Heroes, Seduction, and Damsels in Distress

To seduce a woman takes more than to say the right words. A man must rescue a woman from the ordinary, and provide something she can’t find elsewhere.

I’m reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, pulp fiction from the turn of the 20th Century, right now. They are a blast to read. I haven’t read as much fiction the past several decades (used to read a lot in junior high and high school), and it’s fun to get into these books.

I completed the first three Princess of Mars books. If you’re not familiar with that series, it’s the one that inspired Star Wars (via Flash Gordon), Avatar, and Superman (and in that way all subsequent superheroes), among many others. John Carter from Burroughs’s Princess of Mars books is essentially the first superhero – a visitor to another world who can leap incredible distances there, has super strength, and can move with incredible speed – the same powers the creators of Superman gave him when he first appeared 21 years later (enhancing his powers much more later on).

Anyway, they’re all great books, fast-paced, and page turners.

And they all feature a ridiculously masculine, overpowered hero who repeatedly rescues an incomparably beautiful damsel in distress, who many other men wish to marry, but who loves only the hero. In the stories, the hero very quickly asks for the damsel’s hand in marriage; of course she has other suitors who’ve been pursuing her all the while too.

It almost seems quaint, the idea of meeting a woman, rescuing her, winning her that way, then immediately asking her for marriage. How different from the life of the modern dater – or even more so, the seducer!

But is it? I wondered!