Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 7

Discovering The Meaning of Love

On sleepless nights, I have often thought about the meaning of love and watched in the early hours as the night planes arrive in London carrying sleepless people, some in love, some lost, some thinking about the meaning of love. 

When you remove love from sex you enter a mansion with many rooms shaded in nuance and excess, an invitation to peel away all conventions and programming. A chance to explore your hidden self. A chance to be wicked. You shed something and clothe yourself in something else.

Sex is the greatest of gifts, orgasm a glimpse of perfection. When you add love to sex it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into the core of the infinite. New feelings come to life, emotions without explanations that we try to name with that perplexing little word we avoid using as if the word is sacred or sacrilegious.

What is the meaning of love? Love is indefinable, a mystery, a distant light in the shadow of death: Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Mickey and Mallory from Natural Born Killers. Love is the twin of death, the conqueror of death. Love bends and curves like space and time.

When you are in love you are less afraid of death because you would give your life for the object of your love. If love is blind and unconditional, it must be because we have no control over it. Like nature. Like the tectonic plates below the earth’s surface. Mothers feel that way about their children. Their love best defines the meaning of love. 

My Meaning of Love 

But love and being in love are not the same. A 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.

Love changes the chemical balance in the brain like a drug. It is a drug. Food tastes better. The rain on your face feels warm. When you dance it feels as if the notes of music emerge like an invisible chain that links directly to your moving feet. You smile for no reason. You like people you would not normally like. You forgive them. Perhaps that is the meaning of love: the gift of forgiveness?

Love is like being on a small boat in the middle of the sea with no compass and no one to rely on except each other. Falling in love is completion. Falling out of love is a mini-death.

I had always avoided writing about love and had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine – the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen. I was discovering the meaning of love and it was terrifying.

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Better Sex With A Younger Man

Sex with a younger man makes you feel like a flower just opened, a tiny bird taking wing for the first time, a survivor in a sea of broken dreams. There is no past, no future. Just that glorious moment. Like a camera flash. Like the glimpse of a miracle. Like the surprise half hoped for that you never thought was going to come.

There is nothing like sex with a younger man. His hormones are raging. Soft skin, sweet breath, the salty taste of Mediterranean summers. You can reach out and touch the electricity in the air. You can smell the perfume of your own awe and wonder.

A younger man is like a conquistador discovering a new land. His erections are firm. They last longer if you know how to nurture them, how to build him up slowly, bar by bar like a conductor working towards the canon roar of Tchaikovsky’s 1812.

It has always been my belief that if you are going to go to bed with a man it should be immediately, that night. He who hesitates is lost, an adage I wouldn’t counsel if you are going to stake the ranch on a hand of cards, but if it’s a younger man trying to crawl into your bedsheets the time is now.

Younger Man Reader

I have a weakness for men who read good books. I met Ramon at the Café Zurich in Barcelona, a bar where George Orwell mingled with fellow anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War and made notes for Homage to Catalonia, his moving account of the conflict.

Ramon had read Orwell. He liked Michel Houellebecq (The Art of Struggle) and Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club). He was 23, intense, big liquidy eyes and thick dark wavy hair. He was at uni with my friend Nuria and when she disappeared with Eloy, an old boyfriend, the walk along Calle Diputacion to my flat with Ramon was both inevitable and surprising.

He dropped his jacket on the floor. We kissed and the syrupy sweet smell of the fig tree below the balcony wafted into the room like an aphrodisiac. Sex with a younger man is fierce, fervent, breathless. A younger man evokes memories of those nymphomaniac years when the only time you got off your back was to roll over on to your stomach. You feel renewed, reborn, completely alive.

A younger man moves you this way and that way as if you are or a mound of wet clay he is sculpting into something sensual and abstract. A switch clicks in your head and the light it turns on burns still on your cheeks the morning after. Your face has changed, your expression is different. There’s an impish curl about your lips and your eyelids peel back to reveal sparkly eyes like green full moons.

In December, I had turned 30. The new decade clicking over was like a hammer blow reminding me of all the things I had wanted to do and still not done. Suddenly, it didn’t matter. I would go back to my list of 30 Things To Do Before 30 and do them before I was 31.

When you date men of 35 or more they scrutinise you as a potential vessel to carry their genes into the future. They are not looking at you as a potential sex partner but life partner. Their sideways glance across the table at dinner causes instant migraine, a need to go to the bathroom, a feeling that your shoes are too tight. It is that look that puts lines on your face and turns the light off inside your head. 

When you go to bed with a younger man there is no past and no future. It is just sex the way sex should be, free, primal, a beautiful indulgence. You sleep like a newborn and wake with the promise of morning sex, the light stripy through the blinds and his taste lingering in your mouth.

And one last thing, younger men, you will almost certainly learn something when you have sex with an older woman. 

Please leave a comment and share xx Chloe

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That Inexplicable Rush of Optimism

7.30. I wake with the sun bright through the winter window and an inexplicable rush of optimism.

8.10. Coffee opposite my flat in Calle Diputacion, Barcelona, with Nuria, 23, hair dyed henna red, thin as a knife with a wide leather belt, skinny jeans and a sky blue leather jacket. We speak Spanish. She corrects me, waving her finger. That evening, she is meeting two old university friends from Gerona and invites me to join them.

9.00. Three hours teaching English to a class of five computer geeks at their company on Diagonal, the busy boulevard that leads from the city to the airport. Lunch with another teacher, Ingrid, a Norwegian girl, who also teaches English, speaks perfect Spanish and makes me want to scream.

1.30. Lunch at home, cold pasta from yesterday, salad with Manchega cheese and a cup of Earl Grey. Then, three hours on the laptop correcting, massaging and re-writing a short story, the sixth in a collection still without a title.

5.00. Jog to the harbour, wave at the statue of Cristobal Colón – or Columbus as some people say – and back again. Read the El País, fall into a restless sleep over the pages and dream that I am standing on the platform in an empty Metro station. I can hear the sound of a train whistling through a distant tunnel, but it never arrives. I wake with that morning rush of optimism stalled and take a shower.

Sexy Rush of Optimism 

8.00. Meet Nuria at the Cafe Zurich, where George Orwell used to stretch out his long legs during the Spanish Civil War waiting for pessimism to turn to optimism. Which never happened.

8.01. Nuria is with her old uni friends Eloy and Ramon, 23, like her, wavy dark hair, dark liquidy eyes and a tee-shirt with the face of Penelope Cruz on the front. He tells me he is not a Catalanista and independence would ruin Spain. He believes in unity and open borders to all refugees. We drink beers from the barrel, eat tapas, drink more beers. I tell Ramon about Orwell and I’m impressed when tell me he’s read Homage to Catalonia. Everyone should.

10.25. We go to another bar to eat chocolate crêpes. Nuria tells Ramon I am a melancholic and he laughs. He says melancholia is the disease of the middle-classes. The workers, he says, slapping the table, don’t have time to be melancholic. This sounds original and I like his passion. His expression changes as he looks back across the table as if he has only just noticed me.

11.15. Ramon had planned to stay with Nuria that night but it would have been awkward for Eloy. Nuria and Eloy had something that had broken and they were trying to fix it again. I walk with Ramon down Diputacion to my flat on the third floor, a long narrow arrangement of rooms leading from a tiny kitchen to a tiny living room to a tiny bedroom with a balcony overlooking a garden with a large fig tree whose desert perfume pervades the flat, even in winter.

11.33. Ramon is 23. I am 30. But he has an old soul and a nice kiss. The age difference is meaningless but sexy, sensual, invigorating. We make love this way and that way with the moon’s pale light warming the walls and Penelope Cruz watching from where Ramon has dropped his tee-shirt on the back of a chair.

7.30. I wake with the sun bright through the winter window, an arm around my shoulders and an inexplicable rush of optimism.

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Naked Girls Riding Bareback on a White Horse

One summer when I was studying Spanish in Salamanca, Amadeo, a family friend who knew I liked riding, invited me to visit for the weekend. Riding bareback was the custom on his ranch, but it wasn’t until I arrived at the stables that I discovered riding bareback with Amadeo meant montar a caballo desnuda – riding stark naked.

It was a hot July day, the air thin and dry. My clothes were sticking to me and the earthy smell of the stables lent itself to a mad moment of exhibitionism. I stripped from my shirt and shorts, hesitated as I ran my panties down my legs and used a stool to climb up on a slender white mustang that wriggled its back as I made myself comfortable.

After the weekend, I discovered on Google that girls riding bareback, usually on a white horse, is an image burned deep in the  human imagination, a theme explored by writers, artists and photographers since the beginning of time.

The best known story is that of Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the streets of Coventry in the 13th century to object to the rise in taxes – her protest achieving an erotic coup: revealing her svelte young body, and all in a good cause.

In the Brothers Grimm tale The Peasant’s Wise Daughter, a farmhand finds a golden mortar on some land given to him by the king. His daughter warns that should he give the mortar to the king to repay his kindness, he would ask for the pestle as well. The father ignores her advice. When the king demands the pestle, the peasant says that’s exactly what his daughter had warned.

Intrigued, the king sends for the daughter and sets her a riddle: to come to him neither naked nor clothed, neither walking nor riding a horse, neither on the road nor off it. If she solved the riddle, he pledged to marry her. The girl wrapped herself in a fish net, and tied it to a donkey’s tail so that it had to drag her along while she kept one toe touching the ground. The king agreed that she had unravelled the riddle and carried her off to the wedding bed.

Michael Punke in his novel The Revenant – the film version stars Leonardo diCaprio – tells of a French Canadian legend in which a stallion standing in the river kicks up the water in such a way that a large fish lands on the bank where a beautiful girl named Isabelle stands watching. She takes the fish home for her family.

Each day, she stands a little closer to the horse and each day he gives her a gift, an apple, some flowers, and each day her family laughs when she tells them the story. Finally, the stallion approaches Isabelle, she climbs on his back and they disappear on the current, never to be seen again.

The moral of The Peasant’s Wise Daughter is that kings set riddles where girls must take off their clothes and girls who want to marry kings need to be clever. The moral of Isabelle and the mustang seems to be don’t tell your family if you are falling for a stranger, especially if it happens to have a long mane and watery brown eyes.

Riding Bareback on a Unicorn

Photo Ben Hopper

Some folk tales exchange the horse for a unicorn, the creature with a phallic-like horn rising from its brow adding a new twist to the myth’s erotic fantasy. Horses are gentle, docile, compliant. When a naked girl goes down on her hands and knees, rump pushed out, emphasising the shallow dip of the back, as she gazes upwards there is an equestrian appearance in her benign features.

The circus has thrilled audiences with scantily clad girls riding bareback around the ring performing handstands and somersaults. The good cowboy in a white hat rides a white horse. Sir Lancelot rode a white horse. Boadicea rode a white horse. White horses represent purity. A girl on a white horse represents a purity that invites destruction, according to Georges Bataille, who writes in his masterpiece Eroticism that men have an innate desire to defile as well as cherish all that is beautiful – a lesson that youth is fleeting and all is impermanent.

The impulse to destroy beauty is manifested in human sacrifice when it is always the prettiest virgin in the tribe they send to the flames – her beauty burned to ash pleasing the Gods and a relief to those men who fantasized sullying her purity and would never – with his wife’s beady gaze – have had the opportunity to do so.

There is a growing interest in yiffing, people dressing in animal costumes for nights of wild sex. The white horse has been supplanted in recent times by a pony and ponygirls dressed in chains and leather have taken on the role of the naked girl riding bareback.

Riding Bareback in the Sun

To return to that summer in Spain, I set off on my white horse behind Amadeo and we headed for the distant line of trees. The sierras rose up like black tents along the horizon and the parched air pecked at my bare skin like lots of tiny kisses.

When we reached the trees, I was sweating. A pool of aquamarine water   had gathered in the rocks, an overspill from the river that ran down from the hills . We cooled off in the icy depths and dried in the sun.

I was not attracted to Amadeo. He was married, his wife was away, and he was much older than me, my father’s age. But riding bareback across the empty landscape must have touched the erotic gene our clothes suppress and, at the water’s edge, Amadeo was soon riding me beneath the blazing sun with the horses watching from  the shade of the trees.  

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How To Undress A Woman

You undress a woman in the same way that you would open a magic box sealed by an angel’s kiss.

Just as the act of love should never be rushed – except between floors in an elevator, or with a stranger on a train – you should undress a woman with the same slow devotion she has shown in getting dressed.

Getting dressed for a woman is an art form, surreal, vaguely abstract, figurative and byzantine. When you undress a woman you enter her subconscious kingdom, her scents, her secrets and her fantasy.

Each clip and zip and fastening, each button and bow, each stretch of elastic as you undress a woman reveals hidden treasure, a clavicle, a shoulder blade, the shadowy line of a breast, a hip bone carved by Michelangelo, the discreet charms and mystery of the navel, a neglected erogenous zone cherished by the Ancient Greeks.

Zeus, King if the Gods, once sent two eagles across the world to meet at its navel, its centre – omphalos in Greek – and a temple was erected to mark this divine point which became known as Delphi and, later, the home of the Oracle, the priestess with eyes that could see into the future. The handsome young Apollo, son of Zeus, killed a dragon to protect the omphalos and today, 3,000 years later, you can visit this spot and breathe the air the Gods.

Undress A Woman Wisely

The Emperor of China once sent a messenger to the wise man Lao-tsu to ask how he should rule the kingdom. Lao-tsu replied that he should rule the kingdom in the way you would cook a small fish. How do you cook a small fish? In the steady, cautious, caring way you undress a woman.

Just as a woman strives to dress for the occasion, it is critical to undress a woman with the same deliberation she made when she stared into the closet and uttered her daily mantra: What to wear? You wouldn’t dress a salad rashly or impassively. Why undress a woman with anything but the same attention.

Scenes in movies show couples shedding their clothes as they climb the stairs, but in the omphalos of sex, movies and life diverge. Movie sex is about motion, turning points that hasten the story forward, romance or betrayal. Sex sans celluloid is about stasis, stillness, the suspension of pleasure (orgasm) to reach still greater heights of pleasure (multiple orgasm).

A man who tells a woman to undress for him may be turned on by this power play, this dominant seeking the permissive. But when he silently unsnaps the first button to undress a woman it creates an air of mystery, a narrative unfolding, the first step on the journey of foreplay.

When you undress a woman you discover in her lingerie clues to her mood and desires. These whispers of silk and satin are our armour, our feathers and fantasy – black-sexy, pink-girlie, white-virginal, red-anything might happen and (we pray) almost certainly will.

Underwear is the female second skin, so sensual, so inviting, designers have astutely found ways to extend the metaphor and release the delicate bows and straps from hiding below our clothes to reveal themselves in brief previews above our clothes.

If you are thinking of buying your beloved a gift, girls love underwear. Girls adore underwear. We spend more money on underwear now than at any time in history. In every shopping mall you’ll find Aladdins’ caves filled with the miracles of Intimissimi, Victoria’s Secret, Wolford, Eres, Oysho, Kiki de Montparnasse, Agent Provocateur. Just saying the words is like sucking a pearl until it tastes of semen.

Nudity is fun, especially out of doors, but it is far more erotic when the wrappings are only partly removed from the treasures they conceal. When you undress a woman you are opening the drapes in a darkened room to gaze upon a glimpse of paradise.

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Spanking and Blowjobs Are Human Nature

Spanking and Blowjobs Facts

Spanking and blowjobs are life-affirming bonds between lovers at the very heart of human nature.
Spanking and blowjobs for a woman are deliciously feminine, forms of intimacy more compelling than intercourse.
Spanking and blowjobs are a meditation, the pathway leading to the inner you.

Men can’t help thinking that the woman is giving him a blowjob, or he is giving her a spanking. But it’s not like that. Spanking and blowjobs are mutually satisfying, each partner giving and receiving pleasure in their own way. A spanking has little or no connection to a beating, and a woman would always be loath, except on pains of more tyranny, to give the bully a blowjob.

Spanking and blowjobs are about love, not power. They answer needs planted deep in the roots of our DNA – not the purely animal instinct to reproduce, but mankind’s tendency to want more, to go further, to delve into the hidden corners of our secret desires. We crawled out of the primeval swamp, mated, grew legs and marched across the planet, evolving and reinventing ourselves as we went.

Endlessly making love missionary style is all every well within the moral restraints of past times and missionaries, but instantly on facing a barrier, a limitation, a sign saying NO, it is human nature to rip it down. The pleasure in taboo comes from breaking it.

Urges for Spanking and Blowjobs

When children in kindergarten grow bored with their own toys, they grab those of others. As soon as the babe in arms can throw a fist he will hit his own mother. Eating all the cookies in the tin is normal. So is eating an ice cream and wanting more, or having a lover and wanting another. Our natural instincts are moderated by programming, by education. But the primal urge to transgress remains beyond the restrictions of society, religion, family or feminism.

And there is nothing more feminine than lying naked across the knees of your lover exposing your most delicate parts to the weight of his hands. A loving, sensitive, but good hard smack sends warm gushes to the pleasure gardens where the clitoris and G-spot dwell like flowers waiting for the sun to open their buds.

A firm spanking on a willing bottom prepares a woman’s body for the next phase of foreplay, his (or her) tongue delving into the cavern of your vagina to moisten the blooming buds and awaken all the humming nerve endings until they fizz and erupt in orgasm. A spanking from an attentive partner will make you feel wanton, wild, vaguely wicked, completely humankind thoroughly satisfied.

Spanking and Blowjobs Big Bang

A blowjob inspires the same feeling as a spanking, that sense of pleasure through breaking the rules because you know between the bedsheets of love there are no rules except the constant hunger for gratification and bliss.

When you bring a man to orgasm in your mouth, you feel his entire body tense and turn liquid. There is something irresistible, powerful, even poetic, sliding the soft skin of his penis over the membranes of your throat, lips pressed tight to form a vacuum, sucking and licking the bulbous head as you look up into his eyes.

When his spasms grow faster and he bursts in orgasm, there is a feeling of petite mort, the little death of ending, but also contentment, achievement. The orgasm is like the Big Bang that created the universe, the explosion that brought all things to life.

Male semen is the pure spirit of the Big Bang. Semen makes skin softer, has an inimitable bittersweet taste like a rare fruit from a faraway planet and contains a pinch of protein as well as a cocktail of energizing chemicals: estrone and oxytocin (both uppers), melatonin (for sleep), cortisol (a stress buster), thyrotropin (an anti-depressant) and serotonin (an antidepressant neurotransmitter). It comes in small quantities, so the more you drink the better you feel.

Freud got it all wrong when he said women suffer penis envy. A woman naked on her knees performing fellatio feels no jealousy or resentment. She feels a deep and abiding connection, she feels as if she is doing what she was born to do, what she innately desires and society innately denies her. A woman is not objectified giving head. On the contrary, it is the male penis.

Spanking and Blowjobs are a Meditation

It is hard to fix this in the western mind, but the purpose of mediation is not to meditate on something, but meditate on nothing.

Whether you are pinned down over a pair of knees or absorbed in the quickening rhythms of fellatio, when you stop gazing back into the past or looking ahead to the future, when your mind is empty of everything except the moment, the body is set free, all stress and anxiety disappear and you enter the pure energy of the present.

Meditation is a practise designed to reach Nirvana – perfect bliss, heaven – but whether you reach this divine pinnacle or not, spanking and blowjobs make the journey just as beneficial as the destination.

oOo

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It’s-a-Match on Tinder is About Sex Not Love

On Saturday I went to my first Tinder wedding at a church near Canterbury. Natalie is an old school friend who saw Jamie’s photo in her catchment area on Tinder and swiped right. Jamie swiped right when he saw Natalie and the app flashed It’s-a-Match.

Getting It’s-a-Match on your phone is like winning the sex lottery and Tinder has the same addictive quality as online games – with one big difference, It’s-a-Match really can change your life.

The way we choose and reject dates is hopelessly simple: flick left – NO WAY, flick right and you have a one way ticket for a a ride between the bedsheets. If that’s what you want. Tinder isn’t about love, it’s about that little 3-letter word SEX that makes the wheels go round.

The Tinder generation has grown up aware that sex and love are not the same. Sex is a biological function. Love is a chemical reaction, an unexpected (often terrifying) cocktail of dopamine and oxytocin that charges through the brain and making your knees all wobbly.

The It’s-a-Match function pairs up couples from their profiles, although the simple truth is matches have little to do with interests, intellect, qualifications, past experiences, cash in the bank. It’s-a-Match is about physiognomy, looks, allure, sex appeal.

It’s-a-Match Clichés

Then, it has always been that way. Teens admiring each other across the dance floor, the church congregation, the classroom, will pair up according to how they look. It’s a teen movie cliché, the prom queen ends up with the wild boy with ravishing good looks and dark secrets. But then, that’s why clichés are clichés. 

When sex and love were connected like links on a chain, like the engagement and wedding ring, life was much more complex and confusing. Tinder follows nature’s way and makes it easy. To register and download the Tinder app, all you have to do is submit your Facebook profile, select the age range and sex of those you want to hook up with and decide on the geographical boundaries. You can add an optional description of 500 characters and a list of interests. But what’s really important is your choice of photos – vamp, slut, beauty queen, intellectual, girl next door, cute, foxy, snooty, profile, full-face, great breasts or bum, bright lights or shadows.

In an instant you’re up and running, thumbs flexed and eyes peeled to catch the endless stream of photos zipping across the screen on your smartphone. It’s like being a kid in a chocolate factory. Swipe left for the dustbin, swipe right to start the action.

When you get It’s-a-Match from a mutually interested party, you’re ready to chat and date. In fact, dating is so easy with Tinder, I’ve got one friend who, if bored on a night out, goes to the loo and makes a fresh date to finish off the evening. Then, Gemma is a nymphomaniac and Tinder fuels her addiction.

According to World Atlas, there are 196 countries in the world and Tinder operates in 196 of them. The entire planet colonised since the launch of Tinder in 2012 with a billion users in 30 languages – D’une manière-a-Match, Está-a-Match, Es ist-a-Spiel, هيرو: لقد حان واحد في المباراة – French, Spanish, German, Arabic, you name it and It’s-a-Match has been translated.

Former dating sites with questionnaires and complex algorithms designed to pair off couples have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Tinder’s simplicity may be considered superficial, but then all dating starts like that – at the drinks cooler in the office, the student in the lecture hall, the nice looking barista in Starbucks, the web guy, Brad, too young a year ago, but that was a year ago.

The Tinder downside is you can spoil yourself with so much choice, log in, see who is in your catchment area and, if you get It’s-a-Match, all you face is the age old problem every woman faces – what to wear.

Don’t have a date for New Year’s Eve?

Not on Tinder – just click to play.

Have a good one xx Chloe

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What’s Saturnalia Got To Do With Christmas Anyway?

In the bleak midwinter there was nothing Roman pagans looked forward to more than the annual Saturnalia.

It was a time for unrestrained revelry, lose morals, over-eating and drinking like the sun may never rise again. At the height of the festivities, sodden groups of friends would strip naked and go from door to door singing bawdy songs before going home to saturnalian orgies.

‘They were,’ the poet Gaius Valerius Catallus said, ‘the best of days.’

According to the Greek historian Lucian, each community would choose some sad case they called The Lord of Misrule. For a week, he would be dressed like an emperor, wined, dined and provided ‘every indulgence.’ Finally, he would be led to the Roman Forum to be ritually dismembered as a sacrifice to the forces of darkness. Normally virgins were chosen for human sacrifice by our pagan forebears, but Saturnalia was a special time and that required the blood of a man.

During the week of Saturnalia, masters and slaves subverted the normal order by exchanging clothes, they played dice to decide who would be the household king for a week, no business was done, courts were closed and those caught in acts of vandalism were given an amnesty.

The poet Lucian of Samosata, in the voice of the God Saturn, outlines his concept of Saturnalia: ‘the serious is barred, drinking and being drunk is required, noise and games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water – such are the functions over which I preside.’

Saturnalia Paradise

Saturnalia celebrations began during the week leading up to the winter solstice on 22 December, the shortest day of the year. To mark what was called the Birth of the Unconquerable Sun, parades by candlelight heralded the new light of longer days and culminated with the Lord of Misrule’s journey on the back of a donkey to the Forum on 25 December.

During the feast that followed the sacrifice, masters served their slaves at banquets and gave them inscribed tablets – like gift vouchers – noting the gifts they would be able to exchange in the market: sandals, tunics, dolls, candles, caged birds and other unwanted trifles they had probably received the year before and donated to charity shops.

Saturnalia replicated the paradise of Roman legend when the world was innocent and so bounteous no one needed to work (except slaves). It continued until the 4th century AD, when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and Saturnalia was repackaged as Christmas.

There is some dispute over the dates. The Romans lived under the Julian calendar initiated by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. It was superseded by the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, when 10 days in October were chopped off to realign the one day error every 128 years overlooked by Romans astrologers – Saturnalia over-indulgence, no doubt.

The calendar was changed, but Christmas remained fixed to 25 December, the day baby Jesus was born in a stable to the Virgin Mary and the Wise Men who had followed a star from the East came with gold, frankincense and myrrh. They cooked roast lamb and there was surely a shepherd with a hip flask to raise a glass or two.

Under Roman rule, the pagans of Western Europe were persuaded to convert their traditional solstice observances to Christmas. They exchanged gifts, cooked up a feast, sang carols from door to door and completely understood the concept of Holy Communion, when Jesus at the Last Supper gave his disciples ‘bread as my body and wine as my blood.’

Have a Merry Saturnalia and a Happy Gregorian New Year – cheers, Chloe xx

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Bondage for Beginners

Elizabeth Morris Guest Blog

Being in a relationship when you have found the right partner can be immensely satisfying and comforting. You may have had a really demanding day at the office, but you get to come home, reconnect with your partner, hear about their day and chat about about your plans for the evening or weekend ahead. A good partner will be there to comfort you when you go through strife or tragedy and help you get past it.

Relationships also, of course, provide a means to communicate sexually. You can express your love for one another through a healthy sex life and there’s no rule in any book saying that it has to get stale as you become more long-term and move out of the honeymoon period.

All relationships need work, however, and with so many distractions in today’s world, namely the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, it can be easy to lose sight of the most important person in your life: your loving partner.

Work always needs to be done on keeping your sex life active, but also fun and different. It’s important to not let things like tiredness and stress get in the way. What you will inevitably find is that simply letting go and immersing yourself in some good old-fashioned love action can in fact relieve all your stresses and strains.

Keeping the spark can be difficult, so you both must be open to trying new things which will keep it spicy and intriguing. One way could be to suggest to your partner to try out some light bondage in the bedroom, what I call bondage for beginners. Emphasise that you want to take it slow and see where it leads you.

Some people incorrectly see bondage as seedy or murky in some way, but it can really enrich a sexual experience. Bondage can equate to a simple tying of your partner’s wrists with something like a bathrobe belt or using a t-shirt as a blindfold…the possibilities are many – as are the thrills.

The appearance of bondage in the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey series of books, of course, brought the world of bondage to a more mainstream audience and has even contributed to making it more ‘acceptable’ as an aspect of legitimate lovemaking between a couple. While the E.L. James. novels may have detractors, they certainly have lit the fire of expanding one’s sexual interests, which can only be healthy for many relationships.

This infographic below from Carvaka Adult Toys in the UK provides some information if you are new to the bondage aspect of BDSM. It will give you an idea of how to get started and the precautions to take, the ‘equipment’ you’ll need and it gives some nice ideas about enriching the experience with suitable atmospheric music. Check it out below and good luck.

Elizabeth Morris holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and is the resident content marketing manager @ Carvaka.

Carvaka is an online retailer that specializes in adult toys and specifically Vibrators.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Bondage for Beginners appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.

Seven Secrets of Writing Great Erotica

Writing great erotica requires originality and innovation. Great erotica touches sense points in the dark corridors of the mind. Great erotica makes you see yourself in a different light. Great erotica reminds you that you are here to live life fully, not as a clone paddling through the limp waters on the edge of life, but in the fast currents mid-stream at the heart of life.

Writing great erotica is hard work, all writing is hard work. Every word has to plucked like an apple from a tree, tested, tasted, selected or rejected. Only the best, the sweetest, the most delicious fruits must be allowed to enter the basket of your composition – and, even then, they will be subjected to the steely knife of your own editing.

Is writing great erotica something you can learn? Yes. It’s like learning to play the piano. Put in 10,000 hours of practise and you’ll be able to knock out a lively tune. If your goal is writing great erotica, you have to know the genre from the inside. You have to live it, love it, feel it. Be it. You have to see yourself from the other side of the mirror. Buy a mask. Go to an erotic night club on your own, even if it terrifies you. Forget who you thought you were and become who you really are.

What are the secrets of writing great erotica? This is what I have learned, my seven secrets revealed.

Erotica v porn
POV – point of view
Love your characters
Pleasure and Pain
Turning Points
Quality
Where’s the Money?

1 – Pornography stimulates sexual craving. The Erotic captures the sensual, the forbidden, the exotic, the dark edges of our secret desires and fantasies. Porn is about telling the reader what’s happening: she had enormous plucky upstanding breasts and she could see the giant swelling in his skin tight Levis. Interesting? No. Dull. Dull. Dull.

In my novel The Secret Life of Girls, Bella is 18 and uncertain about who she is and what she plans to do with her life. She awakes one morning and, on a whim, goes barefoot in her flimsy nightdress across the garden to the shed where the gardener is planting cuttings. She watches as he presses a hole in the moist soil with his strong thumb and tamps down the fresh cutting with his fingertips. The shed is warm, the light murky through the narrow window. The gardener studies her breasts as he pauses to roll a cigarette. Bella grows breathless. A bead of sweat runs down her back and she remembers she isn’t wearing any knickers. Nothing happens (well, this time) but the scene and the choice of words portray an erotic situation. Similarly, a woman observed by a stranger as she turns to study the ladder in her stockings is more alluring than the calendar girl in her birthday suit. The erotic is subtle, nuanced, discreet, intellectual. Every woman has breasts and they are far more intriguing half veiled.

2 – The best erotica is told from the female point of view. A male character’s account of sexual desire and the sex act is like a war manual with rules about “capturing” or “confining” or “subduing” or “mastering” or “dominating” the female, as if the female is wildlife, a foxy fox or a bouncy bunny, as if sex is a gladiatorial sport. Descriptions of male mind-sets, attitudes, hungers and needs are often clumsy, vaguely barbaric, often violent, anything but erotic. The female POV is just plain sexy and lends itself to writing great erotica.

3 – You must love your characters and convey that love to your readers. Characters must be “real” with qualities and flaws – they lose things, make mistakes, they are kind and stubborn, vane and modest, they have affairs and they get caught. In an erotic novel the main characters are usually ready to make a change in their life, to set out on an adventure – to do something daring or wayward, something they have never done before. We must see their doubts and we must be with them when they set out on the journey into that forbidden, often unknown realm of the erotic.

Anything forbidden, secret or mysterious immediately attracts us. Like a moth moving closer to the flame, we are drawn to those things which frighten us. Writing great erotica allows the reader to savour the fear and be warmed by the flame from the (reasonably) safe distance of the written word. We read travel books to imagine what it’s like to ride a pony across Patagonia. We read erotica to imagine the sexual feelings and experiences we secretly desire. Have you been bent over a man’s knee and spanked? Are you a man who dreams of bending a girl over your knee for a good spanking? You can live those dreams in great erotica.

4 – There are lots of reasons to have sex. These four spring to mind:

reproduction
money
pleasure
revenge

Through the erotic, you and your readers can explore the rarefied extremes of pleasure. Perhaps your characters are into – or enticed by – bondage, corporal punishment, multiple partners of both sexes, water sports, pony play, role play…there are no frontiers except your imagination – although, I hasten to add, your characters will be over 18, the sex is consensual, and pain is the path to bliss, the greater the pain, the greater the bliss…and, in the end, if it is a pleasure for the participants, by writing great erotica you bring secret and subliminal pleasures to your readers.

5 – An erotic novel needs turning points, as do all novels, but more so. A book with non-stop sex will quickly grow tiresome. Everything palls. Even pleasure. Pleasure to remain pleasurable must be constantly nourished and renewed. The French call the orgasm la petite mort, the little death that announces, not the height of pleasure but pleasure’s end.

To prolong and enhance pleasure, an erotic novel must surprise readers with new, unexpected meetings, situations, couplings that turn the story in another direction and move your characters towards an ever greater understanding of their goals, needs and desires. Great erotica is not about orgasm. It is about suspending orgasm. 

In Girl Trade, another of my novels, Emily starts off sunbathing naked in the Canary Islands. She is captured by people smugglers, voyages along the coast of Africa with an Arab Sheikh and ends up in a slave market in Timbuktu – a journey exploring the tedium of western values, betrayal, love (in all its hues), sacrifice and self-discovery. Once Emily breaks the chains of her past, she discovers herself and can never go back – not to where she was, but who she was.

6 – Someone clever once asked: what’s the difference between erotic literature and porn? The answer: good writing. Erotica is a literary genre with a long respectable pedigree – the Marquis de Sade, Anaïs Nin, Pauline Réage, author of Story of O, Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, Li Yu, the Chinese author of The Carnal Prayer Mat.

Writing great erotica requires discipline and, once mastered, you can allow your imagination to run away with insightful descriptions, inventive metaphors, unpredictable situations – imagine a meeting on a deep sea dive, on the high wire, the glimpse of a stranger on a passing boat or train. The erotic craves originality, innovation, a fresh eye. How do you do that? Read. Read. Read. If your goal os writing great erotica,  you must read the masters. See what other writers do. Ask  yourself if you can do the same – then set out to do it better. Struggling over sentence, a choice of adjective? A tip: if in doubt, leave it out.

7 – One of the upsides of a well-written erotic novel is that it doesn’t date. Sales will – at least this is my experience – decline, but, as soon as a new book comes out, the whole backlist is reactivated. People who like the new book go back and search for the others, and those readers who like your books will remain loyal and send off for the new one. The more books you have, the closer you are to making your living as a writer – which is why writers are in the business of writing in the first place.

In The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena you will find all your need to know and more about writing great erotica.

“Totally awesome dissection of literary success which is easy to follow, and makes perfect sense. Who knows, perhaps I’ll write the next 50 Shades,” Maffism on Amazon.

Just CLICK for Amazon

The post Seven Secrets of Writing Great Erotica appeared first on Romance writer Chloe Thurlow.