WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE KEPT? A COURTESAN? A MISTRESS? TO HAVE A HIGH COURTESAN ASPECT TO YOUR PERSONALITY?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE KEPT?  A COURTESAN?  A MISTRESS?  TO HAVE A HIGH COURTESAN ASPECT TO YOUR PERSONALITY?  MISSY SPEAKS!

When you write a blog called Mistress Manifesto for several years as I've been doing, you wrangle with the question of what it means to be Kept, or what if any difference there is between a Courtesan and a Mistress!  When I profile Dally the Tall I have no doubt that she was a Courtesan because of the times that she lived in as well as the high art of her presentation and personality and the limitations of her ambitions. 

In other cases I'm not so sure.

Of the three words, I think the one the media overuses and uses incorrectly is Mistress.  A woman in any old affair, even if it was just one night, can be called a Mistress in the media if the man she's involved with is married. (For instance, I don't think the once playful Monica Lewinsky was ever President Bill Clinton's mistress and I would never apply that word to Marilyn Monroe, as confused as she was, though I think both women had a high courtesan aspect to their personalities.) Now that there are so many people who consider themselves committed living apart or who never marry legally, the question of ADULTERY as a key to Mistresshood doesn't count so much. Some relationships are so OPEN that Mistressing seems to be downright OLD FASHIONED, what with all that sneaking around!

Mistress is also used to imply that a person is a dominatrix, or at least powerful in the classroom as a teacher or as the owner of independent estate. I'm sure some people have been looking for a dominatrix when they happened upon my blog! I note that in this case the MISTRESS IS POWERFUL and IN CHARGE. Since so many women are not powerful or in charge this mistress can become quite the fantasy for women, especially because she does this and is still feminine though not weak.

So then we look at what it means to be KEPT and that word seems to imply CONCUBINAGE!  When we say someone is KEPT there are always financial implications, like that the person does not work for pay at anything and are totally dependent on someone else for their needs. It is the financial evidence that we are looking for and it's the financial evidence that makes the news and pushes previously low key mistresses into the public eye.

This one is tricky too because not so long ago most MARRIED WOMEN WERE KEPT WOMEN.  They stayed in the home and were "home-makers" or their work was as mothers and wives but they did not go out and earn any pay.  As married women they were respected for this, even honored.  These days most women work or if they are living off savings, an inheritance, or unexpected windfall, they write a novel or do volunteer work.  These days most women do not want to ask a husband for money to buy everything they want or need. They don't want to go behind his back or be tricky to buy a new dress.  They are almost embarrassed to let a man pay for everything on a date.  They are trying to prove to a man that they do not need him or that they are not less than him, at least not less than him financially.  "I don't need you!" she seems to be saying.

With the financial dependence most often for women that means she is COMMITTED TO HIM and their RELATIONSHIP even if he is not so much to her.  Such a woman may decide to not date others or have sex with others even when he has not given her such a commitment.  (It is my suspicion that this was the case with poor L'Wren Scott.)

The ability to admit to need and the willingness to allow someone else to help them financially without embarrassment or apology is where today's Kept Woman or Mistress or Courtesan prevails. This is also an old fashioned aspect of relationship with so much opportunity for independence today. It can even be an act of great self esteem and self acceptance to admit to someone that yes you can accept their generosity and no you are not an opportunist or user. You will really appreciate it.  And do well with it.

Another way to find meaning in these words is in the personality of a person.

What does it mean to have a High Courtesan Aspect to your personality? 

Why are people who have this so appealing to other people? 

Well, people with this aspect to their personality know how to have fun. They can be silly or sweet. They can be childlike and have wonder about the world even as they get older and older. They know how to seize the moment or the day. They see the beauty in things and they make themselves and their surroundings beautiful. They are apt to be a little too forgiving and to make excuses for people and to keep things light. This light heartedness is contagious. They are apt to see the glass half full rather than half empty. They can't stay mad for too long.  They give perceptive and sincere compliments. 

There is a certain happiness to being able to make do, to invent. Even when they can't afford a decorator their pillows are fluffed and there are guest soaps in the bathroom.

When things are going badly they get up and do the next day anyway, because they have faith that change is inevitable but it will all turn out well enough. 

Often they are the ones who make things happen for others, the job interviews, the dinner parties, the group to the opera, the event at the museum, or the little gift they picked up for you at a garage sale that is just perfect!

Missy

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CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG IN THE MOVIE "KEPT HUSBANDS"

I was thrilled to find the full silent film entitled Kept Husbands which Clara Kimball Young starred in, which was posted by a YouTube station called The Film Detective. It's a story about the rich and the poor, and in the end the woman who started out poor returns to her steelworker husband.

 

Why is it that "Kept" is a term used about mistresses, women who are supported by men they are not married to, while "Kept" is not used for a wife who is entirely dependent on her husband for financial support?  A stay-at-home wife and mother - a 'homemaker' - a woman who is entirely dependent on her husband, is honored. It's tradition. It's conservative.  And today, it's rare to be either!

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Research includes using Google, AI, Wikis, YouTube, etc.

GLORIA SWANSON and JOE KENNEDY : THE WAY THEY WERE

 He was married with many children, she was married with two.

Excerpt page 194 : Gloria was very much one of Hollywood's own, and honored player of the movie colony's most popular pastime, a party-giving and party-goi9ng, but Joe was not.  His Catholicism and Boston sense of propriety prevented him from a too ostentatious display of his double existence  Though many in Hollywood would later make the comparison, Gloria and Joe were no Marion Davies - William Randolph Hearst twosome who flaunted their liaison.

For one thing, Gloria and Joe were both married with children. She was no starlet looking for  a sugar daddy; he, no elderly tycoon hopelessly in love with a chorus girl. She saw in him someone who was plainly going far, and she fell in love with his business savvy and can-do openness. He was the one man in her life she trusted when it came to money. To him, she was one of the most desirable women, one of the symbols he had grappled with all the way up from East Boston  He fell in love with a woman who was everything Rose was not.  Gloria was, first of all, fame --- a woman whose public personality spoke to people of golden youth and glitter.  To discover that she was also a creature of shadows was part of his lover's ecstasy. She was a woman of her own means, self-confident and elusive, possessed of a dignity that was both paralyzing and magnificent. In their intimacy, she was almost tomboyish --- terse and disarming.  Fun, too.

Excerpt pages 194-195 :

Smitten with her from the first meeting at the Savoy Plaza (Palm Beach - Florida) two months earlier --- with the idea of her as well as the fact --- he was not only giving her advice but smothering her with attention.  He loved uncovering the Gloria Swanson millions would never know --- the quiet, slightly weary person with soft hair and a dark, husky voice so different from the screen image, the woman who boasted that she'd never been kept.  None of her homes, he happily discovered, was a place into which friends casually dripped.....

They made love at his place. Here, he was in control of comings and goings of staff and underlings. On Crescent Drive (Beverly Hills), her waking hours were a series of disturbances by butler and maids, secretaries and assistants, and her moods ran in channels dammed up by her staff.  On Rodeo Drive (Beverly Hills - his place) order flowed effortless from the master.

Excerpt page 209 :

...When he had a moment alone with Gloria, he called her the most desirable woman, held her gaze with his electric blue stare, and said he couldn't wait to take her out that evening. She told him they had to be reasonable; they couldn't be seen together.  "We're business associates," he grinned.

"Business is done in the daytime if both associates are married," she said.

If you want to know the slightly more scintillating details - not pornographic but - certainly get yourself a copy of this book.|

In this passage, we note that Gloria Swanson had never been kept and was proud of that, as a woman who had earned her own for years. All Mistresses are not Kept, and all adulterers are not Mistresses, and so here we go again trying to define Mistress. It is the nature of the relationship that defines it, I believe, but in popular thought it's all about money and sex, as if love doesn't count.

Gloria Swanson's husband Henri moved into an affair with actress Constance Bennet.

Missy

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SHOULD A MAN WHO BREAKS WITH A WOMAN WHO HE HAS BEEN SUPPORTING GIVE HER MONEY WHEN HE DOES?

QUESTION FOR MISSY

Hi Missy.

I've been the Mistress of a rich wall street broker for a year and a half. He moved me into an apartment six months ago. We aren't getting along. I want to break with him and he probably wants to break with me. I can't afford to move out. Do you think he ought to give me some money and how much?

Melissa in Manhattan

ANSWER FROM MISSY

Hello Melissa,

Yes, I do think a rich man who has moved a Mistress into an apartment so that she could be there for him and who wishes to break with her should help her.  This is not severance from a job or a pension. It is because you once loved and you both gave it a go to see what might happen next. And when people love each other, they try to ease a break up. He well knows that you cannot afford to move out on your own and what your finances have been and are. It is good and right.

I suggest you have to have 'the talk' with the man and you have to get into it spontaneously, because no one likes to have 'the talk.'  (And yes, you can go to couple's counseling.) 

I think it would be reasonable for him to find another apartment for you that is affordable and pay for about six months of the rent, as well as money for the basics such as utilities and food. Hopefully you will be able to get work and independence by then.  I base that on how long you've been together. If it had been more years, more money.

Often a Mistress experiences an elevation in her lifestyle and it can be difficult to go back to what one came from. Whatever self-improvement or awareness you have obtained through this experience you go forward with!

Best Wishes, 

Missy

MARIE DUPLESSIS : AGENOR DE GUICHE MAKES AN APPEARANCE IN THE TEENAGER'S LIFE AND SHE CHANGES HER NAME FROM ALPHONSINE PLESSIS

Grand Horizontals by Virginia Rounding is a primary reference for this month's post.

Excerpt page 20 : "The women of the uppermost ranks, the most desirable demi-mondaines, were also often referred to by the epithets grands or hautes - grandes cocottes, for instance, rather than simple cocottes. The pseudonymous writer "Zed" refers in his Le Demi-monde sous le Second Empire of 1892 to grandes abandonnees (The great abandoned ones) while Frederic Loliee in his Les Femmes du Second Empire of 1907 uses the term grandes horizontales (literally, great horizontals, or women flat on their backs). Collective expressions for the great demi-mondaines included la jaute glanterie (literally high gallantry, chivalry, or intrigue, and colloquially the top rank of kept women) and la Haute Bicherie..."

What I found interesting is that Agenor De Guiche made an appearance in the lives of many courtesans and seems in Virginia Rounding's book to be credited with being the man who turned Alphonsine Plessis into a grandes horizontales. Although De Guiche's family was aristocratic, they had lost their wealth during the French Revolution and so he was not an especially rich young man. When he met Alphonsine he was 21 years old and she was 16. He had finished a couple years of higher education and wanted to bring her up to his intellectual level, though he was not an especially bright student himself. This young man paid for Alphonsine to have lessons in dancing and piano and improved her reading and writing; she became an avid reader who eventually developed an impressive collection of 200 or so books and held literary and intellectual salons. His interest in her seems to have been sincere. The young man spent about 10,000 francs on her in three months but then, in 1840, went to England and took a break from their relationship. By the time he returned, he was not the only man interested in the budding courtesan. 

According to author Virginia Rounding many a mother feared her son would spend his fortune away and acquire venereal diseases by having sex with prostitutes and courtesans.

Excerpt page 36 : She was not unusual, among the grisettes and courtesans of Louis Philippe's reign, in deciding to change her name; it was also a very common practice among the ranks of ordinary prostitutes.  The choice of a new name could serve both to add a touch of glamour and to depersonalize the prostitute, so that she could feel she was merely performing a role, disconnected from her real self.  There was also often a desire to disconnect from her previous life and from her family, either out of shame or from a desire to escape and not be easily traced...

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ADORING

 

MARTHE DE FLORIAN : REMAINS A MYSTERIOUS COURTESAN THOUGH A LOVELY FICTION BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT HER

In search of a biography of Marthe De Florian, without success, I ordered this fiction book which was written by Alyson Richman, who is said to have done research on the mysterious woman herself.

The Velvet Hours is a lovely book but I didn't know how much was fiction and how much was fact I could depend upon. I wanted to could elect Marthe as a Mistress of the Month but there just wasn't enough. The story, as it is written by Richman, suggests that Martha DeFlorian was supported by a man, "Albert," into her late thirties, which only ended at his death, and that he provided for her everything needed as well as luxuries. Like many of my readers, I was amazed to learn through the media that a descendent of Marthe's inherited her Paris apartment that had been locked and left "as is" after her death. The most amazing thing about the apartment was a glorious painting of Marthe that "Albert" had commissioned. It was painted by  Boldini and in it the beautiful woman wears the jewelry and gown he bought her. She might have had a sexless flirtation with the artist.  However, other newsy accounts suggest that she was a Courtesan who had a number of wealthy patrons or providers.

Like other women who became Mistresses that I've covered here at Mistress Manifesto, the woman had a child young who was given over for someone else to raise, a son. With the severe limits on what a woman could do to support herself, she started as a seamstress.

Mathilde Héloïse Beaugiron 

1864 – 1939

Painted when she was about twenty-four years old.

Other artists also painted her but this masterpiece is worth 

at least three million dollars - maybe four.

It is possible that "Albert" renamed Marthe.

Other books have been written about her .... Other bloggers have tried to capture the woman and her moment. Marthe was secluded while her man was alive.  After his death she became more social. Her apartment was found looking as it had in 1939 in 2010. 

OFF THE RECORD BY TONY JONES - WORD PRESS - MARTHE DE FLORIAN  is also a fictive imagining of a memoir or diary excerpt written by Tony.  I enjoyed reading this!

ISSUU - THE CHAP (Beautiful photos of the apartment and more interesting information.)

Excerpt:  There was also a remarkable psyche console (a kind of dresser); drawers full of letters; a multitude of trinkets; faded lace and even an extravagant stuffed ostrich in the entrance. Try to imagine the amazement of Maitre Olivier Choppin de Janvry upon discovering this place, entirely frozen in its 1900 state.

Everything was made of quiet luxury and voluptuousness, all in the full rococo style so typical of Paris at the turn of the century. Through the grey fog of dust and the saturated atmosphere, a bright life could be imagined. An existence frozen in time, not unlike the hands of time on the dial of the small golden alarm clock, situated in the middle of hairbrushes and mignonette perfumes. Ming vases and Louis XVI shepherdesses were shaded by dusty curtains with shell prints. The first time he entered this chamber, Maitre Choppin de Janvry made a spatio-temporal journey that the Situationists would have described as psychogeographical; entering this apartment, untouched

Mignonette perfumes under a carpet of 100-year-old dust...

Missy here!  If you know of a biography or memoir about Marthe, please leave me a comment with the title or location!

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THE STEREOTYPE OF A KEPT WOMAN : CAROLE TREGOFF NO - MARTHA DE FLORIAN YES

MISTRESS LIFESTYLE ?

The short tenure and terms and conditions of Carole Tregoff as Dr. Bernard Finch's Mistress - in waiting to be Wife number three - and in hopes of wealth enough to collaborate in a murder plot - while she worked as an assistant or as a waitress at a Vegas casino-restaurant - defies the stereotypes of a Mistress.  For a Mistress has long assumed to be a Kept Woman, a woman who "does not have to work" because her man is fully supporting her and he can do that because he's rich.

Today, that notion is blurred by economic realities these days. 

However, I do want to give a little time this month to Marthe de Florian, who was most certainly Kept. She may have been Kept by more than one man, but not too many, and one of them, who was likely the Love of Her Life, provided for her after his death...

Missy

ABOUT LEAVING A COMMENT

I read every comment before deciding if I will publish it.  I'm looking for comments that are well spoken and well considered and that are on spot for the post the comment would appear under. I especially like comments that answer the questions I'm asking. I'm open to different opinions but please, think of how you spoke in class discussions at school and consider your audience!  For more information check out the PAGE about comments.

Friends, if there is a Kept Person you think I should do more research or reading about, please suggest books, articles, or leads to that information. 

THANKS!

Missy

QUEEN OF HEARTS : GREGG ALLMAN

LESLIE MCRAY ON AGING OUT OF INTERNATIONAL MODELING

Excerpt:  Page 71 (This is the lowest point Leslie experienced as a mistress...)

"I was forty in a world where players in their twenties were overage. I had come to recognize that I was addicted to a highly destructive life-style. Increasingly I had been involved with men who were violent toward me, yet with whom I continued to associate. I retained photographs of myself from when I was a top international model. I framed a letter from the office of a major presidential adviser. I talked of what was happening in Monte Carlo, Cannes, Rome, London, Paris, and other sections of the world, but I was speaking of past trips, past associations. The telephone no longer rang with offers for the modeling jobs I once dominated. The men who contacted me were fewer in number, less sophisticated that in the past, no longer, the world's elite. My time was past and I knew it."

Excerpt: Page 73

"Then there was another man because there had always been another man. "Use my house, consider my staff your staff, drive my car." It was a familiar litany I heard and I fantasized that all was well again. I was still in the game, still competing with the twenty year olds ...still a prize to be won by men who competed for the attention my presence on their arm would bring... But the man who loaned me his house could not keep me there, did not want me there. He had his own life, his own kept woman. I was no longer his but merely a friend, or perhaps a faded memory for whom he retained enough love or enough guilt to provide what was a little more than a few day's vacation... I was on the streets, living from my car, desperately calling men I knew, yet trying to disguise the panic in my voice...

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LEGAL AGREEMENTS BETWEEN COURTESANS and THE MEN WHO PROVIDED RICHES

Missy here:  As I read these passages,  I thought how it seems to me so few women today realize their worth and are willing and able to negotiate to get what they want with any particular man.  Speak up my dear readers.  Be true to yourself. If you want a commitment, say so. If you want an open relationship, say so. It is respectful to another person to be honest and well, we know that honesty does not require you carelessly hurt someone's feelings.

***
 

Page 51:  "Sophia must have been very sure of her hold over Lord Melbourne at this point, for her arrangement with him was - for her - a dangerously informal one.  By the eighteenth century it was a common practice for a man to make a formal financial offer to the actress or courtesan he wanted to keep, together with any other terms and conditions the couple might mutually agree on.  These were legal documents, drawn up and witnessed by lawyers.  When Lord Molyneaux, one of Sophia's first admirers, had approached her, he was so anxious to expedite their arrangement that he had actually brought his attorney - the 'dissector of his patrimony' - and the deeds of settlement drawn up by him to her house....  No one amongst the middling and upper classes would have thought of getting married without making a similar financial settlement, so these transactions did nor perhaps seem quite so baldly mercenary as they do today."

The eighteenth century was intensely interested in details of this kind..."

Missy here!  Sophia's Memoirs apparently give some interesting financial transaction details.

And they have been republished as "culturally significant."

So Sophia had no legal agreement to be in the Lord's keep.

Page 52 : ... "Melbourne was lavish to the point of recklessness in his largesse to her.  Although he probably did intend to formalise their arrangement .... somehow he never got round to it.  Instead, he was in the habit if dropping great wedges of banknotes - sometimes as much as 500 pounds at a time - carelessly on the table after one of his visits.  It was more than most men could afford to give her in a year; but for how long would it go on? As her friends had pointed out to Sophia before, only a settlement would 'outlive the constancy of the donor', and provide a comfortable resource on which to fall back when age came on.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR

 

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO BECOME A SUGAR BABY?

Let's explore Sugar Relationships!   Elena used a website called Seeking in order to find the right Sugar Daddy.  *Seeking is the new name for Seeking Arrangements.

MEDIUM - ELENA BATEMAN : I BECAME A SUGAR BABY FOR A WEEK

Excerpts: "Now, if you don’t know what a sugar baby is: let me explain. A sugar baby is someone, usually a younger person, that enters into a consensual and adult arrangement with an older person. This older person, typically a man (a sugar daddy), is incredibly wealthy and provides financial aid to said sugar baby in return for companionship. For example, a sugar daddy may give a monthly ‘allowance’, they may pay for rent. Sometimes there may be sexual elements to these arrangements, and sometimes there are not, but these arrangements are very clear to never advertise sex as a condition for financial reward. ...

I had to submit my passport to prove that the images were mine and after a few days, my pictures were approved. It did make me curious as to if similar image and identity verification checks are done on the sugar daddy side of the site. Do they have to prove their income? After all, if sugar babies have to be verified as authentic — shouldn’t the income and identity of the people they’re matching with be too? ...

For a basic sugar daddy profile on the site, there is no verification of income — you can make a profile and input the most ludicrous income possible with no issues. This not only encourages a huge amount of counterfeit ‘rich’ people on the site but potentially puts the sugar babies at risk of being scammed or harmed by people looking to exploit them. ..."

Three weeks into the experience here are the offers Elena got.  (I want you to ask yourself if this is different, and how, than escorting.)

1) For every dinner date that I and this gentleman went on, he was going to give me 300 pounds, including dinner at any restaurant I wanted.

2) A long term arrangement, that would give me 900 pounds as an allowance each month in return for 2 or 3 meet-ups for dinner dates.

3) A man offered to pay my rent (500 pounds) for several meet-ups a month.

4) Another offered to help with university tuition (which the government is currently hooking me up with but the idea of no student loan debt was looking very juicy at this moment.) He didn't say how many meet-ups he would like for this, ut it was to be a long-term arrangement.

5) One man even offered me to come and stay on a weekend away with him whilst he was working away from his home country. Return flights and stay in a five- star hotel for the whole weekend.  He would pay for absolutely everything, as well as give me 1000 pounds spending money for the weekend.

****

Missy here.... 

My take on this is that it sounds like these men were making their offers or revealing the financial investment they were willing to make without actually meeting her or getting to know if they were companionable first.  If you are a man who wants to be a Sugar Daddy, I strongly suggest that you do meet and spend some time with the woman first before mentioning the financial help or gifts you wish to give a Sugar Baby, especially if you imagine a long-term arrangement.

SUGAR BABY? SUGAR DADDY? : PLAYING IN THE FANTASY

Some people think being a Kept Person is all about being spoiled. Some people assume Mistresses are all poor women who have luxury conferred upon them by rich men. It is not always so. There are many ways to love and many ways to have an alternative relationship.  Sometimes there is no extra money at all. This blog explores the many ways. But I think the financial aspects of alternative relationships is something that goes less commented upon, even when we find examples in the memoirs, biographies, and other non-fiction books that I excerpt from.

Some of you, my readers, may have already had the experience of being a Sugar Baby, or a Sugar Mamma or Daddy. But others only think about or hope for a relationship in which the other person is generous. Where the other person has more than you do to share financially.  Where the other person is going to make your life a bit easier. Where you feel no guilt or a sense that you have to pay them back because they truly want to do this for you and can -no sweat!

When is the last time you were invited out to a restaurant and did not feel you had to pitch in - at least for the tip? Or buy the dessert?  How did you feel about it when someone else chose the restaurant and you found out that they did not want to treat you, but wanted you to split the bill?  Do you feel comfortable with accepting an expensive gift?

Let's play in that fantasy!

Missy

POPPIES

The poppy is Poland's National Flower

 

STAGE DOOR JOHNNIES OF EVERY VARIETY

Missy here. Some of the mistresses profiled here at Mistress Manifesto started out in chorus lines or on stage in some way, such as Marion Davies and Gypsy Rose Lee. Men, called Stage Door Johnnies or Back Stage Johnnies, were like groupies in a way that they attempted to get into the personal life of a star. To get noticed they aimed to please and they used their money to do that. In the heterosexual world, they were men who waited to see a dancer come to the club, who wanted to adore them and gift them. Some of them were special fans or became fixated on a certain dancer and wished to make her life easier, Keep her, while others wanted to take her out of the life she was in and have her in theirs. Some of the dancers also also attracted a lesbian following although many of the clubs would not allow women in as audience.

In Leslie Zemeckis book we learn that burlesque dancers were pragmatic. They wanted and liked their independence and were generally careful to prioritize their careers.  On the other hand, making good money for yourself did not mean you had to reject help, favors, or gifts.

Excerpt pages 207-208 :

I found among Sherry Britton's papers the following, which she might have written, "Did you know that the girls had them in categories?  There were the Drugstore Johnnies, those who could be counted on to buy a girl the cosmetics she needed.  There were Dinner Johnnies, Nightclub Johnnies, and even, honestly, G-String Johnnies. You see, G-Strings were all handmade, elaborately beaded, and cost a small fortune. Of course, for many girls, it was a game of "How much can I get from him before he gets too much from me?

Sherry had her share of gifts, including the use of a Cadillac from an admirer that she drove around New York at 4 in the morning looking for - and finding - men.

The women had wonderful adventures outside of work. "It was a great life."  And there was no shame in having the men court the girls, Alexandra the Great maintains. "I thought I was very professional.  I conducted myself that way. I was treated that way.  I think a lot of people have the wrong idea of what it was like.

***

TOP HAT and CANE

 

MISSY ASKS YOU! : ARE YOU INSPIRED BY ANY OF THE PEOPLE PROFILED HERE AT MISTRESS MANIFESTO?

Have any of the people I've chosen to elect to the Mistress of the Month Pantheon here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot inspired you?  I'd like to hear who and why!

If you are new to this blog, you can look in PAGES where there is a list of all the subjects I've covered her over very many years.  Leave me a comment!  

Missy

HOW ARE WE ALL DOING?

Hello My Readers!

As I look back on this year of blogging, I want to thank my readers for encouraging me and giving me reason to continue, for though I never write for hits, and am sometimes surprised at what topics turn out to be of most interest so far to you, I suppose I'd be a bit down if I thought no one was interested with my grand project here. 

Through these years of creating Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, we have all been through our changes. Writing and researching this blog has certainly informed me and helped me understand Alternative Lifestyles and to be much less judging of those who indulge in them than I once was.  I thought one, life-long monogamous marriage was the only way to live for a long long time. That's how I was raised, though I did and still do think a woman is better off not being involved at all than in a relationship in which the partners are incompatible or there is abuse.  

I, and this blog stand for Choice. I do hope my readers will make truthful assessments of themselves and their relationships, ask themselves what it is they really want in this time and place, and also have relationships based on honesty. Perhaps while reading about other's lives we can come to terms with our own needs and desires. We can compare ourselves to the Belle Epoch Courtesans or the people who've had the experience of being Kept.

If you are new to this blog take a look in PAGES for the long list of topics and where you can find them in my archives. UPDATED GUIDE TO ARCHIVES : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT TOPICS BY MONTH!

Someone once told me that it takes a person of some sophistication to find this valuable.

In the past year I've met a few women who live in a pre-feminist mentality and lifestyle, which I suppose works for them, but who are condemning of anyone who is not married with children.  These women have no idea I'm the person behind Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot and there was no reason to tell them, so I just listened as they talked about "the kind of people' who have no children. I thought they were ignorant really, and perhaps did not even know they were lucky to so easily have children and afford them! There is nothing wrong with being unmarried or without a partner either.  I want you to know that I think that way.

I thought about the women I've known in my life who married for the right reasons and had traditional expectations yet had affairs while married.  I thought about the few couples I've met who made it to 50 or more years of marriage and do seem to have great love. There are a wide range of options when it comes to lifestyle though, at least here in America and the West, where independence is admired.

Wishing You All The Best,

Missy