I don’t like my voice. I don’t like the way I look. I don’t like the way I move. I don’t like the way I act. I mean, period. So, you know, I don’t like myself.
Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful woman in the world once upon a time…
Venus in furs
Ok, so I’ve started frequenting Starbucks. I don’t really like Starbucks, I’m usually a Pret patron, and then mostly only because I can’t relax enough to hang in independent cafés – oh, that and the soya lattes. Monolithic mass produced coffee houses may be High Street hussies, but they take your money and don’t ask questions when you stay long after your cup is dry, tip tapping away on your laptop – not so ethical I know.
Just tea zen
I console myself with the thought, at least the coffee’s Fairtrade, but then gobble fruit toast dowsed in butter washed down with English Breakfast tea – when in London, I say. After all it’s the toffee-ness of the warm, sticky fruits and the decadent drizzle of butter which bribed me to sign my divorce papers, before I went to work the other week. I’m harnessing the power of pleasure to have my way with the world, you see –although this may be more ‘ a spoonful of sugar’ as Mary Poppins called it.
Moaning over spilt milk...
The other week I had a day or two off and I was thinking as I read, Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts – Using the Power of Pleasure to Have Your Way With the World, that instead of reading the pretty-in-pink book while devouring fruit toast I should be in New York taking a bite out of the Big Apple.
After all Sister Goddess Mary told me I could have ‘all my dreams and desires’. She said, she ‘believed’ in me and that if I wanted in on the Womanly Arts Mastery Program I could. But I either didn’t want it, or believe it, or something it enough. Mostly I just found it too damn hard to take that leap of faith over the pond and go with the cash flow.
You godda have faitha, faitha, faith-ahh...
Let me explain: Regina Thomashauer, aka Mama Gena, has a School of Womanly Arts in NYC. No, it’s not a finishing school…well not the sort for balancing books on yer ‘ noodle. It’s a kinda modern-day temple-cum-training-centre for nurturing the divine in every female – thus the Sister Goddess epithet.
The word ‘goddess’ has been undermined of late; oft used in conjunction with conspicuous consumption, cookery or copulation – think ‘domestic goddess’, ‘sex goddess’, or Vidal Sassoon hair appliances. Mama G on the other hand is here to tell you ‘women are the most untapped creative resource in the world’ and that being a Sister Goddess – power with a heart and soul – is the way.
“Your dreams, your desires are not too big for you. They are just the right size. And they are rapidly and readily accessible if you follow me through the doorway of pleasure.”
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted
Sounds deliciously Alice in Wonderland-ian, right? Her Mastery manifesto sees Mama G citing such luminaries, as siren of the silver screen, old wiggle hips, sofa lips, Mae West, who reckoned pleasure not pleasing was a girl’s best friend:
“I felt it was time to play. Most of my thoughts, time and energy had gone into creative effort. And this restriction of the love drive, the headshrinkers will tell you, is the greatest urge one really has. When one sublimates the sex drive into creative work it puts a person in high gear mentally. I admit it. But it is against my nature to bottle up the biological plans of pleasure for any length of time. I hope I don’t sound as if I have discovered the secret salve that soothes the universe, but I do want to add my small footnote on the subject.”
Mama calls these “biological plans of pleasure” Pussy:
“Pussy extends way beyond the crotch. In my world, Pussy is a metaphysical term that refers to the essence of female power.”
Birth of Venus
Cor, I can see the men in my life wincing in my mind’s little eye! My otherwise female-friend-ly manager is convinced any of the goddess-style, women-centric classes I rock up to are actually male-hating, sock-titted, feminist covens. And as for Mr Glittery, god’s gift to good girl pleasure, he was completely freaked over my capsule collection of what he called ‘porn’ memoirs, like The Sexual Life of Catherine M, and erotic tales by Anais Nin. Alright, they could be porn I guess, but he said it like ‘porn’ was meant to be a male preserve. And my possession of erotica seemed to arouse his suspicions and question his manhood.
Bedtime reading
Twice he compared me to paintings of Venus, goddess of love and sex. Yes, really. And yes, love is a bit blurred of vision guys. Two different paintings, in fact. Same feeling: powerlessness. He had a thing about action women. How much more passive can you get than a painting? How much more powerless can you feel than when you let a guy in your bed? That’s how I’d come to see it anyway. So when I read the words:
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Maya Angelou, Still I Rise
I began to cry. In Starbucks.
Shake Ya Tailfeather
My adventuressing over the last couple of years has led me to realise I’ve needed a guy partly to feel socially acceptable. But whenever I found out a chap dug me I just didn’t geddit. “The one thing I don’t like about you,” Mr Glittery observed, in bed one day, “Is you don’t like yourself.” Therein lies [sic] the problem. You wind up saying what you think people want to hear for fear of being found to be, well, you. The fear I felt trying to hold it all together – not very well I might add – manifested in myriad ways; including menstrual irregularities and ultimately an eerily silent halt to proceedings.
Darling, Im feeling a bit flat
I guess Mama G would say Pussy was protesting.
Adventuress Undressed 