Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 20
July 21, 2014
Sex Toys
Sárka-Jonae Miller Guest Blog
I don’t often read negative reviews of my books because despite having the initials S & M, I’m not into masochism. But when a 1-star review of my contemporary romance novel, Spin Off, popped up I took a peek. I’m glad I did because I learned an interesting lesson: one woman’s trashy is another woman’s treasure.
Sárka-Jonae MillerThe reviewer, let’s call her Prue, complained that Spin Off contained “trashy” sex scenes. Although I pride myself on being a wordsmith, this made no sense to me, so I checked to see if the definition of “trashy” had changed. The closest synonym that could possibly apply is ‘indecent,’ since there was nothing trash-like in the scenes. No doing it in an alleyway against a dumpster or using a trash bag in lieu of a condom. Since there were only a few short sex scenes and they were between loving, married couples (one gay, one straight) I couldn’t understand how ‘trashy’ applied. Unless a married couple invites a prostitute, a goat, or a clergyman into their bedroom (or dungeon), I don’t understand how anyone could be offended.
If there is one type of sex everyone, even clergymen, agree is okay, it’s sex between a married couple. Sex for money, pre-marital sex, divorced sex, teen sex, sex between very old rich men and very hot young women… the list goes on for what people judge, but married sex is never something people complain about.
That left only two possibilities, Prue was upset because one of the married couples included two women (the book takes place in California, where we believe in that whole freedom and equality thing guaranteed in the Constitution), or because one scene involved a strap-on. Homophobic or afraid of sex toys? Perhaps I’ll never know Prue’s problem, though she’s entitled to her opinion.
Sex Toys Perception
In a modern society where inmates pleasure themselves with screwdrivers on popular Netflix shows and the Secret Diary of a Call Girl was one of the most popular shows in recent times (featuring quite a few sex toys, dungeon scenes, and sexual fetishes), it’s hard to imagine that readers would be hung up on the use of a single strap-on. Admittedly, it did vibrate. Does that make it trashy?
Before you answer, consider that the vibrator was invented as a medical tool, not a sex toy. Victorian doctors once used their fingers to bring female patients to orgasm when the women were suffering from “hysteria,” a vague condition most likely caused by sexual frustration. The lazy men wanted a faster way to get the women off and go about their day (has anything really changed?), so the doctors invented the vibrator. Let’s review: doctors (not known as a trashy profession) invented vibrators (medial equipment) in Victorian times (known for being modest, if not sexually repressed), but if you stick a vibrator on a harness and wear it you’re a trashy whore? Hmm…
As early as the 13th century doctors prescribed dildos for “hysterical” women. If women have been using dildos on themselves as a medical cure for a sexual problem for hundreds of years, how is a woman using the hands-free version to pleasure her partner indecent?
The problem is perception (isn’t it always?). Put a strap-on or a dildo on an adult website and it’s trashy. Would it seem classier advertised on a hospital website? Probably. But, there’s a deeper issue here, one that’s been going on for all of recorded history: people are uncomfortable with the idea of women enjoying sex. History is filled with ridiculous notions that women aren’t sexual, don’t have sexual feelings (it wasn’t until the 20th century that American and European men came around on the idea of women being capable of sexual pleasure), and that romantic love or sexual acts between women were, at best, trivial and, at worst, sinful. If you can’t enjoy reading a well-written (imo) lesbian sex scene because of a sex toy, blame your male ancestors. Ironically, I’d imagine their male descendants would find the lesbian sex scenes quite interesting.
What’s the cure for hundreds of years of wrong thinking about women’s sexual needs, lesbianism, and the respectability of sex toys? I’d start with four seasons of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, three lesbian movies, my two novels Spin Off and Spin Control, and one trip to a high-class sex shop to study the sex toys. If that doesn’t open one’s mind, there’s always therapy.
Sárka-Jonae Miller is an award-winning novelist – www.SarkaJonae.com
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July 17, 2014
Pubic Hair: To Be Cut? Or Not To Be Cut?
Women are obsessed with their hair. Men, predictably, are obsessed with our pubic hair. Being bullies, or babies, or both, men usually get what they want. And what most men want, is seems, is to find beneath their girlfriend’s knickers a shiny shaved mount that gives her the look of a porn star. Or a plucked chicken. Or the little girl you once were.
Which brings me to Gemma. My best friend has cut her pubic hair into a whoosh. Yes, a whoosh. ‘Why?’ I asked and she shrugged. ‘You know: Just Do It.’ Which means Gemma doesn’t only wear Nike when she’s at the gym, she’s logoed by the Nike tick when she takes her clothes off for a shower. Or whatever. ‘I was going to get a Brazilian,’ she adds. ‘But the whoosh is, you know, more original.’
I’m not sure that’s true, but since porn became mainstream, cropping your pubic bush has been a part of the cool culture and girls daily face that Shakespearean quandary: To Be Cut? Or Not To Be Cut?
Guys are infatuated by the shorn, sea-shell look. It’s cleaner, they say. It’s healthier, they say. It’s less smelly. But are they right?
Pubic Debate
First, male readers, here’s some topography. Girls’ exterior apparatus is called the vulva, and consists of the labia majora and labia minora, big lips and small lips – although, to make it confusing, sometimes the smaller inner lips are bigger than the outer lips. The vagina is the internal grotto holding the urethra (for pee-pee), an invisible sense receiver called the G-spot, and a minute magic mushroom – the clitoris, the altar in the palace of divine pleasure.
Nestling sleepily a little below the vaginal opening is something called the Bartholin glands. When aroused, they grow moist, easing penetration before sex, and leaking in your panties if arousal transpires from unexpected or extraneous stimulation, a problem (or not) for right-brained girls wired for sex. Before we leave the genital scenery behind us, between the vulva and the anus is the perineum, a largely neglected oasis that enjoys the occasional visit.
The pubic mount, or mons, or mound of Venus, sprouts hair at puberty, slender silken threads or vast shaggy carpets. Like riddles and secrets, there’s no telling what you are going to find. But hirsute or short-back-and sides, and contrary to urban myth: pruning the fuzz IS NOT healthier, but actually increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and infection.
Shaving leaves invisible nicks and cuts in the skin. Bikini waxes inflame the follicles – more breaches for bad guys to slink into and contaminate. Removing pubic hair removes the cushion between you and your partner, increasing friction and, you got it, pushing up the chances of infection and STDs.
Quite aside from infantilising women, the scalped mons makes the male thingy look bigger – useful, I suppose, for the porn shoot, but it’s not how it appears but how it performs that’s of interest to women, Gemma more than most. When I showed her a draft of my blog, she blushed red as a ripe pepper and refused to explain why.
Coco Channel famously said: A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future. Did she have in mind the sweet aroma that accompanies female arousal? We shall never know, but isn’t that the elixir the alchemists have always been seeking?
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July 11, 2014
Gladiators of the Beautiful Game
On Sunday I shall mask my face with blue and white stripes on one side and bars of red, yellow and black on the other. The gladiators of Argentina and Germany will face each other in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium in the beautiful game’s grand finale.
French fan combining patriotism, nostalgia and chic.I will be watching with friends in a bar with a big screen and drinking beer from the bottle. I don’t particularly like football – or soccer. I don’t understand the offside rule. But I do appreciate the passion football inspires when passion for politics is all but dead and passion for all things artistic will follow as art becomes business and artists are in the business of accumulation and repetition.
By a quirk of my father’s career and constant reassignments, I was born in Brussels. I took my first steps in Italy fourteen month later. Family legend has it that my first words were ciao for now. Should I, when Argentina knocked Belgium out of the cup, felt some hurt national pride? With so much expected, and so little delivered, should my patriotic hackles have risen after Italy’s ignoble exit?
Then, I am neither Belgium nor Italian, but English, and our gladiators slid home like Richard the Lionheart with his bedraggled army after failing to take Jerusalem in the Third Crusade. The world Cup is war. We fly our flags, paint our faces, dress in the costumes of the players in a show of nationalism, patriotism, loyalty. When Germany thrashed Brazil by an unprecedented 7 goals to 1, the host nation went into mourning. Rather than empathise, I thought this was the best possible result, a crude but necessary awakening. Brazil spent $14 billion on the World Cup, the most ever, with close to $1 billion on security alone, according to CNN.
Secure from whom? Surely not the one million street children being molested and damaged in Brazil’s cities, little girls not yet in puberty selling their bodies for 25 cents to buy food? Had the Brazilian government built one less stadium and saved $1 billion, they could have built the schools and hostels that would have solved the problem for street children forever.
Gladiators, Bread and Circuses
Do nationalism, patriotism and loyalty still have the same significance? I mentioned where I was born because where we are born is a quirk of fate. Samuel Johnson in 1775 coined that famous phrase that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. If we look beyond the geographic accident of our birth place, our loyalty must be with the one million street children, not the shapes and colours of the national flag. In a world where what separates people is less our nationality and increasingly the widening gulf between rich and poor, loyalty to a nation becomes loyalty to the banks and corporations that own the politicians, own the means of production and distribution and own our thoughts through the media. Brazil lost the semi-final match, but while their compatriots in yellow jerseys are weeping, the players, whatever flag, remain winners with the average $5 million a year they take to the bank.
In ancient Rome, the gladiators fought to the death in the arena to amuse the ‘shallow populace,’ the creation of public approval through ‘diversion and distraction’ described by the poet Juvenal as Bread and Circuses. The World Cup and Olympic Games are our bread and circuses. On balance, I believe they are a good way to bring the people of the world together. But while we wear our colours, we must not forget the darker sides of patriotism that leads to conflict – while we wait for Sunday’s final, the tanks are rolling and the guns are firing somewhere in the world, usually for reasons hard to understand and directed by politicians few people have any trust in and believe it is probably in some way to their advantage, not anyone else’s.
When the next candidate for office says: I love my country, take it as Juvenal would have done, with a pinch of salt. Truth, Lies & Politicians? Read on before the KICK OFF. Feeling passionate? Leave your thoughts in the box below
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July 9, 2014
Do You Want To Eat My Knickers?
“Do You Want To Eat My Knickers?” is an exciting new TV concept where the world’s top chefs including Ferran Adrià, Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal will go head to head to create the tastiest dish using women’s panties.
Actresses, weather girls and young celebrities famous for being young celebrities will peel off their undies before a live audience and the chefs will reveal their wizardry baking, grilling and sautéing these delicacies with such erotic ingredients as truffles from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, unicorn tears, phoenix eggs from the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity and ambergris from the deepest depths of the Dead Sea.
The idea came to me in a Eureka moment after discovering the hosiery brand Ballerina’s new Hush Hush line of stockings and tights that come imbued with pheromones – the female hormone that drives men into paroxysms of desire. I wasn’t aware that men needed a whiff of chemicals to lose control, but the combination of women’s undergarments and the macho motions of the kitchen clearly lends itself to the small screen’s appetite for exotic foods spiced with a sizzling dash of sex.
Finding unusual uses for lingerie is not new. Vending machines in Japan selling used panties worn by schoolgirls for up to $80 a pair made somebody rich, the practise expanding into what are known as burusera shops. On the web you can find at Lingerie Diva the inimitable treat: ‘Women’s Edible Panties Strawberry Gummy’ ($9.18), as well as a variety of edible knickers and thongs at $4.99 with flavours including passion fruit, Pina Colada and chocolate with peanut butter. Sweet fun foods include the candy bra and G-string set, candy nipple tassels, candy cock rings, edible tattoos and chocolate body paint. Delicious.
Invest in My Knickers
Panty fetishism is called Paraphilia, which describes people moved to sexual ecstasy wearing, observing or handling certain types of underwear; watching women putting on and taking off their knickers; or putting undies on and taking them off themselves. One in ten women, according to one survey, feel aroused going commando, that is not wearing any knickers at all, and feel they project a sexy aura without having to lash out $30 on hormone-scented pantyhose.
“Do You Want To Eat My Knickers?” is still in the planning stage. Broadcasters and investors who want to get in early with a bid can contact me through www.chloethurlow.com and advice in the comments box will be given careful consideration.
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July 7, 2014
Boundaries
One of the joys (and the challenges) of writing erotic stories, is the constant opportunity to push the boundaries of perceived ‘proper’ behaviour. I don’t mean that once I have a pen in my hand I instantly dive into the illegal, dubious, or downright wrong. I mean that within the realms of the fiction I write, I am able to grapple with ideas and fantasies that fascinate me. I can sculpt scenes of sexual action which I would never want to take part in, but which live happily in my mind as erotic dreams – dreams which I have the privilege of sharing with my readers on paper.
The massive range of erotic fiction out in ‘book world’ is testament to the fact that the sexual adventures that exist within the privacy of our minds, are far more excessive than the acts of sex that most of us actually perform – or would even want to perform. The images and scenarios writers of the erotic genre create, work precisely because they take our own boundaries and push them – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – opening up the imagination, and freeing our inhibitions a little.
A Special Kind of Freedom
As Kay Jaybee, I have something of a reputation. I am frequently referred to as the ‘Queen of Kink;’ and when I meet people at readings, I’m often seen with a paddle in hand, skimpily clad, and whip wielding. This ‘adopting of a fantasy’ role is just that: a fantasy. I am, after all, in the happy making business! Would I really want to spank the odd arse and tie up the occasional passing person? Well – yes – of course I would. But would I actually do it? Would I push my own boundaries beyond the realm of paper and pen? Well, that’s up to you and your imagination to decide…
After almost a decade of writing smut I’m more and more convinced that one of the main issues people have with erotica writers isn’t a disapproval of what we write, but a sense of being threatened by it. They (and I know I’m generalising here) are uncomfortable with letting their own imaginations widen; of pushing their own private boundaries a fraction. Are they perhaps afraid of what they may discover about themselves?
If that sounds like you, then try, just try. Read a little erotica, after all, what happens within the safe confines of your own mind while you are reading it, is for your knowledge alone. The boundaries we push within our own heads – like our dreams – are ours and ours only. They are, in their own way, a special kind of freedom.
Kay Jaybee is the author of The Perfect Submissive Trilogy, (Xcite, 2011-14), Making Him Wait, (Sweetmeats Press, 2012), The Voyeur (Xcite, 2012), as well as the numerous novellas and short stories.
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July 3, 2014
Break the Routine and You May Save a Life: Your Own
Raymond Chandler said: Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
Routine dries the soul and turns it into a desert. Routine gives you that sense that time is racing and you’ve been left behind. Routine can set in like woodworm, or migraine, or cancer. Routine is a habit, an addiction that can only be cured by the healing power of change.
What can we do to break the routine?
There are almost as many make-over ideas on the web as porn sites. How to find the partner of your dreams on the latest dating hub. How to be tall. How to be happy. How to lose 30lbs in 15 minutes. We all want to be the most we can be and have more than we’ve got. This is the human condition and the marketing men tune into that fact with unrelenting skill.
The answer isn’t to make sweeping changes but small, realistic changes. By breaking the routine, we create a new mind-set that sends out an unexpected pulse that pumps the blood around the body at a different rhythm and can even renew our perception of life itself.
Start with something easy. Buy a bike, or take the old bike out of the garage and go for a ride in the country. Go apple picking for a day. Buy a sketch pad, walk to the park, sit on the grass and draw a tree. Go somewhere you have never been before without a plan to do anything when you get there. Just see what happens. Explore. Let your eyes wander over fresh sights. Breathe in a different air. Breathe deeply. It feels good and it costs nothing.
Feed the Hungry
Routine is a cloud blocking the sun; a veil that makes everything seem dimmer. If you do the same things every day, time doesn’t merely appear to go faster, it does go faster. When you change the daily grind, it will feel as if a magnet has pulled back the hands on the clock. You feel refreshed, sparky, younger. Routine conjures up thoughts of eternity and eternity is not an extension of time, but an absence of time, a void.
The problem with life-changing makeovers is that they are hard to keep up and we hate ourselves when we give up. Brief excursions from the predictable are not only easy to achieve, they stick in our minds – the tree you drew in the park is still in the sketch pad, better than any photograph.
People save for years to take a cruise or spend two weeks in Thailand or Bali or in Africa on Safari. Such adventures do stay in the memory, but after the money’s spent and the video has been shown to family and friends, the routine returns, more soul destroying than ever.
Try learning a language or to play a musical instrument. Take tap dancing lessons. Join an amateur dramatic society. Start a book club. Clean out all the closets and anything you haven’t worn or used for three years, give it to charity, or have a yard sale, a good opportunity to renew friendships with the neighbours.
I just read an article with statistics from the United Nations World Food Programme: 842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. What can we do? How can we change our routine AND help the starving people of the world?
You could start a group on Facebook. Call it…I don’t know: People Aid. Ask me to join. It’s free. It’s easy. Post your opinions and see what other like-minded people have to say. The more involved you become, the more likely you are to see a way to achieve your own goals – and you may save some lives, including your own.
Do you have any ideas for making simple changes? Leave them in the comment box – no puzzles, all free. And there is one more place where you can feed your brain and stop the years passing like the wind: in the pages of a good book.
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June 30, 2014
Smoke Signals
Elizabeth Woodham Guest BlogA femme fatale is defined in many ways: low voice, an air of individuality, mystery and masculinity together with flawless femininity. She smells uniquely delicious. Her lips and hair colour are true and bold. She is set apart.
She smokes.
She’s the kind of woman others want, but shouldn’t have. Is the femme and her cigarette seductive? Are the two irresistibly linked? Is smoking sexy?
The first advertisement for snuff and tobacco products was placed in the New York Daily in 1789. Advertising was an emerging concept, and tobacco-related advertisements were not seen as any different from those for other products. The World War One Tommie would smoke in the trenches. During World War Two, cigarettes were included in soldier’s rations and tobacco companies sent soldiers their smokes for free. Specific brands used macho imagery and found a new loyal group of customers when soldiers who smoked their cigarettes returned from war.
Today, the nanny state treats us as if we are unable to resist temptation by prohibiting tobacco companies from sponsoring sports, music and other cultural events, and prevents the display of tobacco product logos on clothes. A moral war is being fought on the back of scientific research, which proves that smoking kills. Eventually. A factor unlikely to concern the combat soldier.
Uber-hot motor racing isn’t quite as sexy since the ban on advertising those sexy brands we love to smoke and in the British supermarket, the tobacconist is concealed behind a sterile, ugly façade, like a flasher’s cock hidden by a raincoat. Sliding doors are opened a crack revealing an array of brightly-packaged products akin to a tantalising glimpse of stocking tops on a breezy day. The aromatic, inviting, TARDIS-like purveyor of all things smokey, formerly housed in a Tudor building in London’s High Holborn, vanished in a puff.
Ad-Men Madmen
On re-reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one wonders if Holly Golightly’s provocative me, me, fragrance is channelled through her impossibly long cigarette holder? Is Cool Hand Luke as sensuous without a dangling cigarette? Heartbreakingly hip smokers Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin, two interchangeable femmes, sans fatale, but fatal, seem naked without a cigarette held in fingers or lips. Even super-shiny Gwyneth Paltrow enjoys a sly fag; confessing a Saturday night inhalation after a hard week’s Goop. Somehow, images of Gwynnie, or the equally goodie-two-shoes, Jennifer Aniston, with a smoke don’t have the same impact as modern femme and unapologetic smoker, Scarlett Johansson.
And yet, there’s vanity. Even if you don’t care about your hidden organs turning black with tar, take a look at your bewitching skin and come-to-bed ultrabrite smile. You’ll say goodbye to both and hello to smoker’s face after a couple of decades’ nicotine addiction. Just sayin.
Perhaps all smokers want to quit eventually, after all, shelling out for a pack of twenty erodes your funds, as well as your lungs. Maybe a cigarette has become an anachronism? Enter the not cheap, not big, not clever, electronic cigarette. Manufacturers have attempted injecting sex and sense appeal into the unerotic e-cig, ‘totally wicked liquid.’ Er, no. At present, you’re allowed to drag on your e-fag here, there and everywhere, but they’ll ban it everywhere. Eventually. Nanny doesn’t like citizens to enjoy sex, fags, drugs and/or rock-n-roll. They conjure up wet rock festival weather out of spite. They will have you quit the weed if it’s the last thing they do, and collect their sex kills tax via something else you love to love.
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June 26, 2014
Kiss Kiss – There Is Nothing Like A Kiss xx
The Kiss is a life-sized marble sculpture created in 1880 by Auguste Rodin. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the French artist portrays from this cautionary tale the Italian beauty Francesca da Rimini with puckered lips almost but not quite touching the lips of Paolo Malatesta.
It is impossible to know whether the couple have just kissed, just parted from a kiss or have been caught kissing in flagrante. What Rodin shows is that the kiss is more than a kiss. The figures frozen in marble are naked and the fleeting peck is illicit. Francesca is not married to Paolo, but his older brother, and Dante delivers the customary punishment. Giovanni Malatesta, a nobleman, does the noble thing. He kills them both.
Rodin spent seven years carving the sculpture. He clearly fell in love with Francesca da Rimini and lent her name to the title of the work. When it was finally unveiled he explained that the nude portrayal was ‘a homage to women, not just submitting to men but as full partners in ardour.’ The dignitaries, for reasons impossible to interpret, thought the title too controversial and suggested it be changed to Le Baiser – The Kiss.
The sculpture was created to adorn the entrance to the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris and was a part of a larger work called The Gates of Hell – a pair of ornately decorated bronze doors standing 20 foot high, the doorway topped by a group of reliefs, of which Le Baiser was one. Rodin began The Gates of Hell in 1880 and worked on the commission until his death 37 years later in 1917.
French Kiss
So as not to offend public taste, The Kiss was removed from the display. A smaller, bronze copy of the sculpture, sent to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was likewise considered too lewd for general consumption, and again removed. As Rodin so rightly realised and so brilliantly reveals, the kiss is more than a kiss.
As a picture tells a thousand words, so a kiss says everything that’s important. Prostitutes never kiss their clients. It is too personal, too human. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss our hands and wave as loved ones begin a journey. A kiss beneath the mistletoe. A kiss after midnight. A kiss before dying. The devil’s kiss. According to Matthew’s Gospel, when Judas leaves the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper, Jesus says, ‘Friend, do what you are here to do,’ and the infamous Judas kiss is thought by some scholars to contain a complicity, a brief touching of lips to seal the terms of fate.
Two spacemen touching in anti-gravity is like a kiss. But then, there is nothing like a kiss. A kiss is a rare bird. The first sip of champagne. The fleeting glimpse of a shooting star. The kiss is uniquely human. We exchange bodily fluids with a kiss. A great kiss is like eating melon on a picnic. Like diving into a warm sea. A French kiss is a battle of tongues where everyone wins.
First Kiss
A really good kiss is like a secret you want to share. A really good kiss reminds you why it’s hard to decide on the right lipstick. The first kiss stays in you’re mind – forever. Time expands with a really good kiss and you add another few seconds to the end of your life.
Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say ‘I love you’ a thousand ways but you can say it better with silence and a kiss.
Auguste Rodin understood all that a kiss meant. When in Paris, you can find his masterpiece at the Musée Rodin – on full public display, Francesca da Rimini as beautiful as ever, her lips almost but not quite touching the lips of her lover, her breasts gleaming like snow. If breasts are to your taste you will probably enjoy A Short History of Breasts - but first, tell me about your first kiss: who, where, when? I know you remember.
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June 20, 2014
Insects – Raw, Cooked, Dipped In Chocolate & Always Delicious
I saw Gemma the other day and she looks much better now the doctor’s put her on the bee and grasshopper diet. She blamed Robert for providing nothing but low-protein dishes. But I told her, it was her own fault. If you are going to name your robot Robert, you can expect reprisals. I’ve had Sebastian two years and he’s totally devoted.
My story is set in the not too distant future and is inspired by the World Health Organization (WHO) report that of the world’s seven billion people, one billion are malnourished. The lack of food stocks is caused by over-farming, soil degradation, deforestation, climate change, and a population that grows by over 200,000 every day. There are water shortages across the globe and a developing world demanding the same annual growth and consumer products that people expect as normal in the developed nations.
According to UN estimates, by 2030, the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy and 30% more water, at a time when a changing environment is putting new limits on supply. Dial forward another 15 years, and the world population will have reached nine billion, which brings me back to Gemma and her bee and grasshopper diet.
Insects are free, high in protein and, when you think about it, no weirder nutritionally than oysters, eels, frog’s legs, blowfish, pig’s trotters, sheep’s eyes, blood sausage, shark fins, sweetbreads and caviar – though in the last case that is probably best suited to Russian oligarchs, selling, as it does, in gold tins at $25,000 a kilo at the Caviar House & Prunier in Piccadilly.
Steve McQueen’s character, in the 1973 movie Papillon adapted from Henri Charrière’s memoir, stays strong and survives by eating insects while in solitary confinement in the French penal colony on Devil’s Island. It seems more than a coincidence to me that his nickname was “Papillon,” butterfly in French, an insect. “Papillon” is also slang in France for a parking ticket!
According to Insects Are Food, there are 1,462 recorded species of edible insects. Crickets are the McDonald’s of the bug world; 100 grams of crickets contains 121 calories and 12.9 grams of protein. Bastiaan Dillmann at The Grasshopper Suppliers points out that producing a kilogram of beef requires at least 10 kilograms of food. To produce a kilo of edible insect, you need just 1.1 kilograms. That means insects are 10 times as efficient to produce as a food supply. In terms of land and water usage, they are as much as 12 times more efficient. For every kilo of beef we replace with insects, we can feed 10 times as many people. Vegetarians should be warned before joining Special Forces. In survival training, recruits learn to eat creepy-crawlies live as well as cooked.
In her wonderfully titled book Creepy Crawly Cuisine ($14 on Amazon), biologist Julieta Ramos-Elorduy lists the most popular edible insects, popular, that is, in her recipes: grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, the most popular and high in protein; beetles; butterflies and moths at the caterpillar stage, high in iron and protein; bees and wasps taken from the hive; flies and mosquitoes – which take on the flavour of the food they feed on, like asparagus, I assume; waterboatmen and backswimmers with eggs like caviar; stinkbugs, smelly but high in iodine; and ants, which are low in calories but high in protein and calcium.
Chocolate-covered ants made by Columbia’s Guane Indians are a famous delicacy and only £6.99 at Selfridge’s, the departmental store in Oxford Street. I bought a box for Gemma, her birthday’s coming. I won’t tell her the crunchy centres are ants until after she’s eaten them. That will give Robert a good laugh.
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June 19, 2014
7 Sexy Ways to Put the Oo-la-la Back in the Bedroom TONIGHT
That’s right: good sex TONIGHT.
Desire requires mystery, novelty, risk, excitement. Desire is a battery. When it runs low it needs a hypercharge to put the oo-la-la back in the bedroom. Not tomorrow. Not at the weekend. Not on his birthday. Tonight.
Hang a new dress in the closet for a year and it’s an old dress, out of style, the crispness gone. Time like the sun fades everything. Long relationships – long can be three months for some people – create the same sense of security as an old pair of slippers. Love has to be revitalised. Like the strings on a parachute, affairs have to be renewed or you pull the ripcord and nothing happens.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Or worse, kindness. Familiarity is like a pair of dirty socks in a dusty corner, dull, commonplace, a sign of negative energy. It’s a yawn.
Now, take a deep breath. Here’s 7 sexy ways to switch, the negative back to positive and set fire to the bedsheets. TONIGHT.
Underwear. Splash out on something exciting. A garter belt and lace-topped stockings drive them wild. Buy new sheets in sensual colours, gold, ivory, sea green, scarlet. Wear white silk underwear with black sheets, or reverse it, black silk undies on white. That blend of yin & yang will add some Oriental spice to the candlelit bedroom. That’s right: candles. The flicker of light and dancing shadows shimmers in all the right places.
Cook something messy like spaghetti vongole. Spaghetti and sea food is sexy for some reason and when you splash some tomato over your shirt you can take it off and finish eating in your bra. Did I mention music? Try something Latino, Brazilian, perhaps, or set Spotify on sexy, slow and sizzling.
The Pizza Man ploy is fun for those who can’t abide the kitchen and have the chutzpah. Have a pizza delivered by surprise and go to the door in nothing but your underwear to collect it – it will make the pizza guy’s eyes leap from their sockets and your shamelessness will turn your lover into a fizzing firecracker.
Read aloud in a dark sexy voice the best pages from a great erotic novel. Men are obsessed with girls’ secrets and spend their lives trying to find out what they are. I should suggest my idol Anaïs Nin, but I’m feeling brazen and really insist on my novel The Secret Life of Girls . Start reading from P127 – when Bella is seduced by the rock star Dallas McTee and the heavenly Rupert, her ebony god of a manager.
After tucking into the messy vongole or the peppery pizza, say you’re going to take a shower – and don’t return to the living room. When he comes to find you, you’ll be naked behind the glass covered in soap bubbles. If that’s not an invitation, I don’t know what is.
Masks are my personal weapon of choice. You feel different in a mask and he will see you through different eyes. With a mask you can introduce an arsenal of accessories. Depending on taste – you don’t want to rush him – you can add velvet handcuffs, a ballgag, sky-high heels and that silky soft underwear the pizza man still dreams about.
No.7 is not for the faint-hearted, but love pains require bold remedies. If all else fails, ask a friend to join the party – it goes without saying, she has to be fun, sexy, willing and dipped at birth into an erotic pool of that quintessential crème de oo la la. If you are up for it, he will be.
Do you have a special way to put the oo la la back in the bedroom? Do tell. All will be published unabridged and added to the list for future research.
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