Introduction

Darlings, darlings, darlings, have no fear, Mama Gena is here! Here to take you high and make you fly and have your way with the men in this world. My darlings, I want you to feel the same kind of navigational certainty with your men as you do when you slip behind the steering wheel of your car or assemble the ingredients for your favorite recipe or organize a conference at work. I want you to know your way, with confidence, over that terrain called "men." I want you to become the navigatrix you were born to be. I want you to feel every drop of exquisite power and beauty and gloriousness that you, as women, were designed to feel in relationships with men.

I am so over your sacrificing yourselves and diminishing yourselves and belittling yourselves. I am done, done, done, I tell you, with tales of women doing things to make other people happy, at the expense of themselves. And I want you to be done, too. Or at least, if not done, then open to the idea that things can get a whole lot better than they are. And how do they get better, Mama? They get better, so better, fantastically, unbelievably better, when we, as women, take control of the steering wheel and begin to own and operate our men, and own and operate ourselves.

I want you all to have the unprecedented experience of true partnership with the men in your lives. You cannot be partners with someone you are subservient to. You can't be partners with someone you are obligated to. Partnership is a game of equals, each playing their different part. A knife and a fork are equals, but different. Men and women are equals, but different. When we know our part and play it to the maximum effect, and guys know and play their part to the maximum effect, it is a fantastic combination. A union of differences! Which translates to the thing we want the most -- a friendship in which intimacy and closeness and fun grow over a lifetime. I want you each to relish your womanhood and relish the deliciousness of your relationships with men. Mama wants you to have a man who serves you, worships you, and adores you. A sex life that is constantly evolving, expanding, and giving you extended, massive pleasure. A deep, lovely friendship with a guy who is on your side and wants you to have everything you desire. A partner. A best friend you have sex with. Why would any sane woman want anything less? Ultimately, I want you to be capable of creating a partnership with another human being that reflects you, enhances you, and brings you and your partner the kind of intimacy and ecstasy that you long for, and probably don't see many examples of in the world. My life's work has been about that journey.

Let us reinvent the path to succulent, joyous relationships. Don't you want to get it so good that all of your girlfriends want what you have? Mama is here to pose and answer the question "What is it, exactly, that we are supposed to do with men?" She will explain why the time has finally come for women to fulfill their destiny: owning and operating men. It is a tough job, oh Sister Goddesses, but someone's gotta do it.

By the time you finish reading this book, you'll be able to grab the steering wheel and own and operate your men. All of your men. Your husbands, fathers, boyfriends, dry cleaners, brothers, bosses, employees, waiters, gardeners, and hairdressers. Go get 'em, gals, they are there purely for your pleasure.

At this point, I have a warning and a request: This book is by a woman, for women only. This book simply is not for men. I teach a whole wonderful course for men called "Mama Gena Gives It Up to Men." And do I ever. But this is not that. This is Mama, speaking to her sisters, and if you are a guy, you may feel offended or diminished or slighted. And that is not my goal. I adore men. I love the way they feel, the way they smell, the way they melt me with love and make me weak in the knees. I love to surrender to their touch and feel them respond to mine. I am grateful for their loyalty, their adoration, and their steadfast devotion. But this is not "giving it up to men" time. This is "giving it up to my Sister Goddesses" time.

A Sister Goddess is a woman who has taken one of my courses or read one of my books. "Sister," because we as women are all sisters, and "Goddess" because every woman has a spark of the divine in her. And when you treat a woman as a sister and as a goddess, you bring out the best in her. And bringing out the best in a woman is a very brilliant thing to do. The goal of this book is exactly that -- to bring out the divine in all of you. I have fantastic desires and dreams about women creating lives with their men that include an abundance of sensuality, fun, and intimate joy with each other. And my method is to exclude you, guys, and lay some truth on my Sisters.

Indulge Mama, would you? If you are a man, shut this book instantly. Return it to the shelf you took it from. Leave me alone with the ladies. It's time for a woman-to-woman chat. I'll get to you next time. Remember, Mama loves you....

Now, my darling Sister Goddesses, you know that owning and operating men is something that has been going on for centuries, just as gravity had been going on for centuries before Newton drew it to our attention. Women have been in charge of men since the dawn of time. It is only now that we can articulate and gain control of that which has always existed. Before we knew there was gravity, some valuable piece of jewelry might have been carried off by the wind or floated away or vanished. Once we knew about gravity, we could take advantage of it, count on it, put our fears to rest. We know that missing jewels were either dropped, misplaced, stolen, or else exactly where we left them. We are in control because we understand how this unseen force affects our universe. The laws of owning and operating men work precisely the same way. Once we understand the laws, we are confident, we are in control, and we know what to do next. If he leaves you, it's not because you are a loser or because you are not worthy or that you will never hold on to a man. If he has left, it's because you were done with him, or he was poorly trained before you found him, or you are clearing the decks for something much better. There is method to the madness.

Now, Mama, you say that women have been in control of men since the dawn of time -- what do you mean by that exactly? I believe that Helen had Paris by the balls, that Cleopatra gave eternity to Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, that greatness, inspiration, life, passion, creativity, new directions, innovations all come directly from the impact, influence, and presence of women.

I grew up in a world, like you did, where natural law seemed rather different. My father worked, my mother was responsible for the food and housekeeping. Cover story was that he made all the decisions; he was the head of the household. But I noticed that the most significant decisions in our family life originated from her, not him. We moved from one house to another when she decided she wanted a bigger one. There were three children because she wanted three. We got used cars because she thought new ones were a waste of money. My brothers became doctors because she wanted them to. And the only person her desire had no impact on was me, the only other female. I actually used to get quite annoyed at my dad for being so vulnerable to her power. Men were presidents, doctors, lawyers, and heads of newspapers, TV stations, magazines. They were God, basically, and yet I noticed my dad could not get out of the house in the morning without my mom picking out his clothes for him. A widely respected physician required help matching his tie to his shirt and would wear black socks and shoes to the beach with his bathing suit unless we stopped him.

And you know, the point I am making is not about fashion. It's about power and responsibility. It's about exposing exactly how things are and playing with the cards we are dealt, rather than playing with some already extinct, outdated models that won't lead to happiness. If we keep mimicking our parents' relationships, we will never get to experience the outrageous joy that is available in a game of equals, a game of partners.

Think of owning and operating men as simply an alternative experiment, darlings. The current experiment is an abysmal failure. You know, the whole women-serving-men thing, the whole he's-superior-and-we're-inferior thing. They don't like it, we don't like it. It's a disaster, really. Look at the divorce rate -- 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce, and it's 100 percent in the state of California because so many people get married and then divorce and then remarry and divorce and then marry again and divorce. One person with three divorces could be responsible for a 300 percent divorce rate. In New York City, 60 percent of all households are single. Why is that? And yet, women all over the world are stuffing themselves into long white gowns and scurrying down the aisle as though it were a blue light special at Kmart. What's up with that? If someone told you about a fabulous mutual fund you could invest in, and said that it might or might not give you any interest and that there was a 50 percent chance you could lose your whole investment, you know for a fact that you would decline the offer. So why are women rushing toward marriage with the same purposeful abandon as kamikaze pilots in World War II?

Why are we failing so miserably? In the last century, and in those before, one of the great driving goals of life was simple survival: food and shelter. Man was the provider and the woman supported him. The male-dominated relationship paradigm was great for survival of the human species. We are a living testament to its effectiveness. In order to survive, there needed to be a man going out to hunt or fish or gather, and a woman to tend the home and birth the babies. For the last five thousand years or so, women have traded sex, housekeeping, and childcare for food and shelter from male providers. Even now, many women put their needs behind those of their husbands. Happiness has not been considered a priority.

In the twenty-first century, in this country, we are privileged. Most of us have our survival handled, and we are free to pursue happiness. Once you have survival handled, the purpose of life changes. In this country we are promised, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These days, the common goal for individuals and relationships is happiness. Each of us can handle the survival stuff on our own. What we want with each other is more happiness than we can create alone. We lack the skills needed to create great, fabulous, fun relationships that start well and get better and better over a lifetime. We were taught how to "do" relationships by people who created bonds for survival purposes. For our grandparents, happiness was not a goal; food, shelter, and reproduction were their priorities. We're working with an outdated blueprint: the relationship equivalent of trying to fly to the moon in a 747. Or doing microsurgery with a machete. You can't reach your goals unless you use the right instrument.

Mama will reveal an entirely new model for relationships: the Sister Goddess model, one that is in sync with the men and women of today. The Sister Goddess paradigm is what will take us to our new goals: pleasurable survival, or the creation of fun, intimacy, happiness, gratitude, celebration, and joy. True friendships between men and women are the new opportunity of this century. This book will be a blueprint for how to successfully create a relationship of true friendship and genuine intimacy. That thing that everyone wants but no one has a clue how to get. You know this world is hungry for some new ideas. And ain't it the truth that if you want to make a relationship happy, you gotta ask the woman what's missing, and if you want to make a woman happy, you gotta ask her how, and don't we just have a lot to say on the subject, once you get us started? All of it pearls, pure pearls.

I know you all grew up hearing the saying "If the mama ain't happy, no one's happy." I also know that if you are still married or still with your boyfriend (and if you are not totally numb), then you are with a man who, to at least some degree, knows you are the center of his universe and encourages you to have your way with him. I know that if you have dumped your guy, it is because he thought he was the center of his universe. There is nothing more boring than a man who believes he is operating himself. Case in point: Donald Trump. Women do not leave men who give them everything they want. We are greedy, not crazy. We leave men who are self-absorbed, who don't pay attention to us, who think that what they want is far more important than what we want.

Training a man is not a solo activity. It is far easier and far less dangerous with a good girlfriend by your side. That is why Mama is here. So, as I say every chance I get, "Have no fear, Mama Gena is here!" Mama's gonna train you to have your way with men. For their benefit as well as yours. Come on, gals, it's just an experiment.

This book is my heartfelt, ecstatic effort to open new doors for you, dear Sisters, and guide you toward getting everything you want, desire, and deserve from your relationships. I want you to believe that the potential exists for actual friendship, passion, and union between men and women. That is the kind of relationship I am privileged to have with my husband, Bruce.

But creating a great relationship is learned behavior. We live in a world where people understand how to make a living. We spend years at school studying how to do that, and most people who want to can get jobs and maintain them. Au contraire in the world of relationships. I have seen very successful people in marriages they hate. I have seen the quiet desperation of women who find themselves capable of creating fabulous careers for themselves and incapable of creating intimacy with a partner. I have seen men helplessly trying to make their wives or girlfriends happy. I have seen couples who split up not because they couldn't make a go of it, but because they didn't know how to make things get better. I have seen anger replace love. To tell you the truth, I have seen very little love. More like cold war. Or games of what he owes her or she owes him. What I do not see is a lot of fantastic, juicy fun and friendship.

I started out with that exact degree of ignorance and cluelessness. When I was eighteen years old, I met this guy, Guy, who I thought was going to be my future husband. I loved him instantly, and on first glance. It was winter, and we were walking with some friends in the snow at Dartmouth College. Guy threw himself into a snowbank, just for the fun of it. I thought to myself, I will marry this man and have his children. He was tall, handsome, sweet, and so different from me. He went to prep school, I went to public school. He threw himself birthday parties and was on the wrestling team. I was a theater major and my friends and I were all tortured.

From the beginning, I totally and completely went out and "got" this Guy. He was dating another woman, so I lurked until it was time to make my move. On his birthday, I took a bus to his town, went to the pizza shop, and sent him an olive pizza, because I remembered a story I had heard about him eating olive pizza with his best friend: they left the open box on the windowsill, and the next morning the leftover pizza was gone. They had a joke that the Olive Pizza God ate it. I signed the humorous poem I wrote him, the "Olive Pizza God," leaving just enough clues in the note to reveal my true identity. It was not until two days later that he called me to thank me, but when he did, he invited me out to Chinese food at Dartmouth. My plan had worked.

The thing about this was that I was operating totally on instinct. I had read stories my whole life about women who had been swept off their feet by men and had men pursuing them and worshiping them. So here I was, capturing Guy, and thinking the whole time that I was doing it wrong, that it was supposed to be some other way, that my being in charge and making the moves was not how the fairy tales went. Therefore, I reasoned, something had to be wrong with Guy or wrong with me. Or the whole setup was askew. My expectation was that a man would appear and sweep me away to a marvelous life of intimacy, fun, and delicious fabulousness. This is not how it happened for me. Basically, I spotted him, I picked him, then I clubbed him over the head and dragged him back to my cave, rather than the other way around. I thought there was something wrong with me and the way I constructed and created my relationship. This man was perfectly wonderful, but I thought it was all wrong because I had done all the decision making and the conjuring. We moved to New York because I moved to New York. We moved in together because I decided. I had been taught the Barbie/Disney version of the perfect love story. You know, the one where the prince comes and sweeps us away into our storybook forever-and-ever land. I knew that wasn't happening to me, so I thought I better cut out from this guy, Guy, and make room for the prince. I didn't want to miss my chance. I had no skills to create a great relationship, and of course I blamed him, and myself. I blamed him for being boring, for not being fun, and for not being able to fix it. And I blamed myself for not being able to make it with this perfectly great Guy.

And the interesting thing was, I looked around and thought to myself, I will just find a couple who is having a fabulous time and ask them how to do it. They will tell me. Only, I looked around and I could not find anyone who was doing great in the world of relationships. Most of my girlfriends thought I had it pretty good and wished they were dating Guy. Older couples seemed content with mediocrity or a life of minimal communication, minimal sex, and minimal fun. My conclusion was that the loneliness and the silence that happens between couples who stop communicating was worse than being alone. I went to therapy and that made me feel worse. But I thought it was good to feel worse. So I broke up with Guy, determined to use my therapy to research every last drop of my anguish from which I could rise like a phoenix and be whisked into an ecstatic relationship life.

What happened instead was that I was celibate for about eight years while I examined, in fantastic detail, my problems. (I have since made up for lost time.) I also found out that many of the experts in the psychology of relationships do not have a clue about happiness, especially happiness between a man and a woman. And I had a lust for happiness. I had lust for a man. I had lust for lust. So I appointed myself the Creatrix of Relationship Technologies, a company and research facility for the study and pursuit of pleasure.

And I appointed my fabulous friend and husband, Bruce, as my research assistant and partner. I suppose you noticed that I leapt rather swiftly from my breakup with Guy to my marriage and husband. All those juicy details of how I found him and married him will follow. This is just the introduction. I decided that if we wanted to get a handle on happiness, we had better study pleasure, not problems. And if we wanted to study intimacy, we should keep on having it, rather than looking at the reasons why we shouldn't. And if we wanted to have great sensual lives, we had to study sensuality. Bruce and I have now been married for thirteen years. We work together and have fun together and have a child together and have great sex together. And we have been experimenting with researching pleasure as a discipline for the creation of a great partnership between a man and a woman. So far, it is so good.

And these are the doors I want to open up for you, dear Sisters, as a viable alternative to compromise, mediocrity, loneliness, and hopelessness in the man/woman game. We are going to examine how you can get everything you want from a man and have him be exquisitely happy giving it to you. I want you to have the sex you want, the love you want, and the intimacy you want. And all it takes is practice. What I mean by practice is, you have to learn to drop the habits that you currently have which may not be serving you in favor of methods of operating that bring you closer to your goals. This takes effort.

When a prima ballerina shoots across the stage like a weightless wisp of gracefulness, we all clap and say, "My, what a natural!" But there is nothing natural about it. That diva worked her ass off to become so gorgeous and ethereal. You are going to have to work your ass off to create new pathways by which you can achieve the intimacy, fun, pleasure, and happiness you want with men. Training a man is about telling the truth to men, nicely. It's about handling your anger and not spewing it all over him because he has not read your mind. It's about exposing your desires. It's about asking for what you want and being friendly in your communications. It's about taking responsibility for your pleasure. It's about including him in your deepest dreams and desires. It's about using him for your pleasure and remembering he lives to serve you and make you happy. Training a man is about reminding yourself that you are now, and forever, the superior being, and your happiness is the goal of the relationship. Otherwise, the relationship will fail. You do not have to change in any way. You can be exactly and totally yourself, and still have your way. In fact, that is the only way to have your way.

This book will give you lessons and homework. You will do as much or as little as you want. Bear in mind that this is just an experiment, an experiment in happiness and pleasure between men and women. You will be trying something new, which can feel uncomfortable at first. On the other hand, it's not like the old methods of creating relationships are so successful. We have each had our share of loss in that world. My goal is to create a new outlook that will in turn offer you an opportunity to create the relationship life that you have always wanted. And for each of you, the ideal relationship will be different. Some of you will save a marriage, create a marriage, or break up your marriage. Some of you will find one special someone. Some of you will get a different piece of ass every night of the week. Some of you will do a little of this and a little of that. As long as you are enjoying the scenery, Mama's thrilled to have you along for the ride.

Copyright © 2003 by Regena Thomashauer