Amanda Perkins was a beautiful little girl, camera ready, and as pretty as a picture. Her mother loved to dress her in cute red pinafores, tie her luxuriant blonde hair in gold ribbons, put a dash of color on her lips, and shine her patent leathers to a high gloss. 'The ones with the white bows, Mommy' , Amanda would say, and when she set off for Mrs. Linder's Dancing School, she was as glamourous as Greta Garbo or Hedy Lamar, but with a natural innocence that added charm to her physical allure.
As she grew older she found herself always surrounded by boys. 'I have done nothing to attract them', she thought, but her mother knew and knew well. It was like bees to a flower, bears to honey, ants to sugar, lions to lionesses, and the millions of males irresistibly drawn to the female. All she had to do was to signal her availability, her fertile time, her timeliness, and they would come running.
From an amateur perspective there was no such thing as a particularly attractive cow or sheep - all male animals seemed to be propelled by some inchoate, belligerent, unstoppable desire to mate. They couldn't help themselves at rutting season, plowing the female, mounting and grunting and off to munch meadow grass. The same goes for the delicate butterfly and the hummingbird.
Of course there were peacock fans and the dance of the blue footed boobies put off mating until the female - any female - was ready; but Nature turned the tables on animal sexuality, and it was the human female not the male who flirted and batted her eyes, who wore makeup and frilly things, who acted demure and hard-to-get until she decided who would treat her right, royally, or in the manner to which she was accustomed.
Human males were animal in their sexual desire and limitless sexual ambition, but far more picky and choosy than bulls; so women dressed to the nines, showed a bit of bodice, and hid all their warts, blemishes, and concavities with all sorts of marvelously ingenious powders and creams.
It is not hard to see how women got the reputation of being untrustworthy sirens, wanton sexual mountebanks out to fleece, trick, and deceive men; because of course they were doing exactly that. In olden times women had only sexual allure and appeal as their stock in trade. Men could be as ugly as goats but with money and limitless financial promise, they needn't do anything more.
Amanda watched the boys slip and slide over Mrs. Linder's waxed and polished oak floor to pick her as their dance partner, pushing and elbowing until the best of lot stood out of breath in front of her, smiled, and took her by the hand. The wallflowers - the homely and knock-kneed - ended up alone on the bench to dance with each other.
She could have had the same boys running hell-bent-for-leather for her without the red pinafore, the patent leather shoes with a bow and the gold ribbons in her hair. She had something unique and quite special. Every boy wanted her without knowing why - pheromones or some Garden of Eden uncompromised sexual innocence or just a pretty face fashioned as beautiful women have been fashioned for millennia with perfect symmetry, health, and the looks of well-being.
When a woman has it that easy, the devilishly entertaining games that keep men guessing, fighting, and stumbling over each other are exercises in femininity, feminism, hearty Nietzschean will and good plain fun.
Portia, the heroine of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, a lovely, wealthy, patrician lady was courted by princes who were forced to solve an insoluble conundrum to gain access to her. They stumbled over themselves while she delighted in the pomposity, the sheer imbecility, the blind ignorance of one after the other. Or Rosalind or Viola who were more than a match for the adolescent men who came courting.
Cleopatra, of course, is perhaps the most well-known seductress of all time, having bedded Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Mark Antony, all men of the Triumvirate of Rome. These powerful men could not resist the allure of Cleopatra, her beauty, her elegance, and her absolute confidence. While Caesar might have had some political motivation behind his affair - Egypt was Rome's granary - he like Antony was smitten with the splendors of the East. Antony wanted the ineffable but persistent thing that all older men want - a young woman, sexually and emotionally exciting with a youthful promise that they had once had but lost.
In many ways Amanda was most like Cleopatra - a woman fortunate enough to be gifted brains, beauty, and the talent to use them, but also with a real woman's desire to win, to bed the best and send the rest packing with smiles on their faces.
This is what was once disparagingly called 'feminine wiles'; but the term was right on the mark. Women, given men's natural, instinctive, irresistible desire to pursue them through thick and thin, need only to sift through the chaff to find the wheat, hone in on the object of their desire, and use whatever weapons in their armory, tricks of the trade, and devious, canny, unprincipled ploys to 'get their man'.
Even when men know it's coming, they suspend disbelief - the woman of their dreams cannot possibly be a trickster - and they fall prey no matter how common sense urges restraint. The power women will always have over men is this - men are dupes when it comes to sex, blathering idiots before the holiest of holies, easy marks, easily duped and manipulated.
Literature, theatre, and film are filled with stories of female treachery - Double Indemnity and Body Heat are two which come quickest to mind because the heroines dupe pursuing men into killing their unwanted husbands to inherit millions. There are too many similar stories to even begin to recall them.
On the other hand Othello kills Desdemona to rid himself of a treacherous, duplicitous woman but for the good of all men. She would certainly never stop at the disassembly of just one man, but all men. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot.
There comes a time when a woman's pull-by date comes and certainly it comes more quickly than men's; so that the Cleopatras and Amandas of the world need to know when to hang it up before the ignominy of being overlooked appears; but a smart, savvy, woman will already have her Fifth Avenue penthouse, her homes in Palm Beach and St. Tropez, and the Bentley in the carriage house long before atrophy sets in. Jealousy as she watches her man ogle younger women? Nonsense, he is only doing what he has been programmed to do, and knowing this, she has filled her offshore bank accounts to overflowing.
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