I always assumed it was merely a vehicle for small-time criminals to roll chumps. "What are you going to do, call the cops? You called an *escort service*."
Shanah Tovah. (This is most definitely the right thread.)
I seem to recall that I had a friend who worked for an escort service where sex was explicitly disallowed. (Not kink, I think.) But obviously they're not all like that.
"Sex you up" is contraindicated, for Color Me Badd reasons.
Dan Savage describes it for a chapter in Slouching Toward Gomorrah.
[Jokes about delivery, take out, and Chinese predacted.]
Everyone knows not to call Chinese escort services. Because, you know, half an hour later you're horny again.
Testing, testing...
As a famous blogger, you shouldn't have to pay for anonymous sex -- women should be lining up outside your door, just so they can tell people they got Ogged.
That's how it works for me: I just put up a post saying that I want to have sex, give the basic body type, etc., that I'm looking for, and tell everyone that the slot will be filled on a first come, first served basis.
Welcome to 5767, bitches.
"Predacted" is a great word.
If it's sex you want, I should think you would get in touch with a prostitute rather than an escort. Right? I'm seriously not getting the motivation behind this post -- my understanding of escort services is that like massage parlors, many but not all are fronts for prostitution -- but how is this noteworthy?
Sooo, in Berlin? My friend? As a favor to a friend of his let a friend of a friend of hers stay for a few nights at his place. The person, we'll call him Xavier, was also attending the Goethe Institut, but only for four weeks, in the afternoon. When Xavier left, I met him, a friend of his also named Xavier, the friend of my friend, a different friend of hers, and a dude from Slovenia at a beer garden, where I learned that the second Xavier and a friend of his had hired two prostitutes on Oranienburgerstraße and been taken back to the apartment one of them kept for business purposes ... and it was right across the street from the Goethe Institut! Those places aren't (I assume) cheap. Apparently Xavier2 and his friend were utterly trashed and got up to nothing.
14: maybe the point is that you don't have to sully yourself by consorting with any old streetwalker, or trouble yourself to actually find one.
Why not refer to the prostitutes Xavier as well, for symmetry?
tell everyone that the slot will be filled on a first come, first served basis
You make quintuple entendre look so effortless.
The two guys I'm calling Xavier did actually have the same name in real life.
Didn't ogged once remonstrate with profgrrrrl for wearing too-high boots? Or something like that?
I'd suggest that if ogged really wants to find out if they sex him up, he should make the call, and liveblog it, and let us know if it really is a "GFE", but I suspect it's been so long since he had a GF that he wouldn't be able to tell; plus, I'd find suggesting that the littlest bit distasteful.
Girl Friend Experience. I've done some research but never dived in. If I had unlimited funds, who knows?
They often seem to want references from previous sex care providers you have retained. I dunno what you do for references if it's your first time seeking professional help.
and let us know if it really is a "GFE",
There's more or less no way that can be true, no? "Girlfriend" for an hour is completely meaningless. (And if not, that's really, really depressing.) Since he probably actually misses the girlfriend part, this is probably not the way to go.
Ogged, you really need to rent Fearless.
I still think everyone in your story should be called Xavier, especially the dude from Slovenia.
Ogged, you really need to rent Fearless
Does this bear some obvious relation to the topic at hand, or is this like your Apt Pupil obsession?
It's not clear to me why Ben introduced so many characters in 15 who didn't end up having anything to do with the story he wanted to tell.
13 gets it exactly right. Apples and honey all up in the hizzy.
Guess what? You can also get dope delivered to your door!
Whatta country!
And Heidi Fleiss is setting up a brothel in Nevada for us ladies. No outcall, tho'...
I fear the stamina problem will be insurmountable, DE.
31: In that video, it's the man who's being the ice queen!
ha!
ha
um
Ogged, obviously, you want to pay me as a Research Assistant to discover the answer to these questions.
31: Haven't you heard of Viagra? Besides, it seems as if most of the professional athletes are on steroids and those nasty drugs kill libido. It's like that Jefferson Airplane song: "One pill makes you larger/One pill makes you small..."
Research Assistant in charge of satisfying Purely Academic Curiosities.
Isn't Viagra kinda dangerous if you take it every day?
That sounds like a question for your Research Assistant to investigate.
It's not clear to me why Ben introduced so many characters in 15 who didn't end up having anything to do with the story he wanted to tell.
To set the scene.
I actually think this is where ogged wants to reconsider girl27's application of yore.
So why didn't you name any of them except for the two Xaviers?
The scene involved several shadowy half-personages floating around the perimeter whose involvement was, but whose named specificity was not, important. Why you gotta hassle me so?
I bought a bedside table from craigslist today and finally, finally there are drawers in my room!
Why you gotta hassle me so?
Don't worry about it, man. L'shanah tovah.
Isn't Viagra kinda dangerous if you take it every day?
Can be taken daily, but like anything else some people are more susceptible to side effects than others. There's leeway in the dosage, can vary from (as I recall) 25mg to 100mg tablets. They're something like 8 or 10 bucks a pill, so there's this, cutters so you can get a prescription for 100mg pills, then cut them into 25mg dosages to save money.
There's an episode of Big Love where Bill is pounding so much Viagra trying to keep up with the three wives thing that he starts having problems with his vision.
Ogged should call escort service and ask if they have a cancer patient discount.
""I could just step off this cliff" feeling"
uhh--yeah. Into a dumpster filled with exploited victims, self-loathing losers, wasted lives, and tawdriness.
It is a revolting sight down there, but the good news is that there's almost no danger of falling in by accident.
I mean, you're not suggesting that you're actually *attracted* to that sort of squalid filth, are you?
Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
You're talking about lives wasted, lives ruined, lives stunted warped and miserable. It's a sickening prospect indeed.
But surely you're not saying something in all this actually *attracts* you? Or that the world-wide exploitation of women is something you think is good fodder for fantasy, or for jokes?
Well, that seems to have ended the discussion.
Cold takeout leftovers, anyone?
If you like the kind of sex you sometimes get with one night stands - and I do - the right kind of whore (in the right kind of market) will certainly give you a night to remember. From my limited experience, I can only give you a few tips:
- You should find someone who operates without a pimp
- You should find someone who will actually enjoy having sex with you
- You should hire her for the whole night (it may cost)
- For peace of mind afterwards, and for both of your sakes, you absolutely must practice safe sex. (I suppose you're only likely to get the choice in foreign locations, where the culture may be different, and condom use is not considered mandatory.)
The plusses? The existential adventure. It's very exciting, and the sex can be great for both of you. The minuses? It's very exciting (i.e. terrifying). It's also more than a little bit sleazy and no one (apart, perhaps from a few close male friends) will ever approve. Good or bad, it is undeniably part of what life has to offer.
45: Can we expand this to a general principle that it's immoral for anyone to use another person's labor power and keep the profits for themselves? Or to ask anyone to work in unsafe conditions or with unreasonable customers?
do we need to expand it to some more general principle in order for it to apply within its own domain?
oh--and anonymous client?
"- You should find someone who will actually enjoy having sex with you"
enjoy your self-deception much?
That was, indeed, pretty funny. Wouldn't you think that 'Actually enjoying sex with you' would include 'not charging for it'?
Maybe Anonymous Client meant "someone who will actually enjoy [getting paid for] having sex with you." I mean, if you love whatcha do...
right, but this is someone who thinks they can recommend a practice by saying "Good or bad, it's undeniably part of what life has to offer".
as is putting your hand in a running garbage disposal. As is stealing twinkies from the 7-11. As is--well, you can continue the list.
If there are any things it is wrong, inconsiderate, self-destructive, or merely juvenile to do, then they too are undeniably part of what life has to offer.
you're going to have to try harder than that if you really want to burnish your jenseits von böse street cred.
49: Yeah, fine, the sex trade is bad. I'm reading Marx currently, about the early days of capitalism (currently being replayed in the Third World, to our benefit), and it doesn't seem to me that prostitution is qualitatively worse than what the capitalists would do to everyone if the state didn't step in.
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade -- but maybe that would be impossible, because it would mean recognizing that the majority of us end up selling our bodies and letting someone else take the majority of the revenue our bodies produce.
Maybe this means that we should legalize and regulate the sex trade
I think this may be a good idea from a harm-reduction point of view. Doesn't change the fact that anyone having sex with a prostitute is overwhelmingly likely to be deluding himself if he thinks she's having a good time.
likely to be deluding himself
I thought one of this blog's central projects was ogged's self-delusion and our complicity in that delusion. I'm so confused now.
54: See, this is the kind of innovative thinking that will help Democrats to reach out to those who are disaffected with the political process.
I think prostitution should definitely be decriminalized, but the only people I've known who've worked as prostitutes or strippers/lap dancers have been either junkies or messed up women who were sexually abused as kids, or both! the exacta of sex workerdom. no, I guess I did meet one woman who seemed like a no-nonsense businesswoman about the whole thing, and made $50,000 tax-free per year. of course, it may be that we just didn't know each other well enough for me to hear about the sexual abuse part. we only met twice.
49, 50: Based on what I've read from sex workers, it's not total self-deception. Some prostitutes, escorts, whatever they prefer to call themselves, like their work. Some don't. For some, it's a trap, for some, it's better than retail. I suggest Real Live Nude Girl by Carol Queen as a starting point. I know I've talked with escorts; I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine.
That said, we live in a sexist culture that's deeply confused about sex, so it's easy to over generalize in any direction and it's usually an exploitation of power to hire sex workers. I suggest self-reflection and research in place of certainty.
I recall thinking at the time that they liked their job better than I liked mine
This impression is definitely out there, at least in interviews and things I've read. But I'm suspicious of it, because sex workers must internalize a lot of defensiveness, so they're quite unlikely to admit (even to themselves) that they feel exploited or used, and if, like alameida says, a lot of them were abused, their "liking" of the job isn't necessarily a healthy thing. But then you get into issues of autonomy and choice and paternalism, so it gets a little hairy.
"I suggest self-reflection and research in place of certainty."
why "in place of"? Why not "as a means of arriving at"?
That's like saying "I suggest doing lab-experiment in place of discovering scientific results."
I'm all for self-reflection and research. (And self-research, as an alternative to hiring sex-workers, for that matter).
But certainty is not always a symptom of naivete, unreflectiveness, or lack of research.
I'd like to reclaim the word "hairy" from the forces of pejoration, but the fact is that whenever I see a guy in the locker room who's as hairy as I am, I think, "that's just never attractive."
By the way, Adam, I think most of these escorts work independently, so they don't share their revenue with anyone.
59: It gets hairy 'cause it's a little true for everybody, and a lot true for some people, and a little true for everybody in all careers. Almost everybody only does thier job 'cause they're paid to, and almost everybody tries to find a job that they can enjoy well enough that combined with being paid, it's a nice enough life. Our culture loves to economically exploit people into doing its scut work. Prostitution is worse than most jobs in this regard, because we, as a culture, are very very messed up about sex, about gender, and about power. But it's not unlike other jobs.
So saying, 'I think a lot of prostitutes are victims, to a greater or lesser degree, of false consciousness' is true, but not necessarily the last word on the subject.
One acquaintance who used to be a stripper to pay for college noted that there's a non-insignificant percentage of women who get into it intending to do it for a short period of time (just to make some quick cash, to put yourself through college, etc.) but end up getting sucked in, either through drug use or simply because the first 'real' job after college probably doesn't pay as well as stripping. And those were women that weren't abused or junkies going in. Nasty profession.
NBarnes, I'm inferring the following argument from what you've said: Lots of people hate their jobs, or do it only for money. We only treat prostitution differently because it involves sex. This is implies that sex is somehow a special case. But it's been a pretty good-sized project of the forces of goodness for the last few decades to demythologize sex, and to put it on the shelf next to most other human activities: to show that it's not a special case. So our response to prostitution is, at least formally, not clear.
Is that right?
61: So if Democrats supported legalizing prostitution, they could play it as supporting entrepreneurship! (I know that not all prostitutes have pimps, but I was responding to kid bitzer's comment, in which pimps were part of the exploitation.)
Has anyone seen the Daily Show segment on pimps?
The job nature of prostitution means that, if prostitutes hate their jobs, they're just like lots of people. My ultimate job was so terrible that I didn't sleep well for about 18 months, and I finally made a big financial sacrifice and took early retirement to maintain my sanity, such as it is. I was seriously in danger of picking up a felony assault beef.
Likewise, it doesn't prove that prostitutes don't enjoy it just because they're paid. If they do enjoy it some, it just means that they have an OK job, which lots of people do, but not most. It doesn't mean that they're living a life of ecstasy in fairyland.
I've never understood the argument that strippers were mostly abused in childhood, so stripping is abusive. For one thing, a lot of the same people who say that also say that most women were abused in childhood. And on the other hand, what's happening now doesn't cause past events.
Portland, OR, is the stripper capital of the universe and I've met a moderate number of strippers socially. (Reed girls sometimes work as strippers, rather than as waitresses for 25% of the pay. Go figure.). Some really do enjoy the attention and their ability to manipulate men. Some frame it in an avant-garde post-modern liberationist way. Some have artistic or comedic pretensions. For many it's just a better-paying job than anything else they could get. My guess is that a better-than-average stripper makes more money than an entry-level lawyer and probably enjoys it about as much. (Taking debt into consideration, my guess is that most MDs are 35 or so before they're financially better off than fairly successful strippers.)
Strippers always have to deal with the fact that a new person they meet will reject them, once they find out that they're strippers. In super-hip Portland, that's not much of a problem; in the slacker world, strippers are the queens and duchesses because they're not broke.
How many strippers have successful careers past age 35, though?
It's not a lifetime career, though I have met a 40-year-old stripper. Quite a few were financing school, one of them law school. A lot probably go into the restaurant biz. (The whole restaurant biz is riddled with drugs and alcoholism, as is the music biz.) I think that quite a few marry clients or whatever you call them, on the basis of a shared realism about life.
I'd say the upper limit is closer to 45, especially if they don't have children, but that might just reflect my own sick tastes.
Attitudes like kid bitzer's are total reaction formations.
64: Tim, I'm not one of those people that say that 'sex is just another thing'. Sex is clearly important to humans and 'means something' in ways that most other human activities do not. However, I think our culture regards sex in ways that are unhealthy and... divergent from the ways that sex is authentically special.
Also, I tend to believe that sex is important and special to almost everybody, but differently important and special to almost everybody. The way I feel about sex and the way I relate to it is very different in important ways from how other people around me do; lots of people that agree that sex is special and important may not agree about a lot else about it.
I think there's a lot of tendancy to over-generalize about sex. I think a lot of people universalize aspects of their sexual experience in error. And I especially think that it's almost always a mistake to talk about how someone else experiences sex and their own sexuality, and moreso when talking about groups of people. And so I don't like to make generalizations about prostitutes, but prefer rather to talk about specific examples of sex workers talking about their own experiences.
Oh, and, thank you for the promt, Tim. That should serve as a response to 60, as well.
comments like ben w-lfs-n's are total reaction formations.
(i.e., nyah nyah back atcha).
Not that long ago I was offered 5K a month by an out of town business man who was in the city 2 or 3 times a month. I have to admit I considered it. After taxes on my tuition remission, I take home quite a measly salary for NYC, I have debts, etc. But prostitution is not just like any other job, and shrugging, lots of people are exploited, hate their jobs, etc. seems silly to me, until we are getting down to really ruthless levels of exploitation. Sex is intimate and personal and central to self and identity, and even though its meaning might be understood differently by different people, I'd be surprised if there were anyone for whom selling it was not qualitatively different from any other sort of labor. You might be willing to deal with that and try to isolate its effects for the money, but it's not the same.
Ogged's so hairy, he ain't that hairy.
I'm not sure that everyone feels that way you do, Tia.
I have never had any interest in prostitutes, nor very much in strippers. For me it is as simple as not wanting anyone who doesn't want me. That level of role-playing would be intolerable at home, unspeakable. I have been told, I think by Amanda, that my attitude shows a lack of respect of controlling personality or something.
But lying during sex sucks.
I think that both prostitutes and johns are living in the realization that normal ways of sexual relating (marriage, dating, transgressive orgies, hooking up, singles bars) are not working for them. So they figure something else out.
As I've said, sexual happiness is regarded as the norm, but it really isn't.
No actual skeletons in my closet regarding prostitution. Strippers, yes.
52: You're right, of course. I should have gone with something along these lines:
"It's the business of very few people to be independent: that is a right of the strong. And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but excessively daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of which is the fact that no one's eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets isolated, and is torn apart by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience. If such a person comes to a bad end, that happens so far away from men's understanding that they feel nothing and have no sympathy—and he cannot go back any more! He can't even go back to human compassion."
So true.
I have a feeling that Anonymous Client has an unfortunate incident with a horse in his future, followed by an unhealthy relationship with his sister.
much better!
Now I believe everything *else* you've said, too.
78: was he into dog rescue? That's an awful lot of money-- I'll buy some Ms Clairol.
adam--are you sure it was the horse first, then the sister?
I thought it was the sister first, then the horse.
(Tragedy always repeats itself, first as sistery, then as horse?)
I am not talking about the woman here, and with a friendship and mutual desire it would be good sex and gift, and nothing wrong with that. But otherwise it is just jacking off in somebody else's body, and that would digust me about myself. I never seem able to manage the necessary objectification.
I have or had degrees, much lesser, of the same problem during casual sex. Objectification, role-playing, politeness, kindness...emotional constraint during physical intimacy seemed...I don't know.
More than one woman told me I wanted their soul.
Hey I read the sister's book! Who amongst you can claim such erudtion and devotion?
81 really scared me today. Damn I'm in a mood.
"81 really scared me today"
maybe because it gives voice to the megalomaniacal fantasies of every two-bit banana-republic dictator who fancies himself a welt-historischer demi-god?
maybe because our country is currently run by a couple of them?
you know--the old restraints are gone. Quaint customs. Mere personal virtue. We, the few, strong, daring ones don't need to chain ourselves to mere convention (or mere Conventions)--indeed, we would be wrong to chain ourselves. We would be wronging: ourselves!
Cheap thugs always like this stuff. And it is scary that they're in power.
You know, these days it's not difficult to find blogs written by women who work as escorts.
I will say that while this:
Sexual predation on girls who are being exploited as much by their johns as by their pimps? Touching another person whose feelings towards you range anywhere from boredom on a good day to utter disgust and loathing combined with fear on the bad days?
certainly describes a fair amount of the sex workers out here, it certainly doesn't match what little I know about the realities of the high end of the market.
88:Naw man, it is always about me.
true, true: where there are humans, there is variety.
But how impressed should we be by the purported exceptions?
Too much of this sounds like variations on "my aunt smoked cigarettes for 80 years and it never did her any harm."
Perhaps she did, and perhaps it didn't. That does not exculpate the tobacco industry.
Most people outgrow the Nietzsche phase once they turn 20. The rest grow up to give embarassing talks at Rutgers.
I agree with Tia. I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has. Not so sure that would be a very pleasant world, come to think of it, but it doesn't look much like the one we have now.
certainly describes a fair amount of the sex workers out here
Er, that should be out there.
As Josh notes, the high end of the market's much, much different from the low end. I've known three graduate students--two (gay) males, one female--who supplemented their income working as escorts/performers-in-light-"homemade"-bondage-videos-for-personal-consumption. (A phenomenon which has been discussed here, or hereabouts, recently, I think.) Both males loved their work, but as highly-educated, young gay males in the Los Angeles area, they got to choose their clients. (One even got paid to spend a summer in Italy.) I never talked to the female about it, however, she always sounded excited before heading off to a client's house.
You see. McManus has just explained how sick normal relations can be.
I'm really disagreeing now. I don't know any prostitutes, but I knaow that some strippers actually do like their jobs.
A lot of stuff is really hard for me to understand, but to me having sex with a succession of random strangers met in bars is about as hard to understand as prostituting oneself. One of Heidi Fleiss's sex workers was quoted something like "Hey, I like to screw, and if I'm getting paid, that's better yet". She was very high-end, of course.
"Nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job": my own bad job wasn't a lawyer job, but I ended up angry and stressed all day, every day, for about 18 months, to the point that I was acting out destructively after work, and also feared that I would do something on the job to get me fired, or even prosecuted. Many non-sex-worker jobs have very, very high negatives.
Hey - ogged should offer to pay B.
I was surprised she still had that post up, actually, I thought she would have deleted it after the fact. I know, I know, I'm projecting my middle class, patriarchal false consciousness on to her. Sorry.
I can imagine a possible world where a bad day at the sex worker job was nothing more and nothing less than a bad day at the lawyer job, but that possible world is one in which sex has no meaning at all, or at least no more meaning than a usual profession has.
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
There's plenty of sex workers who'd dispute the thesis that paid sex is meaningless. Again I recommend Carol Queen's writing on the subject as a starting point.
Okay. "Even if we assume that paid sex is meaningless...."
Okay:
I don't find dance performance mutually degrading, from ballet to Fosse to Cunningham, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
I don't find massage mutually degrading, and I should be able to imagine a continuum...
So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line of a pleasurable massage, a handjob, blowjob, penetration...
I must presume the problem is mine, and likely sexist.
The meaninglessness of paid sex doesn't entail that sex has no meaning at all.
Not quite what I said. Part of the reason, aside from the exploitation aspect, that we have a problem with thinking of prostitution as just like any other job is that we treat sex specially. Even if we're not all religiously-prudey about it, we might think that it's an important part of our lives, or love, or part of our identity.
I was postulating that in order for sex work to be as unproblematic as working as a barrista (my original post didn't say totally meaningless, just as meaningless as most jobs), that sex would have to become much, much less important. I am unconvinced that that would be a good thing.
bob--
sounds like you are trying to talk yourself out of a reasonable position by means of a bad argument. You're better off with the reasonable position.
Sex is different. (related to the "meaningfulness" Cala has adverted to). As a result, it can be degrading in a way few other things can be.
Everyone not in the grips of an ideology knows that. It's hard to say why it's different; it's hard to measure the dimensions and degrees of its difference.
Those degrees and dimensions differ for different people, making it all the harder to figure out why and to what extent sex is different. It's all very confusing, and it would certainly be nice to get clearer about it.
But your line of thought in 101 will not get you clearer about it.
I mean, I can hold my breath for one minute without much effort. I can hold it for three minutes without suffering permanent ill effects. "So unless someone can help me with a clear qualitative difference somewhere along the line" between one minute and one hour, then my belief that there's something different about not breathing for an hour must be based on...sexism?
Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism. (Don't trust me--ask the commenters who have been the most vocal on this point.)
I'm not saying its forever shrouded in inscrutable mystery. I'm just saying that you seldom get the correct explanations by rejecting the observed data.
I am glad this isn't posting from my usual ip so that I can say that my one experience of prostitution, which I entered into out of curiosity and a frank desire for the money and a sense that if freely entered into, blah blah blah, how bad can it be? Kind of convinced me (and yeah, anecdotal sample of one) that there may well be no such thing as workable prostitution.
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
So yeah, it wasn't the sex per se; it's more all the other things that, i think inevitably, are bound up in sex. Issues of trust, intimacy, desire, all that stuff. Very hard to negotiate honestly or fairly, especially when you throw all sorts of other realities about gender roles and male/female relationships into the mix. I'm sure there are women who find it just a job, or who find it enjoyable even in some respects, and I can see how the Annie Sprinkles and Suzie Brights of the world could see it as a kind of teaching vocation, but most of the time that's not how it's working.
107: Not hard to discern, for those who bother to read his blog, where he's been writing about this for months.
97: Read that post more carefully. I never said I had done it; merely that I was thinking about it.
"Thinking about it" seems to be about where ogged is too, if kid bitzer hasn't scared him straight.
103: Look: there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake. And it's not sexism.
Bullshit. Our rather prudish attitudes towards sexuality are driven almost entirely by "morality" and commodification. I do not mean prostitution; I mean the commodification of virginity, the judgement of emotional attachment by the size of the stone in the ring or the gifts that precede it, the judging of women as Madonna or whore ["the girl you don't take home to mother"] that is so built into our culture.
Is sex always different from a casual handshake? No, tho' it can be, much in the way that an intimate conversation is different, or an in-joke is different. One can choose casual sex, the zipless fuck, fuck-buddy-no-strings-attached; one can choose something else that one invests with more import. It can mean something, it can mean nothing, depending on circumstance and perception.
Is your basic street hooker being exploited and abused? I'd say that she [or he] is, about 99.9% of the time - drug addicts, runaways, people with fragile grasps on reality, people under duress, people with baggage who sell themselves because they see no other way to survive. Is every person who sells bodily favours exploited? Not at all. There is a vast difference between the street hooker and the high-end callgirl. She [or he] who can choose and refuse clients, who is paid well, who has other options, and has chosen to be a sex worker is not really different from the programmer who sells her skill, the lawyer who sells her expertise. What is different is society's attitude. Does a het male gynecologist slaver over every vagina he examines? Of course not; he partitions his "work" and "personal" lives; it is entirely possible for a sex worker to do the same.
In re "the zipless fuck". I'm not sure what that expression is actually supposed to indicate, but the image was brought to mind.
The usual quotation:
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
Ben w-lfs-n is the new Apostropher, just like referring to Daniel Davies' attractiveness is the new bestiality reference.
114: I believe it's an Elmo quote from Sesame Street episode 1006.
Wikipedia on "zipless fuck," coined by Erica Jong. Jong explains, "when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."
107 and 108 made my night.
Also, since my post failed I'm dying to know who this is aimed at:
In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience.
Also, it looks like the page that takes you to doesn't have the Secret w-lfs-n Hack enabled.
(I haven't even read the damn thing. Where's your cultural literacy, people?)
I think upthread there was some equation of one night stands with meaningless sex--I just wanna say that in my own life, I don't see it that way. I still fondly remember trying to toss blueberries into the belly button of my second ever one night stand and eating them out; with all the good ones there's been a lot of mutual tenderness and care and humor. I've never had any sex that I'd describe as meaningless.
118, what Secret w-lfs-n Hack? Also, that delay thing has been around since forever.
I still fondly remember trying to toss blueberries into the belly button of my second ever one night stand and eating them out;
Blueberries have genitals?
Blueberries have genitals?
You know that little concave bit at the bottom? Yeah.
Where do you think baby blueberries come from?
I think it's too simple to just say that all our attitudes about sex are due to sexism or religion or patriarchy or whathave you. Obviously it's hard, if not impossible to distinguish what is and what isn't, but there's surely a difference between mutually consensual meaningless sex, and sex that happens as a transaction. There's also all the overhead involved with sex--pregnancy, disease risk, penetration, etc--most of which obviously falls on the woman in a sex-for-money situation, even if sexism were completely out of the picture.
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Also, I have especial distaste for the statement, 'there's a reason why nearly everyone has a deep intuition that sex is not on the same continuum as a casual handshake'. For starters, you qualify it as 'nearly everyone', which leaves some people... what? I never claimed that everybody shoud want to sex or buy sex. I never claimed that everybody could buy or sell sex and be happy with the experience and themselves. I'm saying that some people report (and it's an objective fact that they report this) that their experience of selling sex has not been as degrading, humiliating, or otherwise as negative as you think it... is? Ought to be? Is for them because you know better than to believe their self-reporting? If your statement is non-universal, and you admit that it is not, I'm not sure what your point relative to the larger discussion is.
And then we move on to the phrase 'deep intuition'. I'm quite confidant that we could find other 'deep intuition'-based policies. We could take polls and find out if disgust at homosexuality is a cultural trait or 'deep intuition'. Or perhaps if traditional gender roles are a social construct or if 'deep intuition' tells us they are innate.
97: Read that post more carefully. I never said I had done it; merely that I was thinking about it.
Sorry if my comment implied that you had. I just couldn't resist the reference given the topic. I think you should delete that post, given the small chance of losing anonymity.
I do believe some people could like it OK, have it as an acceptable job, etc. I'm just saying I know people who would have said all that at the time, but were really drug addicts, messed-up people etc. actually, I do know a woman who used to act in porn and work in live peep shows in SF, and who really thought it was fun, sexy and great. I wasn't thinking about her when I wrote the comment above. she is just a healthy person who likes kinky sex. irritatingly much, maybe, to where she's talking about her sex life all the time, but that's not unhealthy, it's just boring.
While Teo is out searching the laundromat for punani like De Leon searching for the Fountain, multiple women on this site alone have been offered substantial sums of money for sex by (guessing from the tone) people who were not all that unattractive.
This is why men kill themselves at 4 times the rate of women.
I think people who talk about their sex lives all the time should be quarantined for the good of the rest of us.
129
to say that 103 contained an 'argument' would, I think, be going a bit too far. It merely tried to highlight the plausibility of a premise.
That sort of thing happens pretty often when you get close to argumentative bedrock. It's very hard to argue that the experience of pain is intrinsically bad, but if you encounter someone who is trying to talk himself into the view that pain is really a good thing, it's worth reminding him that it hurts a lot. That's not an argument either, but it's worth saying.
Appeals to intuition are, of course, notoriously dodgy and subject to abuse. Even as I wrote it, I was aware that 103 could be parodied by replacing 'sex' with 'race', or 'gender', or many other things where we have come to distrust what once seemed obvious intuitions. But the fact that some alleged intuitions are the result of racism/homophobia etc. doesn't mean that all of them are.
And in general I'll take a widely shared intuition over an apriori argument any time. Zeno had some great arguments that motion is impossible, and most of us have no more than the intuition that they've somehow, not sure how, just gotta be wrong. They are.
Does 127 demolish my view? You might want to ask the author. I think she makes a good case that 1) the intuition that sex is especially fraught, charged, meaningful is *not* merely an artifact of sexism and 2) that we might profitably look for the origins of its special status in the differential burdens and risks it imposes on women.
That looks like the right direction to me, though it would take a long time to unpack all the complications. Here's one: the risks and burdens of, e.g. pregnancy, can actually be lowered now, and for that I say hooray. But I suspect that the complex swirl of emotional issues surrounding sex--trust, power, intimacy, vulnerability--is not changed overnight with as much ease.
Does 105 demolish your view? It is certainly another story of someone who thought it would all be easy, and then it wasn't easy after all. I think that's the common experience. Maybe not universal, but very common.
Again--how impressed should we be by the reports of exceptional experience? I'm interested in the 99.9% of the time; you can have the 0.1.
Maybe there are some people who thrive on arsenic. I would tend to be skeptical of the reports, but maybe there have been a few cases of people who ate it and prospered. Still when you see a bunch of kids saying "hey gang, I've heard it's really fun eating arsenic and let's all try some, okay?" then you sort of shake your head and think "hooboy. This isn't going to work out well in the long run."
Legislation, morality, education and advice all have to be pitched towards the 99.9%. Especially when our egos would like to flatter us that we are each part of that special, privileged, 0.1%. Every teenage kid thinks he's the special exception that drives better when he's drunk. Every one thinks he'll be able to smoke a few cigarettes, but not get hooked. We'd all like to think that the downsides are only for others, especially if we can be daring, counter-cultural and Nietzschean while we're doing it.
But for the vast majority of people, those vanities are going to wind up being false.
Remember where this started: someone said "hey, kids, I just found out that all of the cool kids are hiring prostitutes and I'm thinking that sounds like fun too!"
And my advice was: don't do it, counselor. The odds against you are real long. The chances of its winding up badly--for you, for her, for everyone affected--are real high.
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
But you know what? I actually don't mind that much if there are exceptional, anomalous cases, so long as no one is holding them up as attractive, aspirational paradigms for the rest of us.
Back in 92, Cala pointed out that maybe quasi-humans with a fairly different make-up from ours could do sex-work as a mere day-job, but it wasn't clear that we'd want to be creatures like that. That's about how I feel about the reported unicorns. Maybe there are already some people, in this actual world, for whom sex-work is not exploitation. But I suspect we might not want to be those people. And they certainly should not be used as the basis for advice to others.
For the vast majority of women, prostitution is a horrible racket. For the vast majority of men, getting involved in prostitution will be a step into degradation. That's the basis of my advice. Unicorns don't demolish it.
oh--and clearly to get to the bottom of this, we'd all have to be a lot clearer (than I've been) about "meaningfulness", and what sorts of things have it and in what ways. Sorry.
Gone on too long already.
Yup. I came into this thread to make fun of Anonymous Customer for thinking that the prostitutes he hired were having a great time, and nothing's changed my mind about it. I don't have a strong opinion as to whether prostitution is necessarily a uniquely horrible experience for the woman or if it can be no worse than any other job (well, I have strong opinions, but they vary on a moment by moment basis). But 105 gives a reason for what I think of someone who's hiring a prostitute:
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful. And then of course the client really likes you because, after all, you're so nice and agreeable and pleasant and yadda yadda, and this means you have to continue to be nice and agreeable and pleasant (if you want to continue the relationship) or else figure out a reason not to do it again.
A woman not under duress, getting into it partially to make a point about how bad can it be, and the best it gets under those circumstances is kind of awful. If you're hiring a hooker, you're either pathetically deluded about thinking she's enjoying herself; you enjoy having sex without giving a damn whether your partner wants to be there; or you're enjoying the fact that she'd rather not be there.
Now 105 didn't sound like the experience was an absolute nightmare for her, but I'd really rather masturbate than have sex with someone who was thinking about me that way.
I'd just repeat that prostitution, from either point of view, might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either. It's not something to be recommended to up and coming young people of good family, but most people aren't up and coming young people of good family. There seems to be a tendency here to put prostitution in a category by itself among the not-so-good things of the world, as an abomination rather than just a sin (as our Christian friends sometimes put it).
There are also intermediate forms which are common enough but somehow less abominable, e.g. the golddigger and the trophy wife. High-end prostitutes used to be called courtesans, and they didn't stand on streetcorners waiting for random strangers.
As I understand there is a small amount of legit first person literature on the subject (i.e. not male fantasy), and it's not all victim literature. Though having been a prostitute is not something anyone is going to brag about, especially if they've gone on to respectability, and probably most testimony is from the rehab / repentance angle.
I agree with LB that prostitution is not "necessarily a uniquely horrible experience", and with JE that it "might be an OK choice for someone whose other options, for whatever reason, aren't that good either".
Sounds right--there are lots of other wretched existences in the world, and compared to some of them, prostitution of the gilded cage variety looks pretty good.
And I certainly agree that you have to assess your choices against your options. A friend of ours, a Bengali woman who grew up in Dhaka, has argued in print that practically all of the sweat-shops that exploit young girls still provide a better life for them than the options they had back in the village--marriage at puberty, early pregnancy, no autonomy of any kind, ostracism at widowhood, etc. etc. etc. Moderately bad things look good when compared to horrible things. But moderately bad things are still not to be celebrated, endorsed, or encouraged.
I don't think being a prostitute is even a sin, much less an abomination. But I think that the business as a whole is still exploitative, sexist, demeaning, and pernicious. Maybe we can point to particular individuals, particular couples, particular transactions, that had no consequences, or at least no immediate ones. But the system as a whole has lots and lots of consequences, and they are almost uniformly harmful ones.
kid bitzer, while I've enjoyed and am pretty sympathetic to your comments on this thread, (I think) ogged meant not that he would ever do it, or even that it sounded like fun; just that the fact that it was available as a possibility, though a dangerous, self damaging possibility, felt dizzying and bizarre, in the same way your ability to take your own life does.
How's that for charity? Boo-yah.
Also, I'd like to point out that as much as our attitudes toward sex may be constructed (and honestly, I'm not sure how true that is, or how useful a frame that is; is there any human culture which values bodily integrity so little that a penis or a finger in an orifice is not a big deal, in some sense? I'd like someone to point me to a sex worker writing that their experince of having sex for money was not emotionally different from their past as a barista, in ways that implicated their feelings about their body, about intimacy, etc. Please note that this is not a claim that sex work is uniformly horrible. I thought about doing it), at least to that extent, and probably more, the desire for a prostitute is also socially constructed. Prostitution is taking place in a context where we understand sex to ideally be mutual; the active desire for non-mutual sex isn't neutral. The sense of ownership, and therefore, even under the most happy smily circumstances, the tinge of degradation, is hot. I'm quite sure that anyone who'd buy sex from me would have some kind of corruption of the innocent fantasy going on. Men who buy time with prostitutes are buying the privilege of being lied to and flattered (or I guess, with a domme, maybe the reverse). I suppose that there are a few people who are really hard up just for skin contact, but I don't know how you would disentangle that from from the cultural construct that men should want objectified women.
Where angels fear to tread: aren't lying and flattering a part of many, many dating experiences? And relationships? And marriages? Certainly prostitution is not the ideal, but compared to actuality it seems less awful than compared to an ideal. At least a john does not have to talk about starting a dog shelter.
The problem I ran into was that, despite the client being pretty nice, I felt compelled to give him his money's worth: in other words, to act like the perfect girlfriend. Which is not only extremely tiring, but also kind of awful.
Drawing once again on my vast reservoir of experience ...
... My paid-for partner thought it was hilarious to have me give her - how can I put this? - oral pleasure. We didn't have much language in common, so she indicated her preference mainly by pushing my head southwards. And I thought: this is really something I'd rather not do, not tonight, but fair's fair ... and I suspect the combination of reluctance and willingness on my part may even have added to the fun, from her point of view.
Sample of one, obviously.
I'm not especially promiscuous, and as with many others, what I think about promiscuity is this: your experience is enlarged, but at the same time experience makes you stale. This is likely even more of a loss for the prostitute - who's promiscuous by definition - the gradual smothering of a certain aspect of life.
Anonymous Client: drawing also from personal experience of a different sort --- you will almost certainly never know if these girls actually enjoyed having sex with you. You'd probably be astonished (if not hurt) by what they have to say about you off the clock. Just so's you know.
Anonymous Client's story gets more interesting -- was he on a sex junket in Thailand or something?
It's totally conceivable that insisting on oral sex was in fact part of the act--look, it's mutual! She wants to get off!
I don't want to rag on Anonymous Client too much--paying for sex once doesn't make you uniquely evil, and sharing the story is appreciated--but I can't resist playing a little. Using my supernatural powers of guessery, I dismiss the Thai angle and say that his escort was...Ukranian.
"You'd probably be astonished (if not hurt) by what they have to say about you off the clock."
True of any service profession. Also true of wives and husbands.
Offhand, I'd say that 111 and 127 demolish kid bitzer argument in 103 that sex is 'special'.
Actually, my 127 was intended to agree with him that sex--because it involves, among other things, physical penetration and necessary intimacy--is "special." The arguments that "any service job" involves x, y, or z are well and good, but they overlook a pretty fundamental distinction between sex and other forms of labor.
I think LB's 136 gets it mostly right. The flip side of what LB says about clients means that, for the prostitute, she's either doing intimate business (and running some risks, among them rape, which no one here has acknowledged, I don't think) with someone who sees her as basically a thing, or else with someone who is buying not only sex but also, whether he realizes it or not, some pretense of liking/affection/intimacy. That's a pretty fucked up situation to be in, and potentially v. dangerous. Isn't categorizing other people as things basically sociopathic? And haven't we all run into a situation where someone who was under a misapprehension about the true nature of your affection/liking for them got suddenly very angry when they realized that they were wrong?
132: Alternatively, the fact that more than one woman on this board has been offered money for sex tells you a hell of a lot about the relative entitlement of men and the relative vulnerability of women.
John, I think your cynicism is confused and wrong. There are some marriages which are basically prostitution, but they're not most of the ones in the contempory United States. Not everyone's relationship is so dishonest; that woman in the bathroom who was caught on tape had extremely kind words for her husband. Lying isn't as essential to dating as you make out, either; the guy did want to start a dog rescue; he so maintained after I asked for honesty as compensation for my trouble, when he knew he had no chance with me and when I was not flattering him in any sense. Maybe he mentioned it to make himself attractive, but I don't think he just read it in Where the Red Fern Grows, or even if he did, he didn't have to; I totally would have fucked him, dog rescure or no dog rescue, if he hadn't had a girlfriend.
Of course no relationship is free of any kind of dishonesty; just the other day I held off telling Clementine that her 98 dollar Anthropologie shirt was fugly until I'd convinced her/she'd decided to return it, but it's different to decide, because of your regard for the other guy or a personal valuation of peace to lie or just to decline to say something than it is to have to lie, in a situation which calls for the freedom to be honest when necessary as much as sex does, because you're being paid. If you all have dating relationships in which you're constructing really elaborate fictions over long periods of time, as opposed to declining to mention someone to protect someone's feelings or choosing to let something go to perserve tranquility, I suspect you're doing something wrong, or, if y'all insist on humility, I'll put it this way: there is a whole universe of people who are not doing that, and enjoying it heartily. That people have fucked up ways of interacting when money isn't involved doesn't mean that money doesn't introduce something that is inherently, structurally fucked up.
149: I don't regard my doctor as a 'thing', even though our contact may be intimate. I'm buying a service and the doctor is the agent of that service. We both go away satisfied (and the doctor perhaps also to make jokes about TUBEs and LUVs, etc.).
What I was expecting from my hooker - before the event - was this: fairly awkward sex, likely to be terminated early, payment rendered, contact promptly closed. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
What I got was this: much better sex than I expected; if the apparent reciprocity was simulated, it was simulated to a high standard, with general good humour and a relaxed attitude all round. And an interesting story. And my friends sniggering ...
Nonetheless, the risks of being a prostitute are as you describe.
Tia, a lot of people live in a less favorable world than yours. Not all, maybe not most, but a lot.
And people less cynical than me sure do complain a lot about their disappointments and betrayals. Of course, when they're happy they're usually less voluble, so I'm getting a skewed sample. But if people want me to stop being cynical, they should only express happy thoughts.
As far as sex being special and something different, I more or less agree, but then, I'm a puritanical cynic. During my time at the fringes of cafe society, I saw people repeatedly jumping into wild and crazy dating experiences which were hazardous and demeaning, or dating people who could afford to "be nice to them", and I ended up not feeling that the one additional step to prostitution would be a big one.
yeah, I should make it clear that my point was not to go beating on ogged, whom I don't know, nor to scare him straight. (I mean, I assumed he was. This was a female escort, right?)
and I realize that my intervention in this conversation has been a long demonstration of missing the joke, being humorless, judgemental, sanctimonious, censurious, pompous and moralistic.
I actually am capable, on other occasions, of light banter and airy persiflage. Witty repartee. Believe it or not.
Sorry to be a killjoy.
Thanks for keepin' it real, Bitzer. 45 et seq. seemed to me like a necessary corrective to a skewed conversation.
Commenters who interrupt banter to wax humorless about sexual politics are abominations unto the blog, and should be whipped.
Christ, they're going to have sex right here, aren't they?
teo, do you ever notice how Labs takes a consistent interest in our sex life? I think he wants in.
Have you seen my pay stub?* I don't think I can afford it.
*Not a euphemism!
We're actually surprisingly reasonable.
teo's still in the trainee period, and he has to log a bunch of volunteer hours before he's licensed. I am already known to do pro bono work for people who work in animal welfare; it's a tax write off.
Has anyone ever suggested an Unfogged meetup/orgy?
Surely someone has. What a stupid question.
I know it's been proposed, but I can't seem to find the thread.
Surely, more people should call their cocks "pay stubs".
Has anyone ever suggested an Unfogged meetup/orgy?
167: I'm instinctively on the "bad idea" side of this one. This is described as a rather severe case. Should we analogize to The Last Picture Show (bad!) or Fanny Hill (good!)?
I'll vote bad idea. Even if the guy enjoys it and doesn't panic or weird out, he's going to be hard put to repeat the experience if he decides he wants to.
166: Are threesomes by defintion orgies? I've seen that use before a couple of times (footnotes: "Packet Man" and Kael's review of Blow-Up), but I always figured orgies should be more social.
Wikipedia says four or more participants, so I guess threesomes are out. Also:
In contemporary usage, an orgy typically refers to group sex, although it sometimes refers to other activities such as dancing or violence.
I don't think that two couples doing synchronized intercourse would count either. I think that you need an odd number. Maybe if it were three women and one guy that would count, especially if the women were bi.
What if the parties to the two couples switched off occasionally? What if there were eight couples? I think you just want an odd number to increase the odds that someone will be left out in the cold.
Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").Now some of you seem to want to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and you seem to think that second hand reports of unicorns demolish my arguments (even though most of the first-hand reports on this thread have gone "I thought it was a unicorn but it didn't turn out so well").
In case this is meant to include me: I'm not trying to hold onto the possibility of unicorns, and I don't think that second-hand reports of unicorns demolish your arguments. I will simply repeat what I said before: it is trivially easy to find a wide variety of blogs written by people who have first-hand experience with this sort of thing. I don't read them, so I have no idea what position in this argument they'd support; I do find it interesting, though, that no one's really evinced much interest in what they have to say.
Unicorns could make interesting sex toys.
Here's one. Take-away lesson from the first page: pretty boring.
I've seen others, but have lost track of their locations. Probably they were posted to metafilter in ages past.
One can follow links from commenters to that blog to other (purported) such blogs, such as.
Anyway, I'd be extraordinarily surprised if, at the really expensive end, unicorns didn't exist.
173: it's not an orgy if no one is watching.
A woman once asked me how many was an orgy. The answer: it's not an orgy unless there at least three times when you say, "where'd this guy come from?"
181 to 179, but it works for 180 as well.
"where'd this guy come from?"
ITYM "who'd that guy come on?".
143: Tia's charity gets it exactly right.
I hadn't even made it to the point of charity -- given what we know about ogged's prudery, I assumed the post was pure chain-yanking.
Unicorns do indeed exist, Ben, and as Stub points out, we make interesting sex toys! It's all in the horn me thinks...ahem...
Ziplessness is our speciality - we don't tell tales and we don't expect to be loved. That's why people hire us - we're uncomplicated and suspending our own needs is part of the deal.
But I must correct you on one point - I'm real and not a bit purported. You can pinch me and see...for a suitable fee of course! ;-)
Livvy xxx
Erm, looking at your blog, you've been doing this for about a month? I mean, interesting and all, but not really the gritty realist perspective on what prostitution is like, is it?
Her prices are a bit steep. "High-end" doesn't come close to expressing it. I'm not completely sure she actually expects much business.
More, descriptions on the left and a much larger blogroll by category on the right. The knowledge that there exist "john blogs" is something I could have done without. I assume that anyone who cares about finding more such blogs can do so h/hself.
130: No apology needed, I just wanted to stress that point. I did think about taking that post and the other one down, but in the end I think that the convos were excellent and that it's a very interesting topic. Those, combined with my sense of the importance of historical and textual records, mean I'm going to leave it up, come what may. (Which recognizing that is one reason I never followed up on whether I'd done it or not; the other is that I think it's more interesting to leave it an open question.)
151: Problematic. We are, generally speaking, *very* careful to distinguish between intimate medical exams and intimacy. Your doctor talks to you about specifically non-intimate things during those exams; you and he avoid eye contact; the focus is very heavily on emphasizing the ways that intimate exams, especially if they involve penetration, are *medical*, not personal. Prostitution does precisely the opposite.
134: I've pointed you by name at least one first-hand account of, written by, a unicorn. There are others past that one if you keep looking. I cannot force you to believe in unicorns, I can only say, 'Look, a book written by an entity that claims to be a unicorn!' and assert that also read other things by putative unicorns.
Again, I assert the objective fact of the existance of some women who found prostitution to be somewhere between tolerable as a job and desirable as a career. You have my cites. Feel free to comment on them, rather than blithely wave them out of existance.
But, please, keep in mind that it's not my experience that you're dismissing. In your haste to denounce prostitution as demeaning and awful for all involved, you are neatly disposing of these accounts as inconvient to the case you're trying to make. At that point, I suspect, you are neatly making the transition from 'perhaps mistaken' to 'actively sexist'.
It seems to me that while you make a strong case, when you are not theorizing that disconfirming evidence doesn't exist, you lack the experience with the issue that someone who's actually sold their body might bring to the issues. As I said (in my very first post in this thread, none the less), I suggest that you spend more time reading the accounts of women who have actually done what you're talking about and gone on to tell of their experiences.
185: Need to work on that sales pitch, I think.
189: All true, but doesn't this show that people can manage their feelings independently of physical intimacy? The first ten years of my sexual life were more or less free from one night stands. They're something I've learned to do, and I guess it was the same for my partners. It's a different kind of activity. I don't think it's about objectification. It does involve communication (almost all non-verbal ... and mostly in the dark ...)
I agree, Anonymous Client, most of us can certainly manage our feelings independent of physical intimacy. That's one reason why several courtesans I know don't do 'f*ckbuddy' arrangements. I'm one of those myself - if I'm paid, it helps me distance myself and focus on the client and the job in hand. Ahem. ;-)
Lizard Breath - I think you need to work on the interpersonal skills a little. Toothpaste and respect are useful things when dealing with ladies. John Emerson - if you read the 'Auction results' you can see how many nights I've booked to date, so that will help you decide whether I expect much business. The English Courtesan may have to spank you both at this rate, only sadly she doesn't do 'spankbuddy' either. :-)
This is certainly a fascinating debate. Although I am indeed a relative newbie to this, I think maybe whether you regard yourself as (and/or are) exploited depends on the prices you charge, the number and type of clients you see and whether you have other options. If you see one or two clients only a month, are well rewarded for it and have a day job and other possible options, then it's more of a choice than enslavement. If however you've been lured to the UK by the promise of a 'decent' job, are paid a pittance if at all, and have no way out, then the reverse applies...
Livvy xxx
Good, LizardBreath certainly needs help in the "dealing with the ladies" department.
"Toothpaste and Respect" would even make a decent album title for a Liz Phair-type singer-songwriter act.
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame."
Ogged wept.
In all due respect, E.C, I wouldn't pay those prices for an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, even if I had the money. I'm nowhere near as heterosexual as that. But hey, if you've found your prey species, fatten up on them.
As for LB, she as well as she wants with the ladies without brushing.
I don't think it's about objectification
I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word "about" to avoid making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with. Objectification is something that necessarily happens during the process. Whether or not it is "about" objectification--who even knows what that means?
Or, since I am reading about material and formal and final causes, I'm noticing that perhaps that was too teleological. I should have said, "I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word 'about' that avoids making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with," maybe.
What, the efficient cause is chopped liver?
What's the difference between material and efficient?
Look Tia, it's not about trying to avoid being refuted or engaged with.
Out of curiousity, are the last five comments (197+) jokes, or is there a point being made?
Professional whores have to wait when there are rhetorical nits to pick.
My point was that "it's not about objectification" didn't mean much, and in fact, objectification was going on.
The efficient cause of the sculpture is the sculptor. The material cause of the sculpture is the bronze.
I do like The EC's rosy cheeks. And I think I remember that there was an escort a while back who got written up in Slate or Salon who was charging something over 10 grand per night, with a two night minimum, so, you know, EC is a bargain.
And if you really want to market yourself to the rich, you have to be expensive. My friend worked for a while as a math tutor to the children of Upper East Siders, and sometimes they expressed disappointment that his rate was only 75 an hour. Another math tutor he knew made a point of raising his rates if anyone else raised theirs, so he'd always be the poshest game in town. The commodity fetishists of the world don't like their whores or their math tutors cheap.
Okay, 206 made me break down and click through (from work, which feels like a bad idea). Sadly, I saw no rosy-cheeked photo. I saw nothing but an eyeball.
And thanks, MJ. Notice how Labs disappears the moment anyone actually asks a philosophy question.
207 is exactly right. Mercedes did the same thing when Lexus first appeared; rather than lowering prices in order to compete that way, they raised prices to distinguish themselves as the true luxury brand.
So, I'm wondering, what's wrong with EC that she comes so cheap?
Thanks, Mike. Off the top of my head, thus likely to be wrong, the final cause is the finished sculpture while the formal cause is something like the design.
Oh look, there's more.
(It wasn't meant to be a funny joke or anything, it's just that Tia listed three of the four Aristotelian causes and I wanted to impress her with my erudition.)
Landers, you no imagination having honkey, in the eyeball picture, you can see the top of a decidedly rosy cheek.
Now Labs has returned, and I am pwned. I guess this means teo and I owe him a freebie.
Just to put things in perspective:
There is one group of professionals who manage to engage in a form of intercourse for money with multiple clients without the legal issues and social stigma that we associate with prostitution. This intercourse is often intimate and personal and central to self and identity (to use Tia’s phrase from 74) as well as deeply penetrating. Some people do in fact argue that those who patronize these professionals should instead use a spouse or intimate friend, who would do it for free either out of mutual pleasure or a sense of mutual obligation. Indeed, some people share this kind of intercourse with casual acquaintances or even random strangers, although this is not considered socially acceptable in various circles. Still, not everyone has an appropriate spouse or intimate friend available, and even those who do often find it useful to engage a professional for this kind of service.
Although the basis for these relationships is professional, and the intercourse would not continue without the payment except in unusual circumstances, I think that many of these professionals do genuinely like and sympathize with most of their clients, particularly the regulars. Certainly these professionals do have clients they actively dislike from time to time, and they are well trained to control the expression of their feelings within the context of the professional relationship, but that doesn’t mean that all interactions with them are simply with a professional façade that is completely disconnected from their true feelings. Many of the people who go into this profession do so because they are genuinely interested in interacting with people in this way, and enjoy their work. And a façade is easiest to maintain if it is not too far away from the truth. Much of the best flattery consists of selective sharing of genuinely positive feelings.
There is a vast middle ground of willingness to engage in intercourse that falls in between the extremes of actively not wanting to be there but concealing it behind a professional façade, on the one hand, and being so enthralled by the connection that one is willing to cast aside any thought of compensation or professional boundaries to indulge in it for purely mutual pleasure, on the other. That is why I think that LB’s 136 and B’s 149 present a false dichotomy - certainly for the professionals I have in mind, and probably for a number of those in the original context. The choice shouldn’t have to be between “don’t believe anything she says - it’s all a façade and she’s miserable being here” and “believe everything she says about how awesome you are, you credulous fool.” (But I do want to recognize what NMUS said in 105 which started that subthread off - if you feel you have to maintain a façade that’s too far away from reality, that takes a lot of emotional energy and can wind up feeling icky. I wonder how that experience would have gone for you if you hadn’t felt so much pressure to live up to an unsustainable ideal, or felt freer to share some of that conflict with him at the time.)
One thing about the professional nature of these relationships is that payment does make the relationship more assymetrical than an equivalent free relationship: the relationship is more about meeting the client’s needs than the professional’s, and the payment is partially compensation for that imbalance, as well paying for the professional’s time and expertise. The professional should still be able to set appropriate boundaries on the relationship and limitations on the client’s expectations as needed to maintain his or her personal integrity and space.
Now I realize that the parallel is not exact, as there are differences in the educational requirements, professional regulation, social status, cultural context, and so on between the two professions involved. Still, if your argument against prostitution could be transformed into an argument for why you shouldn’t pay your therapist just by choosing a different dictionary definition of the word intercourse, you *might* want to re-examine the cultural basis of your assumptions.
By the way, I wanted to do a post to brag about this, but I keep not succeeding in uploading the screenshot I took, so you should all just go look at this Scrabble game and notice that in the top half of the board you find the words "cured," "globed," and "recork." I made all those words on a single turn.
211 looks really good in light of 209. Ow.
Also, how could any possible sexual experience be worth ten grand?
final cause is the finished sculpture
I don't think so, homo ignoramus. The final cause is the "for the sake of which," so what the statue is for: appreciation, or beautification, or edification, or what have you.
how could any possible sexual experience be worth ten grand?
Your first name clearly isn't Sheikh.
Is that right, ogged?
That link:
The final cause of a natural object - a plant or an animal - is not a purpose, plan, or “intention.” Rather, it is whatever lies at the end of the regular series of developmental changes that typical specimens of a given species undergo. The final cause need not be a purpose that someone has in mind. I.e., where F is a biological kind: the telos of an F is what embryonic, immature, or developing Fs are all tending to grow into. The telos of a developing tiger is to be a tiger.
EC's price is in pounds, ogged.
Hey, glad to see you mcmc, and I assure you that I did the google currency conversion before posting my comment, and she's still cheaper than the escort I remember reading about.
Money isn't the issue. The Gayatollah means that he can't conceive of a sexual experience with just one other person.
I think he says somewhere that the formal cause of the statue is its shape.
I think he also says that for living things the formal and final causes overlap. What childhood is for is the development of the form of the adult. But formal causes and final causes should be distinct for artifacts.
Yeah, sure, if the client had near-infinite amounts of money, but still, that's an awful lot of cash. I guess I'm wondering about the differences between the 10k escort and, say, the 2k escort.
Is that right, ogged?
I'm like, sure. More here.
This blog started with ultra-earnest appreciations of Mr. Rogers, and now when a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, we're all rolling our eyes and thinking, "how tame." Ogged wept.
That seems wrong. You should be weeping because a real-life prostitute shows up and makes jokes about her job, and we manage to make it boring.
For the record, "shape" is literally-pretty-accurate-but-still-kinda-misleading translation of "eidos."
225- FL, see 207, and wonder about the difference between the $75 math tutor and the $200 math tutor. (Answer: Probably none, but in realms where non-experts have difficulty directly evaluating quality, price itself is often used as a proxy. And for people who only want the best...)
From your link, Ogged: "Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done."
229: that sounds plausible, but not when Tia said it, because she's a woman.
A reworking of 229: the main difference between the $10,000 hooker anwd the $2,000 hooker is that the $10,000 hooker will not have been purchased by the guy who can only afford the $2,000 hooker.
Sorry, I suppose I should have said "escort".
Another funny line from that Stanford article:
This is one of the several times where Aristotle offers the slogan “it takes a man to generate a man”
So true.
Ok, god damn it, so I've been reading a lot of escort ads in the past few days, and there really is a difference between 2k escorts and 10k escorts and the difference is class, specifically, education. EC touts her education and the one I'm thinking of called herself the "educated escort," and said she had an Ivy league degree.
I mean, we're just thinking of fucking, but high end escort do a lot of escorting, so it might well matter to some clients that the woman they bring isn't dumb or uneducated.
That's it, teo and I are retroactively charging for all past freebies (there was a clause in the contract that enumerated your obligation to stay on my good side. teo's good side doesn't matter). We're putting a lien on your check. How much is University of Pennsylvania at Blue Ball paying these days?
Clearly the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything is done
Final causes are always nested, so the statue can be the final cause in one context, but is not the final cause of itself.
Ogged, are you hatching a plan to claim some new health crisis in order to get us to do another fundraiser to buy you another gift certificate?
uh, 235 to 231, but it goes for all of you.
You wouldn't let a brother die with the Tivo at 1000, would you?
204: In my experience there's communication - 'going on', if you prefer that prepositional construction - between sexual partners, even during casual sex where the partners don't know each other well. That must be about recognition of common, uhm, something or other.
I'm not aware of any 'objectification' on and off switch. I don't think empathy automatically vanishes in certain contexts, which isn't to say that I'm not comparatively empathy deficient without realising it. But something tells me I'm not going to be my own best witness here.
I thought the final cause had to be internal to the thing, but probably I'm just confused. Mostly I'm worried that Tia now owns my house.
I'm sorry, AC, I misunderstood. I thought you were referring to prositution when you said that. In that case, no, no necessary objectification.
I did entertain the idea of a stripper sent to your bedside, but Ben's mom was booked. The thought of you looking utterly mortified amused me to no end, though.
a stripper sent to your bedside
This would have been great, not least because my mom and ex were both there around the clock. "I can't sit up, honey, and you'll have to get creative with the catheter, but otherwise, go to town."
Ogged's Mom: What are all these Hot Cops doing here?
Also, do you know how glad I am not to be talking about whiteness right now? Exceedingly, if you wondered.
Weep not, oh Great and Worthy Ogged, for thou art correct, and the cheeks are rosy! That's with reference to 206, 208 etc. I felt I should clarify that in case you're still weeping. :-)
Livvy xxx
I feel like we have a real connection here, EC.
Lizard Breath, I've just been reading the bios and goodness me, it turns out that you're a girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl!
I always thought it was only boys who had lizard breath. Am I being a tad sexist and if so, might one of the gentlemen like to correct me? Bends over... :-)
Livvy xxx
P.S. Does Mr. w-lfs-n really use Troll Unguent and if so where?
I thought you were referring to prostitution when you said that.
It's never going to happen again. Not after this. Uh uh.
I'm sorry, AC
Only ac is ac.
The first link for the four causes says that efficient cause is the only cause that remotely resembles a Humean cause, but My/les
'weekend at' Bur/nye/at said that efficient cause is actually the least like Humean cause. About then I decided I didn't really understand Aristotle. The wikipedia article on Efficient Cause is one of those horrible philosophy wikipedia articles you read about, which reminds me I have to go grade. (Actually most of my papers are much better than that.)
Mr. w-lfs-n
There you go, making unwarranted assumptions again.
192, 249: EC -- I do apologize for being brusque above. It just seemed that your experience in prostitution wasn't all that representative of the norm. As you said:
If however you've been lured to the UK by the promise of a 'decent' job, are paid a pittance if at all, and have no way out, then the reverse applies...
and aren't situations like that overwhelmingly more common that yours?
If however you've been lured to the UK by the promise of a 'decent' job, are paid a pittance if at all, and have no way out, then the reverse applies...
I know people who were lured to law school under similar pretenses. Ironically, one is now a stripper/escort.
Also, do you know how glad I am not to be talking about whiteness right now? Exceedingly, if you wondered.
Word.
A night with EC would be sort of a touching gift for a wife to give her husband as an anniversary gift. It would show that she cared.
And our sixth was just this past Saturday. Just as well, I suppose; this way, my wife has an entire year to save up.
BTW, Emerson, I wonder if we know any of the same Reedie strippers.
Probably not, the ones I knew personally would be 50+ by now and the others are just freinds of friends and people I've heard about.
Ah well, good to know that it's something that Reed gives back to the community generation after generation.
That's quite all right, Lizard Breath, and yes, I fear you are right that the alternative is actually a lot more common than my own rather better experiences.
Ogged, stop fantasising about my rosy cheeks at once or I'll have to tell your mother. Still, at least you're not a lawyer...or a golf blogger... :-)
Talking of lawyers, Brock Landers - well goodness me, are you saying that Unf's biography is no longer up to date and he is now a Fallen Boy?
John Emerson - what an inspired gift idea that is, and such a shame that Jesus McQueen missed the date! Moi - I couldn't think of anything more delicious. Is that a little biased of me? :-)
What's never going to happen again, Anonymous Client?
Livvy xxx
EC, you don't have to mark the smiley parts. We'll figure it out.
I'm in ur commentz, razzin ur n00bz
264: thank you sb for my first genuine laugh of the week.
I like smiley parts, Standpipe B, so there! :-) That was an extra one for good measure.
I have a nasty feeling that 'in ur comments razzin ur noobz' is the blogger's equivalent of riffling through a lady's lingerie drawer...
I am keeping a careful eye on you, you naughty little creature, you!
Livvy xxx
P.S. I hereby authorise Standpipe B to collect the monies due from Dagger Aleph for which I will pay him the princely sum of 10% commission.
:-) :-) That definitely deserves 2 smilies methinks. You might even get a kiss and a currant bun if you carry on like this.
264:
That
is
the
post
of
the
week,
standpipe
Those are fucking fantastic, Stub.
That's a nice pussy you've got there Stub, if I may take the liberty of saying so...
Livvy xxx
the final cause is
"The fourth cause has got to be my parents. Oh my god, are they driving me insane."
You know what's really funny? One of the four causes is your parents.
I like this variation on the old saw.
Regarding the expensive tutors/ladies of easy virtue, there's a comment about bill gates that I'm pretty sure I made here that I now can't find. It referred to a graph showing how much money it's no longer worthwhile for him to bother picking up, and was written in high-flown language.
Honestly, what's so SPECIAL about sex? It's not like you're touching the face of God or something.
Sex with someone you like CAN be special, but otherwise it's not much different from taking a shit. And good sex is very like taking a good shit.
This "spiritualizing" of sex -- a physical exercise in which you get your rocks off -- gives me the heebie jeebies. Next thing we'll hear wanking is special, or running a marathon backwards. Nobody is so special that the fucking sex they have is anything special.
BTW, the only sex worker I know loved her job, but she was a callgirl with regulars -- an independent operator -- and not a street walker. She started by seducing her uncle for money when she was 15. She was luckier than most of us: she found her career while still in her teens.
If wanking is running a marathon backwards, you're probably doing it wrong.
And if sex is like taking a sh*t, ditto...
Nobody is so special that the fucking sex they have is anything special.
Except me, of course.
"Taking a shit" as a metaphor for sex was explicitly used by Henry Miller, and implicitly by Bertrand Russell. Ezra Pound called it "the twitching of two abdominal nerves".
The first two of these count as sexual liberationists, too. Probably they were saying that never having sex was like never taking a shit, which isn't exactly true, since never taking a shit would be a fatal condition. And in any case, not an elegant way of making the sexual-liberation point.
Apo, maybe if EC saw your wang she would weaken on her "no freebies" policy.
Or maybe your wife could scratch up the money somehow.
Nobody is so special that the fucking sex they have is anything special.
What about the other kinds?
283: I'm not allowed to take money for it, John.
Is your wang at least tax deductible, apostropher?
This "The English Courtesan" is a fraud, or at least writes above her weight: "My demure exterior belies the inner temptress…".
She'll not get my business until she sees an editor!
Apostropher! You mean you escaped from the nunnery again??? :-) Yes, I can see the logic - sex for the celibate is a challenge if not an impossibility. As the bishop said to the actress. Or was it to the lady courtesan?
That's an interesting thought Master Emerson but...long thoughtful pause...naaaaaah... Me detects a touch of the anal fixations on AdamAsh's blog (see the Auction Results on my blog for the tale of The Poo Man That Got Away). :-)
Livvy xxx
Perhaps as a noobie E.C. should be notified that we have only two rules here, one of which is No Smilies. We are indulgent to first offenders.
The second rule varies according to the offense.
should E.C. be getting a fruit basket, or should we expect one from her?
Oh my goodness - when I posted I saw a picture of a pussy! Am I going nuts or did anyone else see that when they posted?
Ogged, come here at once! I suspect you of being the naughty ringleader of the pussy posters...
Livvy xxx
naughty ringleader of the pussy posters
How true this is.
I think it's spelled "Livy".
Please don't sexualize the unfogged happy fun kitty. Sexualizing animals is Emerson's job.
I want a goddamned fruit basket. And by fruit basket, I mean w-lfs-n.
Oh no, John Emerson, I am mortified to have broken your smiley rule already and I beg forgiveness!
You have been most kind and welcoming to me this evening for which I thank you, and I would genuinely hate to cause smiley offence.
Now that I've broken the first rule, might I have the second? And as Standpipe B did one too, can you pop him in my cell please for later?
Livvy xxx
P.S. I assume I'm in too much disgrace for a fruit basket, but when I redeem myself, may I have plums in it please and could you deliver it to the cell?
I want a goddamned fruit basket.
It's right below Ogged's second rule. Bon appetit.
Oh snap, w-lfs-n, its on now! Did you like that? I did that on purpose! Your myne now and their aint nothin you can due about it!!!!1
may I have plums in it please
They kinda look like plums.
296: yes, that's one of the second rules.
No one here is sure whether Standpipe is M or F. They adamantly refuse to tell.
His or her anonymity is important to him or her, and revealing his or her gender would double his or her chances of being outed. 2x is a major factor.
"And as Standpipe B did one too, can you pop him in my cell please for later?"
ceci n'est pas une pipe. or at least, we're not sure if it is.
Is it the Funny Rule? Looks shocked...
Each of your grammatical infelicities is like a dagger through my heart, Stub.
The first rule of funny rule is nobody talks about funny rule. The second rule of funny rule is that if Standpipe turns out to be a guy, I'll eat my foot.
When someone named Stub threatens to eat a foot, I don't know what I'm supposed to think.
My hands are the stubs, I type with my feet. I'm like Daniel Day Lewis, except like 4 times sexier.
Ceci n'est pas un pipe. Ceci n'est pas un homme non plus, alors. Whatever it is, I think it has gone to sleep in my lingerie drawer!
Livvy xxx
The weird thing about Daniel Day Lewis is that his father was Poet Laureate. I had always thought that Poets Laureate were not capable of breeding.
Ceci n'est pas un pipe
I'm not glad that this work entered the lexicon. Taken in the broad context of Magritte's career I don't think thies piece ever nearly matches the context its title is given. This post, brought to you by Becks style.
It strikes me that in my fervor to demystify sex, I might be much gender-mistaken:
Sex might be a more intimate act for women than for men, since women get penetrated, i.e. receive inside, and that seems mightily more intimate than being He Who Penetrates.
So the coarse metaphor about sex being like taking a shit may not apply to women (unless one shits backwards).
So I apologize to women readers. As for you guys, you know that, for you, half the time sex is not much more than wanking off with a very big right hand.
The first rule is: no imersonations. The second rule is for loading and unloading only.
Was Ted Highes Poet Laureate? He's after my time.
I'd rather disavow the testicles that hand down nearly to my ankles than acknowledge even a single sentiment in 318.
['Still Becks style']
317: It lives because it's such a handy pedagogical tool. Otherwise, meh.
He was indeed Young Master Emerson and he was known for rather liking the ladies too.
Standpipe - you woke up! What have you been doing in Livvy's lingerie drawer all this time?
Livvy xxx
Probably the $10,000 guys expect, and get, more than the megawank. Perhaps free hors d'oeuvres and little butterscotch candies.
that's right, Hughes was married to young Plath. Whatever happened to her?
He was indeed[,] Young Master Emerson
You know, I was once told that I had British tastes with regard to commas because I would tend to insert them even when they were optional. Anyway, you'll note that our resident grey-beard loon said that Hughes was after his time.
EC--now that I've read some of your blog--do I understand correctly that you've had precisely one meeting with one client?
They certainly do. Am I allowed to do a winking smiley at that point?
Livvy xxx
We have three grey-beard loons here. Farber has seriority even though he's younger, and I credit McManus with being loonier.
Nope! Two is the magic number, Ogged, with Number Three to follow shortly (only he swapped places with Two). Such is the scarcity value of The Livvy...
Aah, oooh, my fingers are twitching with the urge to do a smiley! Can't you grant me a temporary irrevocable licence Master Emerson?
Livvy xxx
330: It's most appropriate if you note him as Gary Farber the Younger. He is grey-bearded before his time.
So I have a friend who, in her grad-school poetry circuit, met with a certain relation of Hughes/Plath and emoted to her over Hughes's work before she realized this professor's relationship to that circuit, and was extremely embarrassed later. (Acute readers will know the prof. to whom I refer but I won't specify.)
Not my rule. The smiley rule is not absolute, but we'd be compelled to listen to lots of people talking about the smiley rule. even more than already, I mean.
With two clients at £5000 each, TEC has made more than I do in a year.
I like Hughes' poetry, but he seems like an odd choice for laureate. Perhaps the Brits, having been demoted to a second-class power in 1956, were trying to resuscitate their inner brute.
332a: that would imply the existence of a Gary Farber the Elder, though.
w-lfs-n, you're overpaid.
I was going to say, Blair's attempt at brutishness is not convincing, though of course the dead bodies are real.
:_) :@) :#) :-*) :7) Ooooh oooooooooooh that feels so gooooooooood!
Apparently smilies can be an outlet for people who only have sex twice a month.
There's some literature on courtesans in Taiwan, and apparently they are allowed to indulge themselves in childish play while their married friends are being worked like mules (not sexually, it's work work).
Many or most Taiwan courtesans send their paychecks to their parents. They're not transgressive at all. The chapter about them is called "Filial daughters."
Hughes was indeed an odd choice of Laureate, but many of his poems strike me as far from brutish. Andrew Motion who came next was arguably an even odder choice. Maybe the unpredictable nature of it all is part of the allure?
Master w-lfs-n assumes they were one night...but they wasn'ee... that was a googley eyed look with a smile...but not a smiley!
Livvy xxx
EC, I was never in any of your drawers.
Well, a brute has his down time too. "Crow" seems to have revelled in brutishness, and I didn't like it much. I liked "Wodwo" (and earlier better). Then I lost touch with him, explaining my ignorance of his laureate status.
Behind the paywall, the Margery Wolf book I had in mind.
Not surprisingly, the situation has changed since 1970 or so. So much of what I just said is wrong.
An interesting hypothesis Master Emerson, and yes, I think there are many ways of meeting the expectations other's have and this is one of them. In our society though it's often combined with a day job it seems, as in my case, so the playtime is limited.
Talking of which, it's after 4am in Blighty so off to bed with the English Courtesan for tonight! Thank you for making me so welcome and I promise to adhere to All Published Rules if you'll have me back.
Be good now, won't you?
Livvy xxx
that was a googley eyed look
Next comes a hoohole.
Apologies Standpipe - I presumed as you disappeared after rooting in the comments!
I agree that much of Crow was hideous, Master Emerson. Perhaps the events that preceded it ecplain the rage. 'The Literary Life' and 'Perfect Life' are more tender though, perhaps again explained by the events. I will look at the Margery Wolf book...
A most interesting debate and thank you! Good night all 'y que duermas con los angelitos' but not in the Biblical sense!
Livvy xxxx
If all women charged for sex, it would do more for gender equality than any other policy.
If women charged for sex, popcorn vinyl coriolis monster.
What kind of sadist includes a transcendental deduction in the introduction to his book?
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously! With all-women charging! All-one!
Dilute-dilute-dilute!
Your love - a two-headed cow?
I was thinking about this thread on the drive today and it occurred to me that one thing that's "special" about sex, DUH, is orgasm. You know, the oxytocin and the hormones and the feeling of emotional well-being and all that shit. There's no way you can say it's the same as shopping at Target, no matter how much you love their cheap new brightly colored stuff.
Bitch:
But the orgasm that makes sex special is different for men and women.
After orgasm and oxytocin, women get all lovey-dovey and go and get a warm wet cloth to wipe your dick and want to offer you dessert. Men just get sleepy and pass out.
I reiterate: sex may be special for women -- especially because they allow a foreign object quite deeply into their bodies -- but for men it's not much more than taking a decent shit or wanking with a much bigger right hand. That's what makes men such sexists, didn't y'all know?
EC: if you're fresh back up from your slumbers, maybe you'd help us out on a discussion point:
Is it, y'know, good for you? Like when you're on call, an' that. Doubt has crept in, so any information here will be good.
354 and 355: I can distinctly remember the first time I felt a twinge of resentment at having my emotions manipulated by means of blowjob.
This is a very weird thread, but 346 is the weirdest comment I have read yet.
I checked the IPs-- it turns out EC is actually lonelygirl15. Or Jason Fortuny.
I just want to say, Adam Ash took a very different line on all this when he was whispering sweet nothings in my ear.
Then it was all, "ooo this is so, spiritual communion, meaningfulness overflowing with, you're the only one I'd ever, my whole world is like, now I finally realize what, souls perfectly meeting, and."
Gah. It just makes me bitter, is all. That I believed him. And him all the time thinking I'm just a big right hand. I suppose I should have known but, just wrankles.
If cankles are calf-ankles, wrankles are wrist-ankles. Which means you've got other things to worry about besides Adam's caddishness.
Did you charge him for it?
361 -> 359. (We're nearly up to a year, guys!)
I can't see having an orgasm over target, but maybe if the new boots at the pretty, overpriced store were half off, that could be better than sex.
361
no, I didn't, because--can you believe it?
He told me that *not* charging would do more for gender equality than any other policy!
Do you see the depth of his perfidy?
I can't see having an orgasm over [a] target
It's more of a guy thing.
Men just get sleepy and pass out.
Is this actually the case for most guys? I wonder because that's not me at all. Wide awake afterwards. Wife, on the other hand, is sawing logs within minutes.
I reiterate: sex may be special for women -- especially because they allow a foreign object quite deeply into their bodies -- but for men it's not much more than taking a decent shit
You must be taking some pretty mind blowing shits, because I have no idea what you're talking about here.
Adam Ash is bold and daring by saying bold and daring kerrrazzzy things under a pseudo-feminist guise!
On the sleep thing, it depends. If I'm tired before sex, I want to go to sleep after sex. If I'm not, I don't. Seems to be roughly the same with the boyfriend/snugglemuffin/s.o./sweetie/lover.
I think that we should all wipe our fevered brows and return to our quotidian lives. We've had our glimpse of the erotic big time forbidden to us, and now should return to our normal wankery, conjugal bliss, and dating hell. That world is not for our kind. We have been blessed by a visit by an angel from the higher realm, and whould always treasure this moment in our memory.
Hi, E. C.!
Is this actually the case for most guys?
Out like a light. Forget about it. Seriously, I normally have a lot of trouble falling asleep, but after sex, I'm done. (I'm also very sensitive to medication; I wouldn't be surprised if these facts were related.)
368: As one more data point, I tend to fall asleep hard and fast after sex.
Masters and Johnson claimed that men generally fall asleep after orgasm, but women generally return to the "plateau phase" of sexual excitement. I have heard people complain, though, that this view of women's orgasms was an artifact of their emphasis on the rare vaginal orgasm, and that when women orgasm from direct clitoral stimulation, their orgasms are more like men's.
I'm like Cala -- if I'm sleepy beforehand, I sleep. If not, I don't.
Recently I heard for the first time that some people get depressed after orgasm; about a week later, someone in comments here said they experienced this.
And despite what Adam Ash says, orgasms never inspire me to make anyone dessert.
I had one [not a boyfriend, not a lovah, not a snugglebunny; don't know what to call him] who would act like he was coked up after sex. He would talk and talk and talk and talk....
I have a male friend who gets migraines triggered by orgasms, which is just about the meanest trick your body could play on itself.
Becoming depressed after sex is real, for both men and women.
I also recently encountered a second report that some women can masturbate to orgasm simply by flexing their kegel muscles, without any outwardly visible activity at all.
Euphemisms for "lover": one I remember from HS was "munchie". I wonder if maybe it was Polish or Finnish or something.
I, myself, am generally out like a light after sex. It's hard to tell with my wife, because she can fall asleep on a dime in any circumstance.
Another sleepy data point. That's why masturbation is such an effective sleep aid, yo.
Seriously, Adam Ash is very wrong. Out of all the [whatevers] I've had, only one really consistently would just roll over and fall asleep, and he was kind of a dick in general. The rest usually want to hang out [ATM] for a while. Some like, da's dude, talk and talk and talk. I've had some of the best conversations ever after sex.
And seriously, I think the sleepy thing is just more of a function of the fact that most sex happens late at night, often after you've already prepared for "sleeping" (pajamas, toothbrushing, etc.). I've had sex in the middle of the day a lot, and neither I nor the person I was having sex with seemed to want any sleep afterwards. (ogged, would you like to weigh in on this?).
if I'm sleepy beforehand, I sleep. If not, I don't.
Surely this applies to any form of strenuous exercise?
382: No, I think there's something physiological going on for some people (me!). I'm likelier to go straight to sleep if it's night and I'm tired, but even having sex in the middle of the afternoon there's a good chance I'm in for at least a short deep nap. It's not every time, but it happens a fair amount.
384 is a little closer to my experience, but this may be because of being older and more generally sleep-deprived. Really rested, in the afternoon, I may not doze off but I sure am lazy.
Sex enthusiasts recommend daytime or morning sex. Why wait till you're worn out? Fatigue is a massive negative factor for many couples.
Sleepy me, too. But you guys know as well as I that the sleep thing comes from a general sense of well-being, which is usually lacking for the insomniac worrywarts among us.
269: If I had a camera, I would currently be using it to make a picture captioned "I'm in ur suitcase... reading ur bookz." Since I don't, I record the moment in words.
ogged, would you like to weigh in on this?
Just to ditto LB's 384.
anyone else think TEC sounded like an Eric Idle impersonator doing 'nudge nudge wink wink' a few too many times? Say no more, is my advice.
Yes! I knew her shtick was familiar from somewhere. Thanks KB.
Yeah, for 5,000 pounds I would expect better text flirting.
OK, here's a thought experiment.
It needs an establishing preamble, drawn from life.
There's this wedding. I'm one of the guests. Most of the younger guests, while charming, are not really my peers; it's a long way from home. But there's this woman. After chatting for about an hour, on and off, over dinner, over whatever, I realise that we've been flirting - harmlessly. She's a lot older than I am; her husband is around, somewhere, and so are her kids. But we have a table to ourselves. And although she describes a motherly figure, I'm finding that there are dark, dark ringlets going on, some gold embroidery, her face still holds the angles of her youth. And over the wine glasses, between the bottles, in a low voice, she's saying something:
I__wan__oo__dir__wi__you
No, can't make it out. Not over the noise of the dancing. Lean closer.
I__wanna__do__dir__with you.
No, you're really going to have to speak up.
I want to do the dirty with you.
Oh.
I make her say it twice more.
And I think, well, maybe. But then, it's adultery. But then, she wants to. And I like her. We exchange phone numbers. Maybe take a day off work. Take a walk down some well kept suburban street, up some raked gravel driveway. A bright, clean, carpeted, quiet house. Afghan rugs (and cushions with tiny bells). A freshly laundered bed. The marital bed. Can I really do this? What will people say?
The thought experiment is this: what if she helped me over my hesitancy by offering me money?
I couldn't ask for money: it would be insulting. She would have to make the offer. What if she offered fifty pounds? Not so much offered: gave. Tucked it into my shirt pocket as I was getting dressed. Would I give it back? Might not.
What if she offered five hundred pounds? Up front. To stay the night, or maybe a weekend. It becomes more of a plan. I'm not doing it for the money, but the money is there and it gives the thing ... structure. If it happens, it happens. And maybe it really will happen. And maybe more than once.
What if she offered five thousand pounds? The money is beginning to exert a force all of its own. And I'm beginning to feel bought. This is not good.
So, is there a happy equilibrium when money meets sex?
AnonC, it would be better if I weren't imagining her voice as the voice of Count Dracula or The Count or whoever.
394 is awesome. 393 is weird -- I can't see what purpose is in that thought experiment. It makes an interesting story (and becomes way better by the addition of the spooky voice) but the money bit is out of left field.
"becomes" s/b "is made"
390: I was thinking more a fifteen-year-old who has seen Dangerous Liasions and Moulin Rouge and wears too much black eyeliner.
Take a walk down some well kept suburban street, up some raked gravel driveway. A bright, clean, carpeted, quiet house. Afghan rugs (and cushions with tiny bells). A freshly laundered bed.
Holy shit! The thought experiment-- it's coming from inside my house!
Is 393 one of those irrelevant hypotheticals, like the ones that came up in the bombing Iran thread.
The story in 393 does everything to reverse the typical power dynamic between men and women. The woman is the client, and she is older. It is hard to call this a case of the evil of the patriarchy. Fine. But is this at all relevant to the majority of prostitution we see in the real world?
uh--
"do the dirty with"?
Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know right there?
I mean, whatever you may think about trading sex for money, you should at least have *some* standards when it comes to their choice of euphemisms for sexual intercourse.
She could have said, "I wan _____ ay ide ____ sage wi___oo".
"I wandered the Tayside looking for Sage Vindaloo"?!?
No. My response is still: no.
KB: this is actually what she said. Put it down to local culture, generational mores, etc.
Just to be clear, money wasn't mentioned. I'd consider such a thing highly unlikely. If sexes were reversed, though ...
I wanna __ay ide __ sausage wi___oo.
I wanna say: "Ideas! Sausage! Witless Tool!"
and I wanna say--honey, you're drunk, and you're not making any sense. Time to go home.
I wanna make clear that Saislegy is a Jew.
Lean closer, KB. Make me say it again. Let me stuff some bills in your pocket.
Clown--
nuzzle up to AC, okay? It's his fantasy, not mine.
Stop calling Anonymous Client AC!
Does the capitalization not make all the difference? There will only ever be one ac in my heart. And she doesn't have to pay me for the pleasure.
sorry, folks, didn't know the handle was taken.
I tend to fall asleep hard and fast after sex brings to mind this question: What is the difference between hard and light?
I may have finally learned my "stop reading comments in class" lesson when I had to cover my mouth with my hand to stop laughing maniacally after 406. Probably not though.
413: No, silly, it's hard and dark.
actually, 406 went over my head.
But the lesson is still important: washerdreyer, stop reading comments in class!
We can distinguish between "AC" and "ac", Meatman.
411: I was going on bostoniangirl's complaints about "BG" but I guess she sometimes gets called that as well as "bg."
At the very least, you should stop reading comments *to* your class.
I think BG is more possessive about near resemblances. I heard she wrote a cease-and-desist letter to a guy using Bet Gimel.
You think that's bad, you should have seen the letter that bg wrote to us. Man, our lawyer shit his pants when he read it.
it's hard and dark
Depends on the guy. Some are dark-complected, some not.
415: I'll accept that answer LB, but I was really going for:
"A man can sleep all night with a light on."
Ah. The answer I know is "It stays dark all night."
Reference 356, it is most definitely Very Good Indeed, Anonymous Client, but thank you for asking.
Regarding 358, you will be hearing from my lawyer FL, you cheeky little thing! I am absolutely completely and utterly not either lonelygirl15 or Jason Fortuny. Nor indeed am I where my IP address says. The English Courtesan was not born yesterday.
Regarding 369, the angel is de retour, young Master Emerson and smiling at you without smilies!
390-392 don't merit an answer I'm afraid. Tsk, modern yoof, no respect what-so-ever!
Livvy xxx
"A man can sleep all night with a light on."
Huh. I'd always heard "you can pee with a light on."
TEC, I'm a little short this week, you don't happen to have a couple hundred pounds free? (BTW when are y'all going to change your system to metric and use kilos instead of pounds?)
It's about 50-50 that Young Master Emerson is as old as your grandfather, but my spirit is young and I have the virility of 0.25 younger men. So out of respect for your sainted grandfather you might consider fronting the necessary.
yes, I had the same reaction to being referred to as a 'yoof', given that I'm likely to be twice her age.
But, no, I still don't want a loan--my OAP checque comes in at the end of the month, and I can hang on 'til then.
You can't ask an angel for money, Master Emerson! Looks scandalised and flaps wings in a distressed fashion...
As for you Kid Bitzer, you're a very naughty boy indeed, and whatever your age, I'll wager it's not old enough to stop me putting you over my knee!
Livvy xxx
I haven't yet figured out if (1) TEC is here just to comment in good faith, (2) TEC is here soliciting business, or (3) TEC is a complete fraud, a troll having fun with us.
(1) seems unlikely as this is the *only* thread in which she's appeared. (3) seems supported by the comically [redacted]* nature of her posts. But we're not having very much fun, so I don't get it. (2) seems somewhat plausible, given the heavy flirtations and whatnot, but when I try and imagine it being true it just seems too weird.
*Redacted on the chance that (1) is in fact the case, to preserve comity.
430: Well, she was brought up and linked to as a topic of discussion, and has continued to be brought up after each time she's commented. It's hard to stay away when people are talking about you.
I doubt she's interested in making Unfogged a regular hangout, but that doesn't make her a troll. And I doubt she's soliciting business -- who has that sort of money?
2.) TEC wouldn't be soliciting here, that's for sure. People here barely can afford bottom-of-the-line product. (Maybe LB has a little spare cash. She probably would, at least, if she quit spoiling her stupid kid.)
"On the internet no one knows that you're a dog". Maybe I'm not really the grandfather she never knew. Maybe I'm a studly 18-year-old with an antipathy to Updike. Maybe I'm a preteen girl with an active fantasy life. She will never know!
She was linked to? I thought she just showed up out of the blue. Nevermind.
Yeah, I think LB is right. (Pardon me while I talk about you as if you're not here, TEC.) TEC has a crafted blog persona, and it's stylized, so when she uses it here, outside her own blog, it just sounds weird. I kinda wish she'd drop it and talk to us straight, as she might have interesting things to tell us about being a courtesan, but I understand if she doesn't--business, you know.
LB, I wasn't suggesting that you could afford TEC. I was suggesting that, if you fed your kid mostly gruel, which is really the best food for kids that age, you could afford the more reasonably prized ladies in the kicky K-mart faux leather boots.
My persona is going to get the vapors and take up corsets if this keeps up. O flutterby fly!
one thing I'm fairly sure of is that he/she is authentically british. (if a dog, then a proper spaniel or bulldog).
I mean, to even conceive of spanking as an erotic activity is just so...British. So pathetically British. If I were trying to sock-puppet a prostitute, it would no more occur to me to suggest spanking as a pleasurable past-time than--god, peeling potatoes. Watching paint dry. Dropping heavy weights on my toes. Where's the thrill? It takes years of institutionalized degradation (a.k.a. "public school") to think of that as tittillating.
So--that part of her story I believe.
My son's dominitrix friend in Portland (my acquaintance) specializes in spanking, as I understand. You are out of touch with the niche markets, Kid.
I mean, to even conceive of spanking as an erotic activity is just so...British.
Bollocks.
437: kid bitzer, you'd be surprised. Almost every guy I've slept with in the last year has at some point slapped my ass during sex or foreplay, without warning. I was like, WTF? Where did this come from all of a sudden?
Where did this come from all of a sudden?
Heh. Guys are idiots and think duplicating what they see in porn is a good idea.
Soliciting? You should be so lucky, Brock Flanders! The English Courtesan has a selection process and you just failed it by suggesting she's a troll. In addition to which, your narrow erotic repertoire is frankly unenticing. John Emerson - ditto for the dog comment. Applications are not invited from either of you.
This is my real persona, which happens to be the same as my blog one. If only you academic manques might say the same about yours. I came here out of curiosity, in that if I'm talked about, I consider that an invitation to attend. I stayed to comment because it seemed like an interesting debate.
I'm genuinely sad that your self-professed superior intellects have led some of you to become so twisted and cynical. I often think the sign of true intellectual greatness is not needing to score points. The cleverest people I know are also the most self-deprecating. I welcome everyone to my blog because I'm genuinely interested in people and what they have to say.
I hope you have a delightful evening gentlemen - perhaps you will find the post-departure EC rant therapeutic or perhaps you will find a new victim to shoot down? On the other hand, perhaps it's time you got out and tried to make friends with some real people? Just a thought...
Toodle pip!
Livvy xxx
gswift: that was my thinking. But: I was in a relationship for a little while and no one ever did it before that. I come out of the relationship and everyone's all about spanking. People only just started watching porn in the last few years?
Shit, I was (sincerely) hoping we wouldn't hurt her feelings. Bye, TEC.
Heh. Guys are idiots and think duplicating what they see in porn is a good idea.
So right. I don't get the spanking thing at all, but it sure does happen a lot in porn.
See, the middle two paragraphs of that comment sound like someone who could be interesting to talk to, once we stopped insulting each other.
See, the middle two paragraphs of that comment sound like someone who could be interesting to talk to, once we stopped insulting each other.
Yeah, agreed. TEC, if you're still reading, you just did drop the persona, and you were, in fact, more fun to have around. Alas.
We are so self-deprecating around here. The self-deprecatingest. Oh well, toodles, I guess.
TEC, never underestimate the power of envy. A midrange gal might have been a bit better received. The second visit for the higher realm has been less fun.
People only just started watching porn in the last few years?
You know, I figure most guys are watching the same porn on the internet, and it seems like spanking has become more common in the past couple of years. Just in the time I've been watching porn on the internet (10 or so years, I guess), it's changed quite a bit. Does anyone just fuck anymore? It's all up the ass, come on her face, make her gag, slap her around now. Seriously, porn used to be kinda fun, but it's like we're in a spiral of degradation.
451: It is pretty weird. Slate did piece today about several short films; one addressed how the easy availability of porn changes the way the kids are having sex today. It's strange.
That's disturbing. Sex between 15-year-olds is awkward enough without the influence of porn.
I think that we should all wipe our fevered brows and return to our quotidian lives. We've had our glimpse of the erotic big time forbidden to us, and now should return to our normal wankery, conjugal bliss, and dating hell. That world is not for our kind. We have been blessed by a visit by an angel from the higher realm, and whould always treasure this moment in our memory.
Huh, that is a shame that TEC ditched, I meant to ask which college she went to back in the day.
It was laid on a little thick though, I'll give everyone that.
Recently I heard for the first time that some people get depressed after orgasm; about a week later, someone in comments here said they experienced this.
Did they specify after whose orgasm?
Oxford, firsts. I'm a bit suspicious of that because, if true, it would make tracing possible (there aren't that many hot but demure Oxonian ladies, I don't think).
In my dog comment I was in no way calling her story into question, but merely accepting it somewhat conditionally. Alas, I misspoke.
used to be kinda fun, but it's like we're in a spiral of degradation.
No doubt. Hell, I've never been much into porn because that propensity to keep cutting to the close up shot. Now that seems so quaint. Damnit America, we need to get back to the basics.
My ex had a strong niche preference for late 70's, early 80's porn. To the extent I cared, I appreciated that his tastes were so mainstream. I also took it as a compliment that one of his two favorite leading ladies looked passably like me.
"We have been blessed by a visit by an angel from the higher realm, and whould always treasure this moment in our memory."
If only someone had an angel's sword.
As stated, I have 25% of an angel's sword.
yeah, remorse.
after my last comment it occurred to me that talking about someone as though they aren't there is just, well, rude, and that I was guilty of it.
drat. the blogs made me do it.
not true that I'm an academic manqué, though--actually I'm a very successful academic.
decent human being manqué, sure. Musician manqué. Many other things manqué.
Or as Mick says in "Monkey Man" "I'm an homme-homme-homme-homme-manqué!
Still--TEC, I apologize to you for my lack of civility. Oh, and references to dogs are completely unrelated to insults against women--it's just an old internet joke about the degree of anonymity possible on the web. So don't take that part personally.
458: I saw she went to Oxford, but I'd be interested in knowing which college there. There are actually quite a few hot ladies there, as there were at Cambridge, but the First is a real limiter. Only about 10-15% of students got them.
If she went to one of the really posh colleges, like John's or Christchurch, this whole deal would be all the funnier. My bet would also be on a Languages or Arc/Anth degree, as those seemed to be the hottest groups by far. Matt McG could undoubtedly correct me as to whether this is the case at Oxford.
B in 149: I think LB's 136 gets it mostly right. The flip side of what LB says about clients means that, for the prostitute, she's either doing intimate business (and running some risks, among them rape, which no one here has acknowledged, I don't think) with someone who sees her as basically a thing, or else with someone who is buying not only sex but also, whether he realizes it or not, some pretense of liking/affection/intimacy.
and B at 189:
151: Problematic. We are, generally speaking, *very* careful to distinguish between intimate medical exams and intimacy. Your doctor talks to you about specifically non-intimate things during those exams; you and he avoid eye contact; the focus is very heavily on emphasizing the ways that intimate exams, especially if they involve penetration, are *medical*, not personal. Prostitution does precisely the opposite.
I am pre-pwned by 214. But does anyone think that psychotherapy is a bit like prostitution? A therapist is selling intimacy for money. I think therapy can be hugely valuable, but there is something very strange about it.
I think that a lot of men are looking for therapy when they hire prostitutes, yes. A good therapist does a lot of the things people want hookers to do: acceptance, lack of judgment, etc. But again, as with a medical doctor (and yes, I know some therapists are mds), there are pretty well-defined professional rules that are designed *precisely* to keep the relationship firmly on the professional side of the border, an advantage prostitutes do not have.
467: Yes, but there's still something dangerous about selling intimacy for money. There are a lot of people who get the different types of intimacy and the various boundary issues confused and mixed up in their minds. There are rules against sleeping with one's patients, but the rules exist for a reason.
467: I admit haven't really been following this very closely since the pre-100s, but I don't understand your point. An escort has some system of keeping her professionalism intact (in Pretty Woman, wasn't it no kissing?) or she doesn't. This seems just the same as for the doctors; they don't actually make patients sign a notice of appropriate behavior before seeing them. I have a hard time believing we can intuit the methods or resources available to an escort. (I assume we're talking about high-end escorts who are making a substantial living at it.)
468: But therapists aren't selling intimacy. They create intimacy in order to help one figure out one's shit. And the form of intimacy is v. well-defined.
469: Whether or not escorts have rules, the point is, johns don't, and they don't know what the rules are, and there isn't some kind of professional standard that's well-defined. That plus if you're a high-end escort, clients can hire you for a weekend or whatever, presumably, whereas therapists work a 50-minute hour which gives them some down time.
Plus they're covered by most good insurance plans.
Weiner was right to assert ac's claim to AC. ac was the first person to agree with me that it was disconcerting to have someone appropriate one's blog initials.
My search skillz are not mad, but she said that she was bugged when someone used initials similar to hers. She said in that thread about the black guy and the white guy that the rest of us probably didn't notice teh similarity at the time, but she found it annoying.
I don't get the spanking thing at all
Oh, come on.
I'll come on you, but I won't spank you, Big Red.
Hmm. That must run in your family.
Remember to close your eyes, 'postropher.
Only good feminist boys warn you when they're about to shoot in your eye, Ben.
Anyway, I'm 89% serious about the spanking thing. I can understand it in a very abstract "sex and violence often go together" kind of way, but it just has zero sexual content for me. What do people like about it?
I suspect it's one of those eroticization-of-helpless-childhood things. Anal sex is all about those goddamn anal thermometers our parents all had.
In twenty years, it'll be really hott to be put in time out.
During sex? The same things one might like about biting and scratching.
In twenty years, it'll be really hott to be put in time out.
Stop kicking and use your words. Tell me what you want.
Those thermometers taste funny.
No, biting is about orality.
Seriously, spanking is about the firmness of the ass. Absent deliberate smbd intent, smacking seems a reasonable extension of wanting to grab an ass and give it a squeeze, no?
Animals don't spank each other.
Rectal thermometers! Shit, I couldn't remember the word.
Animals don't spank each other.
spanking is about the firmness of the ass.
I think this is one of those instances of the employment of the word "about" to avoid making a statement that can easily be refuted or engaged with.
Is spanking really that hard to understand? I guess I can't really speak to why someone might have an impetus to spank (though what B. says above seems right), but as for being spanked, well, it's just another way to be touched that is sensually pleasurable. Like, it doesn't really hurt particularly much, except for high values of force which most people don't really use, and your flesh feels a little hot, and it's a little forceful without being very painful, which is nice in middling quantities during the sexual experience (e.g. why having one hips held/squeezed firmly by the hands during intercourse feels good). Then your skin becomes a little more sensitive to even light touch, and that feels so good.
So.
That second-to-last "so" should be struck, although I guess it's technically true.
<blink>
I'll be back in a minute.
smacking seems a reasonable extension of wanting to grab an ass and give it a squeeze, no?
But if you want to grab the ass and give it a squeeze, why not just do that? I mean, it's right there. Biting and scratching I get, but spanking doesn't register at all on the eroto-meter for me. I'd ask EC about it, but you bad, bad men drove her away.
why not just do that?
In for a penny, in for a pound?
eroticization-of-helpless-childhood
like about biting and scratching
spanking is about the firmness of the ass
Y'all are making this shit up. The first is the same kind of abstract explanation I would have given. The second doesn't seem to work, because those ways of approaching the body are very different from spanking; they're in the "I want to consume you" category, no? And to third, I guess I'd just no: grabbing the ass is one thing, but spanking is hitting. Why not just punch the other person? That's what it seems like to me.
That was three minutes, apostropher.
Biting seems to be about orality, like B said, so I'm really not seeing why it's being grouped with scratching.
I don't get the scratching thing either.
Why not just punch the other person?
You don't just dive right into punching a person, ogged. There's this little thing we Americans call foreplay.
Scratching is not about consuming. It just a little more of the hurts-a-little-but-doesn't-really-hurt category. And it's intense. There's something inherently sexual about touch that's intense. It's vulnerable.
That was three minutes, apostropher.
I was outside smoking.
I confess that I also don't really get scratching; I was just going with Pervpipe's grouping.
486 explains it somewhat, but the forceful holding of the hips is holding. Spanking is hitting. Hitting bad. (Okay, I don't really get the smbd thing either.)
hurts-a-little-but-doesn't-really-hurt category
Like the loose tooth you couldn't stop playing with when you were a kid. Or smacking somebody on the ass.
491: Okay, it feels like hitting to you. I'm not especially into erotic spanking, but I do know that I absolutely adore spanking PK's butt (no, not as punishment, just as play) because it's so fucking cute and round and, well, smackable. It's like tickling (which some people find aggressive also, btw.) It's just a teasing way of playing with the body.
SB, there's a nice declarative statement for you. Refute it if you dare.
Spanking is hitting.
Intercourse is really inept kicking. You aren't hitting somebody to hurt them.
Fuck me. Pwned by ogged.
Ok, but it's going to hurt.
What do we mean by scratching? Do we mean tracing one's fingernails gently along the skin, or scratching as in an itch? Both are extremely pleasant. Or do we mean, like, digging in and scratching *hard*? B/c I'd imagine the main attraction there (absent smbd) would just be the idea that your partner was both out of control and grabbing you as hard as he / she could.
Intercourse is really inept kicking.
And yet he has two children.
Ok, but it's going to hurt.
He's no Liam Neeson, but still.
Biting seems to be about orality, like B said, so I'm really not seeing why it's being grouped with scratching.
Why would you assume it's always got the same explanation for everyone?
The second doesn't seem to work, because those ways of approaching the body are very different from spanking; they're in the "I want to consume you" category, no?
I don't think it would be too hard to assimilate spanking to that.
Intercourse is really inept kicking
First Adam Ash with the no-better-than-a-great-shit line, and now this. Are we talking about the same thing?
Ok, but it's going to hurt.
The pwnage already hurt. Deliciously.
I can see smacking an ass as a deficient form of grabbing; that's what creepy old me do to waitresses, right? But that's not what (porn) spanking looks like. That looks like hitting. I guess I can't get past that. And I'm almost certain that if I'd ever spanked one of my girlfriends, they would have hit me back, and not in a nice way. Different strokes, I guess.
that's what creepy old me do to waitresses, right?
If you say so, ogged.
484: I am officially squicked out by the noises at the end.
that's what creepy old me do to waitresses
And now they can't say they haven't been warned.
I mean, geez, what did she expect. Can't complain about that.
What 509 said. Except that "Different strokes" s/b "You're all a bunch of deviants"
It's weird how often blonde gun nut gswift and I agree on these sex and gender topics. What's weirder is that I'm convinced he's a sexist bastard.
What 509 said. Except that "Different strokes" s/b "You're all a bunch of deviants"
deficient s/b mackdaddy
509: Well, porn spanking is just weird and stupid. Kinda like porn cunnilingus.
516: No comment.
Other than the comment s/he was probably composing simultaneously, we haven't heard a peep from Straddlepipe Turtleplate since the reptile porn went up.
Maybe it crashed his computer like it did mine.
Your computer can't handle the truth.
When I was a kid we had a pet desert tortoise much like the ones in the video.
I am officially squicked out by the noises at the end.
Me too, but I still want to use that as the ringtone on my cell.
The internet is a strange thing. I'm watching turtle porn, sending URLs of photos of Rosie O'Donnell to my friend to try and convince him that she could be attractive, and talking about spanking on a blog.
Is there anything it can't do?
Okay, explain this pet tortoise thing to me, because all around my aunt's care home there are signs up that say "lost tortoise" and "reward." And I am thinking, a lost tortoise in the Tucson desert? Good fucking luck. And also thinking, "reward? For a turtle?"
What would you like to know? Tortoises make awesome pets.
How? Isn't it like owning a rock?
As I type this, btw, I have two mice rooting around in my bedclothes and probably pooping on the sheets, so consider the source.
Tortoises make awesome pets.
Totally. It's like a rock that shits.
They're not exactly like rocks. They move around and stuff.
Very low maintenance. You don't have to do anything for them.
I admit, I'm not big on pets. Fish and cats, that's about it for me.
When a rock shits, does it feel as good as when it has sex?
See, tortoises are like fish, except you don't have to feed them.
A pet you do nothing for seems boring to me. Also, you can't really pet a turtle, making the name "pet" kind of, well, wrong.
536: Is it a boy rock or a girl rock?
538: So for you, the joy of pet ownership is in all the shit you have to do? I'd rather just chill with the animal. And you can so pet a turtle.
No, the joy of pet ownership is in the affection and sense of reciprocity, kind of like any other relationship. The shit is just a side benefit.
I have mice in my pant legs.
Ah. I admit you're not going to get much reciprocity from a tortoise. Maybe affection, but it'd be hard to tell.
I have mice in my pant legs.
You need to get out more.
I spent all day taking my aunt with MS out and around, which is pretty exhausting actually. I did manage to buy her half a bottle of veuve and some oysters and ahi for lunch, though, which was awesome.
tortoises are like fish
Except for that "interesting" thing. But, I was raised by an icthyologist, so I'm bit biased.
I guess most people don't find reptiles as fascinating as I do.
I have mice in my pant legs.
I have a rocket in my pocket.
half a bottle of veuve and some oysters
Nice.
I should really go to bed. Good night, everyone.
raised by an icthyologist
Who would cry to see that you'd spelled it incorrectly.
(Yeah, I looked it up. So?)
I did manage to buy her half a bottle of veuve and some oysters and ahi for lunch, though, which was awesome.
Referring to yourself in the third person is weird enough without switching between first and third in the very same sentence, B.
Night, Teo.
548: Aren't I, though? Dude, if my cool aunt has to live in a nursing home and sit in a wheelchair and forget the things she just said, the least I can do is buy her a nice damn meal.
Who would cry to see that you'd spelled it incorrectly.
Shit.
551: No, I had the other half bottle and oysters and fish tacos.
I have to admit, though, that at least you can touch a tortoise. A fish, you can't even do that. They're pretty decorative elements, but I wouldn't call them pets.
I guess most people don't find reptiles as fascinating as I do.
Snakes, crocodilians, etc. are interesting, but tortoises?
You should shop around here, they get all the good stuff. Every so often they get in those Goliath Birdeater tarantulas. 12" across. You could feed it mice.
A good therapist does a lot of the things people want hookers to do: acceptance, lack of judgment, etc
Also, spanking.
BTW -- I was talking in my therapist's office last night and realized I was not connecting with him as a person and so I brought that up, and explored it for a bit, over which time I came to realize I was feeling the same kind of radical disconnection that I get from marijuana, except without the pleasant buzz and loosening of inhibitions. That was interesting -- I've never been conscious of that state of being while straight before.
ObReptiles: I had a pet boa constrictor named Victoria for a couple of years in the mid-90's. Mrs. Clown made me give it away when she was given a puppy (Lola, who is now 13 years old), so I looked on USENET (!), I think the group was called alt.pets.reptile.snakes or something like that, and found a family for Victoria. They lived on Long Island and had many pet reptiles.
Very sorry if I made TEC go away, or for any genuinely hurt feelings. I re-emphasize 433, which I think is exculpatory.
I really believe internet porn is ruining our youth. I wish I knew a way to say that without sounding like a cranky old man. I have no evidence for this, I'm just certain that if 13-year-old-me had a vast depository of erotic material at his fingertips, featuring every kink and perversion imaginable, well, it wouldn't have turned out well at all. (And didn't I read somewhere that a recent study -- a well-designed study, not some think-tank junk -- concluded that exposire to sexually explicit music had a significant effect on teenage sexual behavior? Sexually explicit music! If that's true, what will become of the children raised on a diet of bangedup.com and its ilk?)
I've actually wondered if the 'more and more extreme and fucked up porn' thing isn't temporary and self-limiting. As I understand it (semi-theoretically here: porn isn't a major interest of mine) there are (in a vastly oversimplified fashion) two things going on that make porn appealing: first, the straight erotic interest -- watching pretty people doing things that you want to do, or might want to do if it were practical. People who don't find BDSM personally exciting aren't going to want to watch BDSM porn for this reason.
Second is the appeal of the porn being extreme or taboo: forty years ago just seeing naked people was taboo enough to be exciting; now that's fairly conventional, and you need kinkiness to attract people through taboo-breaking. 'Kinkiness' here means mostly violence and degradation, as it's the major category of kink with broad enough appeal not to just come off as silly to people who aren't into it. No one's going to be watching furry porn for the taboo-breaking quality -- if you're not into it for the erotic appeal, you're just giggling. But generally, the taboo-breaking seems to be a bigger part of porn than the straight erotic appeal -- hot vanilla porn gets outcompeted by nastier, kinkier stuff.
The thing about the taboo-breaking quality, though, is that it's self-limiting. From what I understand about the porn out there now, it's getting very close to convincingly real rape, and real infliction of injury. There's nowhere really to go beyond that point, but a close approach to that point is becoming conventional in porn. Once there aren't any practically violateable taboos left to push the envelope on, I have to think that the market for the most extreme stuff goes away, or goes back to being a small niche market -- watching violent degrading mock-rape isn't excitingly taboo if it's been conventionally available for years, and it's not particularly erotic except for the subset of people who have a kink for that kind of stuff.
Again, though, I don't know what I'm talking about at all here.
There's nowhere really to go beyond that point
Simulated necrophilia?
Oh, sure, there are as many weird things to do as the human mind can come up with, but most of them will strike most people as silly or disgusting rather than erotic. There's a limit to how far you can go and have it look like 'more intense' rather than just bizarre to a large audience.
I think that the violational dynamic is self-defeating. At some point you've fantasized everything and there's nowhere further to go. It's especially self-defeating when it's presented as liberation or empowerment, because it's such a stunted notion of liberation.
I read, or read about, some of the French avant-garde icons like Bataille or Sade, and I utterly fail to get the point. Especially because, if you spend any time in skeezy venues, you will meet people who actually seem to want to do those things, and they're terribly dark people, but without being non-boring. It's the same as with the admiration for charismatic criminals and gangsters -- if you've ever brushed up against them, their combination of tediousness and menace loses its charm.
I think that spectatorship is a massive negative factor in American life. People relate to too much stuff as a form of boredom relief, when it's actually weightier than that for non-spectators.
562 -- see to me, the "simulated rape" thing falls into the category of "bizarre, not erotic". As does that Japanese thing I forgot the name of that's been discussed here, where all the men come on the woman's face and body. It seems like porn is pushing the limits of what is seen as arousing rather than (or in addition to) bizarre, and I don't see any reason that couldn't keep happening for a good long time.
I cannot believe I missed this thread-slice.
On the other hand, perhaps it's time you got out and tried to make friends with some real people?
Sweet.
I also want to note for the record that both ogged and LB know much more about porn than I do.
560: I'm not sure I buy that. The "rebel against taboo" model is used to explain music and normal television, and I certainly haven't seen any retreat from norm-shocking.
568 -- good point -- I think people have been saying this about popular culture since well before I was a gleam in Mr. Barnum's eye.
forty years ago just seeing naked people was taboo enough to be exciting
Just seeing naked people is still exciting.
The British government has recently promised to legislate against certain kinds of violent pr0n on the same lines as it has already legislated against child pr0n. This was brought on by a moral panic in the papers after a woman was murdered by a man who claimed to be addicted to rape images.
I foresee a legal minefield here. Where are they going to draw the line? If a couple (or more) are into BDSM, and as the Grauniad once put it, "think global when they think exhibitionist", is it reasonable to prosecute people for downloading their party pics?
On the other hand the desire to control images of (apparently) non-consensual violence and rape doesn't seem unreasonable. I don't know how you'd frame legislation to include one and not the other.
Any free speech purists out there want to make the case for simulated rape on the internets?
And I don't buy 560. When kink gets boring people just turn to kinkier. And, even more importantly, what was kink is now the expected norm, which people incorporate into their lives and relationships.
Also, a big part of the thrust of 559 had to do not with kinky sex per se, but the violence and degradation and objectification so rampant in pornography. I simply fail to see how this can be good for young teens to absorb early on, when their sexual identities and norms are still being shaped so profoundly.
Just seeing naked people is still exciting.
You're really going to enjoy college, Brock.
Any free speech purists out there want to make the case for simulated rape on the internets?
What case needs to be made? It's simulated. There are , I'm sure simulated rapes in a non-trivial set of important films, books, and other media. Off the top of my head: The Accused. I want as little regulation of this stuff as humanly possible. What I'd prefer to see is a kid-friendly domain and crippled browsers.
what was kink is now the expected norm, which people incorporate into their lives and relationships.
I think this is the real problem, not that some small subset of people are looking for kinkier and kinkier. I'm pretty damn vanilla, and these days I feel pressure to kink it up because that's what's expected. I don't give in to the pressure, but it's still there and detracts from my enjoyment of sex.
I, on the other hand, have moved from a more kinky standard to a less kinky one. It was not kinky enough at the beginning, and that caused some problems, but it *is* possible to recalibrate in the more kink to less direction.
I feel pressure to kink it up
Pressure? Explain?
576: You said it was for this one comment, then it was a couple, but now you just can't stop.
578 -- it's all about keeping up with the Joneses.
576 was indeed my point, or part of it at least. And I don't know the age or sex of anonymous, obviously, but my understanding (totally ancedotal) is that this pressure is being felt especially keenly by younger teenage girls in our society. (Who for the most part lack anonymous's resolve, as they've grown up immersed in a culture where yesterday's kink is today's normal expectation.)
579 -- this topic seems to be driving many already anonymous or semi-anonymous commenters to redouble their efforts at misdirection.
well, having staked out the sanctimonious prude position on prostitution, you will not be surprised to hear that I think porn is harmful stuff too. Destructive of genuine human relating.
But...I'm more upset about the loss of habeas corpus right now, so I don't think I'll go on about porn.
578: for example, I was told that I was uptight because I'm not into ass-play. Which I guess is not really a "kink." But even in my promiscuous pre-relationship days, not once did anyone ever suggest it.
Oh, and the fact that everyone seems to want to spank me started to make me feel like my sexual tastes were narrow. Which, you know, is bad. I don't like feeling like my partners are disappointed or think of me as uptight or unadventurous.
It seems to me that the problem is not the set of sexual behaviors that's normalized (provided safe, sane, consensual etc etc) but that people think a norm should determine what they can expect from a sex partner at all. I mean, porn could include nothing but the (to us) perfectly vanilla BJ and it would still be bad to bully someone into it. Either find someone compatible with you, or compromise a little, but don't shame someone for wanting something or not wanting it.
Either find someone compatible with you
What's worrisome is that this might be harder and harder for me to do as everyone becomes more interested in doing things they've heard about or seen in porn.
Anyway, even if no one bullies me, the thought has been planted in my head that I'm vanilla, and vanilla=boring.
everyone seems to want to spank me
Could it be that you've just been naughtier than usual? Seriously, it's interesting that you're motivated not to have narrow sexual tastes. I just asked a femal friend what she'd do if someone spanked her during sex, and she said, "I'd punch him." And I'm pretty positive that this would be the response of the women I've slept with.
don't shame someone for wanting something or not wanting it
The thing is that you don't have to set out to shame them to make them feel unadventerous, as in anon's 585. If you spank someone thinking that it's perfectly normal, and they don't like it, they already feel a little bad, even if you pick up on their dislike and never do it again. Not end-of-the-world bad, but a little bad.
What I'd prefer to see is a kid-friendly domain and crippled browsers.
You're more likely to see a browser-friendly domain and crippled kids.
I just asked a femal friend what she'd do if someone spanked her during sex, and she said, "I'd punch him."
I feel certain most of my female friends would react the same way. It's quite possible that they'd punch me for asking.
Not to mention the fact that teens don't exactly have a well-developed set of what they're into. They're still figuring that out. And if the message from society is that you should be into x, everyone else is into x, and you're prudish and no fun if you're not, well...
Of course it's not okay to bully anyone into anything.
I think if I tried to pull off the spank thing I'd burst out laughing.
Yeah. I think the problem is that being sexually 'adventurous' is overvalued, not that the standards for what makes you adventurous have been raised.
I think if I tried to pull off the spank thing I'd burst out laughing.
Well, that was exactly my reaction (I didn't laugh, but I wanted to). I've thought it was silly, not sexy in the least, and it breaks my concentration.
I've often wondered about this kinkier-than-it-used-to-be expectations business, and how much it is driven by porn.
It seems difficult to prove, but feels plausible.
It may simply be that people have much more explicit ideas about what sex is like, before having it, than they used to. I think I was very lucky to have less concrete ideas than I think prevail today, so that my experience was unmediated.
The thing is that you don't have to set out to shame them to make them feel unadventerous, as in anon's 585. If you spank someone thinking that it's perfectly normal, and they don't like it, they already feel a little bad, even if you pick up on their dislike and never do it again. Not end-of-the-world bad, but a little bad.
But the thing is, there are a million things that you shouldn't do without first getting a sense whether it's okay, whether verbal or not, and that includes lots of vanilla stuff. I would expect any new person to give me a chance to say no at lots of junctures. If you're just hauling off and spanking someone, you're not doing that. I mean, there are cases where the extremely fucking intuitive can figure out that's just the right thing to do, but they're rare, and you (general you) are not that intuitive.
I think that the spank thing is especially "strict mom / bad little boy" dominatrix role-playing, which seems to be TEC's specialty. Though of course, I'm sure some ignorant guys out there haven't gotten the word and are spanking their girl friends.
592: gswift can't spank it without cracking up.
Plenty of women actually do like to be spanked.
If you're just hauling off and spanking someone, you're not doing that
Yeah, fair enough. There's probably still some pressure just from asking if you can do something, but that's more "price of doing business" than "pernicious effects of porn."
Plenty of women actually do like to be spanked.
Next you'll be telling us that plenty of women like to give blowjobs too.
Okay, feminist musing here. I am on some level with Tia (or with what I think Tia's position is) that normalizing kink is at least in part a good thing, because kinky people shouldn't have to feel ashamed about it. And I think that's fair.
On the other hand, the 'being pushed into being kinkier' thing is also bad, and it's being brought up as a men pushing women in the context of sex that wasn't previously agreed upon as kinky. So I have a theory.
There's a standard seduction narrative -- think 50's teenagers in the backseat of a car -- where the man pushes the woman to do sexual things that she's afraid of or resists doing, and a lot of people, men and women, have this script of 'man overcoming a woman's resistance' internalized as hot. It's hard to play out that script in real life with a willing partner, though: a woman who's having vanilla sex almost certainly doesn't feel bad about it or fear it these days, and it's far enough from likely that she would that it's not something it would be easy to convincingly play-act.
Anyone think there's a dynamic going on here where some men are pressuring women into unwanted kinkiness precisely to elicit resistance to overcome, so that the seduction narrative can be played out satisfyingly? That'd explain the trend toward painful kink -- spanking, anal sex -- rather than simply peculiar kink.
There are women who like to be spanked? They're sick! Spanking is a very special thing between me and my young mommy, TEC.
there are a million things that you shouldn't do without first getting a sense whether it's okay, whether verbal or not
If they'd asked me explicitly and I said "no", the effect would still be the same. Or worse, because here they are, being all respectful and shit, and I'm a killjoy and saying "no." Of course I have the right to say "no" and I always refuse to do things I don't want to do. It's less awkward, though, for him to give me a smack on the ass then understand, when I don't respond, that I'm not interested in it.
The problem is that in the past, this stuff never even came up. And not because I was inexperienced. Now it comes up all the time, and I'm starting to fear that I'm hopelessly out of step with what everyone else wants.
596: Yeah, something that really surprised me about the Bitch threads on sexual practices was the absence of explicit negotiation a lot of people talked about.
607 to 604. I was never into overcoming resistance, but being trusted to lead was very exciting.
609: And, you'll remember I worried this one like a dog with a bone, the whole dynamic of signaling indeed but not wanting to be explicit, wanting to take a rest from negotiating and asserting and controlling everything. Wanting a place not to be in charge, or reflexively deferred to.
Further to 604: I should say that I think this is a bad script to be playing out in an unexamined, non-consensual way (which, if my theory is right, is what's going on here). Nothing wrong with finding stuff like this exciting, which I think a lot of people do, but getting off on creating genuine discomfort and fear in a partner when they haven't been consulted about it is lousy.
I was never into overcoming resistance
I'm just irresistable, so nobody even tries.
608: I've got a feeling there are at least some American subcultures where the pressure is still in the other direction. I'm not sure what to say about this. It works out well for me the more kink is prized. (and while I think LB's seduction narrative hypothesis may have some merit, people I meet tend to appreciate enthusiasm.) Disjunctures in what you want out of sex are always painful. I mean, there are people in the world who want loving romantic relationships but never want intercourse. This is neither reasonable nor unreasonable, it just is, and it has to be negotiated with the people they're involved with.
I agree with Brock re. watching lots of porn. Anecdotal theory: my boyfriend, who claims to have never bought porn in his life, is the least showoffy (and yet very unjudgmental) lover I've ever had. It's as though, gasp, the sex were all about intimacy.
The other anecdotal thing I have this morning is that I'm watching a bit of cable American tv these days since I'm staying in hotels, and jeezameezus. I'd forgotten how awful it is. The contract between what I see there and what I'm seeing as I travel and talk to people is really striking. New theory: that a lot of the sexism and racism we react to and argue about is pretty much happening mostly on television. What we see is a big part of how we think the world is (reasonably) but what we see on tv is entirely fake and really kind of fucked up. My god, I'm becoming an anti-tv person.
So yeah, first amendment rights rule and all, but it seems increasingly clear to me that what we're required to do with the internet and tv is be extremely selective, because seeking out things that are kind of shocking is a pretty normal instinct (look, that moved! keep an eye on it!), but can fuck you up. I wonder if anyone's done monkey studies on this. Also, I wonder if the internet is more a replacement for televisioin than it is for print media, and if by and large (porn excepted) that's not a really good thing. Even the stupid shit on the internet is often more creative than the stupid shit on tv. Like CNN's obsession with whether or not Terrel whoeveritis killed himself this morning.
Anyway, I am glad to have an excuse not to pay for cable.
May be, LB, but that wasn't the narrative of my sex life. And I do believe that most of the porn-consumption in my relationships would have been mine, and it was almost all pre-1940 porn. I'm not going to get into any detail, so that's probably all I can say about that.
(and while I think LB's seduction narrative hypothesis may have some merit, people I meet tend to appreciate enthusiasm.)
Yeah. I think that's because you're having sex with people who are actually in it for the kink. I'm wondering if anonymous is running into people who aren't actually excited by spanking as much as by doing something their partner will agree to only reluctantly -- it doesn't so much matter what.
Damn. I'm doing one of those 'spin a theory off the top of my head, and then get attached to it' things. People, remind me that I just made this up, and there's no real reason to think it's true.
Further anecdotes: I've had more than one lover, with whom I had warm, intimate sex, who also watched porn.
618: Oh, I'm completely sure; I'm not saying porn makes that impossible. Just that he's interesting b/c the showoffy aspects of sex interest him not at all, which is unique ime. FWIW, he's not at all opposed to kink, and has done some freaky stuff with ex-girlfriends--that's the non-judgmental part of it. But it does seem as if his kink interests are very tailored to the invidual relationship, rather than coming from some "hey, I saw this in a movie once" thing.
Your theory might be true, LB, for large groups of people in the US. In some communities, the "women don't want sex" thing is still pretty powerful, right? In groups where it's not, it won't be true. Yet another reason to never consort with people of a different class.
616: Isn't JM the tease.
"Up in my apartment I have some rare vintage artwork you might be interested in... etchings, too."
620: Isn't it pretty powerful across the board? Among well-educated middle class secular liberal types, it's largely not accepted as true, but the idea is recent and strong enough that even someone who doesn't believe it might easily have a fair amount of sexual energy associated with it.
I think LB's definitely on to something, usually not harmful but capable of being warped. Avoiding preconceptions and comparisons, as B suggests is a worthwhile goal, and a fortunate circumstance.
I think if I tried to pull off the spank thing I'd burst out laughing.
Then just pull it gently.
I'm wondering if anonymous is running into people who aren't actually excited by spanking as much as by doing something their partner will agree to only reluctantly -- it doesn't so much matter what.
No, not at all. Every time, it's been done in sort of a playful spirit, and the guys have all been respectful.
Ironically, the person who called me "uptight" had, before we ever had sex, referred to himself as boring in bed. (And I should note, he wasn't calling me "uptight" to shame me into doing something I didn't want to do -- he was very respectful and liked me quite a lot. It was an observation more than anything else, and he used that word sort of impulsively.)
I think LB's making sense, too, although I disagree with Idon'tpay that the "women don't want sex as much as men" meme is ever not harmful on some level.
even someone who doesn't believe it might easily have a fair amount of sexual energy associated with it
Yeah, that makes sense. But saying that that's the reason for increasing kink doesn't ring true to me, for some reason. I think people act out what they see in porn because a lot of it turns them on, and then they want to see what it feels like / want to feel like studly porn guys.
I didn't make myself clear: what I think is "usually not harmful" is thatsomeone who doesn't believe it might easily have a fair amount of sexual energy associated with it. Or is that not a distinction? A form of role-assigning, such as I alluded to above, more than role-playing, where you really were quite certain about intention.
I'm not quite sure what I think about porn, especially for inexperienced clueless teenagers. I wonder how much porn normalizes activities/heightens expectations that shouldn't be tried out by people who haven't quite figured out quite how the mechanics of plain vanilla sex works. And while negotiation is part of adult relationships, and it should be part of teenage ones, too, if the expectation is 'but girls just expect to be spanked!', it might shortcut that negotiation.
But I'm not sure how harmful that is, or if it's measurably more harmful than primetime sex scenes where the teenaged couple has a simulataneous orgasm the very first time they have sex, expectations-wise.
Right, but what really matters here is that Jane Galt is kinky: "I should think a public whipping post vastly preferable..." Actually she's advocating whipping over prison, but allow me my fantasies. It's all I've got.
I think people are very powerfully influenced by their first sexual experience. I see myself playing out my first experience again and again, even as I know I'm doing it. So I'm willing to believe that early exposure to porn is enough to permanently set a person's tastes.
I don't know what I think of the idea that sex is becoming kinkier. I have an uninformed sense that oral sex only became prevalent a couple of generations ago, and if that was led by porn, I'm all for it. Maybe it is only stuff that became popular since my tastes were set (ass-play) that disturbs me. But how is that more shocking than oral sex must have been? In your mouth?!
But, I can also reinforce the anonymous commenter's fears. I am trying to meet and sleep with nice guys, and I have no sense of what is mainstream. Perhaps everyone but me shaves exotic shapes into her bush. Maybe everyone but me loves getting it up the ass, with spankings as a warmup. I don't care if they are, but with the boundaries so big, I have more room to be afraid that I am the inadequate one. (Don't worry about reassuring me. I am strong willed enough to assert what I enjoy.)
I regret posting that, because I sound like some kind of pervert. In truth, I abhor sex of all kinds.
And where can you go for information on mainstream sex practices, if not the trade journals?
I'm a nice guy, Megan; you should meet and sleep with me.
oral sex only became prevalent a couple of generations ago, and if that was led by porn
I doubt it. I think the easy availability of internet porn makes the effect of porn vastly different now. Today, anyone can easily see very kinky stuff, whereas you had to be pretty motivated to see it before. I'd like some anthropologist to show up and tell us that oral sex took off after car culture made sex easier, but before the pill was available. Or maybe I'll just tell you myself.
633: I just wait until Harry Shearer summarizes them.
And who can say that Ben has no game?
At least everyone can be assured that I'll never misuse a colon.
I'm enjoying my inability to decide whether anonymous is commenting anonymously because s/he's embarrassed by the kink in his/her life or because s/he's embarrassed by the lack of kink in his/her preferences. Or for some other reason.
I'm a total prude, which became clear when I realized that I'd be weirded out if someone in real life referred to anal sex as "ass-play." But there doesn't seem to be much to be done (or if anything needs to be done) about all of this beyond making clear that people should ask before they act.
I'd like some anthropologist to show up and tell us that oral sex took off after car culture made sex easier, but before the pill was available
That's a very plausible theory, true or not.
No, not at all. Every time, it's been done in sort of a playful spirit, and the guys have all been respectful.
I'm not sure that this is incompatible -- the 50's narrative I'm talking about isn't a rape narrative, this is nice-boy, Richie Cunningham stuff. The idea is that they'll overcome your resistance and release your true womanly sexuality.
I'm taking some of this from personal experience, back in the day. Not so much on kinkiness, but in my checkered past, I have more than once run into guys who took my asking them to stop some form of stimulation or foreplay because it was uncomfortable or unpleasant (nothing interesting or extreme, particularly) as a signal to do it more, and even if they stopped to come back to doing the same thing repeatedly. The guy I'm thinking of particularly wasn't, I believe, intending to be a jerk, although it was annoying. What I think was going on in his head was that he was hearing "I don't like that thing you're doing" as "That thing you're doing is too intense for me, because I fear teh pleasure. If only someone could free me of this fear by making me accept teh pleasure I resist." And I could not get him past it.
Well, I can say that 1850s-era English pornographic stories had a fair amount of oral sex.
I've seen some pornographic comics from the 30s and prior and people are having oral sex all over their pages.
I've seen some pornographic comics from the 30s and prior and people are having oral sex all over their pages.
Yeah, sure, but I don't think it was a mainstream practice, was it?
641.--That sort of overcoming resistance is something I would frown on so strongly that the chappie in question would have to beg his way back into bed on bended knees. "No" and "stop" mean "don't argue, punk, and maybe we'll talk about it later, that is, if you don't piss me off further."
What I think was going on in his head was that he was hearing "I don't like that thing you're doing" as "That thing you're doing is too intense for me, because I fear teh pleasure. If only someone could free me of this fear by making me accept teh pleasure I resist."
I don't think that's it. I'm sure I've done similar in dark days gone past, and--reconstructing a memory that I don't quite remember--it's closer to a kid saying, "But I want the CocoPuffs!" over and over again, until mom gives in out of a simple desire to have the kid shut up.
w-lfs-n, did you read those comics wearing rubber gloves?
The idea is that they'll overcome your resistance and release your true womanly sexuality.
The thing is that they had no idea I was resistant until they tried it, and when I didn't respond to it, they totally backed off.
I read the "uptight" comment as, "Hm. You don't seem to be into things that many other people are into."
I've previously theorized that oral sex became mainstream with daily bathing after WW II.
w-lfs-n, did you read those comics wearing rubber gloves?
Har. No, they were posted to my source of knowledge about all things sexual, metafilter.
634 - Ben, I'll be in Oakland this Saturday. We can go to some jazz/improv show that I won't like.
642,643 - But did that porn pre-date the expectation that oral sex was an entirely mainstream sexual practice? Was it leading the trend? (I honestly don't know. If you do know that everyone expected to have oral sex in my grandparent's generation - both ways - I'll believe you.)
Ogged, I'm not really sure what mainstream sexual practice actually means, or could be proven to be, in a pre-TV, pre-Kinsey era. Steven Marcus and Michel Foucault and a wide variety of later people have tried to come up with ways of approaching earlier cultures' private sexuality, but it's pretty elusive; the people writing about it are either prudes (condemning various things that other people were enjoying) or perverts (obsessing over things that few other people were enjoying), so it's kinda difficult to reconstruct the norm.
What if donkey-punching becomes the norm?
That sort of overcoming resistance is something I would frown on so strongly that the chappie in question would have to beg his way back into bed on bended knees
This is definitely the attitude of the women I've slept with, such that "C'mon, pleeease" isn't really part of my repertoire. BUT, the one Iranian women I've been with totally did the "You may do X, but not Y, and it might all change tomorrow" thing, and clearly not as an expression of her preferences, but as a game or strategy where she doled herself out as she saw fit. I only fooled around with her to make my mother happy.
646: Yeah, but the thing is that it wasn't anything particularly more or different than stuff that we were doing and I was enjoying. To take a non-graphic analogy it was as if I were saying "Don't rub the hair on my arms against the direction it grows, that feels weird. Stroke down, not up." The stuff I was asking him not to do was stuff that made no particular sense out of the context of it feeling good to me -- it was just that he was taking "that doesn't feel good" as meaning "If I keep doing it, it's going to feel really good."
it's closer to a kid saying, "But I want the CocoPuffs!" over and over again
This would make sense in the context of an act that was supposed to be pleasurable for the guy involved, but I can't quite figure it in the context of his doing something that I was supposed to find stimulating.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, ogged, but some nights one is up for wilder and/or kinkier, and other nights not so much. (If these invoked Iranian women are one night having crazy sex with you and the next night refusing to let you take off their blouses, then maybe you do have a point.)
Great! Take your pick, but frankly, despite my interest in Zach Hill, I think you'd prefer the first, though neither is incredibly exciting:
Sat 9/30 6:00 PM Oakland Museum Outdoor Gardens [Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak Street Oakland, California 94607]
The Lost Trio plays The Oakland Museum at the 2006 Girl's Inc. Fundraiser
The Lost Trio:
Phillip Greenlief - saxophone
Dan Seamans - bass
Tom Hassett - drums
Sat 9/30 7:00 PM 21 Grand [416 25th St @Broadway Near 19th Street BART Oakland]
Flossin' (Christopher Willits, Zach Hill, Carson McWhirter)
Antimatter/Wobbly duo
Thomas Dimuzio
William Winant - Damon Smith - Josh Allen
Ettrick
BBQ [this isn't the name of a performer, there'll be a barbecue]
If these invoked Iranian women are one night having crazy sex with you and the next night refusing to let you take off their blouses, then maybe you do have a point
Just the one woman, and yeah, totally like that.
Ben, I don't have an opinion about either and you would be appalled at my usual musical tastes. We might as well go to the one you prefer. Um, do you want to take this conversation somewhere a little more private, or do you want to see if anyone else here is interested in joining us?
-- it was just that he was taking "that doesn't feel good" as meaning "If I keep doing it, it's going to feel really good."
And he was wrong to take it that way.
Um, do you want to take this conversation somewhere a little more private, or do you want to see if anyone else here is interested in joining us?
See? Just what I'm talkin' about. Buncha pervs. Leave me out of it.
Did w-lfs-n just get a date? Megan, what are you doing? We'll never hear the end of this.
661: Oh, absolutely -- it was annoying as hell. I'm just trying to theorize about what might make someone act like that in the absence of a massive head injury.
I am starting to get the impression that a bit of interracial marriage and whatnot is going to be a very good thing for the Iranian-American population.
Megan, you know he's only 19, right?
I'll say that LB's on to something to the extent that I in my youth did what she describes. (Occassionaly what 646 describes too, but that's a different topic.) I think the idea's were mostly in my head from movies (and of course porn), that the woman was supposed to like x, and if she's saying don't or stop or I don't like that, well, then there were two possbilities: either I'm doing it wrong, in which case I'll try again just a little bit different, or maybe it's one of those things that she'll learn to like with just a little exposure, so I should just keep trying. These were in some cases things that help erotic charge for me, but in other cases were really just things I was trying to do for her pleasure. (One of my first serious snugglemuffins really didn't like receiving oral sex. How many times did I make some effort to try anyway, convinced that all women loved this? Many.)
It probably doesn't help the whole "she'll just take some time to start to learn to like it" attitude that this is, in fact, exactly the curve that a lot of young women experience with sex itself. (Which may be a big part of what is feeding the attitude LB describes.)
What a wasted opportunity. Brimstone etc.
Lies! I'm roughly 24 and seven twelfths.
I was just thinking that it wasn't entirely a date, 'cause w-lfs-n is twelve or something. But I am going to be in Oakland and he mentioned Oakland and it seemed straightforward. Besides, I hang out with twenty-year-olds all the time.
Jeebus fucking Cripes. Wolftson better be bald, fat, and acne-scarred by the end of the year.
Also, he's completely physically unthreatening, Megan.
Megan, you know w-lfs-n had his testicles cut off due to an error by Dutch surgeons, right?
Tim! You know I'm sensitive about my weight.
Everyone is, apostropher. When you're me.
If porn in its increasingly easy availability is really that influential, I'd be worried that its most pernicious effects would be in the widespread wearing of garish stiletto heels, too much makeup and comically bad expressions without a trace of real pleasure in them.
Uh, 679 to, like, before the Ben-Megan thing, which is suddenly much more interesting.
I feel as if we should be admonshing Megan not to keep Ben out too late. He has school!
654: I only fooled around with her to make my mother happy.
What, your mom likes to watch?
Speaking of which, I should be going there.
Comment #684 belongs over on the other therad.
679: Porn has apparently had a pernicious effect on fashion choices in Beirut. Big surprise there.
Just back, I've read the comments, and am interested in LB's "guy wouldn't stop" memory in context of her earlier point about the residual appeal, for both sexes, of overcoming resistance.
I think leading, much as a dance partner would, is something many women, including some rather assertive personalities, appreciate in a man. It is a default presumption when otherwise unaddressed, and as the thread at B's demonstrated, remains meaningful, not always but sometimes even among people in established and often explicitly-bounded relationships.
But that is very different from disregarding a verbal que, which is bad practice and a bad sign about how much he's in the moment and how much in his head.
470:But therapists aren't selling intimacy. They create intimacy in order to help one figure out one's shit. And the form of intimacy is v. well-defined.
The analogy is certainly inexact. But what about sexual surrogates? They are still on the theraputic side of the ledger, but use physical as well as verbal intimacy as a tool. Or on the other hand, what about running a phone chat line for pay? How about a phone sex line? Does everything break down along a theraputic vs. selling intimacy line that corresponds to OK/Not OK, or do the boundaries get a bit blurry somewhere?
I don't know how influential porn really is in forming attitudes towards sex. I've managed to develop a couple of kinky streaks, even though my primary sources of adolescent erotica were Sears catalogs and detective novels. One of these days I may have to write an article about "Perry Mason: a Gateway to BDSM?"
One exercise I did several years ago was develop a timeline showing the development of my sexual fantasies and the various types of erotic materials I was exposed to at different stages of my life. The movement of themes was almost entirely from my fantasies into the kind of erotic materials I was seeking out, not the other way around. In other words, I wasn't finding stuff erotic just because somebody put it into a frame called porn: I was deciding what I found erotic and then looking for material that spoke to those desires. Porn/erotica could embellish details, add subplots, and provide frames in which I might build further fantasies, but it didn't define what was erotic in the first place.
Now maybe the spread of anal fetishes is an argument to the contrary, in spite of my own experience. But I wouldn't discount the possibility that porn makers are following a trend instead of creating it. Maybe anal became trendy through other means, and then porn producers started putting out more anal films because that was what was selling.
Does the porn help with your ED?
Every so often they get in those Goliath Birdeater tarantulas. 12" across. You could feed it mice.
Anyone who would do this is a phylum traitor.
690: It's not especially relevant. Solo sex is unaffected so far - it's just sustaining an erection without continual stimulation that's difficult. Medication helps. Getting rid of the damn condoms has helped (let's hear it for menopause!). But racing to achieve insertion before it became impractical was no fun at all for either of us, and it's not a situation in which porn was going to be part of the festivities.
Following up my 689: A stronger counterexample to my thesis would be so-called "facials," if this practice has become at all common among the young. That's a practice that as far as I can tell has no intrinsic value for anyone outside of a porn film. (Cum shots, of which the facial is an example, were introduced in porn films just to show the audience that the actors were really having sex instead of simulating it. Presumably that's not an issue in private sexual relationships.) So any use of this practice in private sex is probably an example of someone thinking something is supposed to be erotic just because they saw it in a porn flick, rather than because they actually like it.
I bet people would have come up with facials without porn.
Aspect of its appeal (and every time I say something like this is not to defend something I actually do) that I could see:
1) mild and exciting degradation of the s/he wants me so bad s/he'll take my cum on his face!/I want him so bad I'll take his cum on my face sort. It doesn't have to be deeply humiliating if you don't find cum on your face that violating and the guy doesn't seem hostile when he's doing it.
2) deep humiliation if you find cum on your face violating and the guy seems hostile when he's doing it.
3) related to 1, but now degradation free: it could just be a willing demonstration of total acceptance of and comfort with bodily fluids. I don't think anyone who's ever played with smearing cum around or eating it or whatever was necessarily getting direct sexual pleasure from it--some of the time that kind of stuff is probably just a showy demonstration of how lovely you find his body and its products.
The butt? For Freudian and physiological reasons, lots of reason to be interested in it totally independent of porn.
Sears catalogs and detective novels. No National Geographic? You poor thing.
The newspaper ads of today are more erotic and revealing than the (pre-Playboy) pornography of the 50s. Be thankful for what you've got, kids -- it was uphill both ways.
Based on a single anecdote (1983, Princeton U grad), F2M blow jobs may be 1.) a form of birth control and 2.) a way of "saving it for marriage". This may go back a long time -- I've read that Bill Clinton's definition of sex as requiring penetration was shared by some church people.
To me blow jobs don't look at all enjoyable for the giver, but that might just be my limited and twisted perspective. Or if enjoyable, more in a friendly social way than in an exciting, erotic way.
Us phylum traitors are always eating our own.
693-5: I think the facial was popularized by (IIRC) ACT UP, with the slogan "Come on me, not in me."
Since apostropher asked about my personal situation at 690, I should note that I wrote a bit more about it in B's thread on male sexuality back during the great BJ debate. Rather than force you folks to dig through the archives, I'll just copy it here to go with my 692:
Some of what I've been dealing with in marriage counselling is coming to terms with the idea that the price of staying in my marriage is to do without many of the types of sexual expression that I most enjoy and find most erotic. Some of them are things that we never did together, others are things that we used to enjoy together, but where we have since moved in radically different directions.
BJs are in the category of stuff we've never done. She's massively repulsed by the whole idea, to the point of being extremely uncomfortable even talking about it. For me, they've been in the "nice to have but not essential" category; not something I've ever come to, but a nice supplement to other activities. So it should be easy to just give up on them and move on, except for two things. One is that I enjoy going down on her, but sometimes get frustrated by the lack of reciprocity. The other is that I've been dealing with ED (erectile dysfunction - partial impotence, in the vernacular) for the last few years, and BJs are one of the few ways I could receive sexual pleasure that don't require a full erection on my part. So it would be nice if we could incorporate them into our sex life, but it isn't going to happen. It's not the most important of our sexual differences, but it's there, and the prospect of someday hitting a point where I can only give pleasure without receiving any is pretty unappealing (though for now, pills are proving fairly effective at keeping the ED at bay).
Sometimes, monogamy sucks.
EDguy | 06.27.06 - 6:06 am | #
There's a bunch of related questions that I'd like to discuss with folks here if the opportunity presents (e.g., thinking about how monogamy makes our partner's limits our own as well). Dunno if this thread will go on long enough to really get into them, though.
695: So the facial is basically a tamer version of watersports? Ok, I can buy that. It makes it even harder to test how much porn really affects people's attitudes towards what is erotic, though. We may be left with just anecdotal evidence from personal experience.
696: Nope, my grandmother was the one who subscribed to NG, and her house didn't lend itself to the kind of privacy I would have needed to take advantage of them. I bought my first Playboy senior year in high school to satisfy my anatomical curiousity about how the female breast was attached to the chest - I couldn't quite figure it out from the lingerie ads in Sears, and I didn't know any live models that I felt comfortable asking.
I can't speak to how enjoyable it is to give a BJ, but I know in giving cunnilingus and backrubs, part of the pleasure for me is taking vicarious pleasure in what my partner is feeling and expressing. There's also the thrill of getting to drive my partner's erotic experience. Backrubs also provide the pure sensual pleasure of broad skin-to-skin contact. So I imagine the vibe of giving a BJ might be similar, but I'll have to defer to those with actual experience.
I found what I was on about in 277—this post.
