SEDUCTION
A History From the Enlightenment to the Present

By Clement Knox

Seduction is an especially fraught subject because we have long had trouble agreeing on what it is. Does it mean chocolate-dipped strawberries and a Quiet Storm playlist? Swiping right? Stretching provocatively at the gym? Sending pictures of your genitalia? Grabbing ’em by the you-know-what? Demanding a “massage” for a $200 tip — or the promise of movie roles?

It is a rich field for Clement Knox, our genteel narrator and a puppy-eyed 30-year-old nonfiction book buyer in London for Waterstones. At first, I assumed the author’s youth was the reason his history of the subject was so gargantuan, a near 500-page feat of millennial overcompensation. But I was wrong. Seduction is a grand theme, influencing politics and power, guiding history, shaping literature and forging powerful social movements.

Knox takes us through the lives of memorable seducers and their critics, in sometimes academic and sometimes rococo prose dappled with doges, coups de foudre, rakes, bawds, coquettes, coxcombs and procuresses — with guest appearances by members of the Frankfurt School sunning themselves in La Jolla.

Like an R-rated version of “A Christmas Carol,” Knox’s history whisks us from Casanova’s mirrored sex suite to the rake culture of London, where we meet Col. Francis Charteris, a serial predator of such distinguished loathsomeness that he was known by his nom de guerre, “the Rape Master General,” and was alleged to have even raped his own grandmother. But by his side we also have Samuel Richardson, whose novel “Pamela” was a blueprint for how chaste women should behave in the face of avid pursuit, encouraging a zeal for housewifery. Then it’s on to the St. Pancras churchyard, where the bachelorette Mary Godwin has sex with a married (and short and sickly) Percy Bysshe Shelley, and to the flapper parties of 1920s America, “where bootleg gin was served behind the bar and vomited up in the ladies’ room.” Later come the Nazis, who deployed propaganda about hypnotists, vampires and sexual monsters to stoke social and sexual panic against Jews.

Knox’s dialectics follow us throughout: It turns out that we were just as conflicted about seduction centuries ago as we are now. Depending on whom you ask and when, the seducer is either a manipulative villain exploiting innocents or a heroic figure of sexual liberation. Among the Romantics, Mary Shelley (see above) celebrated free love as much as men like Lord Byron did, but struggled to reconcile her physical passions with the misogyny of her era.

The African-American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, who was unapologetic about his sexual relations with white women, a few of whom he married, was hounded by America’s racist seduction laws. He was found guilty in 1913 of violating the White-Slave Traffic Act, illuminating the highly elastic double standards around race and gender of the time. (For more confusing fun: President Trump, of all people, pardoned him posthumously in 2018.)

There’s always a debate for reason versus passion, for valiance versus depravity, Knox argues. Flapper sexual freedom begot purity laws for women. In the latter half of the 20th century, seducers from Bond to Bardot were celebrated as independent actors who had relieved themselves of the prejudices of religion, taboo and social custom. Yet to some, that sexual equality meant sex and seduction were dead. Knox points to Elizabeth Hardwick, who in 1973 wrote, “You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value.” In a time of unrestrained sexual freedom, the Supreme Court in 1973 expanded the legal basis for suppressing sexually explicit books and movies.

Where there’s room today for open marriage, polyamory and apps that can yield instant sexual gratification with zero emotional investment, we witness the rise of seduction’s antithesis: violent “incel” culture, in which involuntarily celibate young men — fueled by the online manosphere — kill people. Why? To punish all the people who are having sex, who have succeeded, presumably, at seduction.

We’ve waded into complex sociological territory. An epidemic of hyper-consciousness among American universities now asks students to abide by codes of conduct closer in spirit to the seduction legislation that governed the private lives of their great-grandparents, vastly different from the permissive sexual culture of their grandparents and parents. University consent guidelines currently consist of point-by-point how-tos and how-not-tos regarding not just consent for intercourse, but rules around arousal, proposition and seduction.

And if we haven’t already read enough about the sex drought among young people, there’s even sorrier news. The generations weaned on smartphones and tablets show increased levels of depression, loneliness and suicidal tendencies. They “will likely know no other romantic experiences other than those mediated by online and mobile dating platforms financially incentivized against their lasting happiness,” Knox writes. Seduction doesn’t get much more dystopian than that.

Knox goes into great detail about the culture of the pickup artist, known to one another as PUAs. Their thought leader, a man known as Mystery, was the focal point of Neil Strauss’s 2005 book “The Game.” Mystery teaches his followers how to target women in bars using magic tricks and the art of “negging” — criticizing a woman to keep her attention, or encouraging her to struggle for approval. Mystery spawned a slew of online seduction schools, from Attraction Methods, which teaches “canned routines to seduce women into sleeping with you,” to Double Your Dating, which offers the helpful advice “Never complain about being a loser and how no woman likes you.”

In one of his occasional insights from personal experience, Knox recalls watching a young man in a pub do card tricks for a beautiful young woman — “Mystery Method in action before me.” The woman, summoned back to her table of friends (one of the maxims of Mystery Method is “seldom will you see women of beauty alone”), realizes she has been subjected to a slimeball pickup move. The young man walks out of the pub, defeat stamped all over his face, and slips on a wet step. His first reaction is to check to see if anyone had seen him fall. No one, except for Knox, had. His hands in his jacket pockets, he walks away into the night, just another incel, just another rake.