Getting Turned on by Life 🌹🍯🍒✨

Taking in every last drop, baby!!

Last year, a friend and I left a sushi lunch and meandered to a tea place Uptown to warm up, an icy breeze cutting at the skin exposed where our down jackets ended. As we passed Lincoln Center, she regaled me with her findings from Pussy: A Reclamation.

To many, this book is a feminist Bible. Regena Thomashauer, lovingly called “Mama Gena” by Pussy devotees, uses the 250-odd pages to urge women to tap into their feminine power and perhaps do the most radical thing we can—actually love our bodies, embody confidence, and bravely uncover our deepest truths.

If that sounds up your alley, I highly encourage you to read it, but you’re not here for a book review, and that brief interlude is just a gateway to chat about Thomashauer’s pièce de résistance, the urging that simmers beneath the surface of everything she preaches: That we must get turned on.

To Mama Gena, getting turned on extends far beyond what we do behind closed doors. On the contrary, she wants us all to be turned on out in the open, as often as possible.

By her definition, being turned on isn’t just about achieving sexual arousal; it’s about sucking the marrow of life dry—living in tune with our natural rhythms + most authentic selves, utilizing our senses to their full capacity—so much so that we can’t help but marvel at the miracle of our humanity.

I’m a Leo with her Venus in Libra, so I haven’t had trouble living by Mama G’s sentiment that we should find pleasure wherever possible, but I have found in the last year or so since reading that I’m much less ashamed of it.

I describe dimly lit bars I’ve been to as sexy. I buy a Mister Softee ice-cream cone and eat it while walking home, letting the vanilla sticky my fingers. I don’t stop dancing when my husband enters the room; I allow him to witness my feral unfurling. Every flower that calls out with its aroma is given a moment to smell. Shoes are flopped off, and bare feet burrow into the mud of the park near the river. I witness pleasure, and allow pleasure to witness me.

In doing so, life has become so much more appetizing, and I’m proud that I’m brave enough to taste it.

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Tonight, we’ll be meeting in the Muse Maison salon for our monthly writing circle with the theme NECTAR.

We'll be reading erotic poetry, penning our own epics, and imagining life as honey. It's sure to be a good time.

Join us:

Thanks so much for reading MUSE MAISON, it means more than you know that you’re here + enjoying my words! You can order the monthly print edition of the newspaper I founded here, upgrade to a paid membership here, and subscribe using the link below.

If you liked Getting Turned on by Life 🌹🍯🍒✨, you’re sure to enjoy THE ART OF SENSUALITY:

THE ART OF SENSUALITY