On the Habit of Seduction
I recently started to wonder if I was the only girl who had this almost obsession-like habit to try and seduce a man in every new environment I walk in. I didn't think I was, so I asked around a bit, just to be sure I wasn’t struck by some weird pathology. It turns out that I am not, and that it is actually way more common than I first thought.
I want to focus on why this seduction reflex, sort of an obsession with male attention, formed in my mind. Aside from all the astrology insights I could put out there, I am instead going to talk about the social and environmental factors that can play a part in said habit (but to be honest, if you’re a libra sun, venus or moon, don’t sweat it, it’s your astral chart talking. Just joking, of course, or am I)?
The first possible explanation I thought of was boredom. Yes, “seduction”, the fixation on male attention, could be a coping strategy to get out of boredom land. A “crush” can be, or rather is, a very good distraction when you have to spend more than five hours of your day sitting on a chair at work or university. Given that we all get bored at some point in our day, this can come as a fun, often harmless, escape from the banality of every-day life.
On the downside, if you are, like myself, the kind of person who can go down the slide of obsessive behaviors (hello ADHD, not at a Joe from You level, mind you), it might have a negative impact on other aspects of your life, whether it might be academic or professional. Indeed, when one gets so caught up in thoughts of another human, it can turn into a huge distraction and lead to excessive daydreaming. So in the end, acknowledging these “reflexes” can lead to a greater awareness of one’s mind and help manage the amount of attention paid to men.
The second explanation, which also applied to me at one point, is for the sake of integration and safety in a group. Now, dear reader, I see you might be confused, but it will all make sense in a minute.
All humans are social creatures, some more than others. But ultimately, we need people. No hermit has ever had a happy ending (and I’m very much sad about it because to be honest, sometimes humans annoy the hell out of me, but we’ve got to live in a society, so I’ll deal with it folks).
As women, we have centuries of socialization and biological adaptation behind us due to a certain “selection” by men. Years of evolution made us generally less able to defend ourselves physically, but another threat can be reputation. Words and hearsay can separate you from your group, and you know what they say about a lone wolf without its pack.
To prevent that, a rather primitive strategy would be to get freaky with the strongest (or most popular or influential) of them. But unfortunately, the men who are perceived that way tend to develop a set of dominant habits and would most likely end up being abusers, partly because of how society taught them to assert their power over women in a “violent and controlling way”.
A rather striking example of that would be Han Mi-nyeo from the well-known television series Squid Game. The way she instinctively tries to acquaint herself with the “strongest” players just to later be discarded once she’s of no more use reminds us how ingrained this “habit” is in some women. Ultimately, we are forced to believe our only way to achieve physical and social safety relies on our relationship with the ones who traditionally hold power (re: men).
Mentioning tradition calls for analyzing culture. What culture, at least in Occident, says about the relationships between men and women is blatantly responsible for how, as women, we tend to jump in relationships and care less about so-called “red-flags” (a concept largely known by women but very much unknown to men, that can be defined as potential signals of a problematic partner), these same flags that could prevent us from getting, in the worst case scenario, killed.
We’ve been conditioned from our first Disney movie that as a woman, our adventure begins when we meet a guy. Almost every single time, in movies, books, the narrative often focuses on when ‘we’ meet said guy, fall in love and boom, face conflict, find a resolution, and have our ‘happy’ ending (married with kids, of course).
What if our happy endings could be different? I don’t necessarily want to be married, have kids, or live in a big mansion with a prince. That is not what thrills me (although it can be for other women). Why don’t we see other happy endings? Happy divorces, happy co-parenting, happy ‘we spent some time together, now we say goodbye’? Not all of the endings have to be similar. We could write our own stories, but we are stuck believing in one “good” narrative (the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the subject of single narratives is very interesting and worth the detour).
As women, we are also pressured to ‘find a man’, where men are more encouraged to ‘live their young years’, and this pressure creates uneven gendered expectations. Conflicts will, and are, arising due to these differences. Some people are trying to maintain these narratives by referring to them as “differences of perception”, “natural” or “instinctive”, when truthfully, it is only education and socialization that can be responsible for all of those gaps.
Despite all that, I still think there’s a way to detach ourselves from these patterns, firstly by acknowledging them and then working on it to make them a thing of the past. Of course it will not be an easy process — detangling hundreds of unconscious processes won’t be as fast as lightning, but slowly and surely, having an open mind and accepting that those situations won’t disappear by themselves is a great start.
In this matter, this is why we need women and men (and any person who identifies as such) to fight these so-called habits and to be more mindful of the grasp that society has on us as individuals and in our interpersonal relations. And after that, maybe we can all strive for better relationships between each other, but also with ourselves.
A book that helped shape this article: Réinventer l’Amour by Mona Chollet
Images submitted by Nicole Pollack (@nicolepollackk)