Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 5
April 28, 2016
Student Prostitutes Paying College Fees With Sex Work
Student prostitutes are funding their fees, rents and daily living costs by practising the oldest profession.
Girls turning tricks as student prostitutes have always existed on campus, but the numbers have soared to a staggering 1 in 20, with just as many guys as girls now paying their way by selling their services.
Aside from the high numbers of student prostitutes – tens of thousands across the United Kingdom – researchers behind the Student Sex Work Project at Swansea University have come up with some startling statistics from the 6,750 students taking part.
Although up to 5% of students have or are taking part in the sex trade, as many as 22% stated that they have considered this option due to high fees and the enormous debts that accrue by the time they graduate, a sum often as much as £50,000, and higher than in the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
Student Prostitutes Hug
Earning extra cash was not the only motive for becoming student prostitutes – 6 in 10 thought it would be fun; more than half said they were curious, and almost half, 44%, said the impulse was sexual pleasure. A quarter of those who have become student prostitutes said it was hard to leave the profession once they had started.
One such student is Holly, who tells the story of going out to lunch with a girlfriend who didn’t know she was a student prostitute. When her friend asked what she was going to have and Holly said a salad, the girl replied: ‘Going for a salad in McDonalds is like going to a prostitute for a hug!’
Holly continues: ‘And so I didn’t have a salad. I had a burger. I should have had a salad really because she couldn’t have been more wrong. I’ve been a prostitute for four years now. I’ve lost count of the amount of times men have turned up at my door not wanting sex. I’ve had men come because they want to ask questions about how they should be with their first girlfriends. I’ve had men come because they’re lonely. Yes, some have even come because they want a hug.
‘I would have agreed with that saying until I became a prostitute. And that’s just it, once you become a prostitute nothing else matters really. It doesn’t matter I’m a student. It doesn’t matter that I volunteer every week. It doesn’t matter that the entire reason I am a prostitute is so I can afford to study, so that in a couple of years time I will be qualified to help you when you need help. What I’ve come to realise is that when you’re a prostitute, you’re just that – a prostitute. People don’t understand the amount of other skills being ‘just a prostitute’ requires.
‘I’ve had men hysterically crying in my house over various problems in their lives, I’ve had a man talk to me about the shame of having one of his testicles removed because of cancer. I’ve had countless men tell me things which have ended with ‘I’ve never told anyone that before’. Actually being a prostitute is far more than simply having sex with somebody. I’m not just a prostitute. My name is Holly. I’m a student. I like baking, volunteering, running and, well, all of those everyday things that people with normal jobs like to do.’
Student Prostitutes Giving Care
Holly’s confession is moving and heroic. There is absolutely nothing immoral or indecent about prostitution – as Holly says, a lot of sad troubled men come to her and sex seems to be the least of their needs. Holly, and many girls like her, are answering more a heightened social shortfall than an increased male libido.
It wasn’t the sex trade that caused the world economic crisis, but traders in banks, city corporations and careless governments abandoning banking rules that that brought multi-million dollar bonuses to the bankers and, to pay for it, ruthless austerity measures, inflated university fees and, as a result, a debt crisis that has made so many students – ONE in TWENTY – turning to the sex trade to pay their way.
Of course, not all student prostitutes have Holly’s dignity and sangfroid. While many are paying their bills through lap dancing and pole dancing, with webcams in their bedrooms and by making connections online, others are working as escorts and street walking with all the dangers that has implied since Jack the Ripper haunted the late night streets of Victorian London.
The English Collective of Prostitutes* has said the number of calls they receive has doubled in the last 12 months. The hotline from their London base is Tel: 020 7482 2496.
Prostitution has always existed – that’s why they call it the oldest profession. But austerity measures driven by the present government leaves many young people with two stark choices: pay your own way through college any way you can or don’t go to college at all.
And as the bad always gets worse before and if it ever gets better, according to the National Union of Students, girls aged 17 and 18 who are afraid while studying for their A levels of losing their education maintenance allowance (EMA), grants provided for travelling costs and books, are working as escorts in order that they do not miss out on the chance of going to university.
These are not the bad girls, they are the brightest girls, girls who know if they don’t get through university they are doomed to a life of poverty and view student prostitution as their only option.
*Doubts & Questions? Call The English Collective of Prostitutes:
The post Student Prostitutes Paying College Fees With Sex Work appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
April 23, 2016
Writing Erotica Secrets of SHOW don’t TELL
Writing erotica is a puzzle the reader is obliged to work out for themselves. First tip: don’t tell them anything.
‘The woman seemed to be walking on a cushion of air and every head turned as she entered the room.’
Is she beautiful? Does she have a sexy walk? I haven’t said so, but the reader can visualise the woman and their subconscious is busy doing the puzzle. There are books and websites galore with info on show don’t tell. Here’s my own simple rule:
She was sad = TELL
She wept = SHOW
In a love story NEVER use the word LOVE – unless it’s to say: I love cappuccino, I love long walks on the beach at twilight, I love beer and pizza. For a character to say: I love you, it’s not the breath of life but the kiss of death. When writing erotica, using the word love would be surreal, enigmatic or ironic. Erotica is not about romance, it’s a journey off self-discovery.
Writing erotica, writing any novel, is a a puzzle than can be put together in manifold ways, a promise with no urgency to be fulfilled, an expectation not realized, preferably until the last sentence when there is often a temptation to explain, like repeating the last line of a joke. The temptation is to be avoided. If they haven’t got it yet, they never will.
Good writing is demanding, obsessive; a sickness. It gives you insomnia, headaches, fury and dependencies – coffee, alcohol, promiscuity. There is something in the artist gene that craves the extremes; the view from beyond the box and outside the herd. All artists, all great artists, are monsters and are never fully sated or satisfied.
Oh, yes, penmen can be charming – they learn it from the characters they invent. But beneath the surface they are Vlad the Impaler inventing devilish new horrors. If they are writing erotica, they dream of going two steps beyond the Marquis de Sade.
When you have finished writing something, the creative right side of your brain may feel content, but the hysterical voice on the analytical left screams out as you are about to press send: ‘Come on, Chloe, have another read through, one more edit. You can make it better.’ When you finally do let go of the book, short story, the essay, the relief is tainted by a feeling of failure – the spur to start again. If you are writing a book, set out to write a masterpiece.
Even then, if do you write a best-seller like Fifty Shades of Grey, with all the cash and acclaim comes the acid attacks of ridicule and criticism. A lot of feminists and intellectuals slated the quality of EL James’s writing, though their numbers never amounted to more than a few murmurs in the wind compared to the 50 million people who devoured the trilogy and hungered for more, the seeds of the explosion in writing erotica – and my own decision to write The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena.
Having published six novels and penned numerous essays on writing erotica, I set out in the Phenomena neither to praise nor damn Ms James, but divulge her clever twist on the genre. What she did was write a romance and add the hot sauce of erotica, rather than writing an erotic book with a sprinkling of romance. It sounds simple and the best ideas usually are.
Is the Fifty Shades trilogy a brilliant piece of literature? Best-sellers rarely are. But the books are competent, the dynamic between the two protagonists is compelling, and the sex scenes have the girlie naiveté readers would expect when seen through the eyes of Anastasia Steele. These are essential qualities in writing erotica and contemporary romance – qualities that can be learned, nurtured and honed until your writing sparkles like the stars.
Writing Erotica Test
They say writing has no rules. That’s not true. There are rules of grammar, construction, technique. If you want to break the rules, the secret is to know them first. Like playing tennis or learning to juggle, writing grows easier with practice. The more you practice, the better you get. After finishing a piece of work, put it away in a drawer for a week and come back to it with fresh eyes, revise with honesty until you can say: yes, that’s good; or no, that’s dreadful, back to the keyboard.
I have a test. If I think to myself, ‘Mmm, that will do,’ those three little words are a warning. It won’t do. I put the coffee on and I start again.
EL James chose well with Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. They sound like real people and, at the same time, an interesting couple you would like to hang out with (until you discover Christian’s ultra-kinky proclivities).
How do you name your characters? How do you create realistic conflict? When the man takes the woman upstairs to his hotel room, should you describe the room and, if so, how long should that description be? There are no easy answers; often it is a question of what ‘feels’ right, and acquiring that feeling, that sensitivity is what I set out to distil in The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena, making it as much a source of inspiration as well as a guide.
My book contains samples of my own work, excerpts from the Marquis de Sade – from whom EL James owes a debt far greater than most of her readers realise, and pointers on driving your story forward through ordeals, climaxes, turning points and conflict – the engine of all fiction. My book went to No 1 in Amazon’s writing guides listings and has received many reviews, the few contained here describing how writers have improved their own writing after reading the book.
Liz Adams: “Because I write best-selling erotica, I didn’t expect to learn anything from this book. Boy, was I mistaken! Chloe Thurlow’s Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena is a must read for every writer wishing to incorporate sex in their fiction.”
KL Prince: “I enjoyed the book and can see an improvement already in my style and refreshing my attitude. I had begun to feel lost but now my rudder is strong and my compass again is true. I shall never stray from my course again.”
Elizabeth Woodham: “Thurlow opines that a good writer rarely needs the word ‘very’ but Chloe Thurlow is very, very talented indeed. I’m so jealous I think I will implode.”
Shiralyn Lee: “Chloe Thurlow has certainly given me an insight into writing erotica. She explains how and what works in the right places. She has used a mainstream best-seller and explained clearly on how it became a BEST SELLER! This book is informative and well worth the read.”
To all writers, learn the tricks and remember the secret: never give up.
This article first appeared on Chase Boehner’s Blog
The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena is available from your LOCAL AMAZON
The post Writing Erotica Secrets of SHOW don’t TELL appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
April 21, 2016
Why Girls Like Masturbating in Cars
Girls like masturbating in cars because it’s outrageous, anarchic, decadent and completely feminine.
Inside a car the surfaces are soft and rounded like the womb. The smell of leather when you’re masturbating in cars touches genes from our caveman ancestors – men and women with such short life spans they had to make every second count.
The motor car represents male strength, testosterone and domination. While he’s laying down rubber on the highway, Bruce Springsteen pounding from the speakers, girls masturbating in cars can bring themselves to orgasm by the sheer recklessness of their actions.
With your panties down around your ankles, your hand warmed in the moist crack between your legs, the lights and shadows streaming by like lost visions, you feel the all-consuming pleasure of being in the moment.
If a trucker happens to glance down and observe you diddling your clit, there is the added pleasure of being seen but out of reach like a photo in an album or a star on the cinema screen.
According to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, men are represented as Martians who think about sex every seven seconds and are prone to arguing, fast cars and fist fights. The metaphor for women takes us to Venus, where girls blend veggie juices and sex is less important than having a nice clean kitchen.
John Gray made a fortune with his seminal book on the sexual divide, but I have serious doubts about his research and their results. I mean, it’s so last century. In an age when we are carpet bombed by sexual imagery from daybreak to bedtime, girls have an inclination to masturbation and book early for the spaceship that will carry them to Mars.
Masturbating in Cars Tips
Some weeks ago, I wrote about dogging – sex in car parks, forest clearings and on open land arranged by couples for others to get their kicks from watching. Girls masturbating in cars is an extension of this, a fresh arrow in the voyeuristic quiver.
The internet is an ant’s nest of busy endless porn and sites listing teen blowjobs, first anal and threesomes are beginning to add girls masturbating in cars as a new genre. The clip here (don’t click in the office) was sent to me by Jonathan A., a reader from Wisconsin.
I studied the film for research and found it so incredibly sexy I have gone back to watch it again several times. The girl in the video has the look of an angel just fallen from the stars and personifies what girls masturbating in cars is to me, an innocent, natural, wholesome pursuit.
When is the best time for polishing the pearl? Any time you feel like it. Depressed, anxious, unable to sleep? Flicking through the furry purse is the perfect cure. Long drive alone across country? Pull over, stretch your limbs and click the mouse. On the way home from drinks, a movie, dinner with dull friends? Ringing the bell while your boyfriend drives is a form of foreplay.
Caressing the crease is life affirming, a thing of beauty like dancing and projects the same sense of joy and innocence. Girls like an audience. The camera is an invitation to put on a show. Girls masturbating in cars is like being, as Shakespeare may have said, a player on a primitive stage imitating Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Four new 5****** Reviews for Katie in Love at Amazon.co.uk this week
“Forget Anais Nin and the Marquis de Sade. Katie in Love is probably the best erotic novel you will ever read.’ Dave Johnson.
The post Why Girls Like Masturbating in Cars appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
April 16, 2016
Naked Protest in the Battle for Women’s Rights
Naked protest is often the only way women can highlight their cause – human rights, women’s rights, ant-war, anti-fur and countless other ills men and the corporate system ignore. Naked protest is a expression of female strength through sheer audacity, the act of stripping in public shameless, spirited and ironic.
Swiss artist Milo Moire is well-known for using nudity – her own – in her art, but as all art is ultimately politics, it didn’t come as a complete surprise when she made a naked protest outside Cologne Cathedral to show solidarity with the more than 100 women sexually assaulted in the city on New Year’s Eve – controversially, mostly by young Muslim men seeking asylum in Germany.
Milo in Naked Street Protest
Milo carried a hand-painted placard reading: Respect us! We are not fair game even when naked!!!
Women have made political points by shedding their clothes for centuries. Most famously, Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry a thousand years ago to protest unfair taxes imposed – ironically – by her own husband.
After the scantily clad girls of the punk group Pussy Riot were jailed in Vladimir Putin’s macholigarchy, numerous girls made a naked protest, the only way they were able to get their message of disapproval – coupled with raw footage – on the highly-controlled Russian media.
Femen activists stripped to make a naked protest in Spain’s Parliament in October 2013 to show their objection to changes in the law that would make it harder for women to have an abortion. Shots of the Guardia Civil trying to peel nude girls from the filigreed columns without touching their breasts was hilarious – and ironic. As was the protest that same year in San Francisco, birth place of Flower Power, where nudists made a naked protest over the banning of nudity.
Naked Protest in Sweden
Girls covered in blood recently protested the ‘torture and slaying of animals’ for fur coats in the city square of Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. While in London, at the foot of Big Ben, girls in a naked protest over FGM (female genital mutilation) were roughly-handled by burly police women, handcuffed and bundled into vans – all filmed for the evening news.
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, at 22, with two Swedish Femen supporters, stood naked in sub-zero temperatures outside the Egyptian Embassy in Stockholm holding the Egyptian flag and making a naked protest against Sharia Law, the strict interpretation of Islamic law, and the oppression of women throughout the Muslim Middle East.
Naked Protest Intrigue
Naked protest draws the eye of the camera and the attention of the world. People are intrigued by nudity and there is nothing more compelling than a naked woman in a public place among people who are dressed. It is daring, shocking, provocatively sexual, even enviable.
Femen against the War in Ukraine
Which is why Milo Moiré has used nudity so successfully in presentations that have an inherent subtext of politics. She believes art should never be limited or restricted and tempts censorship of her creations by deliberately publishing, screening and showing provocative, what she describes as uncensored works.
Her most daring conception to date was a performance of action-painting at Art Cologne in 2014 entitled EggPlop. Naked, as ever, she filled eggs with paint and inserted them in her vagina. She then straddled a canvas from a high ladder, and plopped the eggs out so that they broke in multi-coloured abstract patterns. Moiré writes: ‘To create art, I use the original source of femininity – my vagina.’
In June 2014, for The Script System No. 2, Moiré travelled to Art Basel naked with the names of items of clothing painted on her body; she was refused entry by Swiss guards with mediaeval mindsets and forced to dress to enter the exhibition.
A year later, Moiré was arrested by French gendarmes, and spent the night in the cells after posing for nude-selfies with tourists at the Eiffel Tower. A pretty naked girl arrested in Paris! Oh irony of ironies.
Has Milo Moiré birthday suit protests, or those of Femen et al, made any difference to anything? It is hard to say, but it has certainly done no harm to Moiré ’s career. Does the fact that she is slender, shapely and beautiful help? It would be a true irony if it didn’t.
The post Naked Protest in the Battle for Women’s Rights appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
April 7, 2016
Erotic Sex and the Way to Sacred Orgasm
Erotic sex is not about orgasm. It is about the suspension of orgasm; the pause in pleasure to reach a state of still greater pleasure.
Erotic sex is not about love – though there is no reason why couples in love do not enjoy erotic sex. On the contrary, they should. They must. When sex becomes dull, as it will, erotica resembles the electric pulse of a defibrillator that brings a dead heart back to life.
Sex is an animal activity designed by nature to continue the species. Animals eat, drink, preen, mate and rest. Human animals have evolved beyond that. We seek stimulation, education, novelty, opportunity, change of place, change of job, change of life, change of partner and a change of positions a new partner brings to the bedsheets.
Before responsibility clipped my wings, I would go on occasions to a wine bar in Soho and sip champagne while I composed scenes of erotic sex and, sometimes, I would go home with a stranger and live out the scenes I had been writing as if my words summoned from the universe the energy required to make erotic connections.
Erotic Sex Danger
Those nights with unknown men – occasionally women – contained elements of danger and danger (vulnerability, confinement, corporal punishment, BDSM) is at the core of erotica, at the heart of what it means to be human.
In a hood, in a mask, with your hands tied, your feet bound, with the ringing sound of an unfamiliar hand crossing your bare flesh, your mind seems to shift into a new dimension where every nerve ending sparkles like a new star.
With your regular lover, you fall into a routine where you know what is going to happen next, an arrangement of kissing, foreplay, oral sex and orgasm. Or not. There is no such thing as a bad orgasm but, on the Richter scale, seismic oscillations may reach a majestic 8.9, but more often it’s a lowly 3.2, not so much an earthquake as a pleasant little shudder.
With a stranger there is no pattern. You have no idea what is going to happen next and, in a state of uncertainty, your mind is open to travel to unexplored places where the landscape is primeval (your secret self) and the earthquake when it comes is off the scale, what those who commit to erotic sex describe as a sacred orgasm.
Erotic Sex Scientific
It has always seemed to me that during vibrant moments of erotic sex, our brain waves swing from one side of our head to the other like a metronome measuring time and rhythm. Now, recent research published in The Scientific American has reached a similar conclusion.
Pleasure, we are told, is the province of the brain’s left hemisphere. It is more active among people who are content and free of depression. Pleasure grows when we lose our heightened sense of self-awareness and, in this free floating state, feelings of pain decrease – an explanation of the erotic pleasure/pain dynamic.
The pain from spanking, for example, is quickly absorbed as electric pulses travel the short journey from a warmed backside to awaken that Sleeping Beauty, the clitoris, the fleeting agonies transforming to feelings of ecstasy and completion. To reach orgasm under a spanking can truly be described as sacred.
If the brain were a less complex organ, the left hemisphere would glow during orgasm. It doesn’t. On the contrary, it is the right side that bursts into light — so much so that, in one study highlighted by The Scientific American, ‘much of the cortex went dark, leaving the right prefrontal cortex as a bright island.’
In the darkness, orgasm turns on the light. Sacred orgasm through erotic sex lights the universe of our soul and lights the way to new places and feelings we never knew existed. If there is anything better than orgasm, please let me know.
Please share with your favourite social media xx Chloe
The post Erotic Sex and the Way to Sacred Orgasm appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
March 31, 2016
Lipstick Shows Girls are Healthy & Ready for Breeding
Lipstick comes in phallic-shaped tubes. With just a breath of imagination, it feels as if you are holding a miniature penis, rubbing the head over your half-opened lips before squeezing down to spread the oily soft blush evenly over every curve and into every corner.
A girl’s red lips imitate the hot blood coursing through the lips of her labia, a sign that she is healthy and ready for breeding. She may not know that. He may not know that. But this is the design, the primeval impulse to redden our lips.
Your facial lips and the butterfly lips of your vagina are connected by a fine invisible circuit. When you take a hard cock into your mouth, the feeling of pleasure zips in pulsing waves down through your body and rings the bell of your clitoris. The vulva swells with blood and the sensation is carnal, exquisite, the essence of femininity.
Lips are the outward sign, the emblem of desire, and lipstick is the ink in which we graffiti that message on our smile, our pout and pucker. When a girl blows a man a kiss she is sending him a piece of her soul.
Lipstick Noir
Lipsticks of every hue and length come beautifully packaged like perfume and surprise gifts. There is an erotic charge prising the top from a new lipstick, leaning into the mirror and painting your masterpiece. Lipstick has its own unique taste and lingers on your tongue like semen.
Lipstick stains on a cigarette filter summons to mind noir evenings of decadence. A girl with carmine lips smoking is obviously a girl who does not intend to go home alone that night.
Pampering your down-turned lips kills time when you are out on a date with some creep boring you to death. You can go to the loo, pull out your make-up bag and fantasize about all the people you would prefer to be with: Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, Eddie Redmayne, Cameron Diaz.
Empty lipstick cases are like spent cartridges from the eternal war that is love. A used tube has the quality of those books you are reluctant to give away and they line the shelves in my bathroom, mementos of nights to remember.
Lipstick Babylon
The first form of lipstick was a powder used by girls in what became known as Babylon in modern-day Iraq 5,000 years ago. They crushed gemstones in search of the colour red and decorated their lips, cheeks and around their eyes.
At the time of the Pharaohs, lipstick showed status and historians tell us Cleopatra discovered that powdered cochineal beetles made the perfect carmine paste to burnish sun-cracked lips.
English ladies started tinting their lips in the reign of Elizabeth I when powder-white faces with bright red lips was trending. Lipsticks back then were made from a mixture of beeswax and the red petals from plants. Only upper-class women and male actors wore make-up; and prostitutes, of course.
French perfumers using deer tallow, beeswax and castor oil developed the first commercial lipstick in 1884 and it was sold shortly after wrapped in silk paper by Guerlain, the first of the many French cosmetics companies
Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power in Iran, Persian girls are lowering their veils, stretching into denim skinnies and commencing the Lipstick Revolution. Lipstick Lesbians are pretty girls who wear make-up and don’t want to look butch, while a pig in lipstick is a latter day version of not being able to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, not that I’m sure anyone would want to.
Lipstick comes in every shade of a girls’ moods from scarlet that announces sexual desire to pale pink showing an inclination for blowjobs and cunnilingus. Goths go in for plum and purple shades; indigo has a strange hold on sultry French starlets, and fern green is the first choice of tree-huggers and abstract painters.
At school where cosmetics were banned, the girls would bite their lips to make them red during the two hours on Saturday when they were allowed outside the convent gates. They would release a couple of extra buttons on white blouses and flirt with the townies, making the local girls green with envy in their too high heels and crimson lipstick.
http://www.chloethurlow.com/2015/01/cunnilingus/
The post Lipstick Shows Girls are Healthy & Ready for Breeding appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
Lipstick Shows Girls are Health & Ready for Breeding
Lipstick comes in phallic-shaped tubes. With just a breath of imagination, it feels as if you are holding a miniature penis, rubbing the head over your half-opened lips before squeezing down to spread the oily soft blush evenly over every curve and into every corner.
A girl’s red lips imitate the hot blood coursing through the lips of her labia, a sign that she is healthy and ready for breeding. She may not know that. He may not know that. But this is the design, the primeval impulse to redden our lips.
Your facial lips and the butterfly lips of your vagina are connected by a fine invisible circuit. When you take a hard cock into your mouth, the feeling of pleasure zips in pulsing waves down through your body and rings the bell of your clitoris. The vulva swells with blood and the sensation is carnal, exquisite, the essence of femininity.
Lips are the outward sign, the emblem of desire, and lipstick is the ink in which we graffiti that message on our smile, our pout and pucker. When a girl blows a man a kiss she is sending him a piece of her soul.
Lipstick Noir
Lipsticks of every hue and length come beautifully packaged like perfume and surprise gifts. There is an erotic charge prising the top from a new lipstick, leaning into the mirror and painting your masterpiece. Lipstick has its own unique taste and lingers on your tongue like semen.
Lipstick stains on a cigarette filter summons to mind noir evenings of decadence. A girl with carmine lips smoking is obviously a girl who does not intend to go home alone that night.
Pampering your down-turned lips kills time when you are out on a date with some creep boring you to death. You can go to the loo, pull out your make-up bag and fantasize about all the people you would prefer to be with: Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, Eddie Redmayne, Cameron Diaz.
Empty lipstick cases are like spent cartridges from the eternal war that is love. A used tube has the quality of those books you are reluctant to give away and they line the shelves in my bathroom, mementos of nights to remember.
Lipstick Babylon
The first form of lipstick was a powder used by girls in what became known as Babylon in modern-day Iraq 5,000 years ago. They crushed gemstones in search of the colour red and decorated their lips, cheeks and around their eyes.
At the time of the Pharaohs, lipstick showed status and historians tell us Cleopatra discovered that powdered cochineal beetles made the perfect carmine paste to burnish sun-cracked lips.
English ladies started tinting their lips in the reign of Elizabeth I when powder-white faces with bright red lips was trending. Lipsticks back then were made from a mixture of beeswax and the red petals from plants. Only upper-class women and male actors wore make-up; and prostitutes, of course.
French perfumers using deer tallow, beeswax and castor oil developed the first commercial lipstick in 1884 and it was sold shortly after wrapped in silk paper by Guerlain, the first of the many French cosmetics companies
Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power in Iran, Persian girls are lowering their veils, stretching into denim skinnies and commencing the Lipstick Revolution. Lipstick Lesbians are pretty girls who wear make-up and don’t want to look butch, while a pig in lipstick is a latter day version of not being able to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, not that I’m sure anyone would want to.
Lipstick comes in every shade of a girls’ moods from scarlet that announces sexual desire to pale pink showing an inclination for blowjobs and cunnilingus. Goths go in for plum and purple shades; indigo has a strange hold on sultry French starlets, and fern green is the first choice of tree-huggers and abstract painters.
At school where cosmetics were banned, the girls would bite their lips to make them red during the two hours on Saturday when they were allowed outside the convent gates. They would release a couple of extra buttons on white blouses and flirt with the townies, making the local girls green with envy in their too high heels and crimson lipstick.
http://www.chloethurlow.com/2015/01/cunnilingus/
The post Lipstick Shows Girls are Health & Ready for Breeding appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
March 27, 2016
Love Hurts and There is Only One Cure
Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.
Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.
While love lasts it should be relished, gobbled up like ice cream, explored as the conquistadors explored the unknown continent. But when love evaporates, when love hurts, we must learn to let go of the idea that love is forever.
If you welcome love knowing it is insubstantial, a chemical reaction, you heal more quickly when it ends and you open the doors of your heart more readily when a new love comes knocking.
Love Hurts & Heals
Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century – at 21 the world surely has come of age – is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals.
When you lose love, there is a tendency to blame yourself, to stop loving yourself. When this happens, you withdraw into your own little world where perceptions get muddled and you spin off on that roundabout of unanswerable questions: Why me? What went wrong? What did I do?
These thoughts diminish our capacity to start again. Love hurts and the pain lasts until you climb off the roundabout, stand still on one spot and cast your eyes towards a new horizon. It is never too early and it is never too late to be yourself again.
There are many kinds of love. Love of family, children, causes, fetishes, addictions – the English love their animals a little more than they love each other. Some love their country, although, having been born in this place or that place provides no intellectual basis to be proud of that accident of fate.
Love between man and woman – man/man; woman/woman – is different, more extreme, more complex, more intense. Love expresses itself in sex and, even with the best will in the world, sex with the same partner grows dull, tedious, repetitive. Open relationships allow love to linger without the pressure to be faithful.
Love Hurts & Love Lost
I have always been afraid of love and when it came sparkling into my life like a seam of liquid diamonds, it changed me, weakened me in some ways, perhaps strengthened me in others. I stopped being promiscuous. Writing came easier, the words flowed as if a broken tap inside me had been mended.
I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail.
Losing my love turned my heart into an open wound. The tears I wept tasted of acid and burned my cheeks. My tongue swelled in my throat. I wrote empty verse with a fountain pen, dipping the nib into my own blood, scratching out words, unpicking my thoughts as I lay sleeplessly in my empty bed.
Love hurts in the long black night of winter. I hibernated like a wounded bear. I watched the frost grow on the window panes. Then Easy Jet sent me a random text saying I could fly to Barcelona for £39, and that’s what I did. I started teaching English and studying Spanish. I changed my life. I met Ramon, the man under whom I climbed in order to forget the man who had gone back to his old life without me. And the hurt stopped hurting.
That was eight weeks ago. You lose yourself in the darkness until you find yourself again in the light. The light changes everything. Ramon is seven years younger than me. He can make love all night, sleep for an hour and make love again as the first glint of morning peeps through the window. He is my trainer, my teacher. His semen inside me is an elixir.
We went to the Canary islands and made love in the moonlight with the sea lapping at our feet. Love hurts. Love can kill you. I had loved Tom deeply. I thought I would have his babies. That we would be together forever. But nothing is forever. The only permanence is change. To quote Katie in Katie in Love: The only way to get over one man is to get under another.
“You don’t feel yourself falling in love, like it’s a journey, a process; on the contrary, it hits you like a sudden ague, a fever, the realisation that your life will never be the same again.”
“An attractive woman becomes beautiful when she’s happy and in love.”
“Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.”
Katie in Love – more than 100 5***** Reviews on Amazon
The post Love Hurts and There is Only One Cure appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.
March 22, 2016
Hands Hold Our Own Fate and the Planet’s Future
My hands have a mind of their own. They draw on memory and experience to press the keys that spell out the words read by your eyes and transferred to your brain to unscramble, savour and store.
Hands find the light switch in the dark. They find the itch that needs to be scratched. They do up buttons. They remember telephone numbers and codes. The hands on the clock never stop. They tick off time, measure our days. Hands are like the winds and tides, never still. We may share our mother’s eyes and our father’s nose, but our palms are unique, it is where our destiny is written.
Hands make us human. Our relatives, the monkeys and apes, lack the agile thumbs and sensitive fingers Michelangelo required for carving the David, Picasso in painting Guernica, John Lennon playing Imagine.
The piano requires ten fingers, but a solitary digit can pick out blame, point at the villain. You can give someone you don’t like the finger. Or two fingers. A little boy’s finger in the dyke saved Holland from flooding. Those without hearing or speech sign with curling fingers and shaking paws.
Many hands make light work. Busy hands never get into trouble (unless they get caught picking someone’s pocket). You can offer a hand to be shaken. Clean hands inspire confidence, just as getting your hands dirty has its own malign significance.
The surgeon in latex gloves delivers the new baby. The strangler’s claws reach for unsuspecting windpipes. The hand that rocks the cradle can carry a gun. Bananas come in hands. Packs of cards are dealt into hands. After a fight, men will give five, slap palms, shake hands. Or kill each other. Stories are best told first-hand. Sometimes I buy clothes from the Oxfam shop second-hand. But never shoes.
Hands of Fate
Flamenco dancers beat out illusive rhythms with cupped clapping hands. Audiences bring their palms together to show appreciation. Hands fold in prayer. Hands wave to say come, good bye, hello. Cupped hands take water from the river flow.
The hand on the wheel and the hand at the tiller guide us. A bosun’s whistle calls all hands on deck. Masons and magicians have secret handshakes. No uninvited hand except the hand of God should touch the Queen. Politicians and corporate bosses are hand in glove. The workman’s hands with dirt beneath his nails tell us he is a workman.
Truman Capote said – When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
Anaïs Nin wrote in The House of Incest – What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.
From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scent 5 –
Romeo – (taking Juliet’s hand) Your hand is like a holy place that my hand is unworthy to visit. If you are offended by the touch of my hand, my two lips are standing here like blushing pilgrims, ready to make things better with a kiss.
Juliet – Good pilgrim, you don’t give your hand enough credit. By holding my hand you show polite devotion. After all, pilgrims touch the hands of statues of the saints. Holding one palm against another is like a kiss
Pontius Pilate washed his hands after the trial of Jesus. Oedipus with his bare hands ripped out his own eyes when he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. Robert Oppenheimer wrung his hands when he looked out over the New Mexico desert after the test explosion of the first atomic bomb and quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
The very planet is in our hands. If we decide to take ourselves to nothingness, a fingertip is all that’s required to press the red button.
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March 17, 2016
Dogging, Voyeurs and the Joys of Public Indecency
Dogging couples love being watched and voyeurs are polishing their binoculars now spring is ripening the buds and opening the perfumed lips of flowers and plants. 
For those unfamiliar with this particularly British recreation, dogging is having sex in the open and in the backs of cars in places where prying eyes and camera lenses will almost certainly be watching.
Dogging is an act of defiance and sexual abandon, a wet slap across the face of accepted morals and public decency. Sex on the highwire – or at least the riverbank, a shady glen, an open field, the car park at a country pub.
Brits envy the perceived joy and openness about all things sensual on ‘the Continent,’ those wine-drinking, olive-eating lands across the English Channel. Dogging is the antidote, a reverse expression of British reserve and timidity about sex.
Dogging got its name from men – it’s always men – who ‘dogged’ couples – that is spied on them – when they had sex outdoors. Like the mystery of love itself, some couples found they enjoyed their moment of stardom and began performing for the crowd.
Dogging Rules
From these simple origins, a mass movement has grown up with a directory of more than 3000 UK dogging locations compiled by Swinging Heaven where performers can post their planned liaisons and watchers can pick their sites – a rare form of exchange without the profit motive, something Karl Marx would certainly have approved of.
If you happen to know a site where couples, threesomes and moresomes are trading bodily fluids, log into Swinging Heaven and spread the word. You can take part in debates, post photos and, as the British like to play by the rules, you can clue up on ‘the etiquette of dogging and the best ways to enjoy it safely and legally.’
Sex in the open air – the beach in moonlight springs to mind – and sex in cars reminds us of our lusty, brazen primitive selves. Our ancestors without Spotify and presidential debates to amuse them must have slipped from their furs into each other while the tribe gathered around the camp fire, this primal exhibitionism coded into our genes to be reborn in the dogging fetish coming soon to a car park and country lane near you.
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