Thomashauer - Mama genas school of womanly arts: using the power of pleasure to have your way with the world

I thank my daughter, Maggie, for the gift of Motherhood. I thank her for making me aware of the link between me and the ancestresses who have gone before me and made me possible, and to the girls of now, and the women to come. I thank her for her love, and the joy of loving her.

To my Dad who always said I should be a writer. Thank you. You were right.

To my Mom, for her beauty, her sparkle, her flirtatiousness, her vision, and her deep, deep love.

To Steve and Vera Bodansky who awakened slumbering aspects of my soul with their love. Thank you for opening the doors to my passion. You inspire me every day.

To J.B. and Laura, the most magnificent, steadfast friends who taught me so much about the love and fun that a man and woman can create in relationship.

To Anh Duong who drives me higher, challenges me, and has opened my vistas to beauty and extraordinary friendship.

To Peter McGough, my souls playmate. Thank you, dear friend.

To my protge, Auntie Beth Schoenfeldt, who makes sure I operate at full-throttle Sister Goddess power. Thank you for your willingness to leap in the direction of your desires, despite being from Texas.

Thank you to my T.I.G.R.E.S.S.esMeryl Ranzer, Jennifer Freeman, Laleh Nader, Lori Sutherland, Sharon Friedland, Alice Petzold, Laura Tulumbus, and especially Rhea Abramson for being my research assistant.

To Jen Gates, my agent. (Oh, what a thrill it is to have an agent.) For getting meright away, at the beginningand making sure everyone else did, too.

To Amanda Murray, my hot, sexy editor. Thank you for a dream-come-true collaboration, and for my love affair with your mind. I appreciate your willingness to enter my world in order to make this book great.

To Patrick and Walter Fleming, to Brian Bradley and Josh Patner for the clothesthe magnificent, magical clothes.

And to all my Sister Goddesses, now, and forever.

Regena Thomashauer (Mama Gena), creatrix of Mama Genas School of Womanly Arts is an icon, a movement, a revolution rolled into the body of one hot woman. She is a woman who has the courage, passion, tenacity, and enthusiasm to actually live her dreams. Regena graduated with a B.A. in theater arts from Mount Holyoke and then retired from the stage to pursue her exhaustive research into pleasure and fun. She has dedicated her life to researching the nature of pleasure, specifically female orgasm, and its relationship to health, well-being, and overall fulfillment. She is certified to teach courses in extended massive orgasm. Regena is self-educated in the history of womensocially, culturally, and economicallyand is an expert in the anthropology of the ancient Goddess religion. She uses this research to open doors for women today by giving them a context to maximize their actual power, passion, enthusiasm, and creativity. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Bruce, and her daughter.

The stories about people told in this book reflect feelings or situations which many of us have experienced in our own lives. While the essence of the stories is real, many are composites and, in most cases, names of individuals and other characteristics have been changed.

I felt it was time to play. Most of my thoughts, time and energy had gone into creative effort. And this restriction of the love drive, the headshrinkers will tell you, is the greatest urge one really has. When one sublimates the sex drive into creative work it puts a person in high gear, mentally. I admit it. But it is against my nature to bottle up the biological plans of pleasure for any length of time. I hope I dont sound as if I have discovered the secret salve that soothes the universe, but I do want to add my small footnote on the subject.

Mae West

Example A. Picture this:

You are on a long road trip, in a car, by yourself. Youre kind of hungry, kind of cranky, but too impatient to get where youre going to stop at a rest area. You keep pushing yourself, ignoring your discomfort, so you can cover more distance.

Example B. Picture this:

You are on a long road trip, in a car, with a couple of girlfriends. Each of you packed a basket of delicious goodies to snack on, and you are currently passing around some crudits with guacamole. Aretha is blasting on the radio, and some of you are singing along. You have a stack of CDs, books on tape, and The Story of O. You have a destination, but you keep stopping at all the interesting sites along the wayshopping malls, and places called Lost River Caverns and The Worlds Only Anchovy Museum.

Which trip would you rather be on, A or B?

B? Good choice. Know why?

B gets there first. Know why?

Since A began to ignore how she was feeling about a hundred miles ago, she failed to notice the engine light on the dashboard, so the car overheated, and now shes sitting by the side of the road, cursing and waiting for Triple A to come rescue her.

This illustrates two options: a life without pleasure and a life that includes pleasure.

In this lesson we are going to tour the world of pleasure together. We will examine everything that qualifies as part of a pleasurable life. Why? Pleasure gives you clarity, it refreshes and rejuvenates, it keeps you ahead of the curve. Pleasure sends you on wonderful journeys, and you always arrive at your destination ahead of schedule. When you dont prioritize pleasure, you end up arriving in places you never intended to go. So many of us are programmed to choose A in the scenario above that we suffer from the disease called anhedonia (literally, without pleasure). A leading American manual on mental illness describes it as a loss of interest or pleasure in all or almost all usual activities and pastimes. People give up on fun. Making time for pleasure seems somehow naughty, self-indulgent, or slightly illicit.

Society conditions us to worship pain. No pain, no gain. Its everywhere: Jesus nailed to the cross, original sin, the Puritan work ethic. Who goes out for a lunch hour anymore? (We used to.) Who comes home from work at 5 P.M.? (Thats only half a day!) Even our pals in Latin America are giving up that centuries-old ritual, the siesta. And we used to laugh at how hard the Japanese work. Now we have surpassed them.

Pleasure is still there. It is simply not a priority. Reveling in it is a lost art. All you have to do is look at a child and you will see the direct access we all have to pleasure. A child moves from one pleasurable thing to another, gets interrupted with a few tears, a distraction, then back to pleasure. Pleasure is more important than food. Pleasure consumes a childs day. Pleasure is not frivolous. It guides, instructs, unfolds creativity, educates. Learning through pleasure, through fun, is a more deeply integrated experience than learning by rote or under pressure.

The idea for Mama Genas School of Womanly Arts came to me after seeing Jacqueline Bisset in the movie Dangerous Beauty utter these words to her daughter, who she was training to be a courtesan: In order to give pleasure, you have to know pleasure. It was a very beautiful scene, set in sixteenth-century Venice. I was captivated by the idea of a gorgeous, sensual mother sharing the secrets of pleasure and sensuality with her daughter. Why, if that had happened to me, I could have hit the ground running after puberty, rather than spend years mired in confusion and misinformation. Imagine having your mom teach you how to enjoy the touch, taste, and smell of kissing your first boy! Or how peeling an orange or eating an asparagus spear can be a method of seduction. Or how your eyes, the windows of your soul, can be used to ignite a flirtation. Imagine having your mama in your corner as you begin your sensual unfolding. How delicious, and how totally unusual.