Seduction Versus Production
Dr Raven Dolick MsD
July 7, 2015
"Seduction is, at all times and in all places, opposed to production." ~ Baudrillard
"Men use power to get sex. Women use sex to get power." ~ Tom Wolfe
In his book 'On Seduction', the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that there are two modes of love. The female mode is centred on seduction, which is imaginative and symbolic. It is about flirtation, oblique glances, whispered promises, and always seeks to defer the sex act. It employs makeup and fashion to tantalise, emphasize and beguile. Titillating gestures, double entendres and mysterious codes are essential to seduction. It trades in ambiguity and seeks to take control over the symbolic rather than "real" order of things. It revolves around delayed gratification. It is always putting off the moment of consummation, while never saying no to it.
The male mode of love concerns production (we might say that each "fuck" is a commodity and that men want to produce as many as possible), and is unimaginative and direct. While female seduction lures men into a dark, unknown space - the realm of the vagina, so to speak - male love is centred on the known and visible, on the phallus and on penetration. It is like a Cruise missile that wants to get to its target as directly as possible in order to detonate (ejaculate). It seeks to get the job done fast. Whereas female seduction concerns the symbolic order, male love is focused on mastering the real order - the physical completion of the sex act. It is about instant gratification.
Men are simple, direct creatures obsessed with production, completion and simplicity. Women are complex, indirect and painstaking artists rather than production-line manufacturers. Where men are focused on quantity, women prize quality. Where men are unsubtle, women elevate subtlety into a work of art. Men head straight for the target, following the path of least resistance, while woman circle round and take a long route in which the resolve of men is tested to the maximum. Women seek to resist men's short-term objectives.
The French writer Stendhal described the male pursuit of a woman in terms of a siege of a castle. If the castle (a woman's honour) fell too soon, she was dishonoured. If the siege went on too long, the man was humiliated. Timing was of the essence. A man must not storm the castle too brutally, and the woman must not reinforce its defences too effectively. A perfect romance involves perfect timing where the woman's honour is preserved and the man saved from humiliation. It is the woman who decides when the siege is over, hence plays the crucial role. She makes or breaks a romance.
Men always complain about the ridiculous small talk and "beating about the bush" that they have to go through before they get what they want - a fuck. Women always complain that men are like Neanderthals with only one thing on their minds.
Men, on average, have an enormously higher libido than women. Most women have no idea how off the scale male sexuality is. Gay men have the most sex. Why? Because there are no coy, resistant women in the equation. Gay men are highly promiscuous on average and complete the sex act extremely rapidly, and many often with total strangers. Straight men have exactly the same objectives, but their plans are always thwarted by women. Lesbians have the fewest sexual partners; there are no men on the scene to constantly press them for sexual favours so both partners can indulge in a long and complex seduction.
The average man is much more interested in porn than the average woman. Porn rapidly gets down to business. The "money shot" is never delayed too long. Women are much more interested in the erotic rather than the pornographic. They want a story and some kind of emotional contact and meaning.
Consider activities such as striptease and burlesque. They are about tantalising the male imagination. The art is in how slowly a woman can disrobe, how fevered she can make her audience in anticipation of the final unveiling. The performer is operating in the symbolic realm. Each item she removes is heavy with symbolic weight, and gets heavier as she reaches the items that conceal the things the men most want to see. As she reaches the final item, she is moving incredibly slowly, magnifying every gesture, every tiny adjustment of the last garment which conceals the holy grail. Men's eyes are bulging and their tongues hanging out. They are literally drooling. Yet what is about to be revealed is something they have seen countless times before and in some senses is an absence rather than a presence. Women are nevertheless able to transform it symbolically into the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies, where the goddess resides…Venus herself.
Think of the ultimate striptease…Salome's dance of the seven veils. So seductive was it, so potent and infinitely bewitching, that it cost a prophet his life. It was the perfect performance. It gripped Herod's imagination and never let go.
Advertising is a devious synthesis of seduction and production. The advertisements seduce the consumers into buying things that have been mass-produced. The aim is not to uplift humanity or play a fascinating emotional game, but merely to bring profits to some greedy capitalist pig.
We need a new synthesis of seduction and production, one that is not geared to mindless consumerism and capitalism, one that is not based on financial transactions, but is instead about leading us to higher spirituality.
Men want to go straight to gnosis, but in fact the nature of the dialectical route to gnosis is one that demands seduction in all of its forms. Seduction is the antithesis of the direct route. Seduction provides the contradictions, mysteries, resistances and obstacles that are needed to breathe life into the dialectic.
Seduction - the eternal feminine - is the sacred aspect of life that promotes mystery and imagination. It is based on Mythos and Sophia (story and wisdom), whereas the male approach is based on the battering ram and the sheer penetrative power of Logos. We need Mythos, Logos and Sophia all working in harmony. We don't have nearly enough seduction in our real lives; and we have far too much of it in the hyperreal world of the screen - the authentic Matrix.
Seduction can lead us out of the labyrinth. Seduction can lead us higher. We need priestesses and goddesses to bring seduction into the ordinary world. And through seduction, we oppose production. We transfer power from men to women, from capitalism to a just and bespoke economic system based on quality rather than quantity.
Remember, seduction is on the side of quality and production on the side of quantity. We have to escape the production lines, the sausage factories, the one-size-fits-all mentality. Those things all belong to the male obsession with production. Every aspect of life should seduce us, and there's nothing about mass production that is remotely seductive.
Jean Baudrillard writes in Seduction:
1 ) "Seduction represents mastery over the symbolic universe, while power represents only mastery of the real universe."
2 ) "This transubstantiation of sex into signs is the secret of all seduction."
3 ) "[Seduction] is a game, sex is a function."
4 ) "Since Machiavelli politicians have perhaps always known that the mastery of a simulated space is at the source of their power, that politics is not a real activity, but a simulation model, whose manifest acts are but actualised impressions."
5 ) "The strategy of seduction is one of deception."
6 ) "To wear meaning out, to tire it out in order to liberate the pure seduction of the null signifier or empty term - such is the strength of ritual magic and incantation."
7 ) "If you were to see written on a door panel: 'This opens onto the void.' - wouldn't you still want to open it?...That which looks onto nothing has every reason to never be forgotten. That which is arbitrary is simultaneously endowed with a total necessity."
8 ) "Seduction is never linear…it is oblique."
9 ) "Vulgar seduction might proceed by persistence, but true seduction proceeds by absence; or better it invents a kind of curved space, where the signs are deflected from their trajectory and returned to their source.
10 ) "The seducer knows how to let the signs hang. He knows that they are favourable only when left suspended, and will move of themselves towards their appointed destiny."
*****
Whereas production makes tangible things, seduction produces illusions, and these are much more powerful. The world of ideas is what mesmerizes us, not the world of objects.
Baudrillard speaks of the power of the "insignificant signifier" - "the mind is irresistibly attracted to a place devoid of meaning."
Why should that be? Because human beings are "meaning generators". When we look at random clouds passing overhead, we start converting them into meaningful shapes. Why? Because that's what minds do. They impose meaning. So, what is more exciting than the void? What greater challenge is there? Did not the cosmic mind summon the physical world out of "nothing". And why? In order to organize it, in order to give it meaning, in order to see itself reflected in the mirror of materialism.
Cinema is all about seduction. Suspense movies seduce us with the possibility of what surprise may come next. Horror movies seduce us with the possibility that we may not be able to bear what is coming. Mystery movies seduce us with the possibility of unravelling the greatest puzzles of our existence. Romance movies seduce us with the delight of the possibility of perfect love. Comedies seduce us with the possibility of riotous laughter. Fantasy movies seduce us with the possibility of imagining ourselves in another world. Science fiction seduces us with the possibility of glimpsing the future. Action movies seduce us with the possibility of spectacles that take our breath away. Thrillers seduce us with the possibility of an emotional roller coaster.
For good or ill, we are being seduced all the time.
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