Editor’s Note: Betsy Prioleau is the author of Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.

What’s happened to all the ladies’ men, the great seducers who were “onto” women, knew the ropes and love-addled us for life? Where are they now when we need them?

Male approval ratings are at a record low. Women are disappointed in spouses (over half want to stray), the dating pool and our sex lives. We’re single longer and pickier — increasingly peeved with players, slackers, clueless suitors and partners on autopilot.

Times like these call for the ladykiller. History’s legendary lovers, with their forgotten moves and mojo, can pull us out of this funk. They can wise up men and answer women’s prayers.

Their secret? Clearly something beyond sexual science. Most lacked money, status, stability and looks. Italian poet and adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio, the celebrated “Don Juan” of the fin de siecle, was short, “ugly” and usually poor, but the queenpins of Europe fainted at his feet. He had “it,” the basic requisites: brio, libido and a sweet spot for women. He also had the craft of enchantment down cold.

D’Annunzio, like other ladies’ men, ignored the playbooks and practiced love as an art. The goal was grand passion — to conjure and keep it. The techniques go back centuries and can be mixed to taste, even used piecemeal. They’re that powerful.

Physical lures are the minor spells, and maestros knew that passion requires a dash of drama. Casanova finessed this to perfection. Eighteenth-century Venetian romancer, spy, scholar, writer, musician and man of parts, Casanova was the quintessential seducer. He dressed to kill — in purple taffeta waistcoats and rings on every finger; he learned movement from a ballet master; he wore signature jasmine scent; he played the violin; he stage-set assignations in customized rooms and was supernatural in bed.

But psychological charms are the big erotic magic; love is a head trip, a soul heist, a skyjack to an altered state. “Cool” doesn’t cut it. Take fifties’ jet-setter Pakistani Prince Aly Khan. When he struck, he plied women with praise and wore his heart on his sleeve. He once turned to a dinner partner he’d just met, the Hon. Joan Guinness, and said, “Darling, will you marry me?” She promptly divorced her husband and did. Rita Hayworth, his second wife, followed suit ten years later.

Khan delivered another kiloton aphrodisiac: festivity. Women described his courtships as “a flight aboard a magic carpet” — laughter, treats and kicks — where “inhibitions fell away like retreating landmarks.”

Ladies’ men, too, “got” empathy and conversation. Napoleonic “Enchanter” Chateaubriand, politician and author of such French classics as Atala and René, enamored women “suddenly and forever” with his full-on sympathy. And forget the strong, silent lotharios of macho lore; speech is seduction. Swashbuckler Sir Walter Raleigh word-spelled the world (including Elizabeth I) with his verbal legerdemain, as did Lord Byron, David Niven and countless others. One of Niven’s many inamorati swooned, his funny stories were “as delicious as French pastry.”

More to the point: women-charmers remained interesting. They treated love as a verb — a continual tango of yes-no, delight-difficulty, elate-sedate. Grand master of them all was eighteenth-century “hero of the boudoir,” the duc de Richelieu. Soldier, litterateur, diplomat, wit and friend of Voltaire, he was an inexhaustible pinwheel personality whose amorous inventions (he loved disguises), mercurial moods and movements kept his “countless adorers” perpetually enrapt. Such was his allure that two noblewomen once dueled for his favors in the Bois de Boulogne. The ladies took aim, fired off pistol rounds and the comtesse de Polignac felled her rival (nonfatally), the marquise de Nesle. But neither won. This arch-fascinator remained a law unto himself and “irresistible” into his nineties.

But today? Who’s seen a certified heartthrob recently? Aside from the few Warren Beattys and Jack Nicholsons, they’re a dying breed — going the way of the snow leopard. Guys are abandoning the mating effort, babe-trolling or boring us blind. Unless we turn them around.

It’s our call. We can mold men to our wishes. As neo-Darwinist David Buss assures us: if women want men to walk “on their hands,” soon “half the race will be upside down.” Come now: we can give men something better to do with their hands — and heads. We can take the seducers’ secrets, inculcate them, put them to positive ends — hot monogamy and female bliss — and transform the slouches into love studs.

With greater female leverage and autonomy in the future, we’ll increasingly demand men of this breed. Vanguard sociobiologist Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind that alpha women have always chosen ladykillers who “deliver the greatest rapture” over ho-hum providers. He calls this the “Dionysian effect” and believes it accounts for the evolution of human culture and creativity.

So, let’s bring on the ladies’ men, the Dionysian pleasure pistols with their sizzle and sorcery and inside track on what lights our fires and keeps them lit. With our twenty-first century charms, we can recapture and corral this sexy beast. Haven’t we earned a Casanova of our own by now?