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KEYS TO THE CHARACTER. According to the popular concept, Coquettes are consummate teases, experts at arousing desire through a provocative appearance or an alluring attitude. But yoir real essence as a Coquette is in fact your ability to trap people emotionally, and to keep your victims in your clutches long after that first titillation of desire. This is the skill that puts you in the ranks of the most effective seducers. Your success may seem somewhat odd, since you are an essentially cold and distant creature. Should anyone ever get to know you well, they will sense your inner core of detachment and selflove. It may seem logical that once they become aware of this quality they will see through the your manipulations and lose interest, but more often people see the opposite. After years of Josephine's coquettish games, Napoleon was well aware of how manipulative she was. Yet this conqueror of kingdoms, this skeptic and cynic, could not leave her. To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first understand a critical property of love and desire. The more obviously you pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away. Too much attention can be interesting for a while, but it soon grows cloying and finally becomes claustrophobic and frightening. It signals weakness and neediness, an unseductive combination. How often people make this mistake, thinking their persistent presence will reassure. But as a Coquette you have an inherent understanding of this particular dynamic. A master of selective withdrawal, you hint at coldness, absenting yourself at times to keep your victims off balance, surprised, intrigued. Your withdrawals make you mysterious, and people build you up in their imaginations. Familiarity, on the other hand, undermines what has been built. A bout of distance engages the emotions further. Instead of making people angry, it makes them insecure. It makes them think that perhaps you don't really like them, perhaps they have lost your interest. Once their vanity is at stake, they succumb you just to prove they are still desirable. Remember, your essence as a Coquette lies not in the tease and temptation but in the subsequent step back, the emotional withdrawal. That is the key to enslaving desire. To adopt the power of the Coquette, you must understand one other quality, narcissism. Sigmund Freud characterized the "narcissistic woman," most often obsessed with her appearance as the type with the greatest effect on men. As children, he explains, everyone passes through a narcissistic phase that is immensely pleasurable. Happily self-contained and self-involved, they have little psychic need of other people. Then, slowly, they are socialized and taught to pay attention to others, but they secretly yearn for those blissful early days. The narcissistic woman reminds a man of that period, and makes him envious. Perhaps contact with her will restore that feeling of selfinvolvement. A man is also challenged by your independence as a Coquette. He wants to be the one to make you dependent, to burst your bubble. It is far more likely, though, that he will end up becoming your slave, giving you incessant attention to gain your love, and failing. For you are not emotionally needy, you are self-sufficient. And this is surprisingly seductive. Self-esteem is critical in seduction. Your attitude toward yourself is read by the other person in subtle and unconscious ways. Low self-esteem repels, confidence and self-sufficiency attract. The less you seem to need other people, the more likely others will be drawn to you. Understand the importance of this in all relationships and you will find your neediness easier to suppress. But do not confuse self-absorption with seductive narcissism. Talking endlessly about yourself is eminently anti-seductive, revealing not self-sufficiency but insecurity. The Coquette is traditionally thought of as female, and certainly the strategy was for centuries one of the few weapons women had to engage and enslave a man's desire. One ploy of the Coquette is the withdrawal of sexual favors, and we see women using this trick throughout history. The great seventeenth-century French courtesan Ninon de l'Enclos was desired by all the preeminent men of France, but only attained real power when she made it clear that she would no longer sleep with a man as part of her duty. This drove her admirers to despair, which she knew how to make worse by favoring a man temporarily, granting him access to her body for a few months, then returning him to the pack of the unsatisfied. Queen Elizabeth I of England took coquettishness to the extreme, deliberately arousing the desires of her courtiers but sleeping with none of them. Long a tool of social power for women, coquettishness was slowly adapted by men, particularly the great seducers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who envied the power of such women. One seventeenth-century seducer, the Duc de Lauzun, was a master at exciting a woman, then suddenly acting aloof. Women went wild over him. Today, coquetry is genderless. In a world that discourages direct confrontation, teasing, coldness, and selective aloofness are a form of indirect power that brilliantly disguises its own aggression. As a Coquette you must first and foremost be able to excite the target of your attention. The attraction can be sexual, the lure of celebrity, whatever it takes. At the same time, send contrary signals that stimulate contrary responses, plunging the victim into confusion. The eponymous heroine of Marivaux's eighteenth-century French novel Marianne is the consummate Coquette. Going to church, she dresses tastefully, but leaves her hair slightly uncombed. In the middle of the service she seems to notice this error and starts to fix it, revealing her bare arm as she does so. Such things were not to be seen in an eighteenth-century church, and all male eyes fix on her for that moment. The tension is much more powerful than if she were outside, or were tartily dressed. Remember, obvious flirting will reveal your intentions too clearly. Better to be ambiguous and even contradictory, frustrating at the same time that you stimulate. The great spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti was an unconscious coquette. Revered by theosophists as their "World Teacher," Krishnamurti was also a dandy. He loved elegant clothing and was devilishly handsome. At the same time, he practiced celibacy, and had a horror of being touched. In 1929 he shocked theosophists around the world by proclaiming that he was not a god or even a guru, and did not want any followers. This only heightened his appeal. Women fell in love with him in great numbers, and his advisers grew even more devoted. Physically and psychologically, Krishnamurti was sending contrary signals. While preaching a generalized love and acceptance, in his personal life he pushed people away. His attractiveness and his obsession with his appearance might have gained him attention but by themselves would not have made women fall in love with him. His lessons of celibacy and spiritual virtue would have created disciples but not physical love. The combination of these traits, however, both drew people in and frustrated them, a coquettish dynamic that created an emotional and physical attachment to a man who shunned such things. His withdrawal from the world had the effect of only heightening the devotion of his followers.