The Beautiful Kind

Lou Andreas-Salome was a Russian writer and intellectual. From the book Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love:

A self-exalter, Lou valorized narcissism as the true source of love and vitality. Expanding on her female chauvinism, she claimed that women were not only the hornier, hotter, polygamous sex but also erotic multi-taskers who performed a dozen roles at once in love: “lover, sibling, refuge, goal, defense, judge, angel, friend, child, and mother.” Male envy of this sexual superiority explained the angel-whore split and misogyny in general.

On sex she waxed mystical. Through intercourse, she wrote, lovers merged with the unity of all creation and recovered their innate bisexuality. Satiety and infidelity, though unavoidable, could be averted through love artistry or personal charisma. Some “geniuses” of seduction, she concluded, have “an unwonted aura of majesty” and entrain men forever.