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

C 2012 - 2026  Missy Rapport/ Mistress Manifestto.blogspot.com  2014  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights   First published June 24, 2014

NEED A HUSBAND OR WIFE? RECYCLE ONE

 

NEED A HUSBAND (OR WIFE ???)

RECYCLE ONE!

(in English & French)

(first posted July 1 2009)

This chain letter was started by a woman who wants to recycle her husband. It can work for a woman as easily as a man. But first you must be married...

Cette lettre à chaînes a été commencée par une femme qui veut réutiliser son mari. Elle peut fonctionner pour un femme aussi facilement qu'un homme. Mais d'abord vous devez être mariés…
It costs nothing - unless you have to pay for the Greyhound TM bus ticket or the TWA TM airfare ...

Il ne coûte rien - à moins que vous devez payer le billet d'autobus du TM de lévier ou les tarifs aériens de TWA TM…

Just make a list of five our your married friends who want to recycle their husbands... Then bundle up your husband and give him his walking papers and a suitcase you have personally packed for him... Send him to the woman on the top of your list. Then add your name to the bottom of the list and send a copy to five women.

Faire juste à une liste de cinq nos vos amis mariés qui veulent réutiliser leurs maris… Empaqueter alors vers le haut votre mari et lui donner ses papiers de marche et une valise que vous avez personnellement emballée pour lui… L'envoyer à la femme sur le dessus de votre liste. Alors ajouter votre nom au fond de la liste et envoyer une copie à cinq femmes.
WHEN YOUR NAME COMES TO THE TOP OF THE LIST, YOU WILL RECEIVE 17,000 HUSBANDS!

QUAND VOTRE NOM VIENT JUSQU'AU DESSUS DE LA LISTE, VOUS RECEVREZ 17.000 MARIS !

I WILL SURVIVE : GLORIA GAYNOR

GLORIA GAYNOR : I WILL SURVIVE from April 27, 2009 

This one is for Sarah J. Symonds!

SARAH J. SYMONDS : A BITTER EX MISTRESS

SARAH J. SYMONDS A BITTER EX MISTRESS - from April 24, 2009

We're providing you the link to Sarah J. Symonds, her book, her chatroom, and her support groups to help people, mostly females, get out of affairs with married men. Now, I've read this book and I think Sarah is materialistic and very very bitter. She is NOT the woman to be a mistress, and her failure to know that about herself and go after and stay in relationships with married men, because they are or were posh, was her problem.

Now of all things, guess who was posting about Sarah in 2008? Arianna Huffington!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/23/sarah-symonds-gordon-rams_n_145812.html

And this from the Daily Mail in the U.K.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-501371/The-mistress-self-delusion-Lord-Archers-ex-lovers-guide-virtues-woman.html

"I don't advocate affairs," she reiterates. "But it's going on everywhere. I just want women to be more like men and not get their hearts broken like I did. I'm saying that if you're going to do it, make sure you get the most out of it."

**** Sarah was called a "professional mistress" because of her involvement with more than one high-profile married man. 

SARAH J. SYMONDS QUOTE and NEWS from May 15, 2009

"Wives and mistresses have a lot in common. I am all for wives having as much as they can get if a marriage goes wrong, but the mistress should be treated in the same way. "They are sharing half a man. He is getting the best of both of them. I am saying support the mistress as well as the wife. I am very mercenary about that."

It's recently been reported in the April 6, 2009 GLOBE news, that Sarah as a $750,000 book deal to write about her more recent seven year affair with the chef with the television series, Gordon Ramsay who she saw for seven years (We believe you Sarah!). We're hoping Sarah will write the book! And here is one of the reasons why! BECAUSE THIS WAY SARAH CAN MAKE SOME MONEY OF HER OWN IN A PROFESSION OUTSIDE MISTRESSING!

Pamela Des Barres, the Queen of the Groupies, has turned her life into a successful creative writing career, why not Sarah?

According to the page 13 report, Gordon, 42, has denied having an affair with Sarah.

COMING UP : WE REVISIT MY FIRST MONTHS OF BLOGGING

In August of 2022, I decided to take down my first few months of posting. I realized that this blog had come a long way since I timidly started it, a long way in blogging expertise as well as in my notions of how I wanted to design it. The first thing I noticed as I looked at those early months of posting was that I was a bit all over the place rather than focused.  But I actually posted on some of the same people who I devoted much more time to in what would be the future.  I was just finding my way.  It took a while for me to decide that I would devote a month to a Mistress of the Month, or a Special Subject.  It was a long way in my personal understanding of the Mistress Lifestyle. In recent times I've done a whole lot more research than I used to do in order to present my subject. Still, I think some the 2009 posts are worth re-posting. I'll add a little current this and that to this month's overall content. 

In those early months I posted on Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman and Eva Peron, and a contemporary mistress Sarah J, Symonds, who had retired from being a mistress by that time. There were posts touching on the economics and a Declaration for Mistresses (a series of affirmations I ran) that touched upon that too. I posted some music videos with lyrics that I thought were appropriate too.  

Those early months did have value.

Want to revisit 2009 with me?

Here we go!

Missy

A NEW YEAR

My first Mistress of the Month post will be on January 5th, 2022.  

Until then, make a cup of tea and settle into the Archives!

DECLARATIONS FOR MISTRESSES - IN THE ARCHIVES

For a few years I would post DECLARATIONS FOR MISTRESSES.  This was tied into the title of this blog, MISTRESS MANIFESTO. See that tag below that says Manifesto - Declaration?  If you click on that, it should bring them all up.

MONICA LEWINSKY IS STILL HEALING

VANITY FAIR - MONICA LEWINSKY on HEALING and MEETING UP WITH KEN STARR

I dedicated a month to Monica, who was not a Courtesan, not a Mistress in the best, classic scense, but did have an affair with President Bill Clinton when he was in the White House. He denied it because his definition of sex was intercourse.  Now with the Me Too Movement outing powerful abusers, Monica Lewinsky has entered a new phase of her healing.  And she writes a thought-provoking article about her life as it is right now.  Back when I featured Monica here at Mistress Manifesto Blogspot I said GET OFF HER BACK! Sure she was smart.  Sure she was young.  She knew what she was doing.  But being outed by a person posing to be a friend and putting the Presidency into question isn't something she took into consideration.

MARCH 2012 is where to find Monica Lewinsky in my archives.

EXCERPT: ... Given my PTSD and my understanding of trauma, it’s very likely that my thinking would not necessarily be changing at this time had it not been for the #MeToo movement—not only because of the new lens it has provided but also because of how it has offered new avenues toward the safety that comes from solidarity. Just four years ago, in an essay for this magazine (Vanity Fair), I wrote the following: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. 

MONICA LEWINSKY "IT'S TIME TO BURN THE BERET AND BURY THE BLUE DRESS"

VANITY FAIR - MONICA LEWINSKY SPEAKS

EXCERPT: “It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” She also says: “I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”

After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”). Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)”


****

MIssy here! 

In March of 2012 I elected Monica as subject of the month, if not Mistress of the Month, saying everyone needed TO GET OFF HER BACK.  (You may want to bring up all those posts by either going to the archive or using the search feature of this Google Blogger.) 

After all, President William Jefferson Clinton, a known womanizer with a very tolerant wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was and is still respected. He had the nerve to call a woman he was having sex play with at the White House "that woman" and denied he had sex because he went Old School and decided that sex is only intercourse.

Hillary played Black Madonna and refused to speak to him for some weeks as punishment, while Monica, who was much young, infatuated, sexy, and impressed with the power of the Presidency, has lived a life of suffering for her mistake. 

Like some other women, such as Marilyn Monroe, who are called Mistresses in the Press, Monica was never actually a Mistress to the President or any other man that I know of, but I feel sure that back in the day if she couldn't marry Clinton she would have been happy to be his mistress.  In fact at this point I wish Monica had become some wonderful man's mistress because that would be better for her than what she has experienced which is to be a social outcaste.

In the current Vanity Fair article she confesses to being not suicidal but near suicidal at times over the last years since the scandal that will always have her name attached.  She also is open minded about having a life with another woman if not another man since men have also been a problem.  Intelligent and educated, having gone to London to achieve a Master's degree, she has yet to find a good employer.

One of the lessons of Monica Lewinsky is about trusting another woman/person with your private life secrets, someone who you don't know that well and shouldn't be e-mailing your private information with like someone in the same company or same business, in this case politics.