Unlike previous days, we spend a short time at the beach on Sable d'or. We drop off Chunk, and the Savage informs me he is taking us ( Nana is still with us) to a “savage” beach-isolated and natural....or so he claims. He parks the car, and they walk ahead through the forest on a worn path. They walk far beyond where I can see, but I'm not alarmed. I walk behind, as always, taking my time to ponder the greenery. This is, after all, the Emerald Coast or La Cote d'Emeraude. The forest is indeed populated with trees, bushes, wild flowers, overhanging vines all a bright kelly green. But more importantly, the greenery reminds me of the forest that surrounded my house where I grew up. I spent my childhood exploring forest like this. And it isn't just the appearance, but the sounds of the forest-the birds, the frogs, the insects, the wind in the branches, the sound of twigs snapping under the weight of human footsteps. How strange it is to travel over an ocean to a place you’ve never been before, a place almost completely alien, and yet it feels so familiar, so much like home.

I smell the beach, before I see it. It absolutely reeks. And my sense of smell is not very well developed so it is rare for me to be so overwhelmed by a smell, but even I pause. After I come to the clearing opening onto the beach, the smell is even more intense. Imagine an entire sea of rotten eggs and you have a pretty clear idea of what I encountered. Once I join the Sauvage and his daughter on the towels, he explains that the smell is because of polluting pig farmers. My understanding, or perhaps my radical misinterpretation of what he said, is that the farmers illegally discard the refuse from their pigs into the water, off some cliffs he pointed to, and then the tide brings the refuse to the shore. No wonder this beach was “savage.” Who in the hell wants to go swimming at Pig Pee Bay? And more importantly, why would bring one's girlfriend from abroad to this beach of all beaches?

But it seems both of them are fine with this location. I lie down as it seems I am stuck here. While Nana explores the beach, the Sauvage lies next to me sunning. He allows his hand to travel up my leg until I gasp for breath. I've never been the girlfriend at the beach, never been fondled in public, even at an abandoned beach. His hand lingers, and I work to control my breathing. Eventually he allows his hand to travel back down my thigh. He falls asleep quickly leaving me alone to watch Nana wade calf deep into the stinking water while I wonder how much more of this I can take.
Can someone please explain to me why I am so exhausted after making a salad, roasting a chicken with veg, preparing cardamom carrots, and baking gratin dauphinoise? I didn't even make dessert but today I feel like I was hit by a bus. I have a thousand things to do but very little motivation. The good news is that I had a very pleasant night with OE. We had dinner, watched scrubs and Cinematic Titanic's the Oozing Skull, and listened to French music. I even treated him to a pornographic cover of a Little Mermaid song that one of my old college friends composed. A lovely relaxing night.

Incidentally last night was the first time I roasted a chicken. In keeping with my new year's eve res, I cooking/baking a new dish every week. Apparently with a Gordon Ramsay cookbook, all things are possible as my very first roasted chicken was juicy and tasty. And despite my Grandmother's belief that all chicken must be cooked until is like a brick in order to kill any chance of food poisoning, both OE and I are fine.

Hopefully I will find the strength to post the next Frehel port night, but most likely it won't be until tomorrow.



WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS EXPLICIT MATERIAL!
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Now playing: The Herbaliser - The Sensual Woman
via FoxyTunes

The two girls have run off to play in the water and I'm lying in the sun enjoying being a hot young chick in a bikini lying on a French beach next to a hot French lover, when he says to me in English,"Some women don't enjoy sex, but you know you really enjoy sex. You are a sex killer. "

The advantage to being me is that I find pleasure is such a wide range of activities. It allows me, most of the time, to find pleasure in a man’s embrace regardless of his particular tastes. In the pursuit of pleasure, I’ve been bathed, massaged, blinded-folded, photographed, tied up, hand cuffed, whipped, spanked, slapped, bitten, stripped, watched, dominated, insulted, photographed, not to mention to mentioned kissed, fondled, sucked and fucked. Now I haven’t found pleasure in all of these acts, but I’ve given them all the chance to do so.

In his words this makes me a "sex killer." “Kitten” I correct him. “I am a sex kitten.” In one of those weird lost in translation moments, while in English the word Coquette means a saucy sex girl, in French the word is coquine. He doesn't understand my sad attempt at sex kitten so I say, "Je suis une petite coquine." He agrees and rubs his hand on my thigh, which is slicked with sunblock.

"Women don't enjoy sex?" I ask. I don't believe this for a minute. "No," he says. "Some just lie there." He mimes a bored woman checking her watch, "'Oh was that good?' But you enjoy it."

I don't just enjoy sex, I revel in it. The rush of exploration, the intoxication of flesh, the rapture of understanding another person's body, desires, better than he does, the ecstasy of taking a man and bring out the beast in him. Circe was not the only sorceress who enjoyed transforming men into animals. And I’m fairly masculine in my pursuit of sexual pleasure. I’ve been known to pick a guy, a reasonably attractive one, and take him home for the night if I think he'll be a good ride. I’ve even had the experience, often, of men overstaying their welcome. That whole "Your problem is somewhere between 30 seconds and all night" is not just a problem for men. Men thinking because they spent the night, they can just hang out as long as they like, raid the refrigerator, ask for coffee, even order in food. I've had to not turn bartender at the end of the night, but angry bouncer on them. "This is not a hotel, it's not even a motel 6. I am not leaving the light on for you so get the fuck out." And while most men have no problem treating women this way, they suddenly get all hurt when a woman treats them with the same sensitivity and care. In the words of Shylock "If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."1 And while I don't enjoy that kind of sex as much as I do when there is an emotional connection, I do enjoy it. And I have no problem with love 'em and leave 'em.

So yes, I enjoy sex.

And I am suspicious of this whole "Women don't enjoy sex" line. I really believe that almost ALL women enjoy sex as much as I do, but are perhaps more inhibited and afraid of embracing their own desires. And if you can't embrace your desires, well it's unfair to expect anyone else to do it for you. But generally when I hear a man claim that women don't enjoy sex as much as they do or at all my first thought is "Well he is clearly a crappy lover." Admittedly, it is some times a case of irreconcilable differences2, but more often than not it has more to do with miscommunication, fear, and/or a lack of effort. But if I am involved in the equation, the only way I won't enjoy it is if you aren't trying at all to please me. And yes that happens more than I care to admit because a lot of men seem to think that all they have to do is be in the room to fulfill me. And sorry boys, you might have the Sistine Chapel of cocks, but just gazing upon it is not going to fill me with ecstasy.

So when he said that most women don't enjoy sex, what I translated that as is "Most women don't enjoy sex WITH ME." I mean I enjoyed it, for now, but still. "Why would women not enjoy sleeping with him?" I wondered. While a little adventurous, he wasn't the Marquis de Sade.

On the other hand, I hadn't really known him that long so I wondered what he might have in store for me later. And I have to admit, I was a little excited to find out if he had any dirty little secrets. Because honey when it comes to dirty, nasty, dark desires, desires that most people won't admit to even knowing about never mind even thinking about hinting it to another person, I'm in. Because nothing is more exciting to me is a kink I haven't tried, a pleasure not yet tasted.

But I don't have the words for any of this. So I just lie in the sun with a contented smile on my face thinking of the pleasure to come.

**Polymorphous perverse is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to gain sexual pleasure outside socially normative sexual behaviors.
1 Merchant of Venice Act III scene i
2 Irreconcilable Differences is the name of a film in which Drew Barrymore is a little girl who tries to divorce her ambitious and unhinged parents played by Ryan O'Neal and Shelley Long.
In the morning, he kisses me, and we fool around a bit, but he dashes off to take his daughter to horseback riding lessons before I can get any satisfaction out of him. Then it's off to the parents for yet another fattening, but uncomfortably silent lunch. Before we pick up Chunk we stop at the local supermarche. The Sauvage has been sunning himself by the ocean with absolutely no sun protection. As he was baking in the sun, he occasionally smoked, which made me wonder if he was trying to end up looking like beef jerky by the time he was 50 and/or also trying to get cancer. I mean it's good to have goals, but really.

What I didn't think about was a sun burn.

But that morning he woke to find, surprise, surprise, he was burned. So we stopped at the supermarche. He walked up and down the aisles until we came upon an aisle with sunblock. I had brought my own, but it was something ridiculous like 40 SPF. The front of my sunblock should say something like "The only thing that can give you more protection is a lead barrier" and even so I was already lightly tanned. I figured he wanted less intense coverage like SPF 15. But he looked and looked at the shelves and finally said "Well they don't have what I need." And like a fool I said, "But there is all this sunblock."

"No," he says, "I want sun tan oil." 1

Now the one thing I learned growing up is that you don't argue with crazy. Crazy always wins. Not to mention, that when you don't speak the language well, every time you want to say something you have to go through the "Is what I want to say worth the effort of translation?" And most of the time, the answer is no. In this case, I thought, "It's not MY responsibility to stop him." After all this guy grew up by the ocean and if he didn't realize that he shouldn't put on sun tan oil at this age, well I doubted I could convince him. And since there was no sun tan oil, I figured it wasn't worth mentioning.

Except Jean had some and lent it to the Sauvage. So there he was on the beach, after the usual trek to the farthest possible spot, just to make it fun for me, oiling himself up under the bright afternoon sun.

I lay back in my rhinestone studded shades and pondered how this town, which had Roman ruins, could have inhabitants so utterly devoid of anything vaguely resembling logic.



** French Logic Returns
1 emphasis added