Prioleau's captivating debut is a fervid self-help tract well-disguised as a history. "Seductresses are in fact the liberated women incarnate," asserts the author in her opening chapter. "They're the stealth heroines of history. The first feminists." It's a persuasive argument, which Prioleau pounds home with massive fists full of quotations, attributions and texts from anthropology, religion, psychology, history, art, literature, music and anything else she can get her hyperintellectual hands on. Modern women have lost their goddess-centered groove, the Manhattan College professor asserts, and as a consequence the entire race is going to hell in a male-dominated, bimbo-focused handbasket.

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

If only women would search their collective unconscious for their archetypal Goddess roots, they'd realize modern feminism has rendered them joyless, and the reality TV/Barbie look-alike trends are hooey. Rather, women of any age (there's a chapter on "silver foxes") or looks (another chapter on "homely sirens") are multiorgasmic, brilliant, joyous power mavens who possess everything to bring a man to his willing knees and keep both genders happy and sated. Telling wonderfully peripatetic tales of self-possessed sirens and seductresses throughout the eons, Prioleau makes a strong case for women to take back their ancestral birthright of sexy wholeness (though the problems of non-middle-class women, like poverty, among others, never enter her worldview). Whether one buys her argument or not, it's wildly engaging reading and faultless scholarship.

From The Washington Post

"The seductress is one of the most potent female personas in existence," writes Betsy Prioleau in the preface to this book. Well, hear, hear, and tell us all about it, honey.

Ms. Betsy seems just the woman for the job of lauding the seductress. Armed with a PhD from Duke and a Southern-belle mother (she was "Miss Valentine of Richmond, Virginia," daughter notes proudly), she's got the brains and the roots to tackle the siren's enormous historical import.

One settles in with Seductress, eager to be, yes, seduced, and quickly finds Prioleau's verve infectious. She exalts "ladies of strut and accomplishment" and "that numinous shazam we call charisma." On a mission to prove that seduction is more chosen pursuit than exploitation of god-given hotness, she dedicates herself to celebrating the women whom she calls "world-beaters." These include non-beauties, seniors, intellectuals, artists and two "commanda" types -- politically active women and adventurers.

Stressing that androgyny, nonconformity and self-actualization are major factors in the attractiveness of these women, Prioleau is clearly out to send a message that one can, if one dares, balance love, work and self-fulfillment. Such encouragement is to be applauded, as modern women need to believe that we can excel intellectually and materially and still have men falling at our feet.

Bolstered by the author's moxie, the reader is revved for the journey. So, after all the boosterism, where is she headed? On a historical voyage with dazzling characters. We meet, in biographical sketches, such beguilers as Wallis Windsor, Cleopatra, Josephine Baker, violinist Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Gloria Steinem (that's right) and, of course, Mae West -- several chapters worth, a veritable Who's Who of hot mamas through the ages. Here's Emilie du Chatelet (1706-1749), one of Prioleau's "scholar-sirens," making her entrance for a meal with her lover Voltaire after a hard day of intellectual labor: "Emilie descended the staircase for these dinners in full court dress, her hair upswept and decked with diamonds, her hands bejeweled and stained with ink. As dumbwaiters (the first in France) delivered courses of gourmet food, Emilie and Voltaire jockeyed volubly for attention. They fired off erudite screeds, argued at top volume, traded bon mots and insults in gutter French, then stopped abruptly and burst into laughter."

The reader starts out eager to hit all the stops on the star map of Seductressville, but as the trek lurches on, one finds oneself in the mode of a grumpy toddler held hostage in a car seat: "Are we there yet?!" The road, it turns out, is littered with man-bashing. It's hard to stomach Prioleau's claim that men "cut and run at the drop of a diaper . . . binge out on casual infidelity, wife trade-ins, and hit-and-run sex." Geez, with men like that, why bother even snapping a garter to keep them? Anyone can grasp Prioleau's feminist motive of -- say it with me now -- "empowerment," but to clamber on top, must a girl sink her stiletto heel into the eye of the fellow beneath her?

At various points in the book one catches not only a whiff of reverse sexism but also an air of superiority. There's something false in her dismissal of a "Gen Y tide of postfeminist sex avengers" who can be seen bar- and bed-hopping at colleges around the U. S. of A. If she's trying to pump up the next generation of the sisterhood, the Mean Mommy glare doesn't exactly help. She notes some gains -- "we've cleansed the temple of cipher wives and dumb floozies" -- but suggests that the "Lilith model," a "passé remnant of old-guard male-dominated societies," needs to be exorcised while women "recall the sex goddesses."

That goes beyond maternal censure to just plain ick. The book's 1990s-style You-Go-Girl-ism is constantly undercut by this queer sort of ars seductiva McCarthyism. Maybe the author is reaching for a particular rarefied demographic -- one that might fit in a bit of seduction before dashing off to Pilates, say, or to a Garrison Keillor show. She's got her passport to sexual emancipation in one hand and her jumbo can of Flooz-Be-Gone in the other. Taste is a woman's prerogative, certainly, but Prioleau is less likable for her snootiness.

While we should look to the past for guideposts to the future, one can't help but wonder why so few modern-day women are profiled in this book. Do the seductresses operating today fail to meet the author's standards? What gives?

As a historical survey, the book is digestible, smart and quite quotable. As a guide or inspiration, it's a clunker. Seductress is sort of a studied iteration of Jill Conner Browne's sassy Sweet Potato Queens books -- it boasts all of the possibilities, but only a fraction of the fun.

Brimming with pithy quotes, biographical examples, sources, suggested reading and fancy-girl theorizing, Seductress is nothing if not thorough. The time-pressed shouldn't feel guilty about passing it by, however, as Prioleau's ruby-slippers message could fit inside a fortune cookie: With a little charm and a dash of pizzazz, an independent, brainy gal can get some.

Sad to say, that's still news we smart cookies can use.

Reviewed by Lily Burana