THE BARBIZON - MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK RECOMMENDATION

The Barbizon Hotel was the foundation for independent life of many women who came to New York to start careers in writing, editing, modeling and acting, beginning in the Flapper era and continuing into the 1980s. These two recent book reviews say it all and much more eloquently than I can. From names you've heard, due to the success of the women, to those who came to stay and stayed for years due to rent control, The Barbizon is a hotel that has had a place in women's history. I wish there were more places like it today. If you know where they are, please leave a comment including links to properties!

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

By Paulina Bren

Excerpt: Bren draws on impressive amount of archival research and pays tender attention to each of the women she profiles. (Includes Grace Kelly, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Physician Rashad and several writers.)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/the-barbizon-paulina-bren.amp.html

Excerpt: New York City once had more than a hundred residential hotels, places like the Algonquin ... the Carlyle ... the Plaza ...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/when-the-barbizon-gave-women-rooms-of-their-own/amp

KOLA BOOF (NAIMA BINT HARITH) UNWILLING MISTRESS OF THE TERRORIST OSAMA BIN LADEN

Published in 2007, with more controversial books to follow, author Kola Boof, the woman born Naima Bint Harith, and her family received death threats and at one point had to go into government protection, because of her honesty about the brutality that she suffered and her connection to wealthy, powerful, and dangerous men which included terrorist Osama Bin Laden. She brings us to an Africa few Westerners can really try on, one in which racism (not limited to Black versus White) and Arab-Muslim tensions are hand in hand. She is a womanist, a political activist, a mother, a writer and poet.  And if you read her book, you might not be the same. Devastating would be too light a word.

An important aspect to her story is that she was as a child infibulated.  This means that her vagina was sewn to keep it small and tight.  She says still having her clitoris helped her want to live.  But normal sex is impossible for her.  She needs an especially patient and gentle lover and Bin Laden was certainly not one of the men who cared if he hurt her.  A future post will be about this practice, also called female circumcision, which is seen as a right of passage by some people on this earth, but which is seen as the ultimate control over women by many.  Those of you who have pain with intercourse might relate to the frustration she felt with sex.

Through these posts, we become familiar with - and advocate - informed choice.  Yet so many women who have become mistresses have done so because they had little to no choice. Kola Boof was a mistress to other men before she met Osama Bin Laden and had no choice. 

She was seduced and molested as an underage girl, she won a beauty contest and accepted being kept by a White Jewish American man for several years, and as an actress and model hoping to break into the business in Africa, because Hollywood is not enthusiastic about dark skinned women of African heritage, she became the mistress of another man.  She encountered women from France, from Turkey, from Italy, from all over, who were competing to be the favorite in harems of ultra-rich men like Osama - who she called Somi. Her story begs us to consider how much choice she had and how much choice anyone has.

Naima, as she called herself then, was dining out on a date in 1996 in Morocco. when Osama Bin Laden saw her and commanded her to be his.  What followed was six months of enduring and complying with his physically, emotionally, and psychologically sadistic behavior because she was afraid to be murdered. She met Satan. 

As a model and actress she was considered exotic because of her upbringing in the United States, yet was born to a mixed race couple who had been murdered over an incident in which her lesbian aunt was beaten. She was just a girl as she heard the screams and saw the bodies left on the grass and so being murdered was a very real possibility to her.  Rescued by a British couple, placed unsuccessfully with Arabic speakers in England who put her clothes out because she was too intelligent for a girl, she was then adopted by a Black family in the D.C. area who had four of their birth children and three other adoptees to love and care for.  She says she did not know how lucky she was to have a father who wanted her.

Though the first man she was mistress to - the White Jewish man - encouraged her writing and literary knowledge and encouraged her to identify herself as a writer, it was her connection to the terrorist that made her interesting to publishers. She waited out contracts with some because she knew she was not a bimbo. In her case the personal became political. She is an outspoken advocate for the dark skinned - African heritage woman all over the world and in The United States where she feels that rap music erased the progress of the 1960's and 1970's for Black Americans.

I hope I can do her justice in this review.  For she is formidable.
  
And I hope you will stick with me as I post about Kola Boof this month and the men she was kept by.

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto Blogspot  

MISTRESSES ARE READING : JANICE DICKINSON EVERYTHING ABOUT ME IS FAKE...AND I'M PERFECT

Janice Dickinson was a supermodel, a vicious competitor, a verbal snipe, an unapologetic gold digger, into control and power - a discipline mistress in attitude, and over all not a nice person. The book offers you many pictures of Janice herself and her two children. She confesses to AA and finding happiness, yet there is a prevailing feeling reading it that she is totally narcissistic and self-involved. Her intensity gives the impression that she was not just a hard partier and player, but angry and hostile, especially with men. Janice was sexually abused by her own father.

In this book Janice is especially pissed with Mick Jagger - till the end. She had a year long affair with him while also friends with Jerry Hall, the mistress who had so many children with him. Janice was playing for the highest pay. She says models sabotage each other, sometimes psychologically aiming at another models insecurities, sometimes with a little food poisoning.

The difference between a whore, a gold digger, a courtesan, and Janice???

Page 165

"Bad Sex A Go Go: Foreign Men Who Promise You the Freaking World"
"See, there was this head of state - I won't mention his name; I don't need any more men in black showing up at my door in the middle of the night. Well, I was doing a few print ads in his country, and one night he invited m,e to a restaurant with a name that began with Maison and ended with at $500 bill. I was compelled to say yes; after all, I was from the United States, proud of my heritage, and I thought my nation needed my services as a cultural ambassador.

After dinner, Mr. Powerful took me back to his penthouse suite at the best hotel in all the land. He dismissed the armed guards, double - locked the doors, took off his bulletproof vest, and turned down the lights. But he couldn't get it up.

It was a little disappointing. Here I was, already fancying myself a rock n roll Princess Grace. I knew I'd look damn good in one of those little diamond tiaras - and besides, I've always wanted a moat.

"Jan-eese!" my foreign billionaire moaned, trying to seal the deal some other way. "I can give you a fur coat, a Ferrari, a parcel of land in the South of France. Anything if you would be mistress."

"As much as I liked the idea of owning some French countryside, I just had to say no, though. What me and my big trap actually said "Are you kidding me? I don't think so. You need to,uh, be able to fly a different type of flag in order to keep my interest."

The only thing I walked away with that might was a pound of caviar from the minibar and the little gold crest off his jacket."

ReganBooks - AN Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
C 2004 Janice Dickinson.