I tread something similar about Marilyn Monroe who demonstrated to a friend how she could “turn on” the sex appeal.

I never met, nor sensed that i recall, anything like this. The people I knew who had legions hanging around them were exceptionally and exclusively very, very good looking.
Some women I knew dialed it back in dress, hair, makeup, and bearing. And they were careful to be barely civil to guys they didn’t know well.
One woman I knew working in a field project had a self-presentation in public of “don’t even think it”. She was friendly once she was sure you weren’t going to pester her, and possibly relieved and thus even more cheerful and personable. But even in a meeting of colleagues….there it was.
I knew one guy, not at all prepossessing, who was on his fourth divorce in about thirty years. He had persistence, but it took some effort. Nobody was going after him.
I believe people can turn it on wrt some one they wish to impress. But broadcast…. Never seen it. If I had felt something, it would have been explained by the other’s physical attractiveness.

Still, see Crabb, “Men, Women, Enjoying the Difference”
One item he discusses in detail–others pass by without much emphasis–is that if a woman treats her/a man as if she trusts and appreciates him, he’ll be a bigger man. More assertive, problem solving, take care of business, protective, better in bed, etc.
If not, whatever the opposite looks like, he’ll be a feckless wimp sitting uselessly on the sofa dreaming things that would make a pron producer blush.
The guy who is in the first case is going to feel some version of ten feet tall and bullet proof and…he’ll like it.
Maybe that’s it.

I knew a woman who initiated sex with everyone and had sex with anyone willing. I found her creepy and irritating before I learned that about her. I wasn’t interested, she reminded me of a prostitute who’d accosted me on 6th street one evening. Her touch seemed actually slimy.

Afterwards I heard stories from everyone telling about how someone else had had sex with her, but omitted their own encounters. Hard leftist, of course. After she ran out of lovers, she moved to another city to start over.

“She didn’t look like no high-school sweetheart.
She was no obvious beauty queen.
But she had something every man knows,
That fire that’s felt not seen.”

The two stars — an A- man and A grade woman whose names I don’t want to share — were nice enough people in real life, and we spent some time talking. At one point during the film the male star said something teasing to the woman, and she turned to him and “turned on the charm.” I was stunned. When I talked to her she was a somewhat mousy woman with no sex appeal at all. But when she turned on the charm with the man the whole room lit up, and even I could feel it. I don’t think there was a man in that room who didn’t feel a little warmth in his loins when she did that. I can’t explain it, and I can not even describe it clearly, but it was so evident I remember it very precisely.

Well, maybe I’m not remembering it exactly correctly. But I recall that she kept discussing the incident for most of the book as though it was a formative one, and then in a much longer passage she went back and forth in a very confused way and basically said she doesn’t think it made the difference at all.