Pussies, Power & Pleasure, Oh My!

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.

I AM the Fairest One of All – Loving Yourself Warts ‘n’ All

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted…” as the inimitable Mae West once said.  Actually I wasn’t purposely Snow White – although I love the whole hair black as night, skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood thing… very Vampira – I was actually more… off-white… cream, in fact.  Head to foot in cream, with a hood and everything.  This prompted a loud-mouth youth in Southend High Street to bawl out, “Oi, Snow White!” And I shrunk, tortoise-like, into the cavernous depths of my hood, horrified. That was the point of most my clothes then, they were a disguise – though not always so literally.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall..."

I never had a style as such, more like a theatrical costume – or props department – a character for every occasion.  One day, when I was about 11, I had looked in the mirror of our sauna-style bathroom – what was with that look? – and watched myself submerge into its silvery depths, like a mermaid, and reappear Laura Palmer blue – I didn’t recognise me any more. And for a long time after I played at being anybody else but me – except one of them people in the Body Shock documentaries.

It wasn’t until the day I got married, in a dress I felt all wrong in, my scalp singed and my hair pulled into a knot by a mad Italian hairdresser, that I realised becoming Mrs Somebody was not the answer to eliminating Little Miss Nobody – she looked at me from the mirror with her ‘I told you so…’ expression and I knew I had some facing up to do. 

Where had my fairytale gone tits up? When searching through the evidence, photos bore testament to the fact that no matter how much real jewellery, designer scarves, or Thomas Pink shirts I layered on, I was fake.  I’d adopted – voluntarily I admit – someone else’s idea of me.  And I could hear my mother saying, “You used to love colour!  If I see you in another shade of beige, I’ll scream!  You look like death!”  I later realised I had been suffering from a severe case of Beige Zombosis.

At its worst, this disease manifested itself as a desire to create the perfect capsule wardrobe.  In itself this holy grail of sartorial zendom is not a bad objective.  I mean, even Einstein, had a capsule wardrobe of sorts, apparently comprising of seven versions of the same outfit.  Sounds pretty dull, but he had that crazy ass hair-style thing going on, so he didn’t want to go overboard, and he knew what he felt most cosy in when doing all them formulas, so voila!  Ultimately if the point of clothes is to do a job, then the capsule wardrobe is like an elite task force.

Albert Einstein Style

This whole capsule wardrobe thing had me going for a while.  In fact I spent the time I was meant to be writing my novel, trawling the length and breadth of London searching for the pieces which would create this seemingly elusive ideal.  It was when I was packing for my honeymoon and I filled the entire flat with various ensembles for every conceivable occasion, but still felt as if I had ‘simply nothing to wear’, that I realised something had gone horribly wrong.  Dun, dun, dah!  Half finished chapters of my novel flew up and slapped me in the face; French vocab stickers I had studiously ignored in my attempt to learn the language of lurve mocked me at every turn; and playing cards flew through the air… oh no, wrong story.  Basically, I was starting but I wasn’t finishing – anything, ever…

So right now although I have moved on somewhat, I am still standing in the fall out of this unhappy episode, wondering how to pick my way through the debris.  And I may be itching to get the hell outta here, but rule number one when changing anything is:  Learn to love yourself the way you are and where you are NOW.  Stand in the midst of the disarray that is your wardrobe, look into your make-up smeared mirror and say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?” and accept the reply, “You, my queen, are fairest of all.” without cracking up.

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