WHAT WOMEN WANT

A Study in Seduction, The Allure of Mr. Grey

and Great Character Arcs

Still from “Fifty Shades of Grey”, courtesy of Pinterest

I think it was in a crowded restaurant in Bucharest, over the remnants of a duck salad and a bad monologue, that I first realised the game between men and women had been compromised. The man across from me had been talking for forty-five minutes. I nodded and smiled. I laughed in all the right places. I watched his mouth move as one might watch a German documentary film.

He was the youngest urologist in the European something of urologists. He had saved a child’s life and had, as he put it, “felt the pull of death” under his scalpel. He was a freemason. He wore a sharp blue suit and a silk grey tie, and gave a little speech about the favourable clime for grapes in Argentina. At once, the soft clatter of glasses faded in the background, and I became absorbed in the shiny little lights reflecting off the marble tiles. To stand up and leave would have required a defibrillator.

After he blasted his patient phone calls in the car — attempting with a mortifying pride to sound detached and authoritative, yet at the same time curiously charitable — his failure could have hardly been more unsurprising. But he was floored by it. As for me, I realised that night that I had lost something — a certain naiveté and impressionability, that all my reading had finally paid off, and what I was left with in the end was a kind of bitter clarity. Those magic powers of a good suit, and a nice car, and a medical degree, they were completely lost on me. To such impossible ideals had my criteria been pinned, that I wondered that night, perhaps for the first time ever, if my brain would finally cost me a husband.

I was on the train a couple of days later when I noticed a man (mid 30s) reading an article:“Six Proven Strategies to Get Her Into Bed TONIGHT”. It was a special edition of Men’s Magazine. But it wasn’t the business formulation, nor the wicked intention that bothered me. It was the urgency of it. No wonder the new masculine ideal is a banker with a sportscar, who needn’t any Rohypnol. He’ll just talk you to unconsciousness. With the dexterity of a casino Boxman, he shuffles through his deck of plays. The mechanical charm, the anxious bragging, the BORING hurry to a destination. His greatest sins, beyond his obsession with himself, are a lack of imagination and that terribly unsexy haste.

The truth is that a woman’s wants is less the stuff of Men’s Magazine, and more the stuff of Freud. It is a descent into the tangled devices of the erotic mind. In that respect, a sincere interest in her personal psychology will arm you far more effectively than your favourite podcast bro.

To be oblivious, on the other hand, is to be a constant witness to one’s romantic defeats. To wonder, in the middle of the night, why she hasn’t called you back, why she’s always busy, why she’s slipping through the grasp of your very carefully (or not-so-carefully) orchestrated plays. After all, you put on your best game. You even paid for dinner. (I always think we’ve hit a new level of sexual confusion when a man paying for a dinner becomes a milestone.) To live in this fog is to always chase a validation, a destination, an expectation — and what’s worse, to do it tactlessly — whilst blinded to a simple truth: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

The Art of Persuasion

That the initial stages of romance are more about the woman is something that seems to elude the majority of men. This is scarcely a statement of entitlement. Rather, it is a romantic subtlety. A man’s desire is (usually) immediate, lacking all the whims of a woman’s slow-blooming response. The discrepancy calls for a persuasion. It is in this space of persuasion where the stories of Casanova, Don Juan, and Lord Byron unfolded. Naturally, those men understood their job, understood the trajectory, and subtleties, and requirements of a seduction. These were men who had learned to speak the feminine language, who had mastered creating a world of beauty, sensation, surprise, and slowness. A woman could move freely in such world, without the slightest bit of urgency or boredom, until, feeling so refreshingly understood, she renounced all doubts, giving herself utterly. Today, it seems unthinkable to the contemporary man, that a woman should resist him without his wholehearted aesthetic effort. He would rather “be himself”, wear his heart on his sleeve, be transparent even! A commendable goal indeed. If only underneath such flowery ideals, didn’t lie incompetence, sloth, or at the very best, naiveté.

The Sex Appeal of Risk

Which brings me to another delusion that men seem to bask in nowadays, that romance has become some business dinner. Much like traders in a bidding pit, they approach the matter with a mindset of efficiency. Such men know the price of their affections. If they buy you a bouquet of roses, they hope it sways your panties off. If they splurge on some exotic sushi, it is itemised under an expectations list. I doubt that any of these men have love or passion, or some real erotic mission on their mind, otherwise risk, ambiguity, and time would be their allies. And what an irresistible man is he who is secure enough to play a little game of risk!

The Power of Subtlety

Then again, to scoff that all people have expectations is to miss the point entirely. As surely those who miss it think of subtlety in connection only to a Casablanca scene. No, today every thought must be direct, authentic, PRACTICAL! Unfortunately for these men — and I’m going to get in trouble for this — women are neither direct, seldom authentic, and certainly not practical, and a knack for vagueness and theatrics will serve you better in the long run, than your candid egoism.

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Then, of course, there is the question of character. That a woman is attracted to a man’s character more than anything else is something that might sound ridiculous in the abstract — surpassed by more palpable things like money, cars, and a lavish life — but I dare suggest that the increasing prestige of such tickbox materialism is the result of a diminishing number of characters. Because whilst many women will settle, or relish in a beautiful life, this alone will never induce their wholehearted desire, will never win their love. The truth is people—and women are no exception — will often choose either a good deal, or a good story, of which the latter holds infinitely more appeal. Yes, it is a phenomenal STORY that most women want. And a phenomenal story begins with a great character and a palpable conflict.

What Makes A Great Character?

Although to seek a conflict is a risky thing in matters of the heart, it seems to be the first condition crucial for desire. For the truths that sit at the edges of our consciousness are often very different from the shiny “Nice Guy” archetype. And yet — tricky cases aside — I don’t think women want the bad guy either. I think they want a great man, a man with the potential to be even more someday, with the potential to become Good.

It is hardly a surprise then, that a certain (more deserving) kind of men struggle with this notion of goodness. They’re baffled when the script they’ve been given — “be kind, be stable, be successful” — doesn’t guarantee them the affection they expect. As if the right combination of virtues could unlock, like some moral keycard, the heart of another. What they fail to realise is that the currency of virtue loses its value when it is offered without the signs of a battle, a journey, some thorny obstacle conquered. This brings us back to the idea of conflict. I am, obviously, not talking about conflict in its popular sense, but a more subtle, psychological conflict insinuated in the man’s character.

The dreary fact is that moral uniformity (in men) is just as lethal for attraction as a sign of an unsalvageable wickedness. Not to mention that a woman’s affection is rarely a reward for goodness — which is, anyway, easily enough simulated — but a much more visceral response to something far more complex: the man’s character dynamics.

The Allure of Mr. Grey

The success of the romance novel industry stands as testament. Fifty Shades of Grey, Danielle Steel, the bodice-rippers languishing on supermarket shelves — these are not mere trifles. They thrive because they speak to a desire that is, quite literally, plotted. Its terrible quality aside, there is something almost subversive about the romance novel, a genre that grossed over four billion dollars in 2023. From the Victorian swoon to the modern “CEO seduces virgin secretary”, Romance, in its various forms, tells us far more about female psychology than we care to confront. How, after all, could books so terrible be so successful? It is because they comprise an entire economy of female desire.

But what are women really buying with these novels? What untouched experience lies within the cringe-inducing pages of Fifty Shades of Grey? I think it transcends the simplistic fantasy of the forbidden. Nor do I think all the women that enjoyed it had the IQ of a Catholic schoolgirl. I thought Fifty Shades of Grey to be the worst thing since Gwenyth Paltrow won an Oscar, and yet I found myself embarrassingly drawn to its fundamental myth. I suppose the reason it resonated so much with women is because it grasped a subtle reality: that women want a slow burn, ignited by a plot, by the arc of longing, tension, and fulfilment. However, and more importantly as far as I’m considered, the character arc of a powerful figure into — at long last — a GOOD MAN, was the real home-run.

The Character Transformation

The plot, we know, doesn’t vary much. A woman, ordinary enough, but pure and good, encounters a man who is anything but. He is a cowboy, a doctor, a prince, a vampire. These are not the considerate and agreeable partners women ought to want. Neither are they chatty braggy overhasty lawyers that men think women want. They don’t say much at all, in fact. They are men of stature, of mystery, who command their surroundings with brute force or charisma, who bend the world to their will. And there is no denying the psychological allure of these tropes. Forget for a moment, if you will, that they are terribly written. They, just as well, could have been exceptionally written. The purpose they serve is not some literary triumph, but tension-building, moralistic ambiguity, interior conflict. They embody the very risky (thus, sexy) middle-ground between the “Antihero” and “The Hero”, with the woman favourably positioned as the beautiful solution to the battle.

To scream “Cliché!” is to miss the point once more. For in as much as Romance adheres to formulaic tropes, so too does Jung, for example, condense human complexity within a few archetypes. The issue is not essentially one of repetition, or lack of imagination. Rather, it is imposed by a framework that seeks to distill the indistillable into a series of predictable patterns. Though Fifty Shades of Grey might be a teeth-clenching cliché, Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful moralising cartoon which tells, amusingly, an identical story: she turns him into a Prince/Family Man.

What follows is an ancient ritual: he falls in love, she softens him, he relinquishes his armour, but only for her. It seems the entire myth hinges on this transformation, the idea that underneath some hard and enigmatic exterior lies a fluffy cupcake heart, waiting to be opened by a woman’s gentle hand. The climax lies in this revelation of vulnerability. Having it from the on-set, displaying it as some shiny package bonus, counts for nothing in that dreadfully dark archive of a woman’s mind — with all her daddy issues, and 90s thrillers, and Dostoyevsky, and posters of young Mikey Rourke. And if she likes Chanel, member clubs, restaurants-restuarants-restaurants, and Sephora shopping sprees, it’s even worse, my friend.

To lack this character arc, on the other had, is to lack a great story. The fantasy unravels. There is nothing left to be discovered, attained. I am not saying women will not settle for less than their desires, as people generally do. Nor am I suggesting that a life lived in exclusive virtue of desire is a reasonable bet. In reality, we eventually learn to settle into the space between what we want and what we need, finding, if not happiness, then at least a bit of peace. But this essay is titled “What Women Want”, and not “What Women Ought to Want”. It is a study in idealism.

In the end, I suppose it is a matter of power. Not dominance, in a literal sense, but power in the more subtle, emotional landscape. Power in a woman’s theatre of operations. Men who empower our most fundamental feminine qualities with a higher erotic purpose — the chance to break through the fiercest strongholds of masculinity with our gentle heart, angelic beauty and exoplanetary specialness — is a prospect that is terribly hard to resist. Of course, you needn’t be a vampire, or a surgeon, or a sexy CEO for this. All that is required is a highly-wrought fascinating character, some good ol’ imagination, a talent for patience, and respect for the art of the chase. Without these, it is indeed difficult. You’re better off dying and hoping someone named Lestat awakes you.