Category Archives: Hedonism

'Zero Sugar' halftime show could have been worse by Paul Rohrbach | Feb 08 2017 | 7 hours ago

Lady Gagas Super Bowl halftime show was surprisingly palatable, especially given the rumors that she would deliver a definitive statement on politics. Still, the sheer amount of praise thrown at her has effectively triggered the collective gag reflex of music highbrows everywhere.

The high school years of many Super Bowl viewers had been unwittingly intoxicated by Gagas postmodern cocktail of Dadaism and glam rock. By comparison, the muted hedonism of Gagas performance Sunday offered a sweeter aftertaste than Pepsis Zero Sugar the sponsor of the halftime show. The flashy, conspicuously pantless costumes and show-stealing microphone holder succeeded at least compared to the meat dresses from last year.

For a singer whose past artistic statements have been intermittently inscrutable, absurd and horrifying, the return to Guthries wholesome hymn This Land Is Your Land gave hope for the nation during a tough period. Gagas adequate musicianship and amateur Cirque du Soleil stunt work (P!nk, for the record, does it better) were perfectly suited to an audience ready to be wowed by satisfactory things.

The Super Bowl as a whole is an ideal platform for Gaga her forceful, unsentimental maximalism would be suffocated by any smaller venue. Her attempts at sentiment in the show, though, were almost as laughable as her effort to demonstrate proficiency at the piano during A Million Reasons. Gaga was in her truest element flashing a keytar during the shows aggressive rendition of Just Dance.

Though Gagas performance has been lauded as empowering, viewers could question how relevant her self-proclaimed goal to make you feel good is in this day and age. A parallel question, of course, is whether it is reasonable to expect something meaningful to be featured in the Super Bowls orgy of late capitalism.

The tradition of glam rock has always been more concerned with obscuring or deconstructing meaning, as opposed to finding it. David Bowie, for instance, espoused a profound aimlessness, once remarking, I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously. Gagas performance, like Bowies canonical Ziggy Stardust act, though absolutely galvanising, was never remotely purposeful.

Gaga, in many ways, is best understood as consumerisms own coping mechanism. As the ratings show, she admirably succeeded in her role. Though music highbrows, as mentioned earlier, may point to Princes, U2s or Beyonces transgressive halftime shows as enduring classics, the ratings in their infinite wisdom seem to lean towards Gaga.

Sitting comfortably as the second-most viewed halftime show in the Super Bowls history, Gagas Zero Sugar show packed enough flavor for a marketable quorum of viewers.

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Lady Gaga jumps off edge - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

Driving into Australias Rainbow Serpent festival we get the feeling were entering another world before weve even witnessed any of the boundless hedonism, wild costumes, art and heavy-hitting bass that are about to become our life for the next five days (if youre in it for the long haul, Mixmag did four).

Dust shrouds the car as we cut our way up a rocky dirt track towards the entrance as dry wheat-coloured hills dotted with gum trees and boulders create a stark landscape against the clear blue sky of summer in the Victorian bush. A single love heart dangles across the road shortly after tickets have been checked and wristbands placed marking the shift into the unknown for newcomers and a very special place for thousands who return each year.

Rainbow Serpent, or Rainbow, is the centerpiece of Australias bush doof scene (a term used locally to describe parties that shun the mainstream and happen deep in the natural environment away from capital cities), but the transformative festival has evolved to become much more since its early raving roots in the late 1990s. Theres still plenty of psy-trance, but these days youll find a very healthy dose of techno, progressive, melodic and feel-good house, disco, funk, breaks, minimal and more. All of this alongside traditional Aboriginal ceremonies, panel talks and guest speakers, workshops, performers and endless food stalls.

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of Rainbows first incarnation in a field near the town of Trentham, Victoria, in 1998. Now, more than 15,000 people from all over the world converge on sprawling farmland outside the tiny town of Lexton, about 150 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, at the end of January each year.

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Rainbow Serpent turns 20: a weekend of boundless hedonism - Mixmag

When the team behind Bali's legendary Potato Head Beach Club opened a luxury hotel, it was never going to be a getting-away-from-it-all kind of place on a secret beach somewhere.

Right in the heart of buzzing Seminyak, Potato Head is the place to see and be seen, whether you're sipping cocktails at the swim-up bar or dancing to the sound of live DJs after dark. And while its little sister, Katamama, which opened just a few steps away last spring, isn't a party venue in itself, it's certainly no shrinking violet, with a destination restaurant and bartenders who'll come and make you a cocktail in your room.

Yet, it's not all about hedonism. This is perhaps Bali's best hotel for those serious about design, from the angular brick mass of the exterior to the beautifully curated rooms and the thoughtfully designed indoor-outdoor corridors.

Hotel guests can book day beds at Potato Head without any minimum spend (normally around 30 per party), but for a much lower-key experience, Katamama's own pool sits within a pretty, secluded raised garden atop the complex's oh-so-cool coffee shop and boutique, which stocks stylish but pricey trinkets.

Katamama hotel is serious about design

If you have a hankering for Balinese cuisine you might be disappointed that the hotel's only dining option is an outpost of Aussie-based Spanish joint MoVida but you shouldn't be. Local ingredients are cooked to perfection, with highlights including tender calamares in squid ink dressing, and a modern take on patatas bravas. Even breakfast is delicious; there's no buffet everything is made to order, from the juices and smoothies to dishes such as shakshuka-style baked eggs served with sobrasada toast.

Location

Seminyak is by no means the most picturesque part of Bali, and its beach was in need of a serious clean on my visit (a fair bit of rubbish had washed ashore, apparently because it was rainy season), but if you're looking for a resort with plenty of bustle, and a bit more class than Kuta, it should do the trick.

The Katamama Suite looks out to sea

Between the slick bars and banging clubs you'll find some lovely places to eat, including Biku, which offers Indonesian dishes in homely surroundings, and The Halal Boys, a food truck serving Middle Eastern fare. For surfy vibes and better beaches, venture slightly north to the laid-back town of Canggu.

Aussie tapas joint MoVidaprovides the dining

Comfort

The smallest but still spacious rooms are the Island and Pool View Suites, while the largest, the Katamama Suite, has two bedrooms and panoramic windows looking out to sea (and, unfortunately, the stadium-like Potato Head building).

Practically everything you see, from the bare brick walls to the wooden furniture and beautiful terrazzo tiles in the bathrooms, has been locally made using top-quality Indonesian materials, but you'll also find a few mid-century originals designed by the likes of Arne Jacobsen and Le Corbusier.

Rooms are stylish but comfortable

The attention to detail has really paid off the dcor is incredibly stylish, but comfortable too. The bed in my Garden Suite was vast, and looked out towards double doors leading on to a small private courtyard. The huge bathtub and monsoon shower had the same view through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Other nice touches in the rooms include books you can borrow (running the gamut from F Scott Fitzgerald to Irvine Welsh) and a cocktail-making kit, complete with recipes. Though ingredients, along with the rest of the minibar, are chargeable, each guest gets a free welcome cocktail one quick call and someone will be over to make it for you.

Katamama, JL Petitenget No 51B, Seminyak, Bali, Indonesia (00 62 361 302 9999; katamama.com). Doubles from US$270, B&B. Malaysia Airlines (malaysiaairlines.com) flies from Heathrow to Bali Denpasar via Kuala Lumpur.

Wifi:Free

Access:No specifically adapted rooms but all are large enough for wheelchair users, and ramps are available around the hotel

Rooms: *****

Service: *****

Value: ****

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Katamama review: Craft cocktails, hipster coffee and haute tapas at Bali's coolest new hotel - The Independent

For an addict, things only become properly scary with the first futile attempts to stop: Barney Hoskyns. Photograph: Leszek Czerwonka/Getty Images

To this day I dont know why I said yes why I rolled up my sleeve and told my old friend: Do it. I cant say it was peer pressure. I harboured no secret longing to be a junkie. Youd think that, having just graduated with a first from Oxford, I might not have stuck my hand in this particular fire. In a moment of existential recklessness, I did it anyway.

The notion that I deserved to be happy simply because I was alive never occurred to me

Perhaps I had some sixth sense of what heroin would do for me: of how, temporarily, it would fill me and complete me and make nothing else matter very much. I did know, instantly, that Id always wanted to feel like this, as if suddenly there was an invisible forcefield around me. Id wanted to feel like this since I was a kid a skinny, shame-plagued schoolboy who could never tell you what he was feeling, because he didnt know.

I wasnt a wild child, madly acting out internal distress. Id tried to be good. But at my core I was loveless, ugly in my heart and soul. From the outside, it all looked respectable: the middle-class family, the businessman dad, the prep and public schools. Inside it was so different: without being able to name those things, I was bewildered and alone, and crippled by self-consciousness.

Within days of arriving at Westminster school in 1973 I fell in with the pot-heads, the bad boys. The first time I got drunk I vomited copiously in a pals plush home in Marylebone. But the thought that at the end of this lay heroin never crossed my mind. That wasnt the game plan.

At Oxford, in 1977, I became more acutely aware of how anxious and awkward I felt around my peers. I never spoke of it, and neither did anyone else. I drank alcohol and dropped acid. I hoovered up speed as a tool for cramming in information ahead of finals. But none of these chemicals did what I needed them to, which was to strip away self-doubt and nullify self-loathing. Only with opiates did my deep unease what Proust described as an agitation which at any cost, even that of their life, [addicts] must end begin to melt away.

Fate steered me into music journalism, a way of not really growing up while earning a modest crust supplemented by selling review copies of albums. Though I didnt believe all fucked-up rock stars were inherently cool, inevitably I glommed on to bands that dabbled in drugs. As if validating my own unhappiness romanticising my self-hatred I specialised in stars whod succumbed to the dark side of hedonism.

Depending on how you viewed it, the high or low point of this journalistic niche was the day Johnny Thunders dropped by the Paddington crash-pad I shared with, among others, Birthday Party singer Nick Cave. Thunders made us look like amateurs: Nick nearly overdosed on the cotton bud Johnny had used to strain his hit. Nor was my editor at the NME amused when I invoiced him for the quarter-gram of heroin Id scored to secure an interview with the former Heartbreaker.

My own heart was broken at this time, though I rarely talked to Nick about it. He and I didnt talk about much besides heroin: who had it, where to get it, how strong it was. In November 1981, we were busted together in Earls Court and spent a night in the local police cells.

Id fallen for a girl who broke hearts like the Comanche took scalps. Heroin was the only thing that salved the agony of her infidelities, but it also fooled me into believing I could win her back. As addicted to her as I was to drugs, in the end I was forced to move to California in the faint hope that putting her out of sight would put her out of mind.

The drastic strategy almost worked, but I was still left with me: the one thing I couldnt escape, however far I fled. In San Francisco I added intravenous cocaine abuse a horror-show of palpitating omnipotence to the chemical repertoire. Unwittingly, the NME paired me with a photographer who confessed a taste for Class A chemicals. One night we fixed coke till dawn on Polk Street and only just made a flight to Minneapolis to interview Survivor, then perched atop the US charts with the Rocky theme song Eye of the Tiger. Somehow I managed to bang out enough NME articles to keep cash rolling in, even after Nick Kent the papers most infamous dope fiend rightly lambasted my half-baked eulogies to self-destruction.

For an addict in the grip of a chemical obsession, things only become properly scary with the first futile attempts to stop. Friends took the same existential risk Id taken but were somehow able to pick heroin up and put it down. That alarmed me and made me wonder why I needed it more than they did. Was it less intense or less analgesic for them? The answer is clear to me now: without heroin in their bloodstreams, the world was nonetheless bearable to them.

I needed to change the way I looked at the world, but the motivation to do so came only in the depths of hopelessness: a dawning awareness that I could live neither with nor without drugs. At that grim point, marooned in Los Angeles in the summer of 1983, I was desperate enough to accept the offer of help to plug into something bigger than me. At the tender age of 24 I was ready.

It wasnt an overnight job; it rarely is. Returning to London, I reconnected with the old friend whod introduced me to heroin and found myself unexpectedly opiated again. Midway through my interviewing Alan Vega, on assignment in New York, the former Suicide singer produced a bag of cocaine from a drawer and I accepted the offer of a generous line. The experience was repeated a few days later in Detroit with P-Funk chieftain George Clinton. I simply hadnt learned that No thanks was the most important phrase in my lexicon.

Addiction, I found, wasnt a by-product of drug abuse. It was a false filling-up of spiritual emptiness

In late August, the penny dropped. I got a day clean, and then another. I kept plugging in. I started to share my life with others. In November, by an odd coincidence, I flew to Madrid to be a guest on a TV show featuring Alan Vega. When later he phoned my hotel room to say he had some really good stuff, I managed to reply that I was tired and needed sleep. It was as difficult and as simple as that. The next morning, I was able to amble about the Prado without feeling freaked out.

Its more than three decades since I put drugs in my body, so why write about them now? Hasnt the world had enough My Drug Hell stories? But it turns out its not really about drugs at all. As a wise fellow once said: If you think drugs are the problem, stop using drugs. I did stop, time and again. Then one day, in a perfect paradox, I surrendered to my addiction and never had to use again. Addiction, I discovered, wasnt a by-product of drug abuse. It was a false filling-up of spiritual emptiness, a set of protective repetitions designed to eliminate difficult feelings and choices.

For some years, unconscious of what I was doing, I continued the vain effort to fill the void within. I was petrified of rejection by women, by the world. Lacking much self-knowledge or any genuine self-worth, I chased acclaim and sought frantically to prove I mattered. Without drugs, there was still never enough love or money. There wasnt enough because I wasnt enough. Even after marrying and starting a family in 1990, the notion that I deserved to be happy simply because I was alive never occurred to me.

Most abstinent addicts will tell you they replace drugs with surrogate compulsions: sex, food, wealth, power, gambling whatever floats the boat. For me, the most insidious has been work itself, for what could possibly be wrong with working too hard? Workaholism may not have had the hazardous consequences that sex or gambling addictions have, but its removed me from life in the broadest sense of that word: kept me from intimacy with others, unwilling to plunge into the spontaneous experience of the everyday.

Addiction seems more ubiquitous than ever in our society. Pushed by new technologies to chase a fulfilment thats out of reach, Im tricked into believing happiness is perpetually just over the horizon. You might be a rock n roll addict prancing on the stage, Bob Dylan sang in 1979; money and drugs at your command, women in a cage but youre gonna have to serve somebody.

Today I take this to mean that I need to be involved in other peoples lives and need them to be involved in mine. I need to work through the pain of my past to arrive at a place where being me is not a source of relentless discomfort. And then I need to let go of as much of me as I can afford to live without: to right-size the distended ego and reach out to my fellow human beings.

Not using drugs is still the key precondition of my daily life: everything flows from it, all the incidental joy and necessary pain. (I still cant do it on my own.) Many view addiction as a curse, but I see it as the gateway to the greatest life I could have imagined. If it is a disease of More, then at last I am Enough. Ive stopped taking life so personally. Im not so plagued by shame and self-hate. When I finally grasp that nothing matters except evanescent moments of connection and love, everything becomes blissful and shimmeringly alive.

Barney Hoskynss Never Enough: A Way Through Addiction is published by Constable (16.99). To order a copy for 14.44, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

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Dark side of hedonism: a rock journalist's battle with drug addiction - The Guardian

By Beatric Larco

Here's a unique setting for an alternative holiday at the seaside - no diving or energy-consuming water sports, but a week of massages, yoga, and ayurvedic treatments combined with an all-vegetarian menu where alcohol consumption is frowned upon.

It may sound like torture if your idea of a vacation is to party all the time or experience thrilling adventures. But if you are looking for something more serene, a spot along the south coast of Kenya offers respite in the warmth of the Indian Ocean.

In one of my daily walks along the beach in Diani, Kenya, an 8km stretch of white sand about 520km from Nairobi, where I've vacationed in the past, I found myself ignoring a Private Property sign, walking right past a tree house and stepping into a deserted but carefully maintained garden with a wooden platform to one side and earth-coloured, low-roofed buildings.

Shaanti Holistic Health Retreat read an orange sign on a large stone next to the secluded beachfront. I wasn't sure whether holistic retreat meant I would come across a group of singing monks or a religious sect performing rituals, but I wanted to find out.

Orange and red cushions and mattresses covered a cement structure, which was later described to me as the chill-out room, as I reached what seemed to be a reception area.

Tasreen Keshavjee, the managing director of Shaanti, approached me and with enthusiasm explained exactly what the retreat was about.

Shaanti represents a holistic approach to healing. Since almost all ailments and diseases originate from stress and anxiety, the best way to cure them is to attack the root cause.

Take away the stress, take away the anxiety and work on the mind and body so that the process is sustainable, Keshavjee said.

The retreat, which opened in November 2004, is the first of its kind in the area.

Most of the numerous hotels that line this tropical resort provide massages and other health and beauty treatments, but Shaanti offers a specific healing method aimed at improving both the physical and mental state.

The wooden platform on the beachfront is for daily yoga lessons and the tree house is the vegetarian restaurant. The buildings are rooms for overnight accommodation.

Signs are written in English with a Hindi-styled font. Furniture is covered by orange and red cushions, which are made from the local East African kikoi material, a colourful cloth originally worn by men but recently very fashionable among young local designers.

Most of the floors are made from local galana stone, and fishing canoes are used as shelves in the restaurant and in the reception areas.

Meeting Tasreen and seeing the beautiful setting were all it took for me to book a massage - an abhyanga - where warm medicated oils are applied to the body to improve circulation and promote relaxation.

Moments before the massage, the resident ayurvedic doctor from Kerala, in southern India, met me to see what type of herbal oils were best for me.

Ayurveda is a 3 000-year-old system of healing, taught by rishis, or Hindu sages. It is designed to create balance and tranquillity in body, mind and spirit through massage, diet and meditation.

As I lay on the massage bed, the oils were heated and poured in a small bowl. Then I was told to sit up, and the masseuse began pouring the warm oil on my shoulders.

This massage consists Beatric Larco savours the serenity offered by an ayurvedic spa on the African coastof rubbing the oil up and down the arms and legs by going over the back and stomach; it lasts an hour. Unlike other types of massage, you don't relax during the treatment, but the effects are intended to last.

I was given a robe made of kikoi to wear for the next hour while the oil soaked into my skin. I headed for the open-air chill-out room, which looks out on the Indian Ocean, and ordered a freshly squeezed watermelon and mango drink.

After that, I returned for more - an hour-long facial massage, and a taste of the vegetarian menu. My meal started with a green salad, followed by assorted tropical fruits.

The main course was a light curry served with cumin rice, lentils and chapati, a puffy bread.

Kenya's coasts are becoming known for diving and for opportunities to see whale sharks, but Shaanti is yet another reason for travellers - especially Western workaholics - to go to Diani.

If You Go:

To reach Diani, fly to Nairobi and then on to Mombasa. Call ahead to the spa and arrangements will be made to pick you up in Mombasa for the two-hour drive to Diani, which includes a ferry crossing.

Rates: A $50 (R325) day package covers brunch and dinner, two yoga sessions, and various ayurvedic treatments, including steam bath aromatherapy. Two to 14-day packages are also available, including a two-week weight-control package offered at certain times of the year.

Accommodation rates vary from $105 (R680) for a deluxe double in the low season to $185 (R1 200) for the same room in high season, which includes Christmas, Easter and January-March. Low season is April-July.

http://www.shaantihhr.com.

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Hedonism and healing - Independent Online

Charlie can't get to sleep any more. He's a would-be hipster in his mid-twenties who has suffered the double blow of losing his high-pressured City job and his live-in girlfriend on the same day. Then a neighbour's cat is mauled to bits one of a series of gory dismemberments and near-killings that are presumed to be the work of the urban foxes who have lost their native fear of mankind. The lines between reality and fantasy start to warp. As he festers in his yuppified council flat, Charlie develops an obsession with this 'burnt orange'beast. It's a fixation that takes him backward to his childhood when, as an impressionable eleven-year-old, he had intense (and formative-sounding) brushes with a local fox and propels him forward into his bizarre pursuit of the creature now one that allegedly ends in their murderous confrontation amidst the riots of a city on fire.

Oscar Wilde famously described fox-hunting as the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. Could you characterise this monologue in which a man undergoing a nervous breakdown detains us with the story of his compulsive yearning towards a fox who seems to represent several contradictory things at once as the unreliable in garrulous pursuit of the ineffable? Well, yes but only if you meant it as a compliment. With a real flair for rhythmic organisation and shifts of tone, Titas Halder's highly imaginative script pulls you into a mind where various crazy preoccupations are becoming scrambled and it's as though musical motifs have started to strangle each other. For example, there's a vein of vivid satire in Charlie as when he says of a smug banking rival about to brag that: He stank of a new job. But then the idea of stinking is developed in directions that feel disturbing and ridiculous at the same time, starting with the stuffed otter that gets thrown into the fireplace during a drunken session with colleagues at an opulent City club: As it burnt it stank. He has visions of himself rescuing both his girlfriend from impending urban uproar and a fellow-banker, suspected of embezzling, from bloody torture in the boardroom. The potty and the apocalyptic refuse to be disentangled.

The excellent Ben Aldridge keeps you compelled by the character's monomania for upwards of ninety minutes in Hannah Price's well-conceived production. The audience sits in an L-shape round the small rectangular stage where the insistent, beautifully integrated soundscape, provided by the live D J, Chris Bartholomew, and the flashing neon rods and strobes create a disco atmosphere. This social environment, reflective of Charlie's former hedonism, serves to emphasise his essential isolation now. There are a great many virtues in Aldridge's supple and subtle portrayal the ground bass of trusting, genial plausibility as though he imagines he's talking to folk of the same condescending class; the finely paced escalation into flurries of madness (never overdone) etc. For me, though, his most impressive feat is to show the depth of the character's affinity with the fox. When Charlie lets loose those thin, unearthly yowls, or rolls on his back in dustbins, the identification is almost sexual in its intensity.

Human Animals, a recent play by Stef Smith at the Royal Court, imagined a world in which nature had started to fight back in our overcrowded cities. The piece became a political parable about ethnic cleansing and the hysteria whipped up against minorities as the human race retaliated with genocidal culls. But it would be a simplification of Run The Beast Down to say that Charlie's love-hate relationship with the beast illustrates the proposition that, to put it baldly, You are yourself the thing that you fear. That's just one of the suggestions thrown up. Halder's assured and eloquent debut play is all the better for being inexplicit about its main quarry.

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Run The Beast Down, Finborough, London, review: Ben Aldridge keeps you compelled by the character's monomania - The Independent

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Hedonism II Community | Home

Sooner or later, its gonna happen.

The primal urge to just let go, unwind, and unplug. Hedonism II on world-famous Negril Beach of Negril, Jamaica was created as a reward for all those times youve had to deny your basic instincts. In these lush gardens of pure pleasure, the word no is seldom heard.

After a week at Hedonism II, youll view the world from a slightly different angle. Youll be tanned and relaxed, and at times youll find yourself smiling for no reason whatsoever. Hedonism II, unlike all other clothing optional resorts.

Hedonism II is the only resort of its kind in the world. Its the resort where you can do what you want, when you want, in a way that you only can at Hedonism. From the nude beach to piano bar to the disco, Hedonism II is the best resort for adult only, all inclusive clothing optional travel. If you dont have fun at Hedonism II, you probably wont have fun anywhere.

And the best place to book your Hedonism II vacation is right here at Dream Pleasure Tours. Why? Dream Pleasure Tours is you main source for the best prices and best service for Hedonism II reservation.

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Hedonism II Resort Negril, Jamaica

Welcome to World Famous Wild Women Vacations The Party Capital of the Caribbean Book Now We Are The Beginning Of Your Journey

Our guests are typically 95% Male/Female couples whose wives or girlfriends may consider themselves Hetero-Flexible. Ladies, be curious, be empowered, and discover self confidence on a level you never thought possible.

At Hedo 2 there are no strangers. There are only great friends you have not met yet. Wild Women Vacations goes that extra mile with our Private Parties to insure our first timers will return again and again.

Wild Women Vacations organizes many PRIVATE parties strictly arranged to please our wives or girlfriends and the single ladies who may be joining us.

Some parties will vibrate. Some parties will allow free expressions of a womans inner most desires.

Some parties will push personal boundaries. Some parties will play unique games.

The goal is to awaken the wild woman in you as she may have been asleep too long.

Our themed RAVE nights change every year. It begins with a unique introduction, so arriving with all your GLO costuming from the start sets the mood for an explosion of dancing guests by the main pool. It only ends when the resort next door calls and complains.

Wild Women Vacations hires a local company who brings in an enhanced sound and lighting system along with one of the best DJs in Jamaica.

It is usually the night most guests remember when they return home.

Hedonism II sets up a weekly foam party every Thursday night after their toga party. The pit is set up in the courtyard. Music surrounds the area with current sounds and Jamaicas all time favorites.

Become lost under a tower of foam and dance with strangers, that is, if you can find them.

Many togas are typically discarded somewhere on property with guests not caring if they can relocate them.

One night a week Hedonism II has a fetish night. Wild Women Vacations takes this theme up to the next level as our guests are invited to a PRIVATE, more over the top experience. It can be costume oriented such as goth, leather, corsets, riding crops etc. Occasionally, it can be all of the above and one step beyond.

When one or several of our guests have an expertise in any one particular fetish, and wish to share their knowledge, we will set up a PRIVATE workshop/seminar for them. Ladies usually find these quite intriguing especially if never been exposed to others in the lifestyle.

Forbidden desires are awakened. Occasionally, once the genie is out, it remains out.

All week Wild Women Vacations will set up both PRIVATE and PUBLIC pool parties.

Daytime pool parties are complete with contests that will test the sensual abilities for both men and women. At weeks end you should never miss our Last Person Standing au natural pool party. It is usually shoulder to shoulder and ? to ?.

At night the RAVE pool party is always memorable and during certain weeks, we add one more special PRIVATE themed pool party.

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Christian hedonism is a Christian doctrine found in some evangelical circles, particularly those of the Reformed tradition especially in the circle of John Piper. The term was coined by Reformed Baptist pastor John Piper in his 1986 book Desiring God. Piper summarizes this philosophy of the Christian life as "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."[1]

"The great goal of all Edward's work was the glory of God. And the greatest thing I have ever learned from Edwards...is that God is glorified most not merely by being known, nor by merely being dutifully obeyed, but by being enjoyed in the knowing and the obeying" (John Piper; God's Passion for His Glory).

Christian Hedonism may anachronistically describe the theology of Jonathan Edwards: "God made the world that he might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory; but that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies His having an idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it" (Jonathan Edwards; The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 13; ed. by Thomas Schafer).

The Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes the "chief end of man" as "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever."[2] Piper has suggested that this would be more correct as "to glorify God by enjoying Him forever."[3] Many Christian hedonists, such as Matt Chandler, point to figures such as Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Edwards as exemplars of Christian hedonism from the past, though their lives predate the term.[4]

Christian hedonism was developed in opposition to the deontology of Immanuel Kant. Piper supported Ayn Rand's attack on Kantian altruism:

An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)[citation needed]

British writer C. S. Lewis, in an oft-quoted passage in his short piece "The Weight of Glory," likewise objects to Kantian ethics:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and to earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I suggest that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[5]

Piper later argues:

But not only is disinterested morality (doing good "for its own sake") impossible; it is undesirable. That is, it is unbiblical; because it would mean that the better a man became the harder it would be for him to act morally. The closer he came to true goodness the more naturally and happily he would do what is good. A good man in Scripture is not the man who dislikes doing good but toughs it out for the sake of duty. A good man loves kindness (Micah 6:8) and delights in the law of the Lord (Psalm 1:2), and the will of the Lord (Psalm 40:8). But how shall such a man do an act of kindness disinterestedly? The better the man, the more joy in obedience.[citation needed]

Some Christians object to Christian hedonism's controversial name.[6] It has little commonality with philosophical hedonism; however, Piper has stated that a provocative term is "appropriate for a philosophy that has a life changing effect on its adherents." Critics charge that hedonism of any sort puts something (namely, pleasure) before God,[7] which allegedly breaks the first of the Ten Commandments: "You shall have no other gods before me." In response, Piper states in Desiring God that "By Christian Hedonism, we do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. We mean that pursuing the highest good will always result in our greatest happiness in the end. We should pursue this happiness, and pursue it with all our might. The desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed, and if you abandon the pursuit of your own joy, you cannot love man or please God."[8]

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Christian hedonism - Wikipedia