Virtuous Courtesans

There is a horse running this summer who has the best name ... Seven Lively Sins. There is something pulsating about a "good" round of sinning and who better to be the paragons of lusty virtues but notable courtesans.

Susan Griffin compiled a catalogue of virtues possessed by courtesans across the centuries from 15th Century Rome, through the Renaissance, as best typified by Parisian kept women from the courts of the Louis to Belle Epoque, up to Sarah Bernhardt's time. Griffin does not array her courtesans chronologically, even though she stresses that to be the penultimate courtesan, the setting must be perfect, aligned. Instead, she illustrates their talents over seven chapters: timing, beauty, cheek, brilliance, gaiety, grace and charm, sort of the basic merit badges of kept women. At the end of each chapter, she adds in an erotic station, a corruption perhaps of the stations of the cross, themselves with come-hither titles: flirtation, suggestion, arousal, seduction, rapture and afterglow. What promises these end notes seem to promise but alas, Griffin teases us with minuscule vignettes written about lovers seen from the wrong end of binoculars. The boudoir is never entered. The charms are all those publicly flaunted, granted with much more style and taste than over-sexed movie, reality TV and rock stars.

Griffin is a historian, not an author of how-to manuals, yet she does interpret the virtues, especially charm, as key to an arousing relationship:

"Although it is clear that the courtesan would need to have carnal knowledge, what has not always been so evident is the profound nature of what she knew. The realm of sexual pleasure is also the realm of the psyche. To love or be loved, to touch, be touched, feel pleasure, passion ecstasy, to surrender and release engages every human faculty, not sensual adroitness alone but intelligence of every kind. As well as being willing to give pleasure, a good lover must be sensitive and aware, registering what kind of touch, for instance, on which part of the body arouses desire, knowing which mood calls for a robust approach, which moment requires gentleness, able to laugh or tease while at the same time probing both the mind and body of the loved one for gateways to greater feeling."

Remember charm schools? Maybe they were important after all; Griffin writes:
"Faced with a charming woman, for instance, you will feel yourself ceding control almost immediately. Suddenly, your body seems to have a mind of its own. Perhaps you sense a spreading feeling of warmth and then an excitement, one that enlivens both body and soul, almost as if you were being reborn. It hardly surprises you therefore that soon you find yourself letting down your guard. You may reveal to her what you never intended to reveal to anyone or laugh at what you never found humorous before. Then you realize you have agreed to what, in different company, you might have found to be rather wild propositions. And all the time you feel loser somehow in your limbs, closer to liquid than substance. Have you become putty in her hands? Even if this were true, the pleasure is too delicious for you to worry about and such consideration. On the contrary, you are more than happy to stay in her hands for as long as it is conceivably possible and by any means necessary."

These two quotes are the closest Griffin comes to Anais Nin.

Her organization, by quality rather than character, and her erotic vignettes closing out each virtue make the book choppy. The stations seem to have no connection to the virtue under discussion and often focus more on the feelings of the courtesan's protector than on her embodiment of a given talent.

Griffin has other books with tantalizing titles: The Eros in Everyday Life, What Her Body Thought, and Women and Nature - The Roaring Inside Her. Hoping for a bit more lustiness, I reserved the last title, written in the mid-70s. How dated ... what a feminist polemic against male domination. Has Griffin come a long way baby in the past 35 years? Nah