Free B007Q6XJAO EBOK by Betsy Prioleau Page B

truth: only the good and brave deserve the fair.
    Women, in a recent study, said they valued bravery even more than kindness in men. Moralists have long placed courage at the head of the virtues because without it none of the others would be possible. For centuries, valor and boldness of spirit have been seen as the latchkey to female affections. Ladies’ men, however, do courage as unconventionally as everything else. They combine risk, perseverance, brains, starch, and inner mettle with decency and a distaste for gratuitous violence. They need not be physically brave—broncobusters or smoke jumpers—but they have the right hearts and souls of steel.
    They wouldn’t, though, be great lovers without spine. Eros is dangerous terrain; intimacy is land-mined with threats. Women can be transported over the moon, but they can also be abandoned, engulfed, and driven mad by passion. Men, too, have special terrors of their own—performance anxieties and a witch’s brew of other fears. In love, women want a man who’s up to a challenge. As the Romans said, “Venus favors the bold,” and god help the lover who recoils from the romantic fray and runs for cover.
    Evolutionary psychologists argue that the female fondness for male mettle goes back to a physical need for provisions, protection, and status. Prehistoric women sought brave defenders to survive and prosper. Another explanation is more erotic: A woman may have been excited by exhibitions of courage in man-to-man combats because it thrilled her to think she was worth fighting for. Rather than a servile drudge, she became a prize for whom men risked their lives.
    There may be a mythic tug on women too. Fertility gods were a staunch lot. The Sumerian “Fearless One,” Dumuzi, descended to the horrors of the underworld and took the “ultimate adventure of the Lover,” seducing the great love goddess Inanna. By nature unwarlike, Dionysus was intrepid in battle and routed the giants with his unholy uproar. He bravely came to Ariadne’s rescue and stood his ground when King Pentheus imprisoned him. “How bold this bacchant is!” marveled the guards at his cool defiance of the king.
    Women accord premier status to bold lovers in their fantasies. Romance novels teem with commandos, highland warriors, secret agents, and dukes who duel at ten paces, but their feats of derring-do are paired with psychological fortitude and moral sensitivity. Dr. Zhivago, a top romantic pick for women, is a portrait in courage—physical, psychological, and erotic. He braves the war zone, loves dangerously, and politically defies the Soviet state in the face of crushing odds.
    Casanova, whatever his defects, strode out boldly. When the Inquisitorial police arrested him in Venice on trumped-up charges, he dressed in plumes and satin as if for a ball, then managed a daring escape from the impregnable Leads prison over a year later. He was equally valiant in his amours. At twenty, he fell hopelessly in love with a talented beauty of the wrong gender, the castrato singer Bellino. “He” had warded off every suitor, but Casanova persevered and discovered what he suspected: Bellino was a woman named Teresa equipped with a leather six-inch penis. He promptly declared himself, and asked her to marry him. “I am not afraid of misfortune,” he explained to her; he counted courage and a sense of honor among his best qualities.
    Though uniformly courageous, ladies’ men range in degrees of physical and psychological valor. Fascinators, like air ace Denys Finch Hatton and bullfighter Juan Belmonte, fall on the action end of the spectrum. Belmonte, Hemingway’s model for the matador-lover in The Sun Also Rises , was small, ugly, crippled, and tortured with fear, but he became a master in the bullring and in the bedroom. “The same energy that went into his conquering a bull also went into conquering a woman,” said an unnamed famous actress, “and he was the greatest lover I ever had.” More