Sexuality & Lifestyle.

Male escorts: An evening well spent for a high-class woman?

Written by admin on April 22, 2010 — Leave a Comment
Paying for sex is no longer a male preserve. In the final part of our series, Mary-Anne Toy explores the world of male escorts and why more women want their services.
SHE is well educated, well spoken and very well groomed: an attractive blonde in her 30s used to men hitting on her in bars. So why did ”Eva”* pay a man to have sex with her? And how did that encounter lead her, a single mother with a full-time professional job, into secretly running a male escort business?
About two years ago, fed up with internet dating and the desultory randomness of the bar scene, but missing male company, Eva toyed with the idea of using a male escort.
Ignoring the storm of censorial voices inside her head, all screaming variations of ”nice girls don’t do that” and worse, she started searching online.
”It was very hard; there wasn’t much out there. I rang one of the places and they never returned my phone calls.” She ran hot and cold on the idea for six months.
Then she found ”Steve”, a solo operator online. ”I was very lucky,” she says, having now a better idea of what is out there (not much). Steve sent her a picture. They exchanged texts. She wanted to ask all sorts of questions about how it would work, but didn’t feel confident enough to have those sorts of conversations.
So she leapfrogged her doubts entirely and arranged for him to come to her house.
”It was nerve-racking but I was also excited. The anticipation, thinking, ‘Oh goodness, what am I doing?’ ” she says. ”When I opened the door, I just went ‘phew’. He was gorgeous, beautifully presented and he made me feel at ease. He worked very hard to make me feel comfortable.”
That encounter resulted in Eva and a friend setting up an exclusive escort business, My Male Companion, for professional women like themselves who were well-off, but stressed or time-poor and wanted male company and sex on their own terms. About 40 per cent of jobs don’t involve sex; the clients just want the male company. For Eva, hiring Steve was an overwhelmingly positive experience that she doesn’t regret. But she knows that she is totally kicking against societal and possibly biological norms. Some men pay for sex, always have, probably always will. But women? It’s a fraught issue, especially as prostitution is one of the most divisive issues among feminists.
Dr Lauren Rosewarne, a lecturer in public policy and sex researcher at the University of Melbourne, likes the idea of women taking control of their sexuality, of women owning their desires, but isn’t sure that women paying for sex is progress.
”It still comes back to this idea of commodifying bodies and that’s not gender specific,” Rosewarne says.
Author Melinda Tankard Reist, an activist who campaigns against abortion, sexual exploitation and the sexualisation of children, says hiring prostitutes is fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we ”don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men”.
Another reason has been that women haven’t been in a position to treat men that way. ”Women generally don’t have the time or money that men have, nor the sense of social entitlement to the bodies of other people,” Reist says. She thinks that is changing, but that it is not a positive development.
”It’s really the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.”
Eva also believes attitudes are changing, and see Rosewarne and Reist’s misgivings as part of the old-fashioned mindset that restricts women from getting their needs met.
Although Eva was thrilled with her secret adventure with Steve, she was hesitant to tell anyone about it. Despite Sex and the City capturing some of the Zeitgeist of what being a liberated woman today means – if you’re white, educated, physically attractive and well-off – Eva argues that in reality women tend not to talk about their sexual needs.
Eva finally confessed to her friend ”Julie”, and was more relieved than she expected that her friend didn’t recoil in horror. Julie’s reaction was positive: ”That’s great! How much better is that? You didn’t have to go out all night, didn’t have guys sleazing on you all night, the whole internet dating.”
Was it just about the sex? Eva said no. ”We sat on the lounge and he held my hand and stroked my hair and we talked. I enjoyed that as much as the sex, though the sex was great.”
Eva and Julie figured that they were pretty normal, intelligent women and if they were interested in being able to have company or sex on their terms, others would, too, and that male escorts for women could be normalised or at least destigmatised.
My Male Companion has up to eight male escorts working in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. In two years of operation, Eva says hundreds of women have used the service, and they are getting so many men wanting to work for them that they have started charging for a full interview. Eva agrees to interview only about one in 10 applicants.
Eva says it’s difficult to find a good male escort because it’s not enough to be attractive physically. ”The perception of a lot of men who come into this work is it’s all about sex, but it’s not. It’s about making the women feel special,” Eva says.
She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s. ”The whole cougar thing is making women more sensitive [saying] ‘I don’t want to be seen with someone who looks significantly younger than me’.”
So what kind of woman pays for sex? Eva says most clients are in their 30s and 40s though some are older. Most are attractive, professional, normally confident women who go to water when they contemplate hiring a male escort. A lot of Eva and Julie’s time is spent reassuring women and answering lots of questions.
She blames this on the fact that women who are very open about their sexual needs or sexuality are ‘’still labelled and judged”.
”We help women feel good about their choices, give them confidence that if this is something they want to do, they’re allowed to,” Eva says.
What she loves about the business is that so many clients who have agonised over it, contact her afterwards to say it was amazing. ”The feedback I get most is ‘that was a whole lot of fun’.” But they’re not about to tell their friends. ”We’re still very much in the closet. I think women want to do this, but they’re like me, it might take them six months thinking about it before they do it.”
Eva and Julie, who live in Sydney, are now thinking of ”coming out”, which they are certain would result in business soaring. But they are worried about the implications for their children, the fact that both of them are single mothers, and that going public might make it impossible to keep their current professional jobs.
”Even though what we’re trying to do … is an exciting concept, I am obviously conscious of the reality – society’s situation – that if I do come out there will be some judgments and possible repercussions,” Eva says. ”There’s a part of me that would really like to come out because I love the idea and would like to see more women act upon and make choices for themselves … to have the same freedoms that men have.”
Veteran lobbyist for the sex industry Robbie Swan says there are no brothels for women and few male escorts aimed only at women because ” women don’t buy sex, they don’t need to. If they want sex, they can just go get it for free wherever they want.” He wonders if male escorts for women will ever become common. He says women tend not to have sex without love or affection, whereas men do all the time. ”That’s just the difference, biology, and the internet doesn’t change that,” he says.
It does seem a contradiction. Everyone understands why men pay for sex, but women? And why is there more stigma for a woman to be paid for sex than for a man?
Reist says that when women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry (which she calls the filming of prostitution) is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. ”There’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation,” Reist says.
Rosewarne says the number of women who hire male escorts is still so small that it has not been much researched, but women undertaking sex tourism has become a big enough phenomenon to be studied.
Sex tourism for women mainly involves Americans and Europeans travelling to places such as Jamaica and Haiti to purchase sex with local men. ”I’m not saying women aren’t paying for sex, but the way they do it is different,” she says. Men will frequently pay for sex for 20-30 minutes and be satisfied. ”Women are almost buying a boyfriend for a week.”
But she says it makes sex tourism no more acceptable when it is women doing the buying. ”It raises a whole lot of power, sex, political issues that I’m not sure we’ve resolved. It’s not a level playing field … These men in Haiti, if you ask them if they had access to a university degree and could be a doctor or lawyer, do you reckon you would be a prostitute to a wealthy white woman?”
But in Australia, is it a level playing field for male escorts catering for women, and does that make it OK?
”Aundre” (pictured), 23, has been working as a male escort for two years and, like the other escorts The Age interviewed, has a full-time job. His detailed website offers the ”ultimate boyfriend experience”, from ”an intellectual conversation over dinner”, to ”ground-breaking sex” from $170 an hour to $1200 for 12 hours.
Aundre says lots of guys talk about becoming male escorts, but most are not focused enough to do it. ”There is demand out there, but it’s a niche market.”
MELBOURNE-BASED ”Daniel” has worked on and off in the sex industry for more than a decade, but has been specialising in just women and couples for the past year. His website states he ”practices the arts of intimacy, control, erotica, tantra, massage, bondage, discipline, cross-dressing, role play, sexuality and spanking”.
He also has a full-time day job, partly because there is insufficient demand and partly because he finds the work emotionally draining.
He says there are few male prostitutes for women because ”women would rather go without sex than face the fear of asking for it from a stranger and paying for it.”
Women ‘’still think it’s not allowed. They can’t ask for what they want and they don’t get what they want,” Daniel says.
His clients have ranged from a 19-year-old who wanted to lose her virginity with someone experienced, to women in their 30s sick of dating ”losers”; from 40-plus corporate high-flyers and married women bored with their sex lives, to couples (husbands don’t see him as a threat).
”Sometimes you open the door and you see a really beautiful woman and I can’t believe how lucky I am: this woman is going to pay to have sex with me.”
Steve, the first male escort Eva hired, ended up working for her. He is My Male Companion’s most popular escort and will wine and dine a woman for $250 an hour – or have sex with them for $500 an hour, minimum booking of two hours. A full day can cost $15,000. The escort work, which he keeps secret from most of his family, friends and employer, is paying for his higher education and training.
Steve, who moved here from Europe, lives in Sydney but travels, mainly to Melbourne and Brisbane, for one-off and regular clients. Sometimes he is hired just to spend the day with a woman and her children – ”looking after the children, walking in the park or with the dogs, cooking a meal together. Sometimes it’s to make an ex jealous.”
He says the income is good but not the primary motivator. ”In a selfish way I feel pleasure by giving pleasure and by giving I receive, that’s what counts.”
For ”Jeanette”, hiring a male escort was about safely extending her sexual boundaries, doing ‘’something for myself” after working full-time and raising two, now adult, children as a single mother.
She found Daniel online and chose him because he was an S&M (sadomasochism) master. She had no shortage of lovers, but hired Daniel regularly over a year because she could be totally upfront with him in a way she couldn’t with her regular lovers.
The liberating part was that Daniel was never judgmental about her sexual fantasies or responses, but rather patient, supportive and fun to be with.
”It was a trip to Paris or this,” Jeanette says with a big smile. ”My life has gone in a direction I would never have imagined. I would never have seen myself doing what I have done in the last few years with Daniel but I am really glad I have and I think it’s due to the freedom. There’s a lot more freedom for women now.”
Mary-Anne Toy is a senior writer.
*The names of escorts and their clients have been changed to protect their privacy.

Yesterday I saw this article in The Age newspaper. It provoked many a thought within. What are your thoughts as a woman, about the escort industry? Would you pay for an attractive, intellectual man to come over, hang-out, play with your hair, give you a massage or pin you against the kitchen wall?

Basically a male escort (from the right company)- will do whatever you wish, or lead the way if you so wish that too, even take you and the kids to the park or simply walk the street with you, to make an ‘x’ jealous.

Is it alright for men to be used as commodities? How do escorts differ from female prostitution? Why is there a stigma attached to sexually independent women? Should all services within the sex-industry be culturally grouped into the same category? Would you be willing to try an escort service?

After reading the article below, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

Part-time sex worker Aundre, pictured in Sydney. Photo: Simon Alekna

Part-time sex worker Aundre, pictured in Sydney. Photo: Simon Alekna

Paying for sex is no longer a male preserve. Mary-Anne Toy is a senior writer at The Age. In this article she explores the world of male escorts and why more women want their services.

SHE is well educated, well spoken and very well groomed: an attractive blonde in her 30s used to men hitting on her in bars. So why did ”Eva”* pay a man to have sex with her? And how did that encounter lead her, a single mother with a full-time professional job, into secretly running a male escort business?

About two years ago, fed up with internet dating and the desultory randomness of the bar scene, but missing male company, Eva toyed with the idea of using a male escort.

Ignoring the storm of censorial voices inside her head, all screaming variations of ”nice girls don’t do that” and worse, she started searching online.

”It was very hard; there wasn’t much out there. I rang one of the places and they never returned my phone calls.” She ran hot and cold on the idea for six months.

Then she found ”Steve”, a solo operator online. ”I was very lucky,” she says, having now a better idea of what is out there (not much). Steve sent her a picture. They exchanged texts. She wanted to ask all sorts of questions about how it would work, but didn’t feel confident enough to have those sorts of conversations.

So she leapfrogged her doubts entirely and arranged for him to come to her house.

”It was nerve-racking but I was also excited. The anticipation, thinking, ‘Oh goodness, what am I doing?’ ” she says. ”When I opened the door, I just went ‘phew’. He was gorgeous, beautifully presented and he made me feel at ease. He worked very hard to make me feel comfortable.”

That encounter resulted in Eva and a friend setting up an exclusive escort business, My Male Companion, for professional women like themselves who were well-off, but stressed or time-poor and wanted male company and sex on their own terms. About 40 per cent of jobs don’t involve sex; the clients just want the male company. For Eva, hiring Steve was an overwhelmingly positive experience that she doesn’t regret. But she knows that she is totally kicking against societal and possibly biological norms. Some men pay for sex, always have, probably always will. But women? It’s a fraught issue, especially as prostitution is one of the most divisive issues among feminists.

Dr Lauren Rosewarne, a lecturer in public policy and sex researcher at the University of Melbourne, likes the idea of women taking control of their sexuality, of women owning their desires, but isn’t sure that women paying for sex is progress.

”It still comes back to this idea of commodifying bodies and that’s not gender specific,” Rosewarne says.

Author Melinda Tankard Reist, an activist who campaigns against abortion, sexual exploitation and the sexualisation of children, says hiring prostitutes is fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we ”don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men”.

Another reason has been that women haven’t been in a position to treat men that way. ”Women generally don’t have the time or money that men have, nor the sense of social entitlement to the bodies of other people,” Reist says. She thinks that is changing, but that it is not a positive development.

”It’s really the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.”

Eva also believes attitudes are changing, and see Rosewarne and Reist’s misgivings as part of the old-fashioned mindset that restricts women from getting their needs met.

Although Eva was thrilled with her secret adventure with Steve, she was hesitant to tell anyone about it. Despite Sex and the City capturing some of the Zeitgeist of what being a liberated woman today means – if you’re white, educated, physically attractive and well-off – Eva argues that in reality women tend not to talk about their sexual needs.

Eva finally confessed to her friend ”Julie”, and was more relieved than she expected that her friend didn’t recoil in horror. Julie’s reaction was positive: ”That’s great! How much better is that? You didn’t have to go out all night, didn’t have guys sleazing on you all night, the whole internet dating.”

Was it just about the sex? Eva said no. ”We sat on the lounge and he held my hand and stroked my hair and we talked. I enjoyed that as much as the sex, though the sex was great.”

Eva and Julie figured that they were pretty normal, intelligent women and if they were interested in being able to have company or sex on their terms, others would, too, and that male escorts for women could be normalised or at least destigmatised.

My Male Companion has up to eight male escorts working in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. In two years of operation, Eva says hundreds of women have used the service, and they are getting so many men wanting to work for them that they have started charging for a full interview. Eva agrees to interview only about one in 10 applicants.

Eva says it’s difficult to find a good male escort because it’s not enough to be attractive physically. ”The perception of a lot of men who come into this work is it’s all about sex, but it’s not. It’s about making the women feel special,” Eva says.

She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s. ”The whole cougar thing is making women more sensitive [saying] ‘I don’t want to be seen with someone who looks significantly younger than me’.”

So what kind of woman pays for sex? Eva says most clients are in their 30s and 40s though some are older. Most are attractive, professional, normally confident women who go to water when they contemplate hiring a male escort. A lot of Eva and Julie’s time is spent reassuring women and answering lots of questions.

She blames this on the fact that women who are very open about their sexual needs or sexuality are ‘’still labelled and judged”.

”We help women feel good about their choices, give them confidence that if this is something they want to do, they’re allowed to,” Eva says.

What she loves about the business is that so many clients who have agonised over it, contact her afterwards to say it was amazing. ”The feedback I get most is ‘that was a whole lot of fun’.” But they’re not about to tell their friends. ”We’re still very much in the closet. I think women want to do this, but they’re like me, it might take them six months thinking about it before they do it.”

Eva and Julie, who live in Sydney, are now thinking of ”coming out”, which they are certain would result in business soaring. But they are worried about the implications for their children, the fact that both of them are single mothers, and that going public might make it impossible to keep their current professional jobs.

”Even though what we’re trying to do … is an exciting concept, I am obviously conscious of the reality – society’s situation – that if I do come out there will be some judgments and possible repercussions,” Eva says. ”There’s a part of me that would really like to come out because I love the idea and would like to see more women act upon and make choices for themselves … to have the same freedoms that men have.”

Veteran lobbyist for the sex industry Robbie Swan says there are no brothels for women and few male escorts aimed only at women because ” women don’t buy sex, they don’t need to. If they want sex, they can just go get it for free wherever they want.” He wonders if male escorts for women will ever become common. He says women tend not to have sex without love or affection, whereas men do all the time. ”That’s just the difference, biology, and the internet doesn’t change that,” he says.

It does seem a contradiction. Everyone understands why men pay for sex, but women? And why is there more stigma for a woman to be paid for sex than for a man?

Reist says that when women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry (which she calls the filming of prostitution) is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. ”There’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation,” Reist says.

Rosewarne says the number of women who hire male escorts is still so small that it has not been much researched, but women undertaking sex tourism has become a big enough phenomenon to be studied.

Sex tourism for women mainly involves Americans and Europeans travelling to places such as Jamaica and Haiti to purchase sex with local men. ”I’m not saying women aren’t paying for sex, but the way they do it is different,” she says. Men will frequently pay for sex for 20-30 minutes and be satisfied. ”Women are almost buying a boyfriend for a week.”

But she says it makes sex tourism no more acceptable when it is women doing the buying. ”It raises a whole lot of power, sex, political issues that I’m not sure we’ve resolved. It’s not a level playing field … These men in Haiti, if you ask them if they had access to a university degree and could be a doctor or lawyer, do you reckon you would be a prostitute to a wealthy white woman?”

But in Australia, is it a level playing field for male escorts catering for women, and does that make it OK?

”Aundre” (pictured), 23, has been working as a male escort for two years and, like the other escorts The Age interviewed, has a full-time job. His detailed website offers the ”ultimate boyfriend experience”, from ”an intellectual conversation over dinner”, to ”ground-breaking sex” from $170 an hour to $1200 for 12 hours.

Aundre says lots of guys talk about becoming male escorts, but most are not focused enough to do it. ”There is demand out there, but it’s a niche market.”

MELBOURNE-BASED ”Daniel” has worked on and off in the sex industry for more than a decade, but has been specialising in just women and couples for the past year. His website states he ”practices the arts of intimacy, control, erotica, tantra, massage, bondage, discipline, cross-dressing, role play, sexuality and spanking”.

He also has a full-time day job, partly because there is insufficient demand and partly because he finds the work emotionally draining.

He says there are few male prostitutes for women because ”women would rather go without sex than face the fear of asking for it from a stranger and paying for it.”

Women ‘’still think it’s not allowed. They can’t ask for what they want and they don’t get what they want,” Daniel says.

His clients have ranged from a 19-year-old who wanted to lose her virginity with someone experienced, to women in their 30s sick of dating ”losers”; from 40-plus corporate high-flyers and married women bored with their sex lives, to couples (husbands don’t see him as a threat).

”Sometimes you open the door and you see a really beautiful woman and I can’t believe how lucky I am: this woman is going to pay to have sex with me.”

Steve, the first male escort Eva hired, ended up working for her. He is My Male Companion’s most popular escort and will wine and dine a woman for $250 an hour – or have sex with them for $500 an hour, minimum booking of two hours. A full day can cost $15,000. The escort work, which he keeps secret from most of his family, friends and employer, is paying for his higher education and training.

Steve, who moved here from Europe, lives in Sydney but travels, mainly to Melbourne and Brisbane, for one-off and regular clients. Sometimes he is hired just to spend the day with a woman and her children – ”looking after the children, walking in the park or with the dogs, cooking a meal together. Sometimes it’s to make an ex jealous.”

He says the income is good but not the primary motivator. ”In a selfish way I feel pleasure by giving pleasure and by giving I receive, that’s what counts.”

For ”Jeanette”, hiring a male escort was about safely extending her sexual boundaries, doing ‘’something for myself” after working full-time and raising two, now adult, children as a single mother.

She found Daniel online and chose him because he was an S&M (sadomasochism) master. She had no shortage of lovers, but hired Daniel regularly over a year because she could be totally upfront with him in a way she couldn’t with her regular lovers.

The liberating part was that Daniel was never judgmental about her sexual fantasies or responses, but rather patient, supportive and fun to be with.

”It was a trip to Paris or this,” Jeanette says with a big smile. ”My life has gone in a direction I would never have imagined. I would never have seen myself doing what I have done in the last few years with Daniel but I am really glad I have and I think it’s due to the freedom. There’s a lot more freedom for women now.”

*The names of escorts and their clients have been changed to protect their privacy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , ,

Wonderful women: Josie Long at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Written by admin on April 8, 2010 — Leave a Comment
I expected comedy, what I left with was political awareness, inspiration to ‘be great’ and an appetite for the murder-my-blood-pressure, B-grade American breakfast.
The expedition to The Bosco in City Square to see Josie Long at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last night was the best on-a-whim decision I’d made in ages. Josie Long you have a new fan in me (a new twitter follower, and definitely a few @replies in the hope I’ll get you on side too).
It was one of those nights where everything was unfolding perfectly, we found a car spot right near the venue, the parking metre was out-of-order and the hummus we had prior the event was the perfect ratio of chickpea to tahini EVER. Oh yes add to this the pinot-grigio blend that I sipped on while keeping an eye on the line and you’ve got an unknowingly amazing set-up for the homerun in the game of date nights.
Date nights aside, the 27-yr-old Long is/was amazing.
For starters: Long discussed her battle with food and how dieting one summer ruined her personality but set her up for residency in sassy town. Yet, dieting she says lead her to a love affair with online food imagery, which she compares (in her cute British accent) to that of a 50-yr-old man masturbating over porn. At this point in the show she introduces a power-point presentation of her virtual love affair with Walter Ezell and his flickr account of the 365 breakfasts he ate last year. And ended with Josie wanting Walter and his partner Jim to adopt her.
To translate this into a stand-up comic routine was GENIUS – and had me thinking (uh oh) – hey, look at this chick from GENERATION Y taking what we know best (the internets) and ripping it into tiny pieces of hilarity and throwing it in the face of everyone who says our generation is lazy, and in-turn setting the bar for a strong, stand-up show in the process.
Josie used different ‘mediums’ throughout the hour of fun and managed to paint a portrait, literally, of her wealth of knowledge and her ability to be creative and embrace extra-credit for her comedy routine.
Again I’ll use GENIUS, from wishing Billy Bragg was her dad, to Kate Moss and Pete Doherty’s poignant moments during heroin deals – all her stories were captivating.
Somewhere toward the end of this cleverly crafted roller-coaster of a show, Josie expresses her need to ‘be great’ in life and how we should all aspire to this. Actually, in her zine (which you get at the start of the show) it says ‘STAY IDEALISTIC, BE EARNEST, BE SILLY, DON’T GIVE UP!’
Josie’s show amongst her rants has subtle points of humility, which I loved. Saying that she thought she could change the world by talking to people, smiling at them and bringing the light to an otherwise drab day on the tube, which she’s realising might not be enough, and for it to be enough she must perhaps get POLITICAL or at least move to a political town.
Honestly, after the show I was surprised how refreshed and aligned I felt with life!
“I’m going to make the world great!”
I’d say you’re doing plenty Josie, and you surely dropped some sort of inspiring light on me last night in The Bosco, I even want to be friends! And hey, if everyone could start the day thinking a little bit like you as they eat their breakfast (or look for it on flickr) I’d put money on it that the world would be a better place!
Who would of thought?

Josie Long zine_0001

I expected comedy, what I left with was political awareness, inspiration to ‘be great’ and an appetite for the murder-my-blood-pressure, B-grade American breakfast.

The expedition to The Bosco in City Square to see Josie Long’s show ‘Be Honourable’ at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last night was the best on-a-whim decision I’d made in ages. Josie Long you have a new fan in me (a new twitter follower, and definitely a few @replies in the hope I’ll get you on side too).

It was one of those nights where everything was unfolding perfectly, we found a car spot right near the venue, the parking metre was out-of-order and the hummus we had prior the event was the perfect ratio of chickpea to tahini EVER. Oh yes add to this the pinot-grigio blend that I sipped on while keeping an eye on the line and you’ve got an unknowingly amazing set-up for the homerun in the game of date nights.

Date nights aside, the 27-yr-old Long is/was amazing.

For starters: Long discussed her battle with food and how dieting one summer ruined her personality but set her up for residency in sassy town. Yet, dieting she says lead her to a love affair with online food imagery, which she compares (in her cute British accent) to that of a 50-yr-old man masturbating over porn. At this point in the show she introduces a power-point presentation of her virtual love affair with Walter Ezell and his flickr account of the 365 breakfasts he ate last year. And ended with Josie wanting Walter and his partner Jim to adopt her.

To translate this into a stand-up comic routine was GENIUS – and had me thinking (uh oh) – hey, look at this chick from GENERATION Y taking what we know best (the internets) and ripping it into tiny pieces of hilarity and throwing it in the face of everyone who says our generation is lazy, and in-turn setting the bar for a strong, stand-up show in the process.

Josie used different ‘mediums’ throughout the hour of fun and managed to paint a portrait, literally, of her wealth of knowledge and her ability to be creative and embrace extra-credit for her comedy routine.

Again I’ll use GENIUS, from wishing Billy Bragg was her dad, to Kate Moss and Pete Doherty’s poignant moments during heroin deals – all her stories were captivating.

Somewhere toward the end of this cleverly crafted roller-coaster of a show, Josie expresses her need to ‘be great’ in life and how we should all aspire to this. Actually, in her zine (which you get at the start of the show) it says ‘STAY IDEALISTIC, BE EARNEST, BE SILLY, DON’T GIVE UP!’

Josie’s show amongst her rants has subtle points of humility, which I loved. Saying that she thought she could change the world by talking to people, smiling at them and bringing the light to an otherwise drab day on the tube, which she’s realising might not be enough, and for it to be enough she must perhaps get POLITICAL or at least move to a political town.

Honestly, after the show I was surprised how refreshed and aligned I felt with life!

“I’m going to make the world great!”

I’d say you’re doing plenty Josie, and you surely dropped some sort of inspiring light on me last night in The Bosco, I even want to be friends! And hey, if everyone could start the day thinking a little bit like you as they eat their breakfast (or look for it on flickr) I’d put money on it that the world would be a better place!

Who would of thought?

Posted in Empowering women, Media | Tagged , , , ,

‘Women’s bodies are not a commodity’ say Iceland, as all strip clubs are banned

Written by admin on March 26, 2010 — Leave a Comment

The prime minister of Iceland Johanna Sigurdardottir has just banned strip clubs in the country because she believes women’s bodies are not a commodity. What do you think? It seems the government has done their research and found that most of the women stripping were turning to it for income in desperate times. It raises for an interesting discussion topic amongst my little posse as to whether this is taking away a good livelihood for some women who are empowered by stripping… it seems though that most of Iceland are happy with the choices of their first ‘lesbian’ (not that this has anything to do with it) prime minister. Perhaps now a government funded program to help these women find other sources of income is the next step. Your thoughts are appreciated… (the article below is from Julie Bindel at The Guardian)

Johanna Sigurdardottir the prime minister of Iceland

Johanna Sigurdardottir the prime minister of Iceland

Or what I suspect is some fan imagery via www.slapupsidethehead.com

Super Johanna

Super Johanna

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.
While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.
Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: “It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.” When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: “It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society.”
The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.
According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.
So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women’s movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). “Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians,” says Halldórsdóttir, “something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything.”
Johanna Sigurðardottir is Iceland’s first female and the world’s first openly lesbian head of state. Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an organisation based in Reykjavik that campaigns against sexual violence, says she has enjoyed the support of Sigurðardottir for their campaigns against rape and domestic violence: “Johanna is a great feminist in that she challenges the men in her party and refuses to let them oppress her.”
Then there is the fact that feminists in Iceland appear to be entirely united in opposition to prostitution, unlike the UK where heated debates rage over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrading to women. There is also public support: the ban on commercial sexual activity is not only supported by feminists but also much of the population. A 2007 poll found that 82% of women and 57% of men support the criminalisation of paying for sex – either in brothels or lapdance clubs – and fewer than 10% of Icelanders were opposed.
Jónsdóttir says the ban could mean the death of the sex industry. “Last year we passed a law against the purchase of sex, recently introduced an action plan on trafficking of women, and now we have shut down the strip clubs. The Nordic countries are leading the way on women’s equality, recognising women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale.”
Strip club owners are, not surprisingly, furious about the new law. One gave an interview to a local newspaper in which he likened Iceland’s approach to that of a country such as Saudi Arabia, where it is not permitted to see any part of a woman’s body in public. “I have reached the age where I’m not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle any more,” he said.
Janice Raymond, a director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, hopes that all sex industry profiteers feel the same way, and believes the new law will pave the way for governments in other countries to follow suit. “What a victory, not only for the Icelanders but for everyone worldwide who repudiates the sexual exploitation of women,” she says.
Jónsdóttir is confident that the law will create a change in attitudes towards women. “I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale.”

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.

While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: “It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold.” When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: “It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society.”

The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.

According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.

So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women’s movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). “Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians,” says Halldórsdóttir, “something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything.”

Johanna Sigurðardottir is Iceland’s first female and the world’s first openly lesbian head of state. Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an organisation based in Reykjavik that campaigns against sexual violence, says she has enjoyed the support of Sigurðardottir for their campaigns against rape and domestic violence: “Johanna is a great feminist in that she challenges the men in her party and refuses to let them oppress her.”

Then there is the fact that feminists in Iceland appear to be entirely united in opposition to prostitution, unlike the UK where heated debates rage over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrading to women. There is also public support: the ban on commercial sexual activity is not only supported by feminists but also much of the population. A 2007 poll found that 82% of women and 57% of men support the criminalisation of paying for sex – either in brothels or lapdance clubs – and fewer than 10% of Icelanders were opposed.

Jónsdóttir says the ban could mean the death of the sex industry. “Last year we passed a law against the purchase of sex, recently introduced an action plan on trafficking of women, and now we have shut down the strip clubs. The Nordic countries are leading the way on women’s equality, recognising women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale.”

Strip club owners are, not surprisingly, furious about the new law. One gave an interview to a local newspaper in which he likened Iceland’s approach to that of a country such as Saudi Arabia, where it is not permitted to see any part of a woman’s body in public. “I have reached the age where I’m not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle any more,” he said.

Janice Raymond, a director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, hopes that all sex industry profiteers feel the same way, and believes the new law will pave the way for governments in other countries to follow suit. “What a victory, not only for the Icelanders but for everyone worldwide who repudiates the sexual exploitation of women,” she says.

Jónsdóttir is confident that the law will create a change in attitudes towards women. “I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale.”

Via Melanie Hick @ thevine.com.au

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A little cartoon love

Written by admin on March 25, 2010 — Leave a Comment

sex shop

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Mum takes 3-yr-old daughter on a feminist pilgrimage to show her women can be amazing too…

Written by admin on March 25, 2010 — Leave a Comment
Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn’t exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, “Girls are boring. I want to do boys’ things.” I can see her point. Her brother’s life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. “I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy,” she told me recently. “My name is Peter.”
But it’s good to be a girl, I tell her. Being a girl is fun. There are women’s successes to be celebrated. There is joy in the female condition. How can I prove this though? In our home city, London, there is just not that much physical evidence of women’s greatness. The Alison Lapper statue in Trafalgar Square was taken down in 2007. There are nine male statues in Parliament Square – and no female ones. London’s first public statue of a black woman, Bronze Woman by Aleix Barbat, in Stockwell Memorial Garden, did not appear until 2008. Germaine Greer has frequently complained that women are underrepresented in public monuments, noting that one of the only recent sculptures of a woman is of the actor Diana Dors at the Shaw Ridge leisure complex in Swindon. Now, I like Diana Dors. But this is pathetic.
I was not about to frogmarch Vera to Swindon, but I loved the idea of an adventure, exploring women’s hidden imprint on our streets. So I decided it was time for her first feminist pilgrimage. My mother-in-law reeled: “That poor child.” But I knew how to sell it to Vera. “Would you like to come and find out what lots of important ladies did, and then we’ll have cake?” “Yes,” she replied seriously. “I would like cake.”
Rachel Kolsky, a London tourist guide, has run women’s walking tours since 2005. “They open people’s eyes to the hidden history of an area,” she says. “There is a great women’s story on every corner.” Vera and I set off on a three-hour walk around the East End of London, starting at the Royal London Hospital, the focal point of the Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields Tour. Here, Kolsky tells a story about Eva Luckes, the famous hospital matron, whose successes included the containment of a typhoid epidemic. The hospital’s inner courtyard has a magnificent statue of Queen Alexandra, who was instrumental in bringing a new treatment for tuberculosis to the hospital. “Look at that strong, proud lady, Vera!” I say. “You said I could have cake,” she says. “I’m cold.”
Then Vera starts to cry, bringing our adventure to a sudden end. This is the problem with Kolsky’s brilliant London tours: in order to showcase women’s buried history, they cover a lot of ground. Great for an adult, but slightly too ambitious for a three-year-old.
I am not deterred though. Quite the opposite. As we head home I am hatching plans for future feminist pilgrimages. In the UK, we can follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. Or, next time we are passing the Houses of Parliament, we could check out the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, one of London’s few female landmarks, in Victoria Gardens. Then there’s a trail of Pankhurst family blue plaques to be followed in London, from 50 Clarendon Road in Holland Park to 120 Cheyne Walk in Kensington.
Further afield there is Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Now a private home, this address was once host to weekly salons and packed with paintings by Renoir, Gauguin and Cézanne; Picasso was a regular dinner guest. You may only be able to walk past these days, but you can still reminisce fondly on key passages in Stein’s classic work The Auto- biography of Alice B Toklas. Or, in the same city, you could visit Simone de Beauvoir’s grave – next to Sartre’s – at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
In New York there is a lengthy Dorothy Parker trail leading from the Ansonia at 2108 Broadway (one of New York’s most famous apartment blocks: Parker lived around the corner), to the 1925 birthplace of the New Yorker magazine at West 47th Street, where Parker worked, and on for cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel. Then there are all the great feminist museums: the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for instance, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which includes a gallery devoted to Judy Chicago’s “vaginas on plates” sculpture, The Dinner Party.
Maybe I will even start a “Sylvia Plath does New York” fund for when Vera turns 16. We will stay at the Barbizon Hotel at 63rd and Lexington – which was once women-only – wearing dresses with matching bags, as Plath did. We’ll lunch near the one-time offices of Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue where Plath was an intern. Or we’ll criss-cross Massachusetts in a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird Convertible à la Thelma and Louise in honour of Louisa May Alcott, tattered copies of my favourite childhood book, Little Women, in tow. More likely though, we might just go to Stockwell when the weather warms up and take a look at that Bronze Woman, holding her baby triumphantly aloft. As long as there’s an ice-cream van nearby, I’m sure Vera will be up for it.
For anyone who wants to explore women’s lives and history, here are some other great ideas for feminist pilgrimages.
Bath: Jane Austen
Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806. The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street is gearing up for September’s Austen Festival which features “the opportunity to dress throughout the week in 18th-century Regency costume”. You can have “tea with Mr Darcy” (a £10.50 high tea with cucumber sandwiches, scones and cream) all year round. Those keen for an Elizabeth Bennett-style constitutional can download a free audio walking tour “In the footsteps of Jane Austen” at visitbath.co.uk. There is also a “Jane for the day” suggested timetable: “12.45pm: Visit the Assembly Rooms: in Jane’s day, guests assembled for balls, to drink tea, play cards, listen to music or just to talk and flirt. 3pm: Stroll around the streets Jane would have known.”
Sussex: Virginia Woolf
“It is not so much a house as a phenomenon.” So wrote Quentin Bell of Charleston, the country home between Eastbourne and Lewes that was used by the writers, artists and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century. Virginia and Leonard Woolf originally spotted this late-17th-century Sussex farmhouse, situated at the foot of the South Downs, and coaxed Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, to move there in 1916. It reopens for the summer on 31 March, with special tours on Fridays.
The Woolfs’ own country home was Monk’s House near Lewes, East Sussex (nationaltrust.org.uk). This property is occupied by tenants so is open only for short visits on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between April and October. But there is the ideal pilgrimage on Saturday 26 June: an eight-mile walk “In the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf”, from Monk’s House to Charleston, with lunch at local stately home Firle Place (£25). To book tickets, call Charleston on 01323 811626 (charleston.org.uk).
Washington: Michelle Obama
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (on the National Mall, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue) has hundreds of exhibits commemorating the women’s reform movement. The museum’s First Ladies’ Collection celebrates the influence of presidents’ wives and has been one of the most popular exhibitions for the last 100 years, including archive material, diaries, memorabilia and costumes. This week, the white chiffon Jason Wu gown Michelle Obama wore to the inaugural balls went on show for the first time.
For another tribute to Obama, head to her favourite takeout joint, Good Stuff Eatery at 303 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in Washington DC for a “Prez Obama” burger or to Ben’s Chilli Bowl at 1213 U Street NW for the Obamas’ favourite half-smoke chilli dog. Nearby Busboys and Poets (2021 14th Street), a cafe and bookshop, hosts feminist events and has a huge feminist book collection.
Amsterdam: Anne Frank
“Now our Secret Annexe has truly become secret . . . Mr Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door.” The canal house at 163 Prinsengracht was the hiding place of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and there are numerous tours of the city that include the house, where you can visit the annexe where Frank wrote her secret diary. The house opens at 9am, and it is best to visit early to avoid queues (annefrank.org).
Paris: Simone de Beauvoir
As the French travel bible Guide du Routard notes, “In the winter Simone de Beauvoir came always first thing in the morning to the [Café] Flore to have a seat near the stove. Sartre recreated the atmosphere of an English club. Everybody listened to jazz, read poems or played little acts.” Pay homage to the great feminist philosopher over a café au lait at Café Flore, before downloading a walking tour from St Germain to the Louvre at girlsguidetoparis.com for $1.98 (£1.30). This takes in 60 Rue de Seine where de Beauvoir once lived, and while you are strolling, remember: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.
• Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields starts at 11am on 13 March. Tickets can be booked through the Women’s Library on 020-7320 2222. Battling Belles of Bow, 11am on Saturday 5 June, follows in the footsteps of Sylvia Pankhurst. For more information on other tours, email rachel@smallcake.co.uk or visit goeastlondon.co.ukThe
What's that honey?

What's that honey?

The article below has been taken from the Guardian; A 3-year-old girl says to her mum that girls are boring, and she’d like to be called Peter – as in her eyes, boys have all the fun. So mum Viv Groskop decides to take her daughter Vera, on a feminist pilgrimage through the East End of London. Here’s what she had to say…

Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn’t exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, “Girls are boring. I want to do boys’ things.” I can see her point. Her brother’s life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. “I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy,” she told me recently. “My name is Peter.”

But it’s good to be a girl, I tell her. Being a girl is fun. There are women’s successes to be celebrated. There is joy in the female condition. How can I prove this though? In our home city, London, there is just not that much physical evidence of women’s greatness. The Alison Lapper statue in Trafalgar Square was taken down in 2007. There are nine male statues in Parliament Square – and no female ones. London’s first public statue of a black woman, Bronze Woman by Aleix Barbat, in Stockwell Memorial Garden, did not appear until 2008. Germaine Greer has frequently complained that women are underrepresented in public monuments, noting that one of the only recent sculptures of a woman is of the actor Diana Dors at the Shaw Ridge leisure complex in Swindon. Now, I like Diana Dors. But this is pathetic.

I was not about to frogmarch Vera to Swindon, but I loved the idea of an adventure, exploring women’s hidden imprint on our streets. So I decided it was time for her first feminist pilgrimage. My mother-in-law reeled: “That poor child.” But I knew how to sell it to Vera. “Would you like to come and find out what lots of important ladies did, and then we’ll have cake?” “Yes,” she replied seriously. “I would like cake.”

Rachel Kolsky, a London tourist guide, has run women’s walking tours since 2005. “They open people’s eyes to the hidden history of an area,” she says. “There is a great women’s story on every corner.” Vera and I set off on a three-hour walk around the East End of London, starting at the Royal London Hospital, the focal point of the Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields Tour. Here, Kolsky tells a story about Eva Luckes, the famous hospital matron, whose successes included the containment of a typhoid epidemic. The hospital’s inner courtyard has a magnificent statue of Queen Alexandra, who was instrumental in bringing a new treatment for tuberculosis to the hospital. “Look at that strong, proud lady, Vera!” I say. “You said I could have cake,” she says. “I’m cold.”

Then Vera starts to cry, bringing our adventure to a sudden end. This is the problem with Kolsky’s brilliant London tours: in order to showcase women’s buried history, they cover a lot of ground. Great for an adult, but slightly too ambitious for a three-year-old.

I am not deterred though. Quite the opposite. As we head home I am hatching plans for future feminist pilgrimages. In the UK, we can follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. Or, next time we are passing the Houses of Parliament, we could check out the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, one of London’s few female landmarks, in Victoria Gardens. Then there’s a trail of Pankhurst family blue plaques to be followed in London, from 50 Clarendon Road in Holland Park to 120 Cheyne Walk in Kensington.

Further afield there is Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Now a private home, this address was once host to weekly salons and packed with paintings by Renoir, Gauguin and Cézanne; Picasso was a regular dinner guest. You may only be able to walk past these days, but you can still reminisce fondly on key passages in Stein’s classic work The Auto- biography of Alice B Toklas. Or, in the same city, you could visit Simone de Beauvoir’s grave – next to Sartre’s – at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

In New York there is a lengthy Dorothy Parker trail leading from the Ansonia at 2108 Broadway (one of New York’s most famous apartment blocks: Parker lived around the corner), to the 1925 birthplace of the New Yorker magazine at West 47th Street, where Parker worked, and on for cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel. Then there are all the great feminist museums: the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for instance, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which includes a gallery devoted to Judy Chicago’s “vaginas on plates” sculpture, The Dinner Party.

Maybe I will even start a “Sylvia Plath does New York” fund for when Vera turns 16. We will stay at the Barbizon Hotel at 63rd and Lexington – which was once women-only – wearing dresses with matching bags, as Plath did. We’ll lunch near the one-time offices of Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue where Plath was an intern. Or we’ll criss-cross Massachusetts in a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird Convertible à la Thelma and Louise in honour of Louisa May Alcott, tattered copies of my favourite childhood book, Little Women, in tow. More likely though, we might just go to Stockwell when the weather warms up and take a look at that Bronze Woman, holding her baby triumphantly aloft. As long as there’s an ice-cream van nearby, I’m sure Vera will be up for it.

For anyone who wants to explore women’s lives and history, here are some other great ideas for feminist pilgrimages.

Bath: Jane Austen

Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806. The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street is gearing up for September’s Austen Festival which features “the opportunity to dress throughout the week in 18th-century Regency costume”. You can have “tea with Mr Darcy” (a £10.50 high tea with cucumber sandwiches, scones and cream) all year round. Those keen for an Elizabeth Bennett-style constitutional can download a free audio walking tour “In the footsteps of Jane Austen” at visitbath.co.uk. There is also a “Jane for the day” suggested timetable: “12.45pm: Visit the Assembly Rooms: in Jane’s day, guests assembled for balls, to drink tea, play cards, listen to music or just to talk and flirt. 3pm: Stroll around the streets Jane would have known.”

Sussex: Virginia Woolf

“It is not so much a house as a phenomenon.” So wrote Quentin Bell of Charleston, the country home between Eastbourne and Lewes that was used by the writers, artists and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century. Virginia and Leonard Woolf originally spotted this late-17th-century Sussex farmhouse, situated at the foot of the South Downs, and coaxed Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, to move there in 1916. It reopens for the summer on 31 March, with special tours on Fridays.

The Woolfs’ own country home was Monk’s House near Lewes, East Sussex (nationaltrust.org.uk). This property is occupied by tenants so is open only for short visits on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between April and October. But there is the ideal pilgrimage on Saturday 26 June: an eight-mile walk “In the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf”, from Monk’s House to Charleston, with lunch at local stately home Firle Place (£25). To book tickets, call Charleston on 01323 811626 (charleston.org.uk).

Washington: Michelle Obama

Love you

Love you

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (on the National Mall, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue) has hundreds of exhibits commemorating the women’s reform movement. The museum’s First Ladies’ Collection celebrates the influence of presidents’ wives and has been one of the most popular exhibitions for the last 100 years, including archive material, diaries, memorabilia and costumes. This week, the white chiffon Jason Wu gown Michelle Obama wore to the inaugural balls went on show for the first time.

For another tribute to Obama, head to her favourite takeout joint, Good Stuff Eatery at 303 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in Washington DC for a “Prez Obama” burger or to Ben’s Chilli Bowl at 1213 U Street NW for the Obamas’ favourite half-smoke chilli dog. Nearby Busboys and Poets (2021 14th Street), a cafe and bookshop, hosts feminist events and has a huge feminist book collection.

Amsterdam: Anne Frank

“Now our Secret Annexe has truly become secret . . . Mr Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door.” The canal house at 163 Prinsengracht was the hiding place of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and there are numerous tours of the city that include the house, where you can visit the annexe where Frank wrote her secret diary. The house opens at 9am, and it is best to visit early to avoid queues (annefrank.org).

Paris: Simone de Beauvoir

As the French travel bible Guide du Routard notes, “In the winter Simone de Beauvoir came always first thing in the morning to the [Café] Flore to have a seat near the stove. Sartre recreated the atmosphere of an English club. Everybody listened to jazz, read poems or played little acts.” Pay homage to the great feminist philosopher over a café au lait at Café Flore, before downloading a walking tour from St Germain to the Louvre at girlsguidetoparis.com for $1.98 (£1.30). This takes in 60 Rue de Seine where de Beauvoir once lived, and while you are strolling, remember: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.

• Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields starts at 11am on 13 March. Tickets can be booked through the Women’s Library on 020-7320 2222. Battling Belles of Bow, 11am on Saturday 5 June, follows in the footsteps of Sylvia Pankhurst. For more information on other tours, email rachel@smallcake.co.uk or visit goeastlondon.co.uk

Posted in Empowering women, Media | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Love on the couch

Written by admin on October 23, 2009 — Leave a Comment
Those moments when love and light collide.

Those moments when love and light collide.

Image is from http://www.mikaelkennedy.com/pages/polaroids.html

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Butchers are happiest and having the most sex! Need a steak tonight ladies?

Written by admin on July 8, 2009 — Leave a Comment

barry the butchers

Ladies, listen up! If you’re looking for man who’ll give you the right attention in the bedroom – look no further than you local man o’ meat – ’tis right! Refer to the article below taken from news.com.au which suggests that the local butcher is among Australia’s happiest workers and also concludes they are having the most sex.

Soooo, if you equate quantity with quality – I suggest you find yourself a butcher…

The Daily Telegraph reports that a Galaxy poll of consumers, which rated the perceived happiness and job satisfaction of a range of professionals, ranked butchers as the most friendly and contented.

Thirty per cent of consumers perceived butchers as happy with their jobs – a figure confirmed by 76 per cent of butchers surveyed who reported feeling healthier, laughing more at work and having more sex than other workers interviewed. Service station attendants, bank tellers and sandwich hands featured at the lower end of the survey, with less than 10 per cent of consumers perceiving them as happy at work. Butchers are having 60 per cent more sex than other workers. More than half the 295 butchers surveyed had no sick leave last year and 60 per cent described their work as fun.

Oh yeah, I also found this article which suggests WHY the butcher is sexy – in short, a macho man (equated with MEAT CARVING) whom also carries around a big bloody knife!?!

Please fill us in on your carnivorous fantasies and/or just let us know which profession you find the sexiest?

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Oprah: Mums should buy vibrators for teen daughters

Written by admin on June 17, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Let’s talk.

Who better to back up what Mia Muse is all about other than Oprah? Yes! Bring it on! A recent episode of Oprah was wonderfully progressive. In the episode Oprah and Dr. Berman discuss the importance of teenage girls (aged 14, 15 or 16) understanding their sexuality and sexual beings, suggesting that one way to do this was for mothers to buy their daughters a vibrator, said Dr. Berman. The idea of such a purchase is met by Gayle’s distaste who believed that teenage girls already have too much information hence their sexual promiscuity. In argument to Gayle, Oprah and Dr. B say that this is exactly why young women should masturbate in order to understand their own bodies, needs and desires first before they explore this with teenage boys. Too often Dr. Berman works with older women who do not understand their own sexual response, feel badly about their bodies, feel badly about their sexual beings- hence, there is no such thing as too much information in this day and age.

From Jezebel - Dr. Berman’s argument to scared moms is that it’s important that girls not only know about their own bodies but understand what it means to reach an orgasm. Because if they know what an orgasm is, and that they can do it for themselves, then they can own it and they will know that they never have to depend on another person to make them feel that way.

Overall the episode insightfully suggests that at age 10 or 11 parents should discuss the male and female anatomies with their children and then at 14 or 15 parents should have an in-depth conversation about self-stimulation and mention that one option includes vibrators.

I was always taught that it was best to communicate everything that generally was a fear or unknown. This taught me to speak my mind and feelings – which I believe now allows for honesty and understanding with myself. When I was about a 11 I read my neighbours Dolly Dr. this is where I found out what masturbating was- or that this ‘innate desire to touch yourself’ had a name. I think I laughed and couldn’t breathe properly for about 10 minutes. The Dolly Dr. in hindsight was actually quite sad, a girl had been caught masturbating in the toilet by her dad – he then insisted on going to the bathroom with her every time she went. I went home later and asked my parents if they masturbated? My mum in the foreground said, “umm, yes! Everyone does at least once in their life.” My dad in the background, looked a little freaked out and said, “ah, yea, I guess…” I remember thinking oh, okay-cool.

WATCH THE OPRAH VIDEO ON JEZEBEL HERE

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Emotionally intelligent women have more orgasms

Written by admin on May 28, 2009 — Leave a Comment
Image is from Pierre Dal Corso via Lifelounge

A study done on 2000 female twins found that emotionally intelligent women have more orgasms. The study suggests that a healthier emotional state of mind results in better physical, emotional and mental awareness which = better SEX (by better we mean more orgasmic).

The BBC article said;

The research found a significant association between emotional intelligence and the frequency of orgasm during masturbation and intercourse.

Professor Tim Spector, director of the Twin Research Department at King’s College London and co-author of the study, said: “These findings show that emotional intelligence is an advantage in many aspects of your life including the bedroom.

“This study will help enormously in the development of behavioural and cognitive therapies to improve women’s sexual lives.”

Lead author Andrea Burri said: “Emotional intelligence seems to have a direct impact on women’s sexual functioning by influencing her ability to communicate her sexual expectations and desires to her partner.”

The vision at MIA MUSE has always been to promote a confidence and communication in our sexual dimensions of self. This can obviously be hard – so many experiences can shape how we view ourselves, how we communicate and how we then share this with other people. We at MIA MUSE think that by providing a space that allows for us to get in touch with ourselves (to rejuvenate our boudior) this will parallel our ability to communicate with ourselves – resulting in higher emotional intelligence and whoa, wait for it… MORE ORGASMS!

Oh yea, perhaps you could read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman if you need a little help.

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Empowerment within religious parametres

Written by admin on May 27, 2009 — Leave a Comment
Back home in Jakarta, 18-year-old fashion designer Dian Pelangi can whip her fan club into a fizz of guileless adoration: “Wow!” “Gorgeous!” “Inspiring!” “Empowering!”. They thrill to Pelangi’s way (her name, aptly, means “rainbow”) with silky tie-dyed and batik Islamic clothing; how she plugs into fashion trends just enough, but not so much as to compromise a girl’s modesty or provoke other Muslims’ disapproval.

“OMG! I just fell in love with her power, her craziness, her dresses, her everything!” This was a typically impassioned thread among many more posted by young Indonesian women after a photo-strip of Pelangi’s designs recently went up on blog spot “Hegab-Rehab“.

Thanks to Melanie Hick from TheVine – you can read on here, via The Age.

Posted in Empowering women | Tagged , ,
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