But even Mr. Strauss himself admitted that the Homme Fatale is a dangerous creature best avoided.
“These guys just sound like the emotional addicts that view women as projects,” said Mr. Strauss, whose best-selling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists spawned a VH1 reality show, The Pick-Up Artist, featuring the abhorrent yet strangely intriguing pick-up artist “Mystery.” “Obviously it’s much worse than a one-night stand because it’s someone you get emotionally involved with.”
Of course, Aaron Rose has countless real-life pop culture counterparts. There’s Ryan Adams, the sensitive music artist and poet, who has reportedly dated women like Alanis Morissette, Parker Posey and Mandy Moore. Or Justin Long, the “I’m a Mac” actor, who projects an endearing self-deprecating quality at New York parties that has won him the affection of Drew Barrymore and possibly Kirsten Dunst. Or Josh Hartnett—also a partial facial hair victim!—the dark-eyed actor who, in addition to the variety of actresses he’s supposedly dated (Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller), also befriends regular New York girls at bars like Black & White in the East Village or the Rusty Knot in the West Village, with an innocent and unassuming introduction: “Hi, I’m Josh.”
When Helena, 31, a Ph.D. student who lives in the West Village, met her ex, a 30-year-old political speechwriter named Bruce, she found him nonthreatening—at first.
“He’s not like the hottest guy, but he’s cute and sweet in like a Jewish–boy–from–New Jersey sort of way and very self-effacing. He’s not what you picture when you think of your typical dicky guy,” recalled Helena. But the relationship only lasted three months.
“I was really an anxious mess with this guy,” she said. “He’d email me and text me all day and then just fall off the face of the planet for three days. I am not an insecure person and I was terribly insecure. I was constantly checking texts and emails. I would be at home drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette in the corner, waiting for him to call. Finally, I was like, ‘I am 30 years old! What am I doing?’”
James, a 23-year-old editor at a literary magazine, referred to himself as a “reformed Homme Fatale.” He would typically become interested in a girl, achieve a sense of trust and intimacy quickly and bail once the conquest was complete, which at times took months.
“The strength of an Homme Fatale is not like you meet someone at a bar and you pick them up. It’s a long-term game, a dance,” he said. Still, the seemingly immediate affection of an Homme Fatale is genuine, despite its brevity.
“In my opinion, being an Homme Fatale is more of an affliction than a conscious course of action,” he said. “I think you’re in love with the feeling as much as you are with each of those people. The Homme Fatale is not a slut, but the interest is both in the person, and even more so, in the feeling it gives you.”
This constant search for “the feeling” is something that Claire, a 25-year-old assistant in the music industry, eventually detected in her ex-boyfriend, whom she met at a rock show one summer.
“He has this voice he does when talking to girls. It took me a while to start noticing it, but it’s high and nonthreatening and almost squeaky, like he’s being a cute little boy,” said Claire. “It’s pretty strange. But, it works. Nothing else was ever over the top, but that’s what was so sneaky. All of a sudden he was at my house every night, and I didn’t even remember how he got there.”
