The Pleasure Center: Miser's Vacations

The Pleasure Center series isn't all baths and sexy. Sometimes, pleasure is about dreaming of a different life. My mother used to call these dreams and fantasies Miser's Vacations, because they cost no money but still refresh.

The Orient Express

One of my favorite Miser Vacations is fantasizing about glamorous rail travel. I love this thought so much, I've written and re-written variations on train sex and finally got it on in Vamping It Up.

I am fascinated by comfortable, leisurely travel since I love to visit new places. Can you imagine dining like this??

The Orient Express in Andaluz

I love writing on trains, too. You are away from your usual demands. I use the time for daydreaming and brainstorming.

And just for a tease, here is a section of my heroine Holly's train fantasy, just for you.

Her Marine knelt behind her and rested his face against the inward curve of the small of her back. He inhaled as though smelling her deepest essence. Holly rested her weight on his chest and closed her eyes.

He wrapped his arms around her abdomen and placed his hands below her navel. His teeth tugged her tee-shirt higher. He licked the small patch of skin he revealed. Holly shuddered. The hairs on her arms raised in response to his soft tongue.

He blew cool air against the wet spot. Her nipples hardened.

Holly pressed her bottom into his body, wanting his tongue and hands on more sensitive places.

He obeyed her silent command. He cupped her ankles and caressed her legs up to her hidden ass cheeks. Her bare, sensitized skin registered the lines on his palms and the whorls of his fingertips.

He squeezed the hem of her shirt over her ass and hissed in excitement when he saw her panties. A pink satin bow sat right above her tailbone. Thin red straps of lace led from the bow out to the leg band, creating a fan-like pattern over her dark skin.

“So beautiful,” he breathed against her cheeks. He cupped the sides of her hips, just over her saddlebags, and squeezed.

His action shocked her. Her hips were her least favorite part of her body, and he was worshipping them as though they were delectable.

“You have a perfect ass,” he growled. His lips vibrated against her. The buzz traveled through her pelvic bone and set her clitoris alive.

She couldn’t help herself. Holly ground her butt against his face. She willed him to go faster, to put that delicious tingle where it would do the most good.

Self-love and The Beauty Myth.

Naomi Wolf

I was doing some wandering in my old files and found these words of wisdom from Naomi Wolf, from The Beauty Myth.

***

            Can there be a pro-woman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What has been missing is play. The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends on it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter. Once you play for stakes of any amount, the game has become a war game, or compulsive gambling. In the myth, it has been a game for life, for questionable love, for desperate and dishonest sexuality, and without the choice not to play by alien rules.  No choice, no free will; no levity, no real game.

 

          But we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden; a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is. Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive? 

Admiration can include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.

  

        How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on their bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipations, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.

      

 How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.

          A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.