Seduction

You're feeling sexier than ever, but for some reason, you're not getting any sex. What's wrong with this picture? Wait! Please don't go look in the mirror for the answer. You're perfect — the only thing wrong with you is that you're waiting for some sexy guy to come along and seduce you when you should be out there taking care of business yourself.

You want sex? Great! Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it. Now you need to know how to entice men into doing the deed. And you can. You can be a seductress. Men will love you for it.

Think of what becoming a seduction superstar will do for you. "An active seduction can really make a woman feel good about herself," says psychologist Lonnie Barbach, PhD, and author of Turn-ons: Pleasing Your Lover While You Please Yourself (Plume, 1998). "Because when you seduce, it's really a dance: One person puts something out; the other person receives and volleys back. And that kind of attention and positive response can really enhance self-esteem."

So get out there and do some damage! Oh, wait, one more thing before you get started: Seduction is not about getting anyone to marry you. It's about getting men into bed. Which, luckily, is much easier and generally more fun (no commitment issues, no cooking, absolutely no parents to meet). On the next pages, we've listed plenty of seduction strategies — and ranked them from not-so-scary to proceed-at-your-own-risk — to launch you on your way to becoming a seduction expert.

Erika Griswold, 32, a dancer in Chicago, says she would bet her lace-bra collection on the success of the slow, supersubtle seduction. "I tend to like men only after I have talked to them a few times," she says, "and that means that most of my — er — seductees are men who I see around fairly often." So when Griswold runs into them, she makes one or two slightly sexual gestures, like tucking a bra strap under her shirt, touching her tongue to the corner of her mouth, running her fingers along the edge of her ear. "And then I make sure to get away from them as soon as possible," she says. "I put out the suggestion that I might be interested and then walk away quickly, so they're never sure." Each time she sees the man, she intensifies her seduction. Sometimes it will take months, she says, but if she keeps at it, eventually the man will say something like, "What's going on with us?" And I'll say, "Why don't you ask me out and we'll see." Griswold bursts out laughing when asked how men respond to her seduction style. "Respond?" she says. "They never know what hit them."

Don't worry, this doesn't involve going back to school! My friend Sheila Chin, who's 32 and a robotics researcher in Boston, promises me (and she has the notches in her belt to prove it) that the only absolutely foolproof way to get a guy to sleep with you is to become an expert in his chosen field. Maybe this means you find out the city and date of the last Dave Matthews Band concert. Or how many yards Barry Sanders ran for the Lions in '95. When you find yourself trying single-handedly to split an atom in your bathroom because the object of your desire is a physics buff, well, that's when you know you're really obsessed.

"Guys want you to pay attention to them," Chin says, "but they don't just want you oohing and aahing all over them. They want to feel like the attention is really specific to them."

Remembering a time when she — madly in love with a Che Guevara-type activist — read a pile of books on Cuba and South America, Chin warns not to overdo. "I could have just watched Salvador or something," she says. "You just want to be able to ask questions that he'll be proud to know the answers to."

Hopefully, the guy is interesting enough that you don't have to pretend you like listening to him. With your natural curiosity shining through, this method can't be beat, Chin says. "Before you know it, he's snuggling up to you, telling you he can't believe how much you have in common."

My friend Jennifer Reyes, a 23-year-old law student in Philadelphia, doesn't have a whole lot of interest in getting married anytime soon. But don't tell that to the hordes of men who have fallen victim to her feminine wiles at her kitchen table. "My feeling is that what men really want is someone to take care of them, and you don't just do that to get them to marry you — you do it to get them into bed." She invites them over for breakfast and wows them with her domestic prowess. The man walks into a spotless house filled with the aroma of fresh muffins and brewing coffee. She proceeds to wait on him hand and foot, grating fresh cheese right onto his omelette, warming up his coffee before it has even had the chance to cool off. She asks him a million questions and listens attentively to every answer. The trick, she says, is all the while that you're appearing domestic, to keep it sexual — the classic one-two punch. She wears suggestively snug but comfortable sweatpants, her hair up in a ponytail, maybe a fluffy, midriff-baring make-out-with-me-on-the-couch sweater. When she leans in to take his plate away, her cleavage might find itself within his gaze, her hipbone might gently graze his shoulder. If the mood is right, she might just slide right into his lap. At any rate, says Jennifer, she's never had a guy who's seen her kitchen leave without checking out the bedroom first.

My friend's cousin, Carole Gonzalez, a 31-year-old Internet-technologies specialist in San Francisco, meets most of her seductees through her job, so she's had to develop a seduction style that merges business with pleasure. "I do a lot of traveling, so guys usually meet me in a professional capacity first," she says. Gonzalez makes a point of keeping a brisk distance between herself and the objects of her attention, while at the same time wowing them with her expertise. "I'll make a presentation or meet someone to discuss business and be my professional self — that is to say, courteous and femme but with no hint of a flirtation." That lulls most of the men into thinking they know what they're dealing with: a serious, all-business colleague who also happens to look hot in a suit. The very fact that she seems too buttoned-up to get involved with anyone she works with makes her all the more enticing and, Gonzalez thinks, sets the men to wondering what she'd be like in her off-hours. Then as soon as the work is done, Gonzalez abruptly turns the tables — and reveals her inner seductress. "As we're walking out of the meeting, I'll ruffle my hair, loosen my collar, and breathe a big sigh of relief that work is over. Then I'll invite the guy I want out for a drink to unwind, saying something like 'What on earth do people do to have fun around here?'" The man in question is usually so surprised at her change of demeanor — and the personal attention from such an otherwise professional and distant woman — that he feels confused but excited and somehow honored at the same time.

From the bar, it's just a short sprint into bed. "My favorite part of this deal is going back to being my businesslike self the next time I see him at work. It's like we have this dirty little secret between us, which is totally sexy," she says.

My friend Vicki Marsalis, a ballsy 29-year-old teacher in New York City, has clearly studied movies in which the heroine and hero end up making out passionately in a rainstorm. One afternoon, she was pacing her floor, sweating over her tremendous crush on David, a man with whom she couldn't seem to get past the "Hi, how are you doing?" stage. She had to get him to really sit up and notice her but was having trouble thinking of a strategy when suddenly, it began to rain hard. So she marched right out of her house and started to walk 10 blocks to his. By the time Marsalis got to his doorstep, she was soaked — white T-shirt and jeans both clinging to her within an inch of their lives. She made up a story about how she'd gone over to see a friend in his neighborhood, but the friend had left her a note saying she'd suddenly had to take her cat to the hospital. "It was just ridiculous enough to be believed," she said. "Not that he was listening to what I was saying — I was a one-person wet-T-shirt contest, and judging from how fast we ended up ripping off each other's clothes, he must have thought I deserved first prize."

Vicki's best friend, Irene Ng, a 30-year-old doctor in Providence, R.I., takes a proactive approach as well, and she's not worried about letting it get a little pornographic. She met a guy we'll call Billy at a party; he gave her his number. He returned home that night to find that she'd left a message on his machine, with a fairly lengthy and very detailed imagining of what their first night together might be like. She was in bed watching TV when her doorbell rang. It was Billy. "He said he hoped that he hadn't woken me up," she said. "I asked him how he thought I'd be able to sleep after having left a message like that, and he laughed and asked how I thought he'd be able to sleep after hearing it." And so, Ng slyly reports, at that point they decided they might as well just stay up all night.

Tina Silverman, a 34-year-old marketing executive who lives in Oklahoma City, met shy Peter at a party and knew instantly that he liked her but could also tell that if anything was going to happen, she'd have to make the first move. The next week she proceeded to "run into him" at a coffee shop down the street from his house. Silverman sidled up to Peter's table, said hello, and asked him to come out to her car — she wanted to play him a song on her tape deck. Once they were inside the car, she handed him a blindfold and told him to put it on. He looked scared for a minute, but then he shrugged and did as he was told. You'll find that most men will. "I drove around the block a few times so he didn't know where we were going," she laughs and smiles sheepishly, "then I took him to a nearby motel room, sat him down on a bed, and pulled down the shades. I took off my clothes, and then I took off his blindfold." Peter was shocked, she said, but thrilled. "He told me that in 20 years of having sex," Silverman said immodestly, "it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him."

This is my personal favorite. Be direct, and by direct I mean just coming out with it and saying something like "I want to have sex with you." A variation on the theme is "Would you like to have sex with me?" If this sounds artless or crass — merely an exercise in bad taste — think about how great you'd have to feel about yourself to summon up the courage actually to do this. The straightforward approach is not merely about saving time (although it does have a way of cutting to the chase), it's about giving yourself the opportunity to display extreme sexual confidence, to advertise yourself as a person who assumes that whatever she wants, she can have. And you can. It is that belief in yourself — not your bra size, not your eye color or the state of your hair — that will make you sexy and seductive. This cards-on-the-table method may not work for every guy. But honestly...who wants a guy who'd turn down that offer?