<<< Previuous Page of
A Complete Aphrodisiac Dinner <<<
Louis XIV, for example, owned 413 beds with erotic pictures painted on the canopies "to encourage even the most frigid to thaw out a little." Madame Pompadour slept in a bed complete with built in bath. And a French courtesan of the last century, finding herself bored with convention, actually had a model built with an elevated foot, which could be raised or lowered depending on her man of the moment's height. She would place her feet in suspended stirrups, spread apart farther up, and thus be able to watch her standing lover perform to her heart's content. Those wanting to try something along these lines today can rent the Mistinguett Room at LHotel in Paris. Mistinguett, celebrated flapper and lover, once owned this fanciful room, in the middle of which, on a platform surounded by a sea of plush red carpet, is an enormous white fur covered bed made of thousands of tiny mirrors. A bit cheaper are motels like The Experience in downtown Los Angeles. There decadence comes at popular prices for a typical room containing a furcovered waterbed, mirrors on the walls and ceiling, TV cassettes featuring erotic movies, and "free flavored douches."
While sipping that last glass of champagne with silken pillows propped up behind the gluteus maximuses, mention might also be made of the odd ways beds have been used for love throughout history. In the seventeenth century, for instance, entire bridal parties slipped between the sheets with the newlyweds, and young brides often invited their girlfriends abed to test the powers of the bridegroom. The Greeks frequently went to bed together naked al fresco, under the sun or stars, and Louisiana's Cajun fishermen sometimes fished while making love in bed, tying a line to their big toes and casting it out the window no one explaining what happened if they got a bite (from the fish) at the right or wrong moment. Then there was Voltaire who wrote love poems and essays on the back of his naked mistress, using her as a desk between mutual climaxes, and the English playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared the writing of their plays but the same clothes, the same mattress and the same women thereon. Or how about those Abyssinian couples who sleep together in the same nightgown, or the woman in Mississippi whose husband divorced her when she insisted on two double beds one for him and one for her lover. Or those sexist Amazon women who commanded the male to lie passively on his back in bed while the female mounted his member and rode it to satisfaction.
The best time to make love in the bed of your choice is of little importance, but anyone fanatic enough to go to the trouble should know that the finest hour to plan an aphrodisiac meal would be between 4 a.m. and 12 noon. A little inconvenient for those who don't work at home, but according to research conducted by Dr. Adel Ismail at the Endocrinology Research Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, men, at least, experience the highest levels of sexual hormones during this time span. Noting that evening isthe worst time to make love (the male hormone level lowest at 8 p.m.), Dr. Ismail contends that "Man is a daylight animal, not a night time one," which makes a good case for the aphrodisiac breakfast.
>>>
A Complete Aphrodisiac Dinner is Continued on Next Page >>>