A friend mentioned the other day that when she was young, they still ran advice columns in the newspaper on how to ‘be feminine’. She remembered one such article suggesting that wives open the door for their husbands returning home from work wrapped in nothing but saran wrap. She said that pretty much since then, she’s made it a point in her life not to ‘be feminine’.

I cringed.

Here’s my take.

Being in your ‘feminine’ has nothing to do with pleasing a man. Being in your ‘feminine’ has everything to do with what pleases you. Literally, knowing what brings your body pleasure and doing it.

And, I say ‘your body’, because your body is where you actually experience pleasure.

Here’s the thing, most women (and men) learn early on in life to distance themselves from their bodies and emotions. Women are taught to judge their bodies at a young age. And women’s emotions, in particular, are deemed ‘big’, ‘irrational’, ‘unnecessary’, definitely ‘unproductive’, etc. The list goes on and on.

So, most women can’t readily identify what truly brings them pleasure. They either don’t think it’s an endeavor worth their time or they’re too scared to go after it. It seems easier to focus on all kinds of other things that we think will make us ‘happy’ – and this usually looks like us trying to please other people in some way or another.

The big secret – when you focus your attention on what brings you pleasure, and you make a practice of creating and expressing your pleasure in life, you become a deeply satisfied woman. A deeply satisfied woman exudes a certain kind of power – in the way she moves, her choice of words, her ability to be with big emotions (her own and others) – an authenticity that is magnetizing (and often intimidating).

In my world, being an empowered and fully feminine woman comes from loving yourself so intensely that you allow yourself to discover, and to have, what you most want in life. Which just happens to be a total turn on.

So, wrapping yourself in saran wrap becomes completely optional.