La Séduction

Let Spring do its thing!

When was the last time you seduced? Or the last time you were seduced?

It required a life in France for me to hear such questions without a knee-jerk of shame. The French language confers the exuberance of seduction, as what I dare also name the essence of Spring.

Having been raised as an American (and a devout Christian at that), the word seduction has always sounded sinister, shameful, and sinful. What could be more morally abhorrent than a seductive woman?

“For the lips of a seductive woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:

But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” - Proverbs 5:3

There is plenty of wisdom to be gleaned from this and the following verses, but once framed in such terms, can seduction be understood as something other than vice? Is it even possible to refer to seduction in virtuous terms? Even without the fundamentalist Christian undertones, seduction and seductiveness have a pejorative ring to them in English. Is that also your impression?

It’s fair to say that France and the French language seduced me entirely, and I do not fault them for doing so. When I first heard the word séduction, I imagined it was the exact equivalent of the English word. It turns out that the French word has double the definitions and is far more nuanced in its usage. It took me years to get a sense of it.

First of all, it's far more commonly used in French than in English, both in its noun and verb forms (la séduction, séduire). To confirm my intuition, I consulted the Google Ngram viewer of the entire corpus in English (seduce) and French (séduire). If you read a French book, you are almost nine times more likely to come across the word than in English.

More importantly, the French language allows for a broader context for usage. In my marketing and sales studies, for example, I remember learning “comment séduire le client” (how to seduce your clients).

“Nous avons été séduits par….”

In a business context, think nothing of it if a man or woman states that they have been seduced by your flair or some other quality, referring either to you or your organization. This at least is my experience in management consulting with French firms. Whether it be through their intelligence, their manners, their looks, or their charisma, management consultants often seemed set in a seductive mode.

That said, if you were to refer to someone as “un grand séducteur”, it would be understood as a warning to avoid getting snared. Still, to be a “grand séducteur” is not such a bad thing in French: it speaks of one’s innate ability to influence others in a way that is not necessarily against their will, since we can all be tempted to let ourselves be seduced just as we can be tempted to seduce others.

With a little help from the French, seducing and being seduced, maybe it’s time we consider the extravagant seduction deployed by nature.

Does not the irresistible upsurge of Spring seduce us time and time again? Is not this grandiose display of blossoms driving the bees into a frenzy an example of seduction par excellence?

So if you despair at the spectacle of this ranting and raving world, don’t try to think your way out of it. Just let yourself be entirely seduced by the irrepressible attraction of the springtime, and beyond any particular season, by the ineffable beauty of life that has no other plan than to draw you into its dance.

La Vie est une grande séductrice pour celui ou celle qui se laisse séduire.