality, inner plentitude, and androgyny. The lure of gender synthesis, with its “superabundance of erotic possibilities,” exerts a potent fascination on the libido. Feminists have long crusaded for a more androgynous definition of womanhood, without realizing how sexy it is. “The indistinctness of the sexes,” amorist scholars agree, “is seductive.”
    Sirens deliberately traded on the appeal of the androgyne. Venetian courtesans wore pants under their overskirts and adopted a “masculine mode” of behavior and lifestyle, while others, like the omnisexual first goddess, engaged in love affairs with both sexes. Androgyny, no secret to these women, amps sex appeal. As a French connoisseur observed in the seventeenth century, “A beautiful woman who has all the good qualities of a man is the most wonderful thing in the world.”
    Another secret weapon enchantresses deployed was joie