NEXT : SHE WAS RAISED TO BE AN ALL AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT, INSTEAD SHE BECAME A LADY, and THEN A MISTRESS

This Mistress was raised in one of the most famous families in United States History, but she loved England and the English...

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN on LOVE

“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.” -Benjamin Franklin

DITA VON TEESE - YOUR BEAUTY MARK : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

Yes, there are a few nudie pictures of burlesque queen Dita in this book, but there are far more pin-up pictures of beautiful Dita, and lots of her without makeup or in the process of putting hers on, which is the point, because this is a book from her unique point of view about how to do your cosmetics.

Dita, it is revealed, has in recent years, paid more attention to natural and organic products, and since she coats all her skin with cosmetics when she is performing, she is also an aficionado of Korean bathhouses and scrubs later, so her pores can really breath.  She is also cautionary about getting any tan, especially not burns, and uses lots of sun screen.  The woman has world famous skin.

She has not been seen blonde (her natural color) or in jeans for many years.  She loves vintage and vintage inspired clothes and make-up, pointing out that her look comes from not one era, and believes that when you find your look (which she calls your "drag,") and your style, it will be so natural to you that you won't mind, say, coloring your hair every two weeks, keeping your fingernails immaculate, or always wearing red lipstick (she owns hundreds of shades of red).

Marilyn Manson, the musician, is referred to as her ex-husband a couple times (she's had only one) and there is one picture of the two of them together.  (I do wish I knew more about their marriage.)

She mentions that she didn't have sex for a year after their divorce, but for those of you hoping that she might tell all about her sexuality, or how many men have more than adored her from afar, this is not the book.

She wanted to be known as simply Dita, but was forced to pick a sur name, which she did with the help of an old fashioned telephone book. 

Her mom and sister are there for her.

She started stripping early, and is called a dancer, but she doesn't dance so much as she poses, and reveals all except the pasties or G-string.  She's famous for wearing crystals by Swarovski, has been a fashion designer muse, and has worked with many a famous photographer.  She works hard to keep her figure, especially Pilates, but also does wear corsets that can move her usual 24 inch waist to 18 inches... She's active in Mac Cosmetics and other fundraisers for people with HIV/AIDS.

Here are some favorite excerpts!

Page 52

"I enjoy life's roller coasters and nowhere does the ride turn wilder than when it comes to love.  Dear Reader, we might not share the same hair color or lipstick shade, but matters of the heart are universal.  Take solace in knowing that Betty Grable, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner were women with adventurous love affairs and big heartaches.  Even in love there can be heartache.  But just as the road less traveled can be more challenging, it can also be gads more fun.  So live and love!"

(And among lots of information on vintage perfume collecting and her own four original scents)

"There's nothing like the whiff of primal attracti0on, no matter where the individual of interest hails from.  I have found, however, that it's true what they say; body odor as an aphrodisiac is not so embraced among American or Asian men or women as it is among those from other nations.  I've found that European men, on the other hand, always take delight in a little body smell, and I love them for it."

DECLARATION FOR MISTRESSES - Celibacy

"I don't have to be sexually active. I can choose celibacy. Temporarily or forever.  To not be sexually active is a choice, an alternative, and an alternative way of being." 

Some of you may think of celibacy as abnormal or be surprised that a blog about Mistresses, who are popularly defined by their sexual activity, strange.  I think not.  There are still many women who prefer only to be sexual with a lover who they really love. They may feel pressure to have sex while dating and so not date.  They may arrive to their wedding as virgins.  Or they may be very selective about who they have relations with.  There are mistresses out there who didn't sleep with the men who they have devoted their life to right away.

Celibacy for some people is taking a break from sex and all the complications of sex.  Some people think celibacy is required to focus on other aspects of their lives, such as decisions they need to make.  They find the deep involvement and responsibility that comes with being lovers distracting.

So, don't feel obligated to be sexual.  Choose to be sexual and choose who to be with.

C 2017 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

GIBSON FEMALE

EVELYN NESBIT - 1930's SINGING

BEAUTY IS AS BEAUTY DOES

LATIN PROVERB about LOVE

"A man is not where he lives, but where he loves."

HOLD ON TO YOUR HEART

THE FLAMINGOS : I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE on LOVE...

"The course of true love never did run smooth." -William Shakespeare

GIBSON GIRL and CUPID WHISPERING IN EAR

 

IS EVELYN NESBIT MODELING FOR THIS SKETCH?

EVELYN NESBIT AMERICAN EVE : A SILENT MOVIE (Lots of Modeling Photos!)

Two videos... Lots of modeling photos of Evelyn Nesbit, as well as STANFORD WHITE, the headlines, the trial called "Murder of the Century" at the time.  I think she would be considered beautiful by today's standards too.

EVELYN NESBIT - THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING - JOAN COLLINS as EVELYN NESBIT

If curious, you can check YouTube for the film, which is very dated.

This is one of the promotional posters.

The film also came out on DVD via

Twentieth Century Fox DVD Restored film Cinema Classics Collection in 1995. 

 

EVELYN NESBIT was her name, and STANFORD WHITE, an elite architect based in New York was her keeper.  A Pittsburgh millionaire named Harry K. Thaw became her husband,  Thaw was a man who thought that marrying the girl who had once supported herself and her family by posing for artists in the era of the Gibson Girl, and who had been a Mistress, would mean that she was forever more all his.  His jealousy erupted one night in a dinner theatre and he shot and killed White.  His wealthy family hired the best lawyers and got him out of serving a murder's sentence by using the insanity plea.  EVELYN NESBIT might have become notorious for her youth and beauty and artist's posing, for going into the special room that White had designed for his pleasure, where she sat on a red velvet swing hung from the ceiling nude, and swang back and forth on it, but her testimony at the trial was like her third strike of notoriety.

 

VINTAGE LOVE

EVELYN NESBIT : TEENAGE MISTRESS OF ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE and WIFE OF HARRY K. THAW - MURDER SCANDAL

 

EVELYN NESBIT

(1884–1967)

image from Wikipedia

 

Born Florence Evelyn Nesbit, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, life was good enough until her father's death meant debt and poverty. Then her mother pushed Evelyn forward to support them both. As a beautiful girl in the Gilded Age she posed for artists around New York and was seduced by the married and famous architect Stanford White when she was a 16 year old virgin and he was 46.  (There are existing statues, posters, and other art that she posed for. Some call her "the Original Gibson Girl").

 

After being wined, dined, and taught to enjoy the finer things in life, after entertaining White's fetish, for which he had built a secret room, where she sat naked on a special red velvet swing and, well, swung,  as had other girls, Evelyn's introduction to sex was date rape with intoxication. Then, at 17, she became too old for Stanford's tastes.  It was time to move on and up.

 

She had a fling with the actor John Barrymore, and then became entwined with Pittsburgh Millionaire, Harry Kendall Thaw, who may have been unstable all along.  He took her and her mother on a tour of Europe and again she was raped.  This time it was sadistically. Had she entered into a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of relationship?

 

Evelyn claimed till the day she died, in 1967, that White was the only man she had ever loved.   She is quoted as saying, "The tragedy wasn’t that Stanford White died, but that I lived."

The book that is the primary reference for

this months Mistress of the Month!

Author Paula Uruburu, for her book "American Eve" 

made use of Nesbit's own memoirs, photos, and diaries,

as well as personal research, 

to bring the scandalous story of Evelyn Nesbit's life as a young woman to us. 

 

*****

White was murdered by Thaw and in public, making it not just a murder but a society scandal.  He died in 1906, while dining out at what would become Madison Square Garden, when the jealous and perhaps revengeful, Thaw shot him. This event led to a public trial and generated lots of scandalous news.  Evelyn was considered a flirt and a Gold Digger and that notoriety still sticks with her when you research around her in the present day, though it may have been another case of blaming the victim.  (Consider the more recent case of Scott Thorson, the man who was kept by Liberace starting when he was a teenager.)

 

Evelyn may have been promised reward for her testimony in the trial.  According to IMDb,"Harry Thaw's mother quickly financed propaganda, even a film, to portray her son as a protector of women's virtues, while, at the same time, the media reported on the very-married White's many other transgressions involving young women. After her son's first trial ended in a hung jury, Thaw was retried in 1908 and found insane. He was sent away to a mental institution for the criminally insane in upstate New York, from which he escaped once, and was released in 1915 with reputation untarnished -- "a homicidal hero."

Evelyn, be it that she was continually sadistically or otherwise abused by her husband or not, stuck with him for a decade. They were married from 1905-1915 and had a son, Russell Thaw, who would eventually act in some Hollywood films himself. 

 

As I write this month's Mistress of the Month post, I think about EMPOWERMENT, about CHOICE, about SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN, of how it is we (at least some of us) get to live, breath air into our lungs and claim value on this earth, survive, and even prosper, while others do not. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where no one ever gets raped, or molested, or pimped out, or sex trafficked?  Wouldn't it be wonderful if victims were no longer blamed for having become so?

 

Consider reading, here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO, about the lives of the teenage ballerinas in France in the 19th century, who often had to prostitute themselves or find a man to Keep them.  Or perhaps about the life of Dawn Schiller, the teenager who was seduced and eventually pimped out by her porn actor boyfriend,  John Holmes,

 

Then, and this may make you seriously question how young a woman is when she makes the choice to have less-than-legal sex, read here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot about the Groupies, sometimes under the age of 18 (legal adulthood), who had sex with Rock Gods.  The ones talking about it say it was their choice - even if they were 14 at the time.  I ask you to do this having personally known women who started having sex at 14 and who say that's just how they were and do not seem to regret it.  But the women I know were with boys of the same age or just a bit older, boys from high school who lived with their parents too, and the element of POWER OVER that figures in when a man is much older, or rich, or a celebrity or powerful man of business, just isn't there.

 

EVELYN NESBIT seems to have made the case for not having been seriously forever hurt by her early sexuality.  It is historically true that girls who were just 14 or 16, depending on the state, were considered ready to legally marry for quite some time in early America and many of us have ancestors who married that young. Some people think teenagehood as a transitional time in life was just a modern invention of marketers, not a link between childhood and adulthood!

 

We want to know if she survived after this well.  Read the rest of this month where you will find evidence Evelyn sure seems to have!

 

Missy

 

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