Seduction: A History From the Enlightenment to the Present

by Clement Knox

In 1848 in New York, seduction—defined then as the “use of arts, persuasions, or wiles to overcome the resistance of the female who is not disposed, of her own volition, to step aside from the path of virtue”—became a crime. While one generation of feminists had fought for this protection for women, the laws would be dismantled in the 1930s by another wave of feminists who saw that “protection” as patronizing and restricting of women’s sexual freedom.


These contradictory viewpoints reveal the Western world’s prickly relationship with seduction, a topic that has been frightening and fascinating us as far back as we can imagine. How have the cultural mores of heterosexual courtship shifted over the course of history, and how have they stayed the same? How have generations of women reacted to the thrill, freedom, or threat presented in the figure of the masculine seducer—the Byrons and Casanovas—and the direly unequal consequences for women—and among women, depending on race and class—in the game of pursuing and being pursued?


In Seduction, Clement Knox argues that the western world’s preoccupation with seduction narratives truly begins with the Enlightenment, when human actions came to be recognized as a battle between reason and passion—rather than sin and virtue. He examines how seduction narratives have dramatized the question of human agency and its limits across modern history, through the lives of remarkable women and men like Samuel Richardson, Bram Stoker, Gloria Steinem, and Michel Houellebecq . Along the way, he uncovers many figures that are largely forgotten and uncelebrated today—many feminists before we had the word “feminist,” political and legal change-makers before women could appear in parliament or advocate for themselves in court.


And yet even as women’s rights and freedoms have advanced remarkably over the course of this history, the same cultural and legal conversations keep repeating in the sphere of seduction, as we remain utterly perplexed by how to decipher the fine line between free decision and coercion.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Sexuality, Historical, Feminism, Audiobook, Science

516 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2020

About the author

Clement Knox was born in 1989. He has a B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford and an M.A. in International Relations and Economics from Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in London, where he works for Waterstones as a nonfiction buyer.

Reviews

[Kobi]

DNF at 27%

Look, I don't want to be mean, but if I wrote something like this for university, I would fail. It's overly wordy, takes 95% of the chapter to get to the damn point, and uses far too many words to say so little. I've been listening to this on audio and that's the only reason I made it so far. I literally haven't retained a single thing this book had to offer. It's a huge shame that I didn't enjoy this because the cover is so beautiful, but I'm scared that if I keep this book on my shelves I'll end up hurling it across the room. This was harder to get through than a textbook.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book qualifies as a really interesting, thought-provoking read, but a rather poorly executed book. For the most part it is a history of the narrative of seduction, told through the biographies of a handful of well-known historical writers who had a hand in shaping that narrative. This is sandwitched between a far more in-depth preface and afterwards in which the author more properly addresses the topic of seduction, how it changed and how it relates to the bigger picture of Englightenment.
In general, I would recommend this for a book club or something, where you can pick and choose passages to focus and debate on. Or a very enterprising high school student could use it as inspiration to write an absolutely stellar essay in Enlish Lit class.

Pros:
- super interesting topic of seduction and how it was dealt with legally and "morally" over the past 300 years
- a few interesting ideas both from the author and from other people the author cites, thought provoking, like the idea of sexual economics, or the parallelism between the classic englightment debate of emotions vs reason, and how this played out in the seduction narratives (are women free agents, or ruled by emotions?)
- rather engaging prose, if a little heavy-handed with erudite words

Cons:
- Not enough focus on the main thesis of the book, this was left to the margins
- A LOT of unnecessary text, going into the biographies of people who were not very relevant
- Very little work on the part of the author to weave a thread across the whole history, leaving it to the reader to compare the various chapters and figure out for themselves what to take away
- Generally poorly paced, going at great length on some authors' biographies, then cramming into the last chapter advanced analyses on the modern conception of seduction, what the origins of the change were, and basically all the interesting stuff
- not much analysis on the phenomonon, and what there was might not be that well thought through

The best aspect of the book was it's main message; that seduction has always been a problem, and looks like it will continue to be so. This is one of those "rhyming history" things, where cycles are repeated over and over, and if we want any hope of making progress, we need to keep track of where we've already been. Essentially society see-saws between wanting to legally control and monitor how individuals seduce each other, with the assumption being that there are a lot of bad actors praying on emotionally vulnerable people, to believing in "free love" and trusting individuals to make rational choices or at the least be personally responsible for them.

The biggest, most glaring problem with the book is its content. On the one hand, the author does not consistently focus on either the act of seduction, the stories of seduction, or the laws around seduction, and just kind of bounces around these themes, leading to a hard to follow thread through history, difficult to parse what is the goal of a given description, or how it ties to previous content. On the other hand, the author has the unfortunate tendency to get completely lost in the story telling of his chosen writers to the point where 80% of the content of the book is not actually relevant to the topic of seduction. Compounding this is the fact that the choice of individuals to focus on is questionable; he chose writers (who clearly had the power to bias the historical narrative) that were famous but not always the most relevant. Clear examples were the focus on Mary Shelley rather than the more relevant, but less famous, Caroline Norton. The author goes on and on about the Shelley-Byron origin tale, all the way up to the friendship between Shelley and Norton, and from there we get to the actually relevant story of Norton and her crusade for women's rights. Shelley's could be considered an interesting annecdote of courtship and unusual relationships, but it's Norton who went to court to argue that laws regarding divorce and children should be about morality and not just property. Or in a similar vain, one chapter is dedicated to Bram Stoker, and while his Dracula can be a good window into the mentality of the time and its view on women, his life story was completely irrelevant to any of that.

In general, I got the clear impression that I was reading something from the "humanities" perspective; the language is unnecessarily eloquent, the goal is to depict how the luminaries of a given time understood seduction, not trying to construct an "objective" depiction of how society operated, what was the cause and what was the effect (at least until we reach the history within living memory). While books like Pamela by Richardson did clearly have an impact in how society perceived seduction, it is less interesting to hear about the story of the author, and more about the lives of women that inspried the author, and then how the text itself concretely (or not) changed society and attitudes.

The more subtle problem with the book was it seems the author did not grasp the root cause of all this hubbub surrounding seduction: children and paternity. At the end of the book, Knox explains the theory of sexual economics by which historically women (and society) felt the need to strongly control sex because they needed this to be a rare and valuable commodity, because this was all women had to offer in a world dominated by physical labor. So women would exchange precious sex in exchange for financial security. But this theory is demonstrably wrong by the very fact that historically, sex was cheap and readily available no strings attached, through prosititution. Most of the book details quite systemically how much men would go off and have sex before and after marriage, with inpunity. It was not sex that had these men marry a chaste woman; it was paternity and fidelity. What these women offered (i.e. what was demanded of them) was 100% assurance that children they gave birth to belonged to their husband.
For this reason, the concept of seduction is radically different before and after the widespread use of contraception; the fact that the author almost breezes over this divide in the last chapter of the book tells me that he didn't really understand what was going on with the stories of seduction.

[Tomas Riklius · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is called 'Seduction' but the narrative on seduction is examined only in the last chapter. Previous six chapters on various levels navigate through the topics of sexual liberty and sexual equality. I would see all these three not as interchangeable but distinctly different topics. Although, the set of stories from the Enlightenment to the present is engaging, some of the narratives seem to be included because they are interesting on their own not that they would compliment the general thesis of the book. All in all, it is an interesting read as some what cultural history piece

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dear God, the self-indulgent heterosexual, masculine arrogance that is evident on the nearly 500 pages of this book is enough to make me want to hurl it across the room. Instead, I finished it (while skimming entire sections as needed, I’m not here to punish myself) because while this book does contain interesting information and occasionally a look at some of the past three centuries’ literary output through the angle of the seduction narrative (thus the two stars I am awarding it) it unfortunately buckles under its own weight and its author’s inability to stick to the thesis. Knox continuously undercuts his points and inflates his page count by not adhering to his own narrative goal stated in the subtitle.

full review: https://faintingviolet.wordpress.com/...

[Darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a few quibbles with this book. The first is the fact that nobody took Knox's thesaurus away or told him, for instance, that the ten different instances of the word 'chimerical' could all be replaced with 'a lie' without any loss of meaning.

The second is the overwhelming heterosexuality of the accounts. Considering the topic, this is just strange. There are fleeting mentions, for instance, of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment, of Byron and Jack Johnson's accusations (probably, as Knox would put it, chimerical) of sodomy, and a passing description of Carmilla as sapphic, which it is, but there is no analysis of queer history in the context of seduction narratives. Strange, because Knox is otherwise so painstaking in noting how every other factor contributes-- race, economics, nationality, age.

Quibbles aside, this is a wonderful book. In the context of a series of miniature biographies and with extensive quotation, Strange Antics describes a history I hadn't had any real idea of, from Casanova and Mary Wollstonecraft to seduction laws in the American South and through to the sexual revolution. The writing is engaging, the examples well-chosen, and the research painstaking. There's no attempt at scandal, but the result is entertaining; despite the dense text and the complicated theory at work, it's all understandable. Entirely recommended.

[Matilda Burn · Rating 1 out of 5]

An incredibly Anglo-centric and heterosexual review of seduction and the history of sex.

There is a lot to be said and written about the interplays of sex and gender politics throughout Western history, and I find it so strange that this book was attempting to tackle seduction. Because it just...didn't? I think (clearly) this is a man's version of what seduction is/was written with a historical definition of seduction. The chapters focusing on women made them out to be effectively pawns with little sexual agency, which at this point is reductive, unnecessary and I think a bit revisionist really. Women (shock horror) enjoy sex and they probably enjoyed it in the 18th century too. I was incredibly surprised at this massive lack of discussion about how women might enjoy the process of seduction? Revel in it? Want it? Maybe even do it themselves?

Reading this as a woman the majority of this history told a story of rape, ownership, sexual coertion and ultimately showed that it has been a 'man's world' all along. Where is the seduction in this?!

It was genuinely interesting to read about the history of the above, sexual liberation laws, morality legislation etc but if this is the author's definition of seduction then I am worried, frankly. This book irritated me, so 1*, but I want my friends to read it so they can discuss it with me. I'll lend them my copy.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is a bit misleading. This is a serious book about the history of sexual politics and what women have had to do to get by. An interesting read, but it was a slog in places.

[Crystal]

DNF at like 1-2% but since I actually paid money for this just a NTS: it laments how modern-day laws & public opinion have gotten in the way of 'seduction' which a definite nope from me.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preamble
There's a particular subgenre of history book - I'm not sure if there's a word for it, so I'll call it 'Avatar history' - where, rather than studying a single individual, or surveying the background lives of the masses over a particular range of time or space, the lives of a handful of extraordinary individuals across various such periods are examined and contrasted with one another. The assumption is that certain lives are so vivid and fascinating that they can function as symbolic exemplifications of broader cultural shifts within their wider society. The fact of their fame is used as a justification for their centrality to this subgenre of cultural history, since you can argue that their fame arises from what their lives and works told their contemporaries about themselves and their era. Such stories depict these individuals as nothing less than Avatars of the age in which they live.

At their worst, these books are just glorified celebrity biographies - tomes that take an unpleasantly slavish interest in (predominantly upper class) individuals who had the wealth and resources required to live unusual or amoral lives that enter the history books by virtue of being abnormal and unrepresentative of the average person's experience. It's an old Marxist canard, sure, but the lives of most people who have ever lived weren't globe-trotting adventures full of daring escapades and social trailblazing - they were predominantly sad, desperate existences, lived with the full range of tragedy and wonder that all flesh is heir too, but done so semi-, or completely, anonymously, their tales lost in the crowd they formed, unnoticed within the manuscripts of high-culture, their thoughts, worlds, and friendships poured, like so many things, down into the hungry maw of the great monstrous amnesiac, Time.

This isn't to say the genre has no merits. Every era has its heroes and its villains, and there are notable differences in the people we choose to venerate and revile across different time periods (though of course, later generations will also choose to focus on different figures within each period's cast-list of notables, or construct new heroes from the archives, or resurrect forgotten ones whose initial fame had a short shelf-life). And of course, upper and middle class people do exist; history can't just be about nameless masses and any Marxist who feeds only on one-sided histories-from-below is going to end up with a very shallow conception of human potential. But a cultural history is an ambitious project, and when we tell it through exemplars we have to keep a steady eye on what gets left out, and on what basis certain things are included.

Moralities change. Fashions change. Worlds change. New political, social, and ideological dynamics inevitably open up different possibilities for ways of living, even as they seal up old traditions behind them, and since no person is omniscient, it is often luck, rather than will alone, that dictates if a person falls into the new opportunities that an ever-shifting world suddenly contains, with said person perhaps being the most surprised of all to witness the kind of life they end up living. It's not necessarily the case that a person enters the history books by virtue of their extraordinary character, as much as we consider their character extraordinary because their life creates a narrative that throws into stark relief the wider cultural patterns of their era that they did not so much enable as expose and illuminate.

Then again, maybe some people do just change the world. It's hard to tell a story about puppets, but I never know how to trust a history book that transforms select characters into the grand authors of our collective fates. There are so many stories that can't be told, so many ideas that will never have made it onto a page, that Avatar History must, at some level, fail to replicate the true diversity and contradictions of a culture in motion. The chattering masses are silent and cold in their graves. All we have left is an attempt to reassemble their voices from the scraps of paper that a few from their literate classes left behind.

The actual review
Either way, Clement Knox appears to be aware of the limitations of this 'Avatar history' format, even though his critical lens inevitably presses close to the predominantly literary-based caste he choses to reanimate.

If, like me, you expected this to be more of a sociological account of how seduction was cumulatively framed by law, culture, and religion, then you're not going to get that. Instead, Knox's book revolves around the idea that 'seduction' (by which he ultimately means any kind of sexual transgression beyond the polite boundaries of each era's acceptable cultural norms, from pre-marital entanglements, to rape, to prostitutes soliciting customers) is the benchmark for understanding each era's complex attitude to sex, and that the best way to understand seduction is to study which form of the ever-mutable 'seduction narrative' was most popular at that time.

This is, actually, a really interesting thesis, and Knox is at his best when doing deep-dives on the lives of his authors and weaving connections with wider social (and occasional legal) developments into his textual analysis of his protagonists' canonical works. The chapters on Samuel Richardson and Casanova are particularly strong on this front, with many useful and fascinating investigations into the social roles and sexual categories their works engaged with. I particularly appreciated his even-handed perspective on the influence Samuel Richardson had on Enlightenment Europe's awareness of rape culture, even as he erected a Sensibilistic framework around it that ensnared the very women his work was otherwise so genuinely empathetic for.

Nevertheless, regardless of what Shelley might have claimed to the contrary, though writers might influence history, they probably don't make it, and Knox's book suffers from its need to ground each section around the life of a literary Avatar, not least because it constantly invites questions about which authors get left out. Were queerness not such a blind-spot in this book, then we would, perhaps, have seen a lot more playwrights in this text.

That said, when the text moves beyond literary figures, such as in the chapter on Jack Johnson's boxing career as a lightning rod for racial anxieties around black sexuality, we do get more of a sense of how these issues functioned as vehicles of political and social control. For that reason, this chapter is probably the standout portion of the book.

Other reviews have commented on the lack of focus in the text as Knox frequently slides off from his main subject to mention (apparently) any side-topic he personally finds interesting, even if they have little relevance to the chapter's protagonist, the idea of seduction, or relation to sexuality at all.

Personally, I like this. History is at its best when written by kleptomaniacal magpies; I don't trust a history book that is too clean and linear, but it does make the book inconsistent in its pace and range of interests. The fact that queerness does not come up in the book at all - not even once, despite 'seduction' being a persistent explanation of queer desire and a justification for its punishment by homophobic authorities is just... astonishing.

For that reason, though I enjoyed this book, and found myself delighted by Knox's elegant analysis of key texts, it is ultimately hampered by the Avatar history format itself. This topic is too large to be restricted to titans; it needed more visions from the gutter of human experience - less Mary Shelley and more Henry Mayhew - oh, and some gay people. How one could write of Darwin's 'strange antics' without recourse to the rich tradition of queer bacchanalia is quite beyond me, and grievously undermines a book that is otherwise about as good as an Avatar history can really hope to be.

[Vanya Prodanova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Кой би повярвал, че история на прелъстяването може да бъде по-скучна книга от учебник по статистика? Мда, тъжна реализация. :/

Не знам какви мисли са минавали през главата на автора, но това не е книга, която е история на прелъстяването. Безумно скучен и тежък за четене научен труд е по-скоро. Напомни ми на ужасяващите анализи на литературни съчинения тип "Какво е искал да каже авторът?", които ми се налагаше да чета, за да се подготвям за класните по литература в училище. Как ги мразех и колко загуба на думи са, не е истина. Как да е.

В последната глава (те са общо седем доста дълги глави) може да кажеш, че има нещо свързано с история на прелъстяването, любопитно за четене, но все така суха и тромава реч. Първите шест глави са лоши мини биографии на исторически личности, които могат да бъдат що-годе свързани с темата за прелъстяването и сексуалността през последните триста години, но само ако имаш добро въображение.

Изумена съм, че толкова интересна тема е успял авторът да я превърне в толкова скучно четиво. И това си е талант, макар и грешният. :)

О, и тази книга е пълна с цитати. Сигурно едно 25% са просто цитат след цитат. Мда, не си струва мъките.

[Hao Zhang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw the book in my local bookstore and got seduced by the book's cover art.

The book isn't trying to give a history lesson on seduction, thus the subtitle is quite misleading. Instead, it compiles a collection of biographies like Casanova, Mary Wollstonecraft, Caroline Norton, Jack Jackson, and so on. I'm not that familiar with any of the names before, hence I had a jolly time reading the book.

If I'm the author I would rework the thesis argument to make it more pronounced and compact. Because I found the author's analysis is a bit wordy, hard to follow, and sometimes absent. I would like to see the author offer more of his own analysis on the subject and a more fluent transition and logic from one story to another.

So I gave it a 3 star.

[Keeley Dennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite disappointing ngl. there were some interesting discussions about Francis Charteris, Dracula and dating apps, but apart from that the book was NOT as described in the blurb. this was not a history of seduction and instead just consisted of biographies of "seducers", e.g. Casanova, or authors who wrote on "seduction", e.g. Wollstonecraft. these biographies barely contained information or discussions of seduction and just told the story of their lives, which was not what I was reading the book for. at times the book also read like a GCSE literature paper, which makes you wonder how the author (who was not a woman, I might add) graduated with an MA from our beloved Oxford.

[Sarah M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah it was good. I got some new perspectives which I always love so I’m glad I read it!

[Miles Row · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was an interesting look at some well known historical figures and their contexts.

[Haley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book quite a bit until the end, but then the author went on a confusing ramble against the #metoo movement. He seemed to not recognize it as I do, as women coming forth with their experiences of sexual misconduct, and seemed to instead see it as a puritan backlash. He also claimed it was promoting economic inequality, but I didn’t really see good rationale for that.

[Mikaela McShane · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF 30% of the way through, this reads like a first draft of a freshman research paper that was paid by the word.

[Mike Cross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite entertaining, but, for heaven's sake, put the thesaurus away! It also could have used some editing and some tying of the themes together. Overall a good read that focused more on historical stories than on the subject itself.

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb suggested that the book would have a clear argument, but in reality the text wasn't nearly so clear. It was more of a collection of vaguely related events/biographies. No attempt was made to define 'seduction'. I understand that it's the kind of word whose meaning has probably morphed overtime, and differs between places and situations, but the fact that that's never really dealt with makes the text hard to make sense of. It's a book about seduction, but its rarely clear what is meant by 'seduction' and the only thing that is clear is that it's not always the same thing.

Because of the issue with key definitions of words, I was les forgiving of other things than I might have been. For instance, I found that in places the text relied to heavily on quotes from other authors, trusting that the quotes would clarify everything (which they didn't always).

When the book finally got to it's conclusion, I wasn't entirely sure what it had been trying to say (and the end of the book didn't really help with that). What it did manage to get across seemed simplistic.

In the end, I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to have gotten out of this book. I picked up some interesting historical facts. That was about it.

[Grant Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange antics has the obvious marks of a first work, but it is still quite impressive for what it is. The language is florid and purple, seductive in itself. It surprised me in not being a strait historical narrative but a series of mini-biographies through which the cultural and legal norms around sex are explored. Such figures include Samuel Richardson, Casanova, Mary Wollstencraft, Shelley and Jack Johnson. The book explores the dichotomous relationship between sexual passion and the attempts to draw such passions into the rationality of a legal system, and how these systems were often harmful against minorities and women. The structure and content of the book was mildly disappointing in some regards. The book seems to languish in the 1800's. In comparison the sexual revolution, the rise of Nazism and the current era of seduction are crammed into the space of one chapter. Enjoyable and always interesting.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had me at “Hello” and lost me by the third chapter

[Gabi Leoncini · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read and although a little slow at times, I learnt a lot. (I'd recommend the audiobook if you're worried about the length)

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book. I found the concept of seduction (as opposed to sex, lust or love) to be really fascinating. I particularly liked the chapters which examined how ideas around seduction were shaped by notions regarding race and racial purity in both America and Europe, pulling apart both the legal dimensions of radicalised understandings of sex and the more cultural presentation of these ideas.

The structure of each chapter which takes a single individual and uses their story as a way into broad social-cultural trends that occurred during the subjects lifetime is very clever. If someone is looking for a book that crosses the boundaries between biography and history this is an excellent example. the writers shows both the influence of people such as Mary Wollstonecraft on the time in which they lived but also locates them in their time and shows how they are part of broader trends and influenced by the society in which they live. With all the figures he addresses, the writer demonstrates a great deal of nuance and often compassion for people, recognising both hardship and success.

The final chapter demonstrates a skilled deconstruction of the various historical explanations for the development of free love in the 1960s and 1970s. Straying somewhat into anthropological theories Bourdieu the writer demonstrates a great deal of awareness about current events, including an unflinching look at how the beliefs of Incel groups can lead to violence and the complexity of current discourse.

if I was writing about sexuality/seduction for a university essay I would probably not make use of this text. However, as a for pleasure read I found it eminently readable if somewhat meandering. However, it is not without its flaws, at times the point of the chapter is somewhat obscure the selection of historic figures doesn't seem to be intended to build to an overarching narrative or point.

The text is also pretty heterosexual in its focus with no examination of were gay men or lesbian women fell into these narratives, given the historic rhetoric around the LGBT community as predatory (such as the disparity in the age of consent, and section 28 in Britain) in would have been an interesting addition to the text.

It would also have been beneficial for the writer to define from the outset what they mean by 'seduction' often the book takes a broader focus on love as opposed to seduction.

Also personally I found the focus on narrative construction was inconsistent, certainly the second half of the book is the best and there is a recognition of the power dynamics at play in American seduction laws in relation to race. However, unfortunately there is less consideration of the female perspective in relation to law, there is recognition of the fact the sexual double standard but there is a lack of understanding of the impact of economic inequality that might drive a woman to blackmail, it also somewhat uncritically accepts the male fear of blackmail without considering the possibility of male backlash to restrictions on their behaviour (or the possible parallels to the response to the metoo movement).

I did throughly enjoy the book and its was very readable but it does at times lack focus.

[B. Rule · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is intermittently an interesting read, I think it must be classed as a failure on the whole. Certainly the subtitle is selling you a bill of goods: in no sense is this a history, understood as a linear exploration of the concept of seduction over time. At best, Knox has produced a collection of essays loosely (at times, very loosely) tied to the topic. They can be fun and insightful, but there's little cogent through-line connecting the pieces, and the quality is all over the map.

The first chapter on Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, opens with a promising approach grounded in literary criticism, but the chapter on Casanova is basically a "ha ha, get this!" rambling retelling of his memoirs. I guess Knox got so caught up recounting salacious anecdotes that he forgot to say anything insightful about his subject. Other chapters fall somewhere in the middle: his bits on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have a little context on the political and moral debates of the day, but all too often fall into gossipy nonsense.

Later chapters discard entirely the literary approach to give scattered histories of the Mann Act and the history of miscegenation laws in the U.S. Only in the final chapter is there any effort to give a theoretical framework for understanding the idea of seduction. Even that is a pretty dissatisfying assertion that seduction has been understood as a swing between the poles of reason and passion. Knox largely ignores the more sophisticated dialectical approach most Enlightenment thinkers applied to that insight.

I'm left struggling to grasp what Knox thought he was doing with this book. It feels like he was interested in some random topics related to sexual politics, but lacked the focus to build a framework for understanding them. A lot of these chapters would have worked better as standalone pieces. Considered in isolation, it wouldn't be so obvious that this is a patchy and inconsistent affair. Further, it might allay some suspicion that Knox doesn't really have a conceptual fulcrum from which to do the heavy lifting. He doesn't appear to understand any distinction between seduction, rape, or sexual harassment, and the primary driver of all of this stuff (paternity anxiety) is not spotlighted as it should be. There is a promising allusion near the end to the idea of "erotic capital" arising from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Houellebecq, but like many topics in this book, it barely peeks its head above the waves before being submerged again in a tide of lascivious flotsam about pickup artists and the Me Too movement.

This could have been such a cool project, but as presented it feels simultaneously incomplete and like a slog. The lack of clear thesis gives the reader the impression of wandering lost with the author, in hopes that a brilliant insight will late arrive to tie it all together. A hope, I might add, that is indefinitely deferred. If you're going to read this, I'd suggest treating it like an anthology to dip into rather than a narrative piece to be consumed whole.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Etymologically speaking, to seduce derives from se ducere, to lead away, connoting a sense of manipulation to the art of seduction. Strange Antics tracks the seduction narrative in Western society from Richardson's moral preaching in Clarissa, to Casanova's libertinism and the proto-feminist culture of cicisbeo (where married Italian women would have their own kept men in the household to satisfy their emotional and sexual needs), through the various seduction laws of the 18th-20th century, right up to incel culture and #MeToo. It's especially interesting to see the switch from Medieval depictions of women as seducers, Eves luring Adams away from what is moral and good, to a post-Enlightenment scorning of men as deceitful, while women were raised on a pedestal as vulnerable, moral beings, the angels of the hearth. Perhaps what shocked me the most was the extent to which seduction laws were fuelled by racism, and the insecurity of straight white men - to the extent that even the Nazis thought America's segregation laws were too extreme. It's not always the easiest of reads, but the chapters regarding Jack Johnson onwards are absolutely essential.

[Holly (honestly.holly) · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I wanted this to be another Curious History of Sex but alas, it wasn't. Instead of interesting short chapters on various historical seductions, we got long chapters on various figures from history (mainly writers) that mostly talked about their life story rather than seduction.

I think this book focused too much on the random people who were deemed as great seducers (e.g. Casanova) rather than seduction in society in general, or interesting tidbits of sex history.

In the blurb it mentions #metoo and 50 Shades. Both of these were only mentioned in the Afterword; #metoo for a few lines here and there, and 50 Shades being a quick mention in one single subordinate clause.

I enjoyed the final chapter most, which dealt with more modern seduction such as pickup artists. But even with the more modern topic, it was far too wordy. It took me 2 weeks to finish this book, when usually it would have taken me 2 days.

[Kacie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was no clear cut definition of Seduction, leading to many of the narratives in the book to blur the lines of consensual relationships and rape, and focuses mainly on the male experience, even in chapters where the female experience is supposedly centered. The literary biographies of Wollstonecraft, Shelsley, Byron, Stoker etc were interesting but were narrow in their focus on notably upper-middle class heterosexual assumptions of "seduction," and their are pitifully few attempts to broaden the scope of the book (mentions of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment for example, or one of the various rakish lords proclivity for working class women).

What results is a rather disappointing answer to the questions the blurb poses, as the book fails to deliver what it suggested it might. On the topic of sexual history, I've definitely read better🤷‍♀️

[Alenka of Bohemia · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all: this book does not cover the entirety of human civilization, in fact, it only starts with the era of enlightenment. And if you are only after the discourse on seduction and sexuality, you might as well only read the last portion of this book. However, if you like engagingly-written accounts of interesting people (in this case chosen as representatives of ever-changing stances on the question of seduction), you might enjoy it as much as I did. True, the author sometimes goes into such details that have very little to do with the original topic, and I was also surprised that the focus was pretty much only heterosexual, but overall I found this interesting, well-written and food for thought.

[milena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I pretty much agree with the majority of reviews on here. While I did like the writing style, the author failed to set out his definition of seduction, so instead of a focused study of seduction, it became a tangential work about cishet male sex, and often sexual assault. It was more anecdotal than academic, and instead of the anecdotes being treated as case studies to prove a point, they were just 'fun' - and very long - tidbits.

The writing style itself was good. I know a lot of people say it's too wordy and too much academic jargon, and if you don't enjoy that then it's true, but if you do then it's nice.

Overall I'm just disappointed, and feel mislead by the blurb, and there was little-to-no focus on female pleasure or queer experience.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprisingly dull book about the history of seduction and the debate concerning reason vs. emotion in human relationships. There are interesting people discussed in each chapter including Casanova, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker but they never seem to come alive on the page. Perhaps the issue is the structure of the chapters, which are comprised of short biographies of the historical/literary figures under discussion and the wider context of their times before connecting these themes to the overall narrative. There are some interesting analyses of classic novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula and an engaging afterword that compares the sociability of the 18th century with the comparative isolation of 21st century but the book itself is not a page turner.

[Reading_in_Bed789 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here’s the Table of Contents for the curious:

Introduction
Ch 1. Rake Culture p 13
Ch 2 The Transit of Venus p 80
Ch 3 An Unsentimental Education p 143
Ch 4 Circling Mary Shelley p 197
Ch 5 Of Mann and Men p 251
Ch 6 Blood Out p 320
Ch 7 Seduction Remains p 374
Afterward 418
Endnotes 434
Index 473

Yes, I saw the negative reviews here. I figured I’d toss it on my TBR but probably never get around to it, as it’s not available as an audiobook.

Then I stumbled across it in the stacks at the library. Whoa Nelly. It *is* that meandering and boring. I hoped the index might help me zero in on some interesting passages. Nope. 9 pages in 8 point font.

If you’re looking for some dense reading to put you to sleep…you found it.