High life | 6 August 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the art of seduction

The smell of pine wafting from the shore, the whitewashed and sun-bleached terracotta houses shimmering in the midday heat — both remind me of the simple island life during the good old days, before super yachts, oligarchs and the brain-jolting cacophony of modern music emanating from so-called clubs. I’m lying off the eastern side of the Peloponnese, far from the fleshpots of Spetse and Porto Heli, having done them all last week. And I finally have my mail and The Spectator and I am happy at last.

But only for a minute. I read a New York rag that describes Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a great seducer, and I turn into Orlando Furioso quicker than you can say Errol Flynn. How dare these know-nothings call that frog-like corpulent sybarite a seducer? It’s like calling the Wehrmacht’s conquest of France a stealth operation.

Our phallocentric culture tends to do this sort of thing. Every whoremonger is now referred to as a seducer. Even a low-life like Boris Berezovsky. ‘He’s had countless lovers,’ writes Richard Kay. You mean hookers, don’t you, Richard? People who look like DSK and BB are either grab-ass artists like the former, or whoremongers like the latter. No one of the fairer sex would give themselves freely to such ghastly-looking individuals. It’s either physical or financial weakness that does the trick, believe you me.

And I know all about the Casanova syndrome. Poor old Giacomo was not exactly a looker, he was bald and had a pot-belly, but he had the art of seduction down pat. It is called crave-ability, the knack of convincing   a woman that one cannot live without her, and old Giacomo had that talent in spades.