"Seduction is the art of coercing somebody to desire you, of orchestrating somebody else’s longings to suit your own hungry agenda."

"Seduction was never a casual sport for me; it was more like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself."

Creepy unpleasantness that would never have been published in The New York Times if it were written by a man.

I've got to call it female privilege — this sense that what would be stalking rapacity in a man is rather adorable in a woman.

The writer is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the memoir "Eat, Pray, Love." Yeah, sic, it's "Pray," not "Prey," as you might think if all you know of her is this op-ed, which is, in fact, all I've read of her. But I do know of "Eat, Pray, Love." And I did finish this op-ed, which becomes instructively self-helperish in the end. She eventually "forced myself to admit that I had a problem" — there's a phrase — and realized after 20 years of "[s]tealing other women’s boyfriends" that her behavior wasn't, in fact, "feminist" — nice to get to some sisterhood after not noticing until you're — what? — 40?

She determines that "There is no way to stop a destructive behavior, except to stop" and goes "celibate" for the amazing time span of 6 months. She was "serious, working with a good therapist, trying to learn if I even existed at all when I wasn’t blazing in the heat of somebody’s longing gaze." And if you like reading sentences like that, you should be up for the cheeseball ending where she meets a guy she likes, wins an invitation back to his apartment, but she passes it up, and the two go get Italian ices instead. In the end, she walks away, "alone but calm" and "realized that the better part of my life had already begun."

Or she walks away alone and planning a piece of writing and realizing that she's got the better part of a neat narrative arc already composed in her head.