Sex Secrets of an American Geisha (31 page)

As a strong American Geisha you must assertively stand up for your most important beliefs. When I ask you to avoid confrontation, I mean that you should not aggressively defend your position (nor should your Good Man). Always treat each other with respect and care, and try (both of you) to come from the place of trusting each other’s good intentions, no matter how en trenched the disagreement might seem to be. Try to follow your Older Sis ter’s ways:

• Do not raise your voice; speak calmly. If his voice gets too loud, ask him gently if he could please speak more softly.
  
• Keep your face calm, your hands relaxed.
  
• Seek to have a discussion, not an argument. If he gets more argu mentative, always seek to return to a calm discussion.
  
• Be ready to say you are sorry for how upset both of you are. Often, with your lead giving him permission, a Good Man will express similar feelings.
  
• Be ready to apologize explicitly for your share of any blame, if do ing so can help you get beyond confrontation to working together on the situation.
  
• Very importantly, remember that an angry, emotional word spoken and heard can never be unspoken and unheard; it lasts in his mem ory for your entire relationship. Speak very carefully when you are upset. Ask him to do the same.
  
• Allow your Good Man to save face by nonjudgmentally seeking a solution, not by seeking to place blame on him (even if blaming him seems appropriate and fair).
  
• Try always to make each other happy, not wrong.
  
• Ask your Good Man to read this section; then jointly seek to have calm discussions whenever you disagree.
  

Many books and courses are available that can help you develop skills for dealing with conflict assertively and compassionately in your intimate relationship. When each of you treats the other well, you have the base upon which a great relationship and marriage can be built. All that is re quired is the somewhat undefinable magic “spark” that leads to emotional love and attraction, and another one that leads to physical chemistry and at traction.

When those two sparks ignite between a Good Man and a Good Woman, can marriage be far away? Assuming your needs are met in his complementary needs, the answer is, “No, marriage cannot be far away.” So, let’s end this chapter by going back to the sex that is only a part of love (yet a very important part). When the engagement ring is on your finger and the wedding date is set (or after the marriage), celebrate the totality of your mutual love by pounding the mattress and shaking the walls with the hottest animal-emotional sex your combined desires can produce.

W
hen you marry, your journey is not over, is it, sweet Younger Sis ter? You realize, don’t you, without my telling you, that after the wedding ceremony the pleasurable journey continues. If you’ve spent twelve to eighteen months on the journey to finding love and marriage, now your years-long journey will involve maintaining a happy, sexy, enthusiastic mar riage. Remember that your goal is not to have a great wedding. It is to have a great marriage.

Here, too, there are lessons to be learned from your Asian Sisters. When a gentleman or a company initiates a relationship with a particular teahouse (ochaya) or geisha, the relationship often becomes a long-term one, even if sex is never a factor. Many clients that employ the services of the geisha district return again and again to the same teahouse for their func tions or request the presence of the same geisha. The relationships some times extend to the next generation; clients introduce their sons to their favorite teahouses or geisha, and the sons eventually form their own rela tionships.

Over time, both the geisha and the women who run the teahouses learn how to make their clients totally satisfied with the services they receive. They get to know the types of dance the men enjoy, the musical instru ments they prefer, the sorts of entertainment they wish to see, the games they like to play, the food and caterers they prefer, the brands of alcohol each guest likes, the type of conversation the gentlemen find stimulating, and the level of involvement with the geisha the client expects. They cater to the client’s preferred seating arrangements, show the appropriate deference to company VIPs, and determine what mix of maiko and senior geisha the client enjoys. With such good care taken of the client’s needs and desires, why would he wish to start all over again with another teahouse and a new geisha?

Your Good Man’s Greatest Fear: That You’ll Change

For centuries, in what is probably one of the earliest examples of “relation ship marketing” strategies, teahouse owners and geisha have cultivated these years-long relationships with their clients. This is good business. Clients enjoy the continuity provided by familiar interactions with the geisha.

Likewise, your Good Man hopes that you will remain the loving, beau tiful, feminine, kind, sexy American Geisha that you were when he decided, with your subtle help, that he wanted to marry you. Do not disappoint him, dear Younger Sister. Continue forever to be his incredible Good Woman. If you could dig deep into a man’s subconscious, you would find that the new groom’s greatest fear is that after the wedding his wife will change.

Far from completing their training when they become maiko or even full geisha, Asian Geisha may continue taking classes for their entire careers . They may learn new entertainment talents, refresh old skills, improve their conversational skills, or educate themselves about subjects that allow them to converse knowledgeably and intelligently with the rich and powerful men who are their clients. (Even Prince Charles, of the British royal family, has been entertained by Japanese geisha.)

Yet, as much as they continue to grow as geisha, they never forget that their primary function is to have that certain presence their clients count on. Though individual geisha change over time, of course, the role of the Asian Geisha has changed little over hundreds of years. The culture of the geisha is known as “the flower and willow world” (karyukai in Japanese, a po etic term for the society within the geisha district). The geisha is expected to be as beautiful as a flower and as flexible as a willow, a lovely creature who is aesthetically pleasing to her client’s eyes and willing to bend to his particular (but reasonable) wishes. Should the men who patronize the geisha districts have wanted things to change much over the centuries, to be come “modernized,” the Asian Geisha would probably see it as her duty to accommodate those wishes. This has not happened. Clients desire that the geisha not change; they want her to continue to represent the traditional ways.

Make Your Good Man Feel Lucky
That He Married You

Do you sense where I am leading you, dear Younger Sister? Your Good Man married his American Geisha because of all you brought to him that gave him such pleasure: your sweetness, your niceness, your love, your beauty, your femininity, your sexiness, your sexuality. Now that you are married, he wants to continue to experience all of these pleasures. As the Asian Geisha focuses on continuing to please even her longtime clients, so should you fo cus on continuing to please your husband even after you are married. Your beauty, femininity, and sexuality are very important parts of your marriage. Take care of yourself, your husband, and your marriage. You were excited about getting married. Now stay excited about being married.

You have attracted and married your Good Man, the best man for you. You are so happy. You are so lucky. You made your own luck. But you feel fortunate to have found and married such a great Good Man. He, too, no doubt is happy to be married to such a great Good Woman. He’s a lucky man. You want him always to feel fortunate that he found and married you. You want to continue to treat him so wonderfully that he frequently says to you, “I’m so lucky I married you.”

If you are already married, I hope your wonderful husband does tell you over and over how happy and lucky he is to be married to you. If you, dear married American Geisha, have read this far in a book where you are a sec ondary audience to my primary audience of single women, I know that you are incredibly motivated to have a fantastic relationship with your husband. He is lucky to have you as his wife. Just as the willow bends and changes yet remains a willow, I only suggest that you imagine ways to bend and change that will allow you to remain the fabulous woman he married ten months or ten years (or fifty years!) ago. All the while, keep the knowledge in your heart that he is lucky that he married you!

In the midst of all of this happiness and celebration, Younger Sister Apprentice American Geisha, please listen to your Older Sister for just a few more words of advice about your marriage. You and I both know what happens to more than half of American marriages: They end in divorce, which means they end with love lost, beauty only a memory, femininity abandoned, kindheartedness turned to anger, sexuality long departed. And many more couples do not divorce but live out diminished or loveless lives together, perhaps an even worse fate. There must be a hundred or a thou sand or a million different reasons for those marriages to have failed. I want you as an American Geisha to avoid this painful unhappiness, of course.

The goal of this book is not just to help you get married, but to help you keep your husband happy and help you to be a happy wife, forever. Once again, hearing a little bit of my own story may be helpful.

My Failure as a Sweet, Sexy Wife
for My Husband

After Rich and I married, in April 2000, we began to plan for a baby. Rich, who is twenty years older than I, had never been married and had no chil dren. Our desire to have children meant he had to have a twenty-five-year old vasectomy reversed. Well, Rich was a little slow to schedule his scrotum to go under the surgeon’s knife (perhaps understandably!). But he did do it. By August 2003 we were informally paying attention to my fertility cycles, then happily fucking like bunnies to give ourselves the best chances of get ting pregnant. By December 2004 we were still not pregnant. We decided to try in vitro fertilization. We chose to work with a well-respected Korean fertility clinic in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Rich’s sperm were mostly “floaters,” not “swimmers,” and my egg-retrieval procedure, a lengthy, painful process involving multiple needle shots into my stomach and butt, produced only one egg, which did not mature and therefore could not be mixed “in vitro” (in a petri dish) with Rich’s underperforming sperm. The doctor’s opinion was that an attempt at a second lengthy, painful, and ex pensive egg-retrieval procedure would probably fail to produce more or bet ter eggs.

We decided to forego any further attempts to have our own child, and we decided not to adopt. Rich probably embraced the “no kids” mindset better and faster than I did. I grew clinically depressed for a while. What could I do since I would not have a child to raise for the next eighteen years? How could I fill the void of unfulfilled expectations? My life felt empty.

An idea developed in me. If I couldn’t give birth to a baby, I would fill the void by “giving birth to” a book about the Asian secrets I had learned. I thought they would be as helpful to other women who were pursuing love and marriage as they had proven to be to me. Rich thought the book was a good idea.