'Come Hither' - A Woman's Seductive Allure Lost In An Uppity Age

Lucretia Billings had always known that she was destined for something important, not just aprons and frilly dresses like her mother.  No, she would make something of herself, a name, a reputation, a place in history.  The old days of Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen were long gone and those of feminist arousal, championship, and destiny were upon her.  

Of course, daughter of a most appealing, seductive femme for a mother, she had her work cut out for her.  Lucretia had been properly schooled in the arts of subtle feminine persuasion - the arts of Cleopatra, Mata Hari, and millennia of women who, gifted with natural beauty and sexual appeal, learned how to use them. 

Mrs. Billings, Lucretia's mother could have had any of the young, wealthy, attractive suitors who came calling at Hastings Court, her ancestral home; but waited patiently until she had the prize caught in her carefully-woven web.  Cabot Potter Lodge had always been in her sights - scion of one of America's finest families, Harvard graduate, and junior partner at Locke, Burnham & Fiske - and she wasted no time in seducing her prey. 

Securing money, position, influence, and social status with no more than a voluptuous figure, sensuality, and a breathless come-hither allure was far easier than punching a Wall Street clock, or fighting little nasty Jews for prime New York real estate. 

And so it was that the upbringing of young Lucretia was consistent with this moral philosophy - women have something that men want and will fight for, so why dawdle?  'Men are darlings, but they are fools', Mrs. Billings told her daughter, 'and the sooner you realize this, the better'. 

But life, society, mores, and ambitions never remain the same, and Lucretia's generation valued other things like work, professional success, adulation, and power.  Women have for far too long labored under a male yoke, she was told, and revolution was at hand. Grasp the reins of power while you can. 

So the young, nubile, ineluctably seductive and alluring Lucretia became an uppity woman - a bitch, a cunt, a harridan in search of her rightful place atop society's ladder.  Her classmates at Columbia dressed her, directed her, and made her into a New Age woman, ready to do battle. 

At first Lucretia felt disoriented.  Her heritage and her upbringing could not so easily be dismissed.  More importantly she knew that feminine wiles, that limned and poetically endorsed trait of the most endowed women, were far easier weapons with which to storm the battlements than the screeching creeds of feminist cant. 

Yet her sisters insisted that she lose the eyeliner, the blush, and the décolleté and fold into the fare of the militant Left.   Confronting misogyny and the racism and homophobia it spawned required frontal attack not the backdoor, insidious, and outmoded tricks of a pre-feminist era. 

So, Lucretia marched with her feminist sisters, banging up against age-old prejudices and assumptions, howling and screeching to no effect.  Men in power did not want legions of bull-dykey looking women bustling up to their redoubts.  Women were a pain the ass to begin with, and now with all this feminist curiosity, were intolerable. 

One encounter with a Republican operative, on the sly in the basement apartment of a Dupont Circle duplex, was enough to convince her that her and her mother's way was right.  A little pussy aimed in the right direction could do wonders 

Congressman X of District Y was an easy mark, a pushover, a john in need.  Lucretia could have her way with him, this desperately lonely striver with a cunt for a wife. 

The old ways are the best ways, Lucretia knew. Why waste energy, resources, and time in proposing, postulating, and demonstrating when the key to influence was in the bedroom?

The Congressman didn't exactly change his vote, but his colleagues were nonetheless surprised at his conciliatory gestures to the right.  Pillow talk was indeed the operative vehicle in official Washington, and Lucretia was a master. 

A woman with sexual allure and political savvy can go places in Washington, and before long Lucretia was known - not as a courtesan but a woman of intellect and influence. She had seduced the Congressman's mind as well as his body - the easiest thing in the world for a savvy, confident woman to achieve, 

The War Between the Sexes is a misnomer, because men have laid down their arms before women conquerors since time immemorial.  Rosalind, Viola, and Portia of Shakespeare's Comedies, women who run rings around their besotted suitors, are eternal woman - a naturally powerful, controlling interest in sexual politics. Physical strength and socially endowed privilege? Nonsense.  Men can be outbid, outperformed, outclassed by women at every turn - not by the force of will but by sheer, irresistible desire. 

 

Why would a woman of Lucretia Billings’ caliber and pedigree even bother with the likes of Congressman X?  Because she could.  Reminded of the Animal Farm meme, 'Four legs good, two legs bad', she claimed what women always knew - women reign and always will. 

Not only do women have a jump start because hound dog men once getting a whiff cannot back off, but because they control paternity, the hole card of sexual poker, the future is female. 

'What's life like in Washington?', asked Lucretia's Great Aunt Margaret, a woman of the old, old school without a clue of anything after 1938; to which Lucretia responded, 'Fine, Aunt Maggie, just fine' and poured herself another Lustau Reserve sherry.

Lucretia made her way famously in Washington - never a courtesan or paid consort but a woman of natural sexual promise and influence. She flew under the censorious radar of official Washington, was the nouveau Hostess of Georgetown par excellence, sought after by young swells, arrivistes and political insiders alike. 

When it was time to leave Washington - a matter of lines and wrinkles, boredom, and disinterest - she retired happily to her home in Chillicothe and when her bonds matured, to a villa on St Bart's.