Free B007Q6XJAO EBOK by Betsy Prioleau

happiness for the greatest number.”
    Although some women do fancy wild and wicked reprobates (especially for flings), a bigger turn-on are men who scramble the good/bad categories and are nice with spice. Unalloyed virtue—or the appearance of it—has zero allure. Ladies’ men stir it up. Morally mixed and inclined to bend rules, they are fundamentally decent and know the secret to the oldest conundrum: how to make goodness charming.
    Virtue has long been entwined with romantic love. In the fourth-century BC, Plato defined eros as a love of goodness that led up a transcendental ladder to the spheres. Medieval amorists put moral excellence back into romance with courtly love, where it has remained in various degrees ever since. “Honesty [and] virtue” are “great enticers”; “No love without goodness”: these rubrics still resonate today. Philosopher Robert Solomon believes ethical worth is a linchpin in love; partners must reflect and magnify our own virtues.
    In studies, women seem to be of two minds about virtuous partners. On the one hand, say researchers, they want a nice guy, with “that old-fashioned quality: integrity”; on the other they want a fun, bold, bad boy. The problem is in the polarized choice, writes Edward Horgan in a Harvard University paper; after reviewing the literature, he concludes that women desire a combination of both—niceness commingled with deviltry, and served up seductively.
    Seduction, in fact, may have been one of morality’s earliest functions. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller speculates that prehistoric man deployed morality as a “sexual ornament,” designed to intrigue and enchant women with the delights of fair play, generosity, decency, and concern for others. “You enjoy helping those who help you,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker. “That’s also why men and women fall in love.” Particularly if the lover isn’t too perfect.
    The ancient love gods were the sexiest of all nice guys. A variegated species with their share of faults, they were glamorous deities who made virtue voluptuous. The volatile Dionysus was also kind and compassionate, and dispensed his benevolence through song, dance, and joyous celebration. Although a tricky customer, the phallic Hermes was the “giver of good things”—a luck-bringer, protector, and silver-tongued seducer. And the “too reckless” Cuchulain of Gaelic myth endeared Irish women young and old with his “pleasing” rectitude and “kindness” to everyone.
    Female readers always rate Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice as a romantic favorite because he is so deliciously decent. Fitzwilliam Darcy is both an odious snob and a man of honor who saves the Bennets from calamity and charms Elizabeth with his eloquent mea culpa: “You showed me,” he says, “how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”
    Mass-market romances are supposed to be black-and-white morality fables, but the “nice” male protagonists in these novels are ethical crossbreeds. Harry, the straight-arrow accountant of The Nerd Who Loved Me , has an inner wild child. He’s a covert Vegas buff who flirts with the Mob, beats a snoop to a pulp, and wins the heroine by advertising his good deeds through a series of seductive adventures.
    Ladies’ men are notorious admixtures. Casanova was not incapable of skullduggery; he exaggerated his exploits for profit and conned the wealthy dowager marquise d’Urfé out of a fortune by faking occult powers and staging a “rebirth” that entailed sex three times in a tub. But he brimmed “with kindness” and performed numerous charitable acts—a gallant visit to a dying inamorata and an impromptu gift of shoe buckles for a little girl.
    Poet Alfred de Musset also misbehaved (as when he went on a brothel-bender in Venice while George Sand lay ill), yet he had a “sweetness of character that made him absolutely irresistible.” So, too, Warren Beatty: at times a vain rascal