WHY ARE YOU AGAINST FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS MISSY? IS THIS TYPE OF RELATIONSHIP THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO BEING A MISTRESS?

Question for Missy:

Missy, I want to know why you're against Friends With Benefits  I'm 21 and a senior in college.  I'm smart and I use contraception.  I have two friends I have sex with.  We think this is a good way to avoid having sex with partners who would want more with us.  We're not ready to get married to anyone.

Becky

UCLA - Los Angeles

Answer from Missy:

I'm for Choice and respect that the Friends With Benefits lifestyle is your choice at this time in your life. However, it's possible that you might be missing out on being completely available to someone else who might be an excellent choice as a partner in your life in your youthful stage.  Let's face it that as the years go by it's more difficult to meet someone to partner with, not impossible but more difficult. Many college students find their first partners while at school. After that is a career building period, with many feeling themselves established and seeking a first marriage in their late twenties. Into your thirties a great number of previously available potential partners are already in commitments. I tend to think a woman should consider being a Mistress only after having experienced their twenties - early thirties. By then a person probably knows themselves well enough.

Right now you're sort of man sharing and maybe you'll also find that an interesting way to live your life as a Mistress. Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot we continue to try to define what a 21st Century Mistress is or is not. We know being a Mistress does not necessarily mean adultery or being involved with a person who is married. We also know that there are many who give it a try and do not like it. The days of the Classic Mistress, a woman who is fully supported for her lifetime by a rich married man, may be over. We also know that the best mistresses are not known to us.

I tend to think that a woman should experience her sexuality and figure out where she's at with it before she partners. I also tend to think this, which I recently shared with a man I know. I said to him - and to you - and my readers - that idealistically I think it should be that people get to experience loving in many ways and with many people - with everyone in the know and unbothered by jealousy - but pragmatically we choose commitment to have and hold family. In the Western world the majority do marry and attempt to restrict their lives to just one partner, making those in Open Relationships or who share a partner with someone else in the minority.

And though there are women who Keep men, and there are women who have more than one lover at a time, it's usually men who have arrangements such as this.

So check in with yourself Becky, and ask yourself if you're the type to happily remain independent and relatively unattached, and what it would be to have great sex with someone you love rather than with a friend you like. Will you be OK when one or both of your Friends With Benefits partners end it with you because they found someone Special?

Missy

DO YOU LIVE AN ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLE? : MISSY ASKS YOU!

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT focuses on an alternative lifestyle choice, that of being a Mistress (or Kept Person).  I was wondering how many of my readers live what they consider to be an alternative lifestyle?  Are you Kept?  Do you Keep somebody?  Are you married? Do you share a man with another person?

Please leave a comment.

I read all comments before I choose which ones to publish!

Hope to hear from YOU!

Missy

POLYAMORY : THE NEW LOVE WITHOUT LIMITS by DEBORAH M. ANAPOL : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVBIEW

  One of the things we do here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO BLOGSPOT is try to define Mistress, the role, and because the word is too often used to describe a woman who is the dominant one in an S and M relationship - or experience - I sometimes think I should have called this blog KEPT PEOPLE.  Once you start reading this blog, however, you know this is an ongoing discussion worthy of an college Woman's Studies class.  I bring this up because this book, Polyamory - the New Love Without Limits further challenged me. Focusing on agreements and compromise without a mention of the finances, I'm trying it all on.

What the author, Dr. Deborah M. Anapol, does most excellently is challenge the reader to ask themselves a whole lot of questions in order to define who you are and what you want ideally when it comes to relationships with one, two, three - even a whole group of people.  The book came out in 1997 and at that point Anapol had been helping people explore the New Paradigm of relationships for over a decade.  New Sexual Ethics.  Serial Monogamy?

She doesn't like serial monogamy.  She is opinionated to say; "Unlike lifelong monogamy, it (serial monogamy) allows us to express our polyamorous nature while maintaining a monogamous fiction in which our multiple mates are separated by linear time."  (Read that again...)

She warns us that Polyamory is not a synonym for promiscuity.  She points out the high percentage of affairs men and women have during marriage as full of lies, deceit, guilt, and broken commitments.

So are you ready to commit to TWO or MORE lovers?  (I'll bet some men who are keeping a mistress and reading this blog are ready to say YES!) To tell anyone you are about to get involved with the truth about yourself so they can decide if they want to continue with you?

Learn the difference between Open Relationships, having an Intimate Network, Group and Multilateral Marriage,  Swinging, Polyfidelity, and a Triad.

A few years ago I lived in a neighborhood that housed a Group Marriage.  It was actually two men and two women who considered themselves all married to each other.  They would leave - all four of them - arm in arm. I often wondered if that was to show the neighbors they were still intact.

C 2020 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot 
All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights

WHO APPROVES OF MAN SHARING?

Who approves?  

You might be surprised.

Often wives.

Princess Diana wanted Prince Charles all to herself we've been told - though recently it's been suggested she didn't want a divorce, just to live separate lives and "partner" when needed.  Though Diana Spencer was raised in aristocracy, and must have heard that Mistresses were historically part of aristocratic living, she was a modern creature.  She wanted to be "enough."

The Prince's circle helped him have his separate life. They held entertainments in which Charles and Camilla were invited and treated as a couple, leaving Princess Diana at home or to her own life.

Camilla has been honored (!) with two Mistress of the Months here at Mistress Manifesto. To read more about her go to the archives May 2010 and April 2016.

Sometimes a wife practically throws her husband to another woman. Sometimes she gives the Ok for him to have another woman in his life and a Mistress is preferable to sleeping around.  Sometimes she chooses. Our Mistress of the month for April 2012, May Fung Yee Pang, is said to have been chosen by ex-Beatle John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono.

Some wives negotiate their marriage with their husbands, but most often they signal their approval passively by continuing the marriage. Now some wives, who have prenups, may renegotiate the terms and conditions, but please - keep this basically financial, about responsibilities. I heard of a man who expected his fiancée to sign a prenup that she agrees to have sex with him for the rest of their lives together three times a week. How horribly unrealistic and anti-romantic.

I suppose Susan "Shoe" Taylor was a "hippie.  Clearly she shared a man with his wife.  What, if anything, I wonder does she have in Common with Bob Dylan's mysterious musical muse, also considered a hippie,  Ruth Tryangiel , Mistress of the month August 2012.  Or Pamela Des Barres, the famous Groupie who started out as a hippie with flowers in her hair, who waited it out to marry her British husband, as he had to leave a marriage first. Read about Pamela in the month I devoted to Groupies, comparing them to Mistresses, in October 2016.

THE MARRYING FAMILY OF ROUSSY (ROUSSADENA MDIVANI) - HOLLYWOOD

Roussadana Mdivani "Roussy" became artist Jose Maria Sert's wife. leaving Misia in a complicated situation. 

The story goes that Roussy, from a family of Georgian Princesses and Princes, looking to make advantageous marriages, styled herself a sculptor and had her own tiny studio in Paris.  In 1925 she rang the bell of Sert's studio, a studio that Misia considered to be his turf and never visited without notice, to ask for advice. Some thought this was a predatory gambit. Hearing of the visit, Misia decided to turn up and see what was going on there. Her instincts were off and she didn't think of the girl as any threat. But she was. 

Roussy's real mother was dead, as Misia's had been, and she felt maternal towards her.  She said the girl was enchanting. 

Roussy died of a brief illness on December 26, 1938, age 32, having not given Sert the heir he claimed he desired.  She died of an infection that would likely easily be cured with antibiotics today. Misia was 66 years old and alone in the world, many of her friends had died and other people had taken over her role as muse of the creatives. Eventually she and Jose Maria would be good friends but never live together again.

Roussy's brothers were also considered fortune hunters who appealed to Hollywood actresses and young heiresses at a time when having a title by marrying a poor noble still held appeal to some and people could still "buy" titles.  As a result Roussy had sisters-in-law such as actress Pola Negri, a vamp, and Mae Murray.  

In 1931 a younger brother, Alexis, only 22, married an Astor family heiress named Louise Van Alen and came to America.  She was only 19 and he lived like a Prince he always was on her money.  Only 18 years later he divorced her to marry Woolworth stores heiress Barbara Hutton.  But another brother, Serge, went ahead and married Louise four years later, keeping her money in the family.

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.

MISIA SERT : THIRD MARRIAGE TO ARTIST JOSE MARIA SERT and THE ACCOMMODATION OF ROUSSADANA MDIVANI

NOTE: April 2020
I got a comment that said two things that I question.  The link to the person who posted showed him on blogger but not to a blog.  The commenter first said that Serge Diaghilev was not a ballet dancer.  This is what Wikipedia says:  Serge Diaghilev was a Russian ballet impresario.  He was a Russian promoter of the arts who revitalized ballet by integrating the ideals of other art forms - music, painting, and drama - with those of dance.  From 1906 he lived in Paris, where in 1909 he founded the Ballets Russes.  Thereafter he toured Europe and the Americas with his ballet company, and he produced three ballet masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (1910),Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913.)

The other thing this poster said was that Misia did not get a settlement from her marriage, that she was, in so many words, too proud.  I'm basing my account on the book noted.

And not publishing this comment.

Please back up any statement you make with some reference such as a book title and page, an article on the internet, or otherwise.  I realize that in some cases there are very many books that contradict each other.  Thanks, Missy

************************

ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE:

Misia met and became the mistress of famous and accomplished artist Jose Maria Sert, who was patronized by the Spanish royal family. They lived together for twelve years before they married in 1920 when he was 45 and she was 48. She knew he had a lifetime habit of affairs. Two marriages behind her, she was finally with a man who wanted and needed more than a playmate or wife to show off. She was finally with an equal. Misia was said to be - for the first time - "Sexually overwhelmed" for the first time.  And she became serious with Sert quickly, so quickly that he seemed to want to back out of a relationship.  But she followed him to continue the affair and they went on an art and architecture tour where he played tour guide. She was now considered a liberated woman but she did not want to go it alone. Her money came from a settlement with her last ex-husband, Edwards, in their divorce.  (Before he died in 1914 he had even begged her to marry him again.)

Her life was continually entwined with the up and coming and the renown artists, sculptors, ballet dancers, choreographers - the biggest talents in arts, culture, and society in France. Together the couple were friends with ballet dancer Serge Diaghilev, who had been born in Russia in 1872.  He was a fashion "dandy," a homosexual and he and Misia gossiped and intrigued for the next twenty years as special friends.  Friends even said that she was the only woman Diaghilev could ever have married. By 1910-1911 Paris season his ballets were considered to be a "revelation" attended by aristocrats, royals, high society, and homosexual society, (Including Isadora Duncan, the dancer, who has also been a Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto.)

Misia rarely visited Sert at his studio, thinking of it as his sacred space but it is there that the young Georgian Princess Roussadana Mdivani, called Roussy, as a neophyte sculptor herself appeared, looking for advice in 1925.

For some reason, Misia did not initially feel threatened when she heard about her.  But then the young woman was young enough to be a daughter and so Misia felt that she and her husband could take the playful Roussy underwing. The day came though when she showed up at the studio hoping to meet her.  She was enchanted. Misia had grown up without her birth mother and Roussy's mother was dead.  The Serts were childless.  

Misia and Jose Maria had a Catholic marriage in Spain, considered impossible to divorce and had been married for 20  plus years and Misia loved the girl too but the idea that she would remain a surrogate daughter to the couple was ridiculous. The girl had once even crept in on all fours and watched Misia and Sert have sex!  The girl claimed she loved Misia as well. Would they go on as three?

They sure didn't want Misia along on their honeymoon.

Was it an act of love on Misia's part to let him go to the girl?  She cooperated with civil divorce and an annulment (considered invalid in France) so her old husband and the girl could marry.  She agreed there was something wrong with her sexual organs and he said he had married Misia in order to have an heir!  (Well, we wonder, how the childbirth adverse Misia managed to perhaps never become pregnant at a time when contraception was not what it is today.)

As the truth came to her, Misia became depressed, even driven insane.  She even took a job in a dress shop in New York to get away and it was there that she got the letter from Sert saying he had married again and in the Catholic church.

Roussy died of what sounds to be a throat infection that she went to Switzerland to cure, not having created an heir, and then Misia and her ex-husband lived separate but became friends.  They visited daily and sometimes went out to dinner.

Sert died November 27, 1945 and she didn't make it to his death bed. He left his property to others but he did give Misia his apartment and everything in it on the rue de Rivoli including paintings, furniture, and the library.  Over the next five years Misia sold whatever when she needed money as she herself had little.  It was there she died.

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot
References for this post are Misia's own memoir and the book about her by Fizdale and Gold.

WIFE AND MISTRESS LEARN THERE IS ANOTHER MISTRESS IN ALDO'S LIFE

Missy's Notes and Quotes from "In the Name of Gucci" by Patricia Gucci:

Some people think "once a cheat, always a cheat."  I don't think that is true.  Some people cheat because they are with the wrong person for them and very unhappy and it's their way out, perhaps not the most honorable way, but their way.  Others were never meant to be monogamous by nature and need to realize that about themselves and proceed honestly with the people they meet.

However, in the story of Aldo Gucci's Mistress, Bruna Palombo, who'se a Classic Mistress Kept from early womanhood and all her life, and Aldo's one and only wife Olwen Gucci, there is yet another woman, another Mistress, who provides more competition for them both.  In Patricia's memoir, her mother's discovery of this third woman in Aldo's life comes after she has met her much older half brothers. At that point Bruna and Olwen have separate lives with Aldo but he has done what he promised and united the children from his two families with the introduction.  The third woman will challenge Bruna's long held assumption that she was "the one."

Patricia tells us that Olwen and Bruna both stopped trusting Aldo. (160)  Patricia's father visited her and her mother less, a sign that there was trouble, and I imagine especially unnerving because she is so dependent upon him. Bruna knew he'd had "dalliances" in the past too and she'd overheard and seen suspicious things.  Bruna was afraid to make an issue and Patricia's friends also seemed to have fathers who could not be monogamous.  Were all men this way?
The man had nerve.  After hearing that he had set this woman up in an apartment and bought her expensive things including works of art and jewelry, Bruna was shocked to find out that Aldo had taken her out to dinner and introduced her to the new woman without explaining who she was in his life. (161)  She also found photos of the woman on a trip to Palm Beach and wasn't Palm Beach just supposed to be for Bruna and Aldo?

After all the seclusion, after all the privacy that Bruna had complied with and desired, this blonde was being seen all around openly with Aldo.  She had her informants and her notes.  The explosive showdown was now not between the classy Olwen and Bruna, but Bruna and Aldo.  He refused to admit what he was up to until she had an "explosive" argument with him and presented to him the details of all she knew.  Finally, confronted with dates, locations, everything, he admitted he had this other Mistress!

"We were completely on our own with no legal rights." (171)

During crisis Patricia was sent back to boarding school.


*** It's true that Mistresses do not have the legal rights of a wife. I think about why gay people have fought so hard for the right to be legally married.  I think the only way for a Mistress to have legal rights is to become the wife or for us to allow legal marriage to more than one person at a time. I admit this is probably more complicated than the gay marriage issue.  Missy

DECLARATION FOR MISTRESSES - Man Sharing

"I decide.  If I man share knowingly that is my decision."

A bit of a meditation on MAN SHARING.

Back in high school, young women were so determined to declared themselves one man women, and young men were so determined to have a "girlfriend," that having a ring on your finger from him was not only important, it was fairly easy to get.  All he needed was a generous allowance or a job at the Drive Through Burger Stand. Then off to the jewelry store in the mall he went.

These rings were called "going steady" rings or even "pre-engagement" rings, and people took the status they inferred fairly seriously.  These rings, by my way of thinking, were also, "We're having sex but we're serious" rings.  Without one, you might just be sleeping around.  It just wasn't in our experience or our surroundings, with everyone's parents married, to think past the "good girl / bad girl" dichotomy, which was very much in place as if it were - the 1950's - even if that was long ago.  Nobody wanted to be thought of as a bad girl.  Good girls had rings.

Yet, it seemed to me that, just as seriously, certain girls - OK - CHEERLEADERS - did a lot of "giving back" of rings to declare themselves free and ready for - another young man - another ring!

So, just about graduation and prom time, there was a young man from another school who asked me to the prom and I said no.  I had spent some time with him hanging out at his house playing Scrabble and at my house watching TV - with our parents in the next room - and yet he had started rumors about me, claiming we'd had sex.  What a jerk! 
So I said no to the prom and he then went and asked another young woman from my school.  She was acting a bit haughty about it but I didn't care.

Proms seemed to me to be from out of the past.  I just wanted to graduate and never turn back.

But, to go ahead with my story here, off to the prom she went, and from what I heard he wasn't a perfect gentleman and she regretted it.  And soon it emerged that this young man had not only gone to our prom, but the prom as his school, and the prom at yet a third school!  With three different dates. How he ever met three young women to even ask or how he ever even afforded to go, who knows. 

All three young women, sans rings, were upset and angry. They had some romantic notion of what a prom date meant. And they had unintentionally shared a man, if only for a short time.

A few years ago a woman who had been a hippie, which I was never, told me about her man sharing experience in the 1960's while she was in college.  She, and two other women found out they were all having sex with the same man, who was playing them all as if they were the Only One.  This was pre legal abortion, they all had contraception, but he did not and it could have gone wrong for any or all of them.  So they decided they would play him.

One by one they called him and told him they need to Talk.  Then each woman told the man that, shockingly, she was pregnant and that she had not been with anyone else.  It was mean but they thought it was hilarious when he quit college and joined the army.  One can imagine what one unintended pregnancy might mean to a college student - but three? This woman was laughing about it years later. Now since they were all hippies I imagined they would be into the "Free Love" of man sharing, but they were not.

So now it's 2017 and there are women who knowingly and willingly man share.  Some of these women move in and have a Triad, others are Secret Mistresses, some are Ex Wives who don't want to live with their ex husbands any more but still, sometimes they feel as close as they once always were and still have sex even though they know he has Other Women. There are just endless varieties of reasons why but women do man share -  including the real or perceived lack of men in the vicinity though it seems to me that on-line dating may have helped - and it's not always out of desperation. 

There's so much talk about man sharing.  I hear senior citizen women do it a lot.  They all do lunch with a certain man.  No one involved is trying to be Exclusive. 
Is Exclusive only for people who want to be Traditional and Get Married and Have Children?

I thought of all of this as I thought about Ray Charles and his women.

You have to DECIDE.  Is it what you want to do with your life for now, for always?

C 2017 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

MARGIE HENDRIX in THE COOKIES

BECOMING SISTER WIVES - TV SHOW - FALLOUT - CANCELLED or ANOTHER SEASON ?

June 2021  Missy here!

The original video from 2014 went poof so I took down this post, hoping for a replacement.  There are so many! The TV show was considered to be a shocker when it came out in 2010. Various decisions have been made - to stay or go - since it aired. An April 2021 was supposed to be the end - the 15th season.

I posted about a form of polyamory that is unusual because of the great number of women man sharing just one man but within a form of commitment, not in ancient China or present day Africa, but here in the United States. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints goes against polygamy though it was very much part of the foundation of their church, which was referred to as Mormonism. However Fundamentalists with a huge number of wives, usually the first one being the only one legally married to the man, and a huge number of children, exist in Utah and some other enclaves. 

A reality TV show that went for 15 seasons of changes, each person has their fans.  This article from The Sun does a good job of explaining who is who and what's happened.

SUN - SISTER WIVES CAST

i.e. Meri Brown, the first wife, who has one child with him, was married to him from 1990-2014 when they divorced so he could marry Robyn and he adopted her three children....

With Janelle he has six children and two grand-children.

With Christine he has six children.

With Robyn he has two children plus three from a previous marriage.

AND SO THEY SHARED A MAN

MARILYN YOUNG AND MIYOKO WATEI and MISTER BOBBY FISCHER, CHESS CHAMPION AND BROKEN GENIUS

The story of American Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (Robert James Fischer) is one of the strangest stories ever,  not just because his body got dug up for DNA tests in an ugly inheritance battle between one woman who said she was his secret wife, Miyoko Watei, who is President of the Japanese Chess Association, and his Filipina mistress , Marilyn Young, with whom he fathered a child*, and I'm reminded of it because of what's been happening over the last couple months with Edward Snowden, the leaker of NSA secrets.

Snowden, who has not had a mistress to my knowledge but did leave a girlfriend, who is now pictured all over the net for her pole-dancing hobby, in the lurch,  holed up in a Moscow airport transit terminal for weeks. His American Passport and travel papers were revoked by the authorities and his bid to find asylum and citizenship in Iceland went nowhere. On August 1, 2013 he was given one year temporary Russian refuge and is reported to be living with American expats somewhere that is not Moscow.

American Chess Champ Fischer also had his American passport revoked, after not giving in to threats of prison and huge fines by the United States, when he decided to go ahead and play his main opponent in Yugoslavia, which was forbidden at the time.  He took his win of over 3 million dollars and started to travel. 

Fischer grew to the age of five in Russia, the son of a single mother, a brilliant Jewish woman who he remained close to.  She brought her son to New York City where they became American citizens and she remained, but at the end of her life, though he called her everyday, he couldn't even attend her funeral.  The life-long loner and increasingly reclusive man ended his travels when he moved to Iceland and became a citizen there. But during his years of exhile he got involved with the women.

There are those who say if it were not for Bobby Fischer, the United States would have remained unaware of chess as a competitive sport.  Before Iceland, he disappeared in travel for about 20 years, and then emerged as a ranting anti-American DJ on Phillipine radio, a man who also was terribly anti-semetic.

Fischer's father was likely a Hungarian Jew, so it's bizarre that he would be so convinced that he would become a holocaust denier and worse, but these days it goes almost without saying that he was a broken genius - mentally ill. 

In 2010 the two women in his life had his body exhumed to be tested for a DNA match  Marilyn lost and Miyoko became his sole heir. * Though he believed himself to be the father of Marilyn's daughter, who looks nothing like him, the DNA showed no match.