Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for July, 2010

Just Drawn That Way

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2010| 45 Comments »

The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.  –  Madame de Stael

One of the drawbacks of the daily column format is that it’s sometimes difficult to summarize all of the aspects of a complex issue in under 2000 words.  Try as one might there are always loose ends, and any short discussion of general rules allows little space even to mention the exceptions, much less analyze them; this unfortunately allows desperate people with agendas to dismiss one’s entire point with a mental “Aha! She didn’t mention such-and-such so she’s full of shit!”  I don’t know if anyone has done that with any of my columns so far, but I may have come close yesterday because a careless reading of that essay might suggest to some people that I was either denying the female sex drive or portraying women as paragons of control, neither of which is true.  Undoubtedly, the promiscuous woman is not uncommon, and since time immemorial her existence has been used by men to shore up the doctrine of the wanton.  But as we shall see, the reasons women seek sex are not usually the same as those of men, and the nature of those reasons generally precludes paying for sex even in women who are not in a position to give it away (such as those who fear the public exposure which might result from an affair or bar-trolling).  In other words, even women who seek promiscuous sex generally do so for reasons other than overwhelming physical lust such as men experience.

The first and foremost reason women seek sex is to attract men. This is the last psychological vestige of the estrus or “heat” cycle which affects every mammal other than humans; when a woman wishes to attract a mate or bond a newly-attracted mate, she experiences a much greater sex drive than at other times.  I seem to recall reading that the period of increased drive lasts for about 18 months from the onset of sexual activity with a new partner, but I couldn’t find the exact figure while writing this.  In any case, this increase is wholly involuntary; it is Nature’s way of bonding the male to the female for long enough to protect her through pregnancy and the early infancy of her child.  Once this initial period is over a woman’s sex drive will generally decrease to a marked degree or (if she’s tired due to work and baby) even vanish altogether.  When this happens, a man may feel betrayed or lied to; he may even feel as though his wife has consciously engaged in a campaign of deceit intended to ensnare him into marriage.  But she cannot help the variation in her sex drive any more than a man can help being attracted to other women; both derive from evolutionary necessity, and the fact that we humans use sex for lots of things other than reproduction is neither here nor there.  The male who brands the lonely woman a “bad girl” or his unresponsive spouse a “bad wife” would profit by remembering the words of Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”  Women and men are each “drawn” in a certain way by Nature, and though unlike cartoon characters we can alter our own designs to a degree, this requires both conscious effort and a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to alter in the first place.  Expressed another way, it’s impossible to reach any specific place without having both a map and knowledge of one’s current position on it.

Unfortunately, many people of both genders refuse to accept their current positions or even to acknowledge the need for movement; they simply whine “but I shouldn’t have to!” or insist that it is their partners’ obligation to do so.  This attitude is both immature and counterproductive, yet it seems to have become the norm nowadays.  Men moan that wives lose interest in sex, and women bitch that husbands should simply accept the lesser supply; neither of these is realistic, but IMHO the typical male response is far more sensible than the typical female one:  He satisfies his need elsewhere, usually with a whore.  At one time, the wise wife understood this; she may not have liked it, but she realized that it was the way of things and tolerated it as long as it was discreet and had no obvious effect on her standard of living.  But the typical modern Western woman is the product of over a century of brainwashing that the male sex drive can be artificially repressed and several decades of propaganda that men and women are the same, female psychological norms are the standard, and male norms are a pathological deviation from it.  These fallacies, combined with her profoundly overdeveloped sense of entitlement, create the usual histrionic display which ensues when the spoiled modern woman discovers her husband has employed a whore.

Cheating on your wife with an amateur can have unpredictable consequences.

Don’t get too smug, guys; I’m not giving your infidelities a free pass.  Note that I only mentioned whores; it is my considered opinion that for a married man to have unsanctioned affairs or one-night-stands with non-professionals is irresponsible and wrong (albeit predictable).  An amateur who has sex with a married man is driven by the same needs as any other woman, and if her primary motivation is mate attraction a fling could potentially turn into a disaster.  Thus the value of understanding why women act as we do:  If a man is laboring under the delusion of female lasciviousness he will no doubt interpret a “slut’s” attraction to him as engendered by pure animal lust (just like his for her), when in actuality she might be desperately lonely and unconsciously seeking a husband.  She might be completely unaware of this motivation and even think of her affair with the man as a mere dalliance, until she suddenly finds herself in love with him and starts calling his home, demanding he leave his wife for her or even provoking major public scandal.

The whore, on the other hand, has absolutely no interest in attracting a mate; for her, sex with customers is a business, a means of support.  This is not to say we are immune to love or have no desire for marriage; far from it, and many a working girl is either married or attached, or else eventually leaves The Life for a husband (as I did).  What I am saying is that for a whore the extension of a general offer of sex has nothing to do with either lust or husband-hunting; it is merely the advertisement of a service for hire.  I’m not sure why so many people are confused about this; nobody thinks that an accountant loves to prepare tax forms, or that a roofer has ulterior motives for advertising his services.  On the other hand, nobody insists that it is impossible for a chef to enjoy cooking, nor that an actress must be “damaged” for playing different roles on screen rather than just being herself.  Men and women both are so psychologically invested in their stereotypes about sex in general and prostitution in particular that the vast majority of people simply cannot recognize that a whore is no different from any other professional: Though she may or may not enjoy her work, her primary motivation for doing it is to earn a living.  Therefore, she is the only safe and moral outlet for the married man’s desire for extramarital sex; the cost is specific, she has no interest in him outside the business relationship, and her discretion can be relied upon.  She therefore poses no financial, emotional or social threat to the wife.

Like any other businessperson, the whore must advertise in order to attract the attention of potential customers and to motivate them to choose her above her competitors.  One common method of doing this is to appeal to male fantasy, and since the “wanton woman” is such a universal theme it is one many whores (and strippers, singers, actresses, etc) choose to appeal to.  Many males may be tempted to view this as a “lie”, but seen dispassionately it is no different from one company’s claim that its products are of higher quality or more “fun” than those of the competition.  Once a man learns to think critically, he can shed the preconceptions on which advertisers attempt to capitalize and judge any product, whether it be beer or automobiles or sexual services, on its actual merits rather than on hype.

The third most common female motivation for sex is one shared by both professionals and amateurs alike, and is the one to which my epigram refers. Since Nature has programmed women to attract men, it stands to reason that women should enjoy being attractive to men, and indeed that is the case; the desire to be desired is a very powerful stimulus indeed.  Every normal, well-adjusted woman wishes to be seen as attractive, and no amount of neofeminist propaganda will ever change that because it springs from the very core of the female experience.  Having said that, I must point out that a powerful enough trauma can distort natural drives into unrecognizability, so many women who have been raped or sexually abused (including most neofeminists) may come to view male attention as threatening because such interest resulted in their being badly hurt.  But for undamaged women, male attention is both exciting and validating.  When I first embarked on my career of harlotry the dear, late friend I shall refer to as Dr. Helena (who was a prominent sexologist and sex therapist in New Orleans) warned me that it could be addictive, and she was absolutely right:  The sheer thrill of being offered large sums of money for my sexual favors was the most intoxicating experience of my entire life.  The neofeminists love to pretend that sex work is “demeaning,” but the truth is that a large percentage of women in the trade (including strippers and porn stars) find it more empowering than anything else we have ever done, sometimes even more gratifying than romance.

Because romance, of course, is the closest amateurs ever get to that feeling.  For a man to offer not merely his attention but his heart, his goods, his name, his time and even his life to a woman is just as exciting and intoxicating to the average woman as the offer of financial tribute is to her harlot sister, which is why romance novels are a multi-billion dollar industry and the fantasy of romance has just as powerful a commercial appeal to women as does the fantasy of unbridled sex to men.  What the gigolo or the young boyfriend of a “cougar” brings to the table is male sexual interest (or at least the appearance thereof), for which the rich matron is willing to pay money and the “cougar” is willing to trade sex.  And knowing this, it should be obvious why it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man:  It is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her, and that invalidates the primary reason for which she might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex.

In the sphere of sexual relationships, as in so many other things, knowledge is the key to understanding why things happen as they do; one who denies the validity of verifiable facts merely because they conflict with his preconceptions condemns himself to unending confusion, but one who accepts the facts will find that they provide a useful map with which he can chart a course through the convoluted landscape of relationships with the opposite sex.

Read Full Post »

The Myth of the Wanton

Posted in History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 20, 2010| 29 Comments »

Penis envy? You’re kidding, right? With what I’ve got between my legs, I can get a penis anytime I want one.  –  My friend Liz

Since the beginning of civilization men have been mystified by feminine sexuality; in the earliest times they even considered it magical, tied to the moon and the fertility of the crops, and whores were priestesses.  Then slowly, over time, the reproductive aspects of the mystery faded and with them male reverence for women in general and whores in particular.  The reverence was eventually replaced in many cultures by a resentment of the nigh-uncontrollable power of male desire for women, made all the more bitter by the ease with which women manage our desire for men.  Men in general were (and still are) galled by the fact that no matter how much stronger, tougher, better at mathematics and more inclined to dominate their environments they are than women, when it comes to sex they need us a great deal more than we need them.  So I suppose it’s not surprising that, in the face of this humbling and annoying fact, many of them simply choose to deny it.

It has been an article of faith in the Middle East since Biblical times that the lust of women is stronger than that of men, and that women thus draw men into sin; the widespread interpretation (though certainly not the original meaning) of the story of the Fall is that Eve’s offering Adam the apple is symbolic of her tempting him into carnality, and to this very day Muslim men pontificate from the pulpit (and on the internet) about the greater lustfulness of women.  The Classical Greek philosophers taught that woman was like an animal always in heat, and the mythology of every part of Eurasia is full of temptresses, seductresses, succubae, enchantresses, whores and other wanton women whose entire reason for existence seems to consist of luring men into sex.  The fact that all of this is observably untrue makes no impression on men who want so badly to believe it, and once Platonic doctrine came to dominate Western thought around the beginning of the modern era, even reasonable men could be convinced; Plato taught that since the senses are fallible, the observation of reality leads inevitably to error and thus only pure thought is reliable.  In simpler terms, the Platonists believed that no matter how it LOOKED like women, planets, ballistic missiles or anything else were acting, they were really doing something else which could only be “discovered” through philosophical contemplation.  This of course conveniently meant that philosophers, scholars and priests could say whatever they wanted about female behavior and motives, and it would always be right even if women didn’t actually behave that way.

In combination with the Madonna/whore duality this was devastating to any kind of male comprehension of female sexuality, and even after the Renaissance replaced the Platonic principle with the scientific one men still seemed unwilling to give up their cherished beliefs; in the Age of Reason even the existence of God was questioned, but the doctrine of the wanton woman was not.  In fact, the division of womankind into the pure and the purulent became even more severe; during the 17th century witchcraft hysteria many thousands of women who were judged “bad” in one way or another (including, of course, many prostitutes and other “loose” women) were tortured or burned to death all over Europe.  And though this bloody horror eventually spent itself, the doctrine which had helped spawn it only grew worse; by the middle of the 19th century the general consensus among learned men was that “normal” women had no sex drive whatsoever, and that any woman who did was an atavism, a primitive and uncivilized beast in human form.  Is it any wonder Freud, reared on this poison, came to the rather strange conclusions he did about female sexuality?

But whatever Freud’s shortcomings, he had opened the door to the study of the mind, and by the middle of the 20th century understanding finally began to dawn in the minds of those men brave enough to look at the subject honestly.  Old preconceptions were, at least among sexologists, cast aside and replaced with conclusions drawn from actual study of the behavior of real women viewed without a filter of dogma.  The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s accelerated the inquiry, and the new climate of sexual openness resulted in a veritable avalanche of articles and books, including many for the lay reader.  The new “men’s magazines” featured explicit discussion of sex, and by the early 1970s even pornography came out of the closet and became more acceptable to the general public.

And that, unfortunately, was where things started to go wrong again.  Porn and girlie magazines are commercial enterprises; they must sell in order to turn a profit, and they must please their customers in order to sell.  And since the overwhelming majority of those who purchase porn are male, it should come as no surprise that the product which sells best is that which appeals most strongly to male fantasies…especially our old bugaboo, the wanton woman with the uncontrollable hunger for sex.  This strange creature infests porn to the virtual exclusion of all other female imagery, and as a result an entire generation of young men has come of age believing the same thing as their ancestors did for the past several millennia, that many if not most women are really sex-starved no matter what we pretend in public.  Nor have the feminists helped in this regard; the “pro-sex” feminists, in their headlong rush to eradicate any and every distinction between the sexes, encourage young women to seek out casual sex as men do whether they actually want it or not, and the neofeminists’ insistence on interpreting any and every male behavior as symptomatic of “patriarchal oppression” results in their attacking porn, prostitution, stripping and any other service which caters to men’s sexual needs as vehemently as any 19th century “purity” crusader ever did.  So, the “pro-sex” feminists unwittingly reinforce the age-old fallacy of the “lustful woman,” while the neofeminists screech that any heterosexual act which is initiated by the man or even pleases him is somehow “demeaning” to all women.  I’m not even going to try to discuss what impact all these contradictory messages have on society at large; even considering it makes my head hurt.  But what I can do is to tell you a little about how this affects working girls and escort service owners.

Every whore who has seen more than one client in her career has encountered the stereotype that we enter this profession because we’re “horny” and “slutty”.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked if I would like to “hang out” (and provide more sex, obviously) with a client after completing a call; this naïve request obviously springs from his belief that I just couldn’t get enough and would therefore be happy to spend my off-time in bed with a stranger.  Others believe the exact opposite, that all whores are “frigid” and our careers are actually quests to find that one man who can arouse us; presumably the money is merely a fringe benefit.  The neofeminists also ignore the commercial gain, and claim that we’re all poor brainwashed victims of the almighty Patriarchy who allow ourselves to be “exploited” because we were “damaged” by childhood sexual abuse; whores who experienced no such abuse are claimed to be “in denial” or suffering from “repressed memories.” And so on, and so on, ad absurdum.

But the strangest symptom of the general ignorance about women’s sexuality is the persistent myth of the female customer, the woman who is so desperate for sex that she’s willing to pay a man for it.  Hollywood loves to perpetuate this one, and not a month passed that I didn’t get a call from some guy who wanted to work as a male escort catering solely to women.  Despite the fact that my ad clearly stated “female escorts,” I always took the time to explain to these fantasy-addled men that the only way for male prostitutes to actually make a living is to see men; I was generally met with incredulity and I’m sure a number of them only called another service after hanging up with me.  They just couldn’t get it through their thick skulls that WOMEN DON’T NEED TO PAY FOR IT.  This obvious fact even seems occasionally to escape the minds of people who should know better, because every so often somebody announces that she’s going to open a brothel or escort service featuring male prostitutes who cater strictly to women.  The service opens to great fanfare, then within a few months either closes or starts accepting male customers.  A friend of mine who owned a male stripper service in addition to his escort service eventually had to stop offering so-called “bachelorette parties” because none of his boys would do them anymore.  The reason they gave?  “Women are lousy tippers and they’re more interested in the buffet than the dancers.”  Even the professional “all male revue” strippers generally travel unless they’re in really big cities, which are also the only places a few male prostitutes who refuse homosexual trade can eke out a living; they profit by the Law of Very Big Numbers, which states that given sufficient opportunity even a rarity becomes a certainty .

Yes, there are a few women out there who will pay for no-strings sex with a man (the gigolo is an entirely different phenomenon because what he sells is the illusion of romance), but unless you live in a place where several million people are crowded together I wish you luck in finding one.  In all the years I owned a service I never once had a serious inquiry for a man from a lone woman, and the other service owners with whom I was friendly had the same experience.  We had drunk coeds calling on dares, crackheads with no money and the occasional psychotic, but no actual customers.  Twice in my career I was hired by a lone married woman seeking a lesbian encounter; couple calls I’ve already discussed at length, and on a few occasions (in several years) we had calls from men who hired other men to screw their wives while they watched.  And that’s it.

Really, how could it be otherwise?  Every attractive woman gets offers all the time, and if she goes into a bar she practically has to beat them off with a stick; even less-attractive girls need only wait around until most of the guys put on their “beer goggles.”  And if even ugly girls can get it for free, why in the world should any woman pay for it other than to experiment or to prove a point (neither of which occurs with remotely the frequency or dependability of the male sexual urge)?  Yet the myth persists, despite its incredibility; now, as for most of human history, many men’s egos are so invested in the idea that women need sex as much or more desperately than they do that they simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge a fact which should be as obvious as the sun in the sky.

And they say we’re the irrational ones.

Read Full Post »

A Fictional Interlude

Posted in Fiction, The Dark Side, tagged , , on July 19, 2010| 8 Comments »

I said in my introduction that I’m not a fiction writer, and though that’s generally true I’d be lying if I told you I don’t make the odd attempt from time to time.  So, when Sailor Barsoom made the comment (on my July 11th column) that he would like to see a prostitute as adventure heroine, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; the idea was so compulsively interesting that I eventually decided that I had to try my hand at it.  So, here’s my humble effort at a short story about a heroic harlot; I hope you like it, and I promise that tomorrow I’ll be back to the nonfiction.

The Trick

“Almost ready?” asked Van, sticking his head into the bathroom where Bella was checking her makeup.

“Just about,” she replied, “I had to make sure I had enough supplies in my purse.”

“So, what do you think?” he asked.

“Not sure.  He sounded promising.”

Van nodded.  “Well, the car’s ready when you are.  Where are we going?”

“The Downtown Hilton,” she said, picking up her purse and gesturing him to move back from the doorway.  “Let’s go.”

She relaxed and collected herself while Van drove her to the hotel; it made her job so much easier to know that she had a partner in whom she could completely rely.  His mere presence was reassuring, and he had never failed to be exactly where she needed him to be exactly when she needed it; having him as a partner made an impossible job merely difficult.  As if he could hear her thoughts, he reached over and gently patted her leg, giving her thigh a reassuring squeeze.

They soon arrived at the hotel, and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek before getting out.  The autumn night had turned unexpectedly chilly, and she clutched her filmy shawl a little more tightly about her shoulders as she hastened into the big revolving door.  In a few moments she was through, and with practiced nonchalance walked over to the bank of elevators and chose an empty car in which to ascend to the 23rd floor.  She consulted her notebook to be sure of the room number, checked her face and hair in the elevator’s mirror and stepped out into the quiet hall as soon as the doors opened.  The numbering system in this hotel was pretty straightforward, and before long she found the room and knocked on the door.

When she had first started this job three months ago, the interval between her knocking and the answer seemed interminable; she had always felt exposed and obvious in the hall for an impossible length of time before the door was opened and she could begin the process of feeling the individual customer out.  But within a week her confidence had increased, and now it always seemed as though the client was literally waiting at the door; this time was no exception.

“Byron,” as he had called himself on the phone, was a striking man, proverbially tall, dark and handsome and endowed with a magnetism Bella could almost feel.  She remembered how she used to believe that all of a hooker’s clients were fat, old, ugly or otherwise unable to pick up women, but it had not taken her long to discover how mistaken that notion was; in her experience there were just as many attractive men among her clientele as in the general population.  In any case, it was neither here nor there; she had a job to do, and had schooled herself to be immune to the charms of those with whom she did it.  So she smiled her prettiest smile, introduced herself, and stepped into the room.

While he closed the hall door, she walked down the narrow little hall past the closed bathroom door and made a quick appraisal of the room; she was struck by its sheer messiness.  Not filth, mind; there were no pizza boxes or beer cans or overflowing garbage or any of the other typical rubbish one sometimes encountered in clients’ rooms.  No, this was just clutter, a sheer volume of luggage and clothes which told her that Byron could not have come by air unless he owned the plane.  Several large suitcases stood in the space between the bed and the curtained window, while garment bags and loose clothing draped every available hook and fixture.  “Goodness, what a mess!” Bella exclaimed; she had discovered that plain honest conversation usually made a better impression than pretense or flattery.

Byron laughed.  “Sorry about this,” he said; “I’m going to be in town for a while and I like to be comfortable.  Please don’t be put off by it.”

“Not at all,” said Bella with a smile, but inside she was keyed up; she had noticed a telling detail, and knew that she must be on her guard at all costs.  But he hadn’t done anything really unusual yet, and she had to be absolutely sure.  So she continued with, “I like to get the formalities out of the way first, so I can check in with the agency and then we can relax.”  As he pulled out his wallet, he reminded her that she had agreed to stay the full hour, and she nodded and assured him that she always took as much time with her customers as was needed.

He handed over the cash, and she thanked him sweetly and put it into her purse, then picked up the phone to call the agency.  After noting the time and checking in, she turned again to Byron and said “So, what did you have in mind tonight?”

“Oh, I just thought we’d chat for a few minutes first; there’s no need to rush things.”  He said.  “How long have you been doing this?”

“I’m pretty new at it,” she said, “only three months now.”  She had discovered that an honest response to that question generally got a good reaction, and this time was no exception.

“Three months!  Why, that practically makes you a virgin!”  This was said with a sort of condescending undertone that Bella did not at all like, but she was here to do her job and so pretended to laugh at his “joke”.  He continued, “Aren’t you ever scared?”

This wasn’t an unusual question, but the mockery in his voice drove her to a higher state of alarm which she nevertheless kept from her face.  “Sure, sometimes,” she said.  “But the agency knows exactly where I am, so if I don’t call out on time they can call my driver downstairs.”

As she expected, he was unfazed.  “That didn’t help those other girls, though.  How many now, eight in the past few months?”

“Nine,” she answered, unable to keep the choke out of her voice.  The sick bastard was enjoying this; he wanted to terrify her before having his way with her, but she fought down the fear and continued to watch him with poorly-feigned nonchalance.

“Haven’t the police any leads?” he continued, attempting to meet her gaze.

She turned the slightly to the right and squeaked, “No, none of the bodies have been found, and he keeps changing hotels.  And besides, the cops never try very hard when it’s whores who are vanishing.”  Then, abruptly, “Look, do we really need to talk about this?  Wouldn’t you prefer to do what you hired me for?”

Then he laughed, and in an instant Bella erupted into action.  In one smooth motion she drew the pistol from her purse and swept the obscuring clothing from the bureau mirror, ascertaining in an instant that she was the only person reflected in it before turning to fire three perfect shots straight into the rapidly-approaching Byron’s heart.  He clutched his chest with a look of complete astonishment, then collapsed onto the floor at her feet.

She did not hesitate for a moment, but put three more shots into his back, confident that the sharp “Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!” of the silenced weapon would not be audible in the next room above the sound of the television set.  Her hands shaking, she dropped again into the chair and called Van.  “It’s done,” she sighed.

“So it was him!  I’ll be right up!”  While she waited, she opened the largest of the suitcases; as she expected, it was empty but for bloodstains.  She showed Van when he arrived, and with carefully-controlled anger he said “This time it’s his turn to be carried out in it.”  Then he unshouldered his bag and she turned away; no matter how many times they did this, she would never be able to watch Van decapitate them.  She knew that Byron had been dead for a long time, decades maybe, and that he was no longer human but a hellish monster who preyed on unsuspecting women.  But try as she might she just couldn’t handle the sight or sound of the head coming off, and Van understood; as usual, he waited until she left the room.

She felt stronger as she walked out into the cold night air and went to the car to wait for Van to arrive with the loaded suitcase; as usual, they would torch its contents on their way out of town.  As she waited, looking up at the moon, she felt her face creep into a smile; she was going to miss being a call girl.  Her cover for this mission had been a lot more interesting than posing as a coed, a barfly or any of the other kinds of women their quarries usually preyed on, and it had been even more lucrative than the time she had played the part of a stripper.  One thing was for certain; the money she had made in the past few months would not only support them for quite a while between hunts, but also purchase quite a number of silver bullets.

Read Full Post »

Modern Marriage

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , on July 18, 2010| 60 Comments »

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.  –  Marie Antoinette

The highest divorce rates in the world are in economically and industrially developed regions; since the primary socioeconomic rationale for marriage has always been support and protection of women and children, obviously a woman whose sole source of support was her husband’s income did not have the option to leave him if she became dissatisfied, because her need to survive outweighed all other considerations.  Indeed, it can be shown that in most periods of history, women with their own sources of income (heiresses, tradeswomen and whores) divorced at much higher rates than poor women did; they had no economic incentive to remain in marriages with which they were unhappy.  This has been noted before and analyzed to great exhaustion, but taken alone it fails to point to the true reason for the high modern divorce rate.

In preindustrial times the family was the basic unit of government; even the king was a sort of father over the extended family of his kingdom, which at the earliest times actually was his extended family.  The title “sire” clearly reflects back upon this role of his.  Each family’s economy contributed via taxes and levies to the economy of the local noble and to the king, who thus derived their upkeep from taxes just as modern governments do.  More recently, however, the size of the population, the increased preeminence of ideology over personality, and the unifying and organizing ability made possible by modern means of transportation and communication have combined to result in the depersonalization of power.  Power has been removed from the hands of individual rulers and spread out over entire organizations, and even though there are powerful personalities within each organization, the power ultimately rests in the organization itself rather than in any individual.  A political party or other power-holding organization is itself an organic entity, a superhuman “being” deriving power from its myriad members like Hobbes’ Leviathan, but as an inhuman entity it has motivations different from those of a human.  Our ancestors were ruled by human men with the desires and needs of human men, while we are ruled by inhuman collectives with their own needs and desires.  Both types of rulers have one thing in common, however; they both desire power above all else, and will do anything necessary to acquire and retain that power.

Female sexuality is perhaps the most powerful social force known; what men will do for the privilege of sexual contact with a sexually attractive woman is nothing short of incredible, and what women will do to satisfy their sense of intimacy is only slightly less so (I use the term “sense of intimacy” because in most women this impulse is more complex than that of men and may encompass children, sexless physical intimacy, spiritual devotion to a cherished belief system, etc).  In the past a poor or low-born woman might raise her status through her sexuality, either by conventional whoring or by long-term arrangements such as becoming the concubine or kept woman of a wealthy man.  And because both individual men and governments cannot help but recognize this, control of female sexuality has always been an important factor in the control of a society as a whole, usually with repressive results for women.

As if female sexuality alone were not powerful enough, consider the formerly-inevitable consequences of that sexuality; female control of child-rearing and the earliest socialization of children is another source of enormous power.  The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and because both religions and modern totalitarian states recognize this they have both worked diligently to usurp the control of such socialization from women.  It must also be recognized that in every society in history (with rare exception) adult women have outnumbered adult men by a significant margin, so any entity, whether human or collective, which is to hold power for very long must control women, whether overtly or covertly, via repression or via conciliation.  The critical error made by neofeminists in their constant prattle about the “Patriarchy” is their assumption that the mechanisms of power and control are consciously created and maintained by men and for men, which is a fallacy.  Institutions are inherently sexless; they can be made up of men, women, machines or any combination thereof without making any difference in their motivations or behavior.  All organizations, no matter what their constituency, wish to survive and grow, and will obtain that end by any means necessary; since the most powerful social forces emanate from women it is women who must be controlled in order to control society, even if those in power are mostly female.

Most people are confused about why modern marriages fail because they misunderstand what marriage really is in the first place.  Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that the institution is alive and well; it has merely changed into a form most people fail to recognize.  Contrary to what most modern people like to believe, marriage is and always has been primarily a socioeconomic arrangement; the most basic motivation for any woman is the acquisition and retention of security for herself and her children, and only after that basic need is met can she pursue any higher motivations.  In the past, a woman married in order that she and her children would be provided for and protected, and love or sexual passion had little or nothing to do with these considerations.  Historically, marriage was almost never for love; it was a social arrangement designed to ensure that women and children were protected and provided for.  Men who could support and protect a larger number of women and children married more women and fathered more children, and the arrangement worked; the woman was guaranteed security for herself and her children, and the man was guaranteed as much sexual variety as he could afford.  Women (or their parents) sought out whichever man they felt could best provide for them: They “married up” whenever possible.  Men who were less able to provide got the less desirable women, and women who either could not or did not wish to marry still could gain male support via some form of whoring; only those with no prospects whatsoever and a psychological aversion to any form of harlotry attempted to subsist on the meager wages available to women through “honest” work.

It must not be imagined, however, that love as we know it is a modern invention; it merely had nothing to do with marriage.  A look at the love stories of ancient and medieval times (and even many modern ones), in which the female character was often married (or in modern “romantic comedies”, at least claimed) and the male almost never was, supports this.  In other words, once a woman’s basic needs were met by marriage, she was then psychologically free to pursue her higher needs for love and intimacy, whether inside or outside of her marriage.  In some societies this situation was more or less acknowledged or else actively ignored by the men; in others the woman had to go to considerable lengths to disguise the affair, with dire consequences if she was discovered.  Even in societies like that of the Arabs, where the men in power took great pains to ensure the fidelity of their wives, the poor-but-interesting men were more than happy to assist those wives who wished to engage in extramarital liaisons, and because of the need for secrecy the husbands saved face.  Even in situations like this everyone could profit: The husband got the social prominence deriving from a large family and access to as many women as he could afford; the wife got security from her husband and intimacy from either him or her lovers, as she desired; the children got security and an illustrious name, and the lover got the sexual favors of a woman to whom he would otherwise have been denied access.

It is probably safe to assume that the vast majority of these affairs between married women and unmarried men were more or less short-lived; eventually the risk would outweigh the reward for one or the other and the affair would be broken off.  No matter how brief or varied extramarital contact was, however, marriages tended to endure because the commitment to maintaining security for herself and her children was always paramount.  In other words, though a woman’s source of security must be stable and enduring, her source of sexual and emotional intimacy could and often did change over time.  Then, as now, more women wanted to marry those with power (either political or economic) for the reasons already stated above, and those with power of course wanted to marry as many women as possible for both sexual and social reasons.  More wives meant more power on every level, and this has not changed and probably never will.  What has changed, however, is the nature of those in power.

For those with power are now inhuman entities, namely corporations and collectivist governments, and it is they whom many women now seek to marry.  Because these entities are inhuman, their needs and desires are different from those of human men, but no less focused on women.  The “wife” of a corporation provides some form of work rather than sex, and in return receives the sort of security once provided by husbands, namely income (even during pregnancy and old age), medical care, etc; a faithful “wife” is rewarded with higher pay and benefits.  Similarly, a collectivist government has many “wives” which it attempt to support through social programs and attempts to protect through legislation.  The fact that it does such a poor job of both only means that most women will seek to marry a better provider first; only those women with low standards and poor prospects “marry” governments.  And although sex is not part of the reward for these institutions, they demand fidelity in their own fashions: The United States government stops supporting mothers who marry mere humans, and companies give their best positions and income to “career women” who give their all to the company rather than “cheating” with a family.

Prototype career women

Once this parallel is recognized, the reason for the high divorce rate in industrially and economically modern nations is self-evident: The true “husbands” of most women in those countries (in other words, their security-providers) are the companies they work for or the governments whose social programs support them.  Their relationships with those institutions, like the relationships of nuns with the Catholic Church, is a long-lasting and mutually beneficial one (nuns become “brides of Christ” and even wear wedding rings).  Just as the wives of kings and nobles were actually supported by the taxes they levied on their subjects, so the “wives” of socialist governments are supported by taxes and the “wives” of companies by their profits.  And just as the wives of polygamous kings often sought emotional intimacy with poor but interesting lovers, so modern women “married” to companies or governments often seek intimacy with mere human men who are poor but interesting when compared to their faceless and inhuman “husbands”.  Like those extramarital relationships of the past, however, these “affairs” the “wives” of institutions have with human men are often short-lived and replaceable; lovers come and go, but the marriage endures.  In other words, modern “marriages” are not the true successors to marriages of the past; they are instead the successors of what used to be called affairs, born of passion and the need for intimacy and usually transitory for that reason.  The modern woman’s relationship with her employer, government, or organization, like that of nuns with the church, is the true equivalent of the traditional woman’s relationship with her husband, which may in part explain why those most devoted “wives” of industry and government, the neofeminists, attack their unfettered and independent whore sisters just as vociferously as the “respectable” married women of the past ever did.

Read Full Post »

Couples (Part Two)

Posted in Call types, tagged , , , , , , , on July 17, 2010| 10 Comments »

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. –  George Eliot

Yesterday I talked about couple calls, those in which an established couple (whether married or not) takes a whore into their bed so as to allow the husband either to experience two women at the same time or to see two women together, usually both.  If you missed that column I suggest you scroll down and read it first, because this one is written with the assumption that you’ve already read the other.

A couple call is different from a two-girl call in that the latter involves two professional women rather than one professional and one amateur; despite the fact that the fantasy is the same, the dynamic is quite different because in the two-girl call the whores generally know each other and may even have had similar dates together before.  There were two girls in particular with whom I really enjoyed doing these sorts of calls, and since they liked me as well such calls usually went smoothly and professionally, with few surprises.  The same cannot be said of couple calls; since most of the time the wife has never before been naked in bed with another woman, her reaction is unpredictable and potentially problematic.  Over time, though, I had developed several very effective techniques for putting wives at ease, letting them know that I was not a rival and reassuring them that they were to be in control of the proceedings; as a result, I rarely had any problems with them, except for the few examples mentioned in yesterday’s column.  I had never bothered to develop any special strategies for dealing with the husbands in such calls because I deemed them unnecessary; men were always so happy to find themselves in bed with two women that they presented no problems whatsoever.  The one single exception to this rule I ever encountered, however, turned into what was undoubtedly the worst couple call of my entire professional career.

In the summer of 2005 I went to see a very young couple in a very expensive hotel; he was 29 and she was 19 and absolutely gorgeous, with a stunning figure and the face of an angel. After my usual introductory talk we undressed and started the proceedings, and I quickly discovered that the young lady was a veritable volcano of repressed lesbian passion; I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been kissed so passionately by anyone, male or female, in my entire life.  And when she wasn’t kissing me she couldn’t stop looking at me and touching me, whispering things like “Oh God, you are so beautiful!”  Needless to say I was equally turned on and so everything seemed to be going extremely well, when suddenly the boyfriend got up and went over to sit in a chair with an unmistakably angry expression on his face.

The girl and I looked at each other quizzically and then I asked him, “is something wrong?”

He replied, “No, nothing, just keep doing what you’re doing.”  This was clearly a lie; he was absolutely furious.  So I prodded him a little more, and after a few more denials he suddenly exploded, calling his girlfriend a “dyke” and a “slut” and several other less-telling dirty names.  The poor girl was thunderstruck; his bizarre reaction was as startling to her as it was to me.  She shot me a pleading glance, and though I wanted nothing more than to slap this asshole into next week I couldn’t let that sweet little creature deal with the abusive freak alone once I eventually left.  So I swallowed my pride, put on the sweetest face I could manage, pushed my righteous anger down as far as it would go and literally begged the sleazy son of a bitch to come back to bed with us, wheedling and cajoling him in my most ingratiating manner.  Realizing what I was doing, the girl followed my lead and joined in, and soon the petulant little brat was back between us, enjoying the caresses of two women (though speaking for myself, I would’ve preferred to bite his cock off rather than do to it what I was doing).  As I worked, I thought about what had occurred and realized that, unlike normal men who would have been ecstatic about watching such a hot girl-girl scene, this whiny baby had presumed that we would both be so caught up in worshipping his almighty studliness that we would only take interest in each other when he ordered it to please himself.  Instead, his fragile ego was shattered by seeing his girlfriend more interested in me than in him; obviously it was okay for him to want sex with a strange woman, but not for her to desire the same thing.

Eventually, after forcing her to accept him orally for an absolutely punishing length of time, he finished and got up without a word, heading for the bathroom.  I held her closely, keeping an eye open for his return, but soon heard the shower and knew it was safe to ask her what the hell that was all about.  She whispered that he was from a very wealthy family and was very spoiled; she had made the mistake of accepting his invitation to come to New Orleans (they were from Ohio) and soon discovered that if she didn’t dance to his tune he would strand her there without any money of her own.  This of course made me still angrier; I told her she could come with me if she wanted, that I had an extra bed and we could arrange for her flight home in the morning (at my expense if necessary).  But though she was clearly appreciative of the offer, she explained that it would be better for her in the long run to return with him; so, I wrote my cell phone number on one of my business cards and insisted she get out and call me if he later became completely unmanageable.  She thanked me, hid the card in her purse and kissed me, and I dressed and waited until he got out of the shower so I could see for myself that he seemed calmer; she never did call, though, and all that weekend I prayed she would get home safely and promptly dump the selfish prick.

What a contrast between this jealous, narcissistic pig and the lady from Mandeville (a suburb north of Lake Pontchartrain) who arranged what may have been the best couple call I ever went on; she was a shining example of the true spirit of giving, of sincere love and the real desire to make one’s partner happy.  She called me one afternoon (in 2002, I think) and explained that for their 15th wedding anniversary she had decided to give her husband a gift he would never forget.  The two of them were high school sweethearts, he a football player and she a cheerleader; they had married soon after graduation and neither had ever been with anyone else.  They both worked (he in some sort of managerial capacity and she in real estate) and had chosen to delay children until they were financially comfortable, so they had a lovely house in an upscale neighborhood and could well afford an occasional extravagance.  On this particular occasion, that meant me; she proposed to hire me for three hours in order to fulfill her husband’s fantasy of seeing her make love to another woman.

I could not help but be impressed with how carefully she had planned the whole thing.  We ran her credit card right then so we needn’t worry about it later and her husband wouldn’t know how much it had cost.  I was to attach the slip to a few sheets of legal paper in a manila envelope, then arrive at their house at a certain time immediately after dinner (which she had perfectly timed); while dining she was to tell her husband that a girl from work would be dropping by later with papers for her to sign.  And so it unfolded like clockwork; I arrived within the instructed time range, wearing an attractive but businesslike dress and carrying the folder, and was introduced as Maggie from work.  After she signed the concealed transaction slip, I put the folder on the kitchen table, made small talk for a few minutes and then, as I had been instructed, sidled up behind the unsuspecting gentleman and began to rub his shoulders.  The move caught him off-guard, and he looked up at me and then across to his wife, who could no longer suppress the giggles; I then explained exactly what his beloved had done for him, and his reaction was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

We adjourned to the bedroom and undressed; her husband sat in a chair which afforded a good view and proceeded to take care of himself while we gave him a show.  She was willing, but at first very nervous and awkward; she kept saying things like “This feels so weird!” until I whispered in her ear that such talk might ruin her husband’s mood, upon which she nodded and whispered back a promise to try harder.  The funniest thing she said during this stage of the game was as she held me around the waist, “You have such a strange shape!”  I was a little taken aback and told her that no one had ever described my figure that way before, whereupon she replied, “Oh, what I mean is that you HAVE a shape, and I’m not used to that!”  We all laughed, and it served to break the tension; she quickly relaxed under my caresses, returning them diffidently at first but soon with greater interest, and before long she was kissing me fervently and unmistakably approaching climax.

When she arrived, there was no mistaking it, and then this prim little suburban wife turned into a girl I would’ve hired in a heartbeat.  Her language became much coarser and her demeanor more passionate and demanding; there was absolutely no way I could steal a glance to see how her husband was getting on, because she required my entire attention.  The dam had burst, and if I wrote much more about the next two hours it would violate my statement that I am not here to provide wanking material.  Suffice it to say that she soon expanded the activity to include her husband, that if we had videotaped it we might all three have considerably larger bank accounts today, and that the lady accomplished her plan to give her man a truly unforgettable anniversary present.  I have no doubt that the two of them are still together today, because that kind of unselfish love can resist any pressure which might attempt to tear their marriage apart.

And there you have the two extremes:  Pathological selfishness vs. unselfish giving, exploitation vs. sharing, sexual repression vs. sexual acceptance, fear and doubt vs. courageous exploration.  In most cases the couple call is just a pleasant experiment, but for some it becomes an emotional crucible in which weak material disintegrates and strong material fuses into a new kind of alloy.  As I used to tell my customers, it definitely isn’t for everybody.  But for the confident and unselfish woman it can be the means of not only expressing the depth of her commitment to her husband’s sexual happiness, but also a way in which to explore a part of herself whose existence she may not even have suspected.

Read Full Post »

Couples (Part One)

Posted in Call types, tagged , , , , , , , on July 16, 2010| 7 Comments »

Real giving is when we give to our spouses what’s important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not. – Michele Weiner-Davis

Being with two women at the same time has got to be, if not the most common male fantasy, a close contender for the title; really, how could it be otherwise?  It satisfies his need for variety, boosts his ego, makes him feel virile and dominant, allows him to be stimulated by four hands and two mouths at the same time, and has lesbian undertones even if the two women don’t actually do anything with each other.  From what guys have told me the ideal seems to be that the women already know each other (sisters, friends or whatever), but since this would require convincing TWO women rather than just the wife, the guy often settles for calling in a whore as girl #2.  With rare exception such calls are entirely for the man’s benefit, either something he has talked his wife into or a love-offering she arranges herself.

They’re much more common than many of my readers might think; I would say as many as 5% of all calls I did in the years I was working were couple calls, and during my busiest years (2000-2002) I was doing about one a week.  I don’t know if it’s that high in other parts of the country; perhaps New Orleans just puts people in a mood to experiment.  And I’m pretty sure I got a disproportionate number of them because I like doing them and lots of other escorts in that time and place didn’t.  I’ve never been sure why, except that couple calls take longer (usually the full hour) and women tend to be more finicky about the girl’s looks and personality than men are.  In my experience it’s nearly always the woman who calls to set it up, probably because she wants to feel the girl out and make sure she isn’t buying “a pig in a poke”; since I get along with women just as well as I do with men, this was never an issue for me.  It’s also possible that some girls dislike couple calls because they aren’t bisexual, but my male readers must understand that it’s a lot easier (both emotionally and physically) for girls to fake a homosexual scene than it is for guys; most of us just aren’t as hung up about it as y’all are, and besides whores are very practiced at faking arousal.

I, on the other hand, had no problem with lesbian scenes because I am bisexual, and I don’t mean just somewhat; I’ve had as many continuing relationships with girls as I have with men.  But I don’t respond sexually to them in exactly the same way; the way I put it is, I’m attracted to men below the waist and women above the waist.  In other words, my reaction to men is primal and visceral, but my reaction to women is aesthetic.  I feel the attraction to a man in my guts, and I can’t tell from a picture whether I will be attracted to him or not; I have to see and talk to him.  Women, on the other hand, appeal to my appreciation for beauty; I feel the attraction in my mind and heart rather than my guts.  So for me, couple calls could be a special treat if the wife was pretty, and even more so if she found me attractive as well.  I also liked them because they were easier and more comfortable on a number of levels; a man will never misbehave or try to mistreat a hooker in front of his wife, and she even does some of the work!  And since I’ve never, ever heard of the cops using a couple as sting bait one can go in relaxed, without having to worry that the prospective client might be a Judas goat.

I suppose another issue some girls might have with couple calls is the potential for drama, but I had tension-defusing down to a science and only rarely had any problems; since I had already experienced a number of ménage à trois situations in my late teens I knew what to expect even on my very first couple call, and quickly developed a program to smooth the way.  The first thing I always established after arriving was that the wife would be in control; I explained that since she might become jealous by seeing another woman touching her husband, she had to have the right to speak up if I did something to him or he did something to me which made her uncomfortable.  Sitting close to both of them, I would point out that they had called me to help them experience something novel and exciting, but that it wasn’t for everyone so if the wife felt overwhelmed or freaked out she needed to say something immediately, because I had absolutely no desire to be the cause of marital difficulties.  During this little speech the wife would usually listen intently, and I could often see an expression of relief cross her face; the husband for his part was nearly always looking at his wife’s face rather than mine, and might nod his head or agree with me out loud.

After this, the proceedings might go a number of ways, depending on the woman’s sexuality and open-mindedness.  We would usually start stimulating her husband together, and I would arrange things so I could peek at her face to see how she was reacting.  Then as the scene developed, I would usually hazard contact with her hip or waist; if she shrank from my touch I would not repeat it, but instead concentrate on pleasing her husband with her.  This really didn’t happen too often, though; most women on such calls were at least “bi-curious”, willing to kiss another woman or be caressed or licked by her, but not to respond in kind.  A fair number would do anything except go down on me, and some were every bit as bisexual as I am.  Sometimes, it was established from square one that the husband would not be entering me, but I remember a few calls where the wife became so relaxed and/or excited that she changed her mind and decided it was OK after all.  Usually they seemed pretty excited by the sight of their husbands taking me, but there was one funny little thing that often happened at this point.  Apparently, when I’m excited I sound like I’m in pain, especially to a woman who has never before seen another woman actually being screwed in front of her.  So very often she would ask, “Is he hurting you?” or even exclaim to her husband, “You’re hurting her!” (the latter sometimes punctuated by a slap on his shoulder or back).  And this showed me that everything really was fine, because it demonstrated that she was genuinely concerned for my comfort and safety.

No matter how everything in between went, I always made sure he finished up with his wife if at all possible; it seemed to me the best way to prevent any remaining possibility of jealousy which might result from seeing her husband actually climax with another woman.  And while they were coupling, I usually held her hand and kissed her; many women become extremely passionate kissers when near orgasm, and I honestly think my second favorite sex act in the world is to kiss a woman and hold her hand while she’s being taken by a man.  My favorite?  Having a woman hold my hand and kiss me in the same circumstances!  Though most of a whore’s sexual response is by necessity feigned, it was rare that I had to fake excitement during a couple call.  Afterward, we always relaxed together, talking and touching; if the husband went to the bathroom as men so often do right after sex, the wife and I might engage in a little whispered “girl talk”, and I would make sure she was happy and comfortable and had no lingering doubts about what had just happened.

Of all the couple calls I did in my career, few stand out from the general good memories, but the ones that did are worthy of note.  Probably the strangest of these involved an American man with a Japanese wife who spoke no English at all; she just wanted to make love to me (but not vice versa) while her husband watched from a chair, fully clothed.  But the cutest story involves a young (late 20s) local couple with whom I had a really good time, but would probably not still remember except for the fact that about one week later I was getting into my convertible (the top was down that day) in a Wal-Mart parking lot and looked up to see the same couple, coincidentally parked right next to me!  There was an older woman (probably her mother) sitting between them, but that didn’t stop the girl from breaking into a broad smile and calling her husband’s attention to me.  He turned and saw me, then grinned and waved.  I’m sure they would’ve stopped to chat if not for the presence of the mother, to whom it might’ve been awkward to explain me.

Of course, they weren’t all good; there were a few times it was obvious the wife had no intention of carrying the arrangement out, and so found some excuse to send me away upon arrival (one haughty bitch simply waved me off, saying to her obviously-submissive husband “not within parameters”).  Only once to my recollection did a wife press the panic button to stop the call; she was quite overweight and I assume my looks and figure intimidated her, because the poor thing burst into tears about 15 minutes in.  I immediately quit what I was doing and gently asked her if she wanted to stop; she nodded while sobbing “I’m sorry!” and I assured her that there was nothing to apologize for, that this sort of thing wasn’t for everyone and that she didn’t have to do or see anything which might upset her.  Her husband was also good about it (though obviously disappointed), and she quickly recovered and thanked me for my understanding and kindness.

But there were two couple calls which stand out above all others as examples of how badly things can go and how well they can go, respectively.  When I first started writing this column I intended to discuss them today, but by the time I finished the first story I was already 400 words over my self-imposed length limit and still hadn’t even MENTIONED the second one, so I’ve decided to make those two stories into a column of their own.  As the TV announcer used to say when I was but a wee lass, “Tune in again tomorrow, same time, same channel!”

To be continued…

Read Full Post »

What’s In a Name?

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on July 15, 2010| 5 Comments »

That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet. – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii)

As I said in my introduction, very few whores use their own names when working; this is, first and foremost, to maintain privacy in a business which still carries considerable stigma in our society. If one’s real name got out (which in the internet age is not at all unlikely) it could cause embarrassment to her family, attract unwelcome attention from cops or anti-prostitute activists or even result in social consequences if she is a student or has another, “regular” job. Unless the girl’s first name is rather unusual, though, there would be no harm in giving out her real first name alone, would there? She could keep her surname private and everyone would be happy, right?

Well, yes and no. Some girls do indeed use real-first-name-only or a nickname version of it (Sue for Suzanne, Nicki for Nicole, etc). But most still don’t do that, for various reasons. For one, the use of a “stage name” gives us a little fence between our daily lives and our professional lives, which might otherwise sometimes overlap; the stage name helps the girl to get into the proper frame of mind, just as donning a suit or a uniform or a lab coat puts various kinds of professional men into the proper frame of mind for performance of their jobs. This use of stage names is by no means restricted to hookers; when Vincent Furnier is at home he may just be a regular guy, but when he dresses up and calls himself “Alice Cooper”, he becomes another thing entirely. The change in modes may eventually become unconscious and automatic; when I answered the phone and someone asked for me by my stage name, I instantly adopted a different mental posture than if he had used my real given name. Once someone actually hailed me by my stage name on a city street when I absolutely did not expect to hear it, and I actually experienced a moment of confusion before realizing that he was speaking to me!

For some girls, though, there is a much more important reason for the new name. Unless you’ve been living in a cave your whole life, I’m sure you recognize that Judeo-Christian societies in general and American society in particular have got massive hang-ups about sex, and women in particular are loaded down from puberty onward with more guilt, shame and conflict about that one subject than about all others combined. Even if a girl’s parents have more enlightened attitudes on the subject, you can bet the rest of society will still be very hard at work attempting to brainwash her into the usual powerless, ambivalent, conflicted female state of sexual shame. For a fortunate few of us (including myself), this poison tree for some reason just doesn’t take root in our heads; our mental soil is somehow inhospitable to its growth, and we simply don’t feel ashamed of being what we are. Alas, we are in the minority; many girls do indeed feel ashamed of their profession on some level, even if they accept or even enjoy it on a more conscious one. For a girl like this the stage name is a symbolic covering, an insubstantial garment she wears to clothe her soul while she bares her body to strangers.

It never ceases to amaze me how clients fail to understand the need for this symbolic gesture; time and again I have been assailed with “Oh, that’s not your real name! What’s your real name?” When guys of this sort wouldn’t shut up, “Maggie” is the name I fell back to; it’s not my legal name either, but it’s a good, basic, believable, comfortable sort of name (I’ve even been told “You look like a Maggie,” whatever that means). But then, I suppose it’s not surprising; most men also cannot understand why a stripper covers up when she has finished dancing, or why most hookers won’t kiss. It’s probably the old Madonna-whore duality again; the man stuck in this mode of thought imagines any working girl to be a “slut”, a carnal animal with male-like sex drives who screws strangers because it’s her idea of a great time; indeed, a number of porn starlets and sex writers actually encourage this fallacy in order to capitalize on the male fantasy of the “wanton woman”. But a man who thinks that way cannot be expected to understand that just because a whore has agreed to give him that which for most women is the most intimate form of sharing, it doesn’t mean she wants to share EVERYTHING with him. And what could be more personal than a name? The ancients believed there was magical power in names; in some ancient societies people kept their true names secret (except from the parents who had named them) and offered another, public name to the world. Is this so different from what we do? By keeping our true names to ourselves we symbolically prevent clients from having power over us. Kings and queens in many societies took throne names to symbolize that their actions as rulers were not to be confused with their actions as private citizens; the man whom history records as Augustus Caesar was called Octavian by his family. And the actions of “Rose” on a call are not necessarily related to those of “Gertrude Smith” at home.

And that, of course, brings us to the third and most human reason for stage names. The fact is simply that many if not most parents have the annoying habit of giving girls the most unromantic, unsexy names imaginable. Who wants to be Hillary or Jane or Anne or Mary when she can be Tabitha or Roxanne or Simone or Jade, at least for a little while? Most little girls choose different names for themselves when playing house (I know I did!) and growing up does not eradicate the desire for a name we like better than the one we’re stuck with. For those with unusual names like mine, this can instead be motivated by pragmatism; I actually did use my true name when I first started stripping, but I got so tired of “That’s not your real name!” that I started to use a stage name (a childhood nickname, actually) which was actually less unusual than my real one, and I can think of two other girls who did precisely the same thing.

Choosing a name for oneself is an act of will, an act of power; in a sense it’s a reflection of the way that we choose to make our own living by our own means rather than following either the traditional “good girl” path or the neutered, politically correct “career” path. For this we are called whores, which in the minds of many people is the worst label that can be applied to a woman. And that is precisely why many of us have decided to claim the word for ourselves, just as early Americans adopted the mocking term “Yankee” as a badge of identity, and in recent years lesbians and gay men have claimed “dyke” and “queer”, respectively. If we use the term to describe ourselves, it loses any power as an insult.

Norma Jean Almodovar (1986 political poster)

Norma Jean Almodovar, author of the book Cop To Call Girl (see the bibliography page) and director of the Los Angeles chapter of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a prostitute’s rights organization), helped to organize the 1997 International Congress on Prostitution, which included an exhibit of art by whores. A neofeminist academic for the university hosting the Congress insisted that prostitutes could not use the term ‘whore’ to describe ourselves, and demanded the exhibit use the neutered, politically correct term “sex worker”. She of course got her way, but Almodovar wrote the following poem as a rebuttal to this sort of bluenosed attitude. Shakespeare it’s definitely not, but it does sum up most of our feelings on the issue quite well.

The “Whore” Word

I am a woman…and if I get out of line, you call me a whore!
And if I have a good time, you call me a whore!
And if I speak my mind – you call me a whore!
You throw the word at me when I stand on my own
You use the word often to hold me down.
You ever remind me that whores are the worst –
The outcasts, pariahs, without any worth.
“You’re just a whore!” you repeat like a mantra –
Like a shot of cold water to dampen my joy.
“You’re just a whore – so what do you know?
And what do I care of whatever you think!”
“You’re a whore,” is a dagger you drive through my heart
As you pound into my psyche that name.
You equate everything that I ever thought good – with that word
Which you spit out like venom – to show me how awful I am.
But I ask you, please tell me, just what is a whore?
A whore says what she thinks and she thinks for herself…
She’s independent and feisty – so what? Is there more?
Why does it frighten you so to know I’ve a mind of my own
And don’t need your permission to live or to love or to be?
And what if I tell you I don’t care anymore if you call me a whore…
What will you call me now?

Read Full Post »

Do You Party?

Posted in The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , on July 14, 2010| 8 Comments »

If your thing is gone and you wanna ride on; cocaine./Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back; cocaine. – Eric Clapton

In yesterday’s column I mentioned that I rarely had problems with guys who were sober, but of course lots of guys are not remotely sober when they call for an escort.  And though many of them are just plain old-fashioned drunk, a large percentage are messed up on what I consider to be absolutely and undoubtedly the nastiest, filthiest, most disgusting drug it has ever been my misfortune to see people high on, namely cocaine.

Before I go on, let me remind you of what I said in my column on streetwalkers: I consider the current US drug policy to be a form of evil lunacy which we could no longer afford even if it were moral and reasonable. The United States currently incarcerates 0.756% of its population, which may not sound like much until one considers that it’s a markedly higher percentage than Russia, Rwanda or Cuba and roughly five times the world average. Almost a quarter of all prisoners in the entire world are locked up in American prisons, and of these almost a quarter are there for drug offenses.  Literally hundreds of thousands of people in the “Land of the Free” are imprisoned for years because they chose to entertain themselves in a way the government disapproves of.  Personally, I think drug use is rather silly; I never touch the stuff myself because I like to know what I’m doing when I do it and remember it the next day.  But my personal dislike for something is insufficient grounds for banning it; criminalization of consensual acts, including both drug use and prostitution, has no place in a free society.

That having been said, I must also point out that just as others have the right to do as they like with their time and money, so I have the right to be disgusted by their behavior.  And the one thing which disgusted me most of all the things I saw in my professional life was cocaine use.  Powder cocaine users like to believe they’re cool and sophisticated, but the effects aren’t all that different from those of crack and made the user just as ridiculous, pathetic and annoying to me.

First of all, cocaine users of both types never seem to recognize how utterly ludicrous they look while imbibing.  Powder users rub their noses over their little glass plates like some kind of cartoon hound dogs, loudly inhaling and then pulling back to blink and sniff.  The more they snort, the more their noses run, and soon there is a coating of dried snot on their upper lips.  Then there’s that crusty white stuff which develops in the corners of their mouths; I don’t know if it’s stray cocaine or salt deposits due to dehydration or what, but it’s just plain nasty looking and whenever I see it I am irresistibly reminded of a four-year-old who has not yet learned proper hygeine.  The crack user is no better, bending over his little pipe and reacting in much the same way after taking his hit; he doesn’t get the runny nose of the powder user for obvious reasons, but it seems to me that he trembles more and his eyes get more bloodshot.  And then there’s that godawful stench; whenever I got out of a crackhead call I immediately went home to change because otherwise the reek would cling to my clothes for hours.

But the appearance is nothing in comparison to the behavioral effects.  Drunks behave in lots of different ways, but all cokeheads act in exactly the same way, as though the drug feeds a little program into their fucked-up brains.  First of all, they seem to find it impossible to remain in one place for more than a few minutes; they keep wanting to change rooms, change positions, change activities or whatever else comes into their heads.  One wealthy cokehead I dealt with a number of times would actually want me to drive him around, going from a hotel to his office to his mistress’ house to his boathouse; it was so utterly exhausting that I never reduced his rate for multiple hours as I did for other customers.  The crackhead doesn’t usually move around quite so much, but he is far more paranoid than the powder user and will wander around between rocks, peeking out between or around the window-blinds and out through the peephole; if in a hotel room he will repeatedly check the towel he has placed under the door so the smell can’t get out.  And while the cokehead will usually let all of his coke strewn about in plain sight, the crackhead often hides his rocks, sometimes in multiple hiding places, and often demands a girl turn her back while he fetches it.  Once I had a guy who forgot where he put his stash, and I just quietly watched the time go by as he searched for it for almost an hour, then got angry when I said my time was up and I had to go.  I’ve even seen some of them hide their money in various places, so they have to go to several parts of the room to get the fee together! And while the cokehead usually loses track of time completely, the crackhead seems to know he has no time sense and will repeatedly ask how much time he has left, sometimes mere minutes apart.

The most pronounced effect, though, is the obsession with sex.  Cocaine clearly stimulates the sex centers in the brain, because while a man is under its influence he wants to think about sex, talk about sex and attempt to have sex until his money runs out, which is of course why he usually calls a whore as soon as he takes his first snort or hit.  I say “attempt to have sex” because he can’t; cocaine is a vasodilator and therefore prevents erection.  I’ve even seen cases where the effects are just starting to fade, and he’s actually beginning to get hard, but then he does another line or rock and promptly goes limp again.  This can be quite maddening, especially with crack users because they have a nasty habit of blaming the girl for their inability to get it up.  I once asked a medical doctor client why crack users so consistently believed they could achieve erection when they obviously couldn’t, and he explained that after the initial use one can, and that the sex is incredibly intense in that one instance.  After that first time or two, however, the rapidly-increasing levels of the drug make him impotent, so he constantly seeks to recapture that initial experience he can never have again.

Powder users don’t seem so concerned about their inability to perform; they just want to keep trying every conceivable position they can imagine, moving from the bed to the floor to a couch to a chair to the bathroom, etc.  But there is one perplexing syndrome I saw far more often with powder than crack: Homosexual fantasy.  Clearly, most of these guys are heterosexual; I simply can’t believe that 90% of powder coke users are closet cases, and besides they call for girls, not boys or transsexuals.  But once they’re high, they sure can TALK about it!  It’s rare that I went on a call with a cokehead in which he didn’t at some point start describing a homosexual fantasy; usually they’re about sucking cock, but sometimes it’s the whole shebang.  Sometimes they start making plans that they don’t actually intend to carry out, asking “does your service have guys? Do you know any with really big dicks?” and so on.  On rare occasions, they actually do carry it out; the wealthy cokehead I mentioned earlier told me he had done so on a few occasions.  I’m sure some gay activists out there will claim this “proves” that all men are at least somewhat homosexual, but considering that it’s caused by induced neurological impairment that argument is equivalent to saying all men are at least somewhat psychotic.  It seems to me to be just another side effect of the drug, like the restlessness and the sex-obsession.

As if all of this weren’t annoying enough, there are also physical effects to the user’s companion.  It’s impossible to be in a room with a crack-smoker without inhaling some of the fumes, and a powder user gets traces of it on his fingers, lips, genitals (when he touches himself as they often do) and less likely places, and that in turn is transferred to the lips (both sets) and nipples of the girl when he touches her or vice versa.  Since cocaine is an analgesic it causes numbness in mucous membranes (such as the tissues of the vagina) with which it comes in contact, and even such incidental exposure is enough to give a nonuser like myself headaches and/or dizziness.  Keep in mind that when a cokehead goes on a bender it can last for HOURS; the effects, though short-lived, are constantly renewed every time he takes a puff or jams his nasty fingers into one’s pussy.

What grace! What dignity!

Though crack users want to keep it all to themselves (and indeed have been known to accuse girls of stealing “rocks” they’ve already smoked themselves), powder users usually want to share, so they often call for an escort under the assumption that all whores are “party girls” who would be happy to do lines with them or even take payment in coke.  And certainly there are lots of girls who will; I always reminded such girls that no matter how they choose to take payment, my agency fees were due in US currency.  The title of this column is the universal interrogative used in trying to find such a girl; in my experience the verb “party” always meant to do powder cocaine, not any other drug or even crack.  When I was just starting out and still very infatuated with the prodigious sums I was earning, I welcomed cocaine users because they had money to burn and were willing to burn it on me.  Crack users generally weren’t so well-heeled, but I had one (the owner of a construction business) who would hire me to sit with him for hours on end, just keeping him company while he did his crack, because the paranoia made him afraid to be alone.  So, when I heard “Do you party?” my stock answer was always “No, but I don’t mind if you do.”  Sometimes that was a deal-breaker and I had to send another girl, and sometimes the guy would invite me over anyhow because I intrigued him or he just didn’t want to wait for another callback.  A few actually preferred my sobriety because I could keep an eye on them; the wealthy crackhead I mentioned above would eventually have nobody else because he trusted me implicitly.

As I grew older, more experienced and wealthier, however, I began to lose my patience with cocaine-induced weirdness, and I began to answer the dreaded “Do you party?” with a simple, curt “nope.”  This usually got me off the hook with powder users, but crack users never say they’re doing it, and since they nearly always sound totally lucid on the phone I never found out until it was too late.  These were the only customers with whom I ever rushed calls; instead of my usual 50-minute callout I would quietly ask the agency for a call in 35 minutes, because I knew that even six hours with such a man would accomplish exactly nothing.  Contrary to the refrain of the song from which my epigram is drawn, the only thing cocaine does MORE than lie is to steal from its user – time, money, health and sometimes even life.

Read Full Post »

Madonna and Whore

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , on July 13, 2010| 16 Comments »

A compassionate prostitute am I. – The Goddess Ishtar, from a Sumerian cuneiform text

Perhaps the loveliest compliment I ever received was from one of my customers. I honestly don’t recall whether it was before or after the act, but I was lying naked on the bed talking to him, with my hair falling about my tits, and he suddenly looked at me with a reverent expression and said in a hushed voice, “You remind me of Mother Eve.” It was in my mind the supreme compliment that could be paid to a spiritually-inclined whore by a modern man, to compare her to the closest thing his religion offers to the Mother Goddess.

Ishtar, the Divine Whore

That client was not alone in perceiving the aura of sanctity which, apparently,  often surrounded me in the performance of my calling, though he expressed it the most beautifully. I always felt, and still feel, a deep connection to the ancient temple-prostitutes of the Dawn of Civilization, those sacred harlots through whom ordinary men might experience connection with the Eternal Feminine. And though the spiritual senses of most modern men are too dulled to perceive it, a sizeable minority clearly did, and often told me so in ways which let me know that these were no idle compliments; sometimes their reverence was palpable. It was very rare that I had trouble with a sober client, because most men treated me with the same respect one might expect them to give to their wives or girlfriends. As I told so many of them (when asked how someone like me could do that sort of work), I genuinely like men and sincerely want to make them happy, and so whenever I arrived at a call I tried to use the initial conversation to discover something in each client that I could truly love or admire and concentrate my erotic energies on that thing. Put another way, I tried on each call to find the nexus through which the God in him could connect to the Goddess in me, and thereby give him an experience which transcended mere copulation. Many people are barely above the level of apes, and so the offering was to them as pearls before swine. But for those men of perception and sensitivity, I was able to conjure that ephemeral union of Madonna and whore which is the core of what is called the “GFE” (girl friend experience), and for a small number something which transcended even that.

Why is it that men divide women into “pure,” asexual, revered Madonnas and “dirty,” sexual, degraded whores? Why do they persist in ignoring the fact that all women are capable of both, and that the well-rounded woman fills whichever role is required by the occasion?  The neofeminists tell us that this is a tool of their favorite bogeyman, the “Patriarchy,” intended to keep women under their control; this demonstrates once again the paranoid delusions which characterize the cognitive dysfunction I call neofeminism. They believe, and expect all women to believe, that a monolithic conspiracy involving literally HALF of the human race somehow hides its machinations from the other half. No, a more sensible explanation is needed, one which does not require vast secret midnight planning sessions which have somehow escaped the attention of the entire female population for millennia. Until recently, I myself was at a loss to understand what the psychological root of the Madonna/whore duality might be, but only a few months ago a friend of mine proposed a solution to me. I’m not sure if this was her idea or something she was taught in a psychology class, but I had never heard it before so I’ll give her the credit. Anyway, her theory is that the duality arises in the mind of boys in order to shut out uncomfortable sexual thoughts about their mothers and sisters. So they divide women into Madonnas who must not be seen in a sexual way, and all other women who can. This primitive form of the duality is normal and healthy; perhaps the monsters who molest their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces etc need a little MORE of that feeling. But like so many psychological mechanisms, the duality often gets out of hand, and in the minds of many men grows into an overarching principle, a veritable Iron Curtain across the female population. And when the men with this overdeveloped schism between motherhood and the act which creates it happen to be kings, priests, legislators, philosophers, writers or other influential types, their sickness is impressed upon the minds of countless impressionable followers. No vast conspiracy is necessary, just good old human psychological maladjustment. And its roots in a vital defense mechanism would explain the incredible tenacity with which it clings to the male psyche.

For most modern men, however, there is one figure who straddles the divide; one woman who partakes of both Madonna and whore, and that is the girlfriend. Not the wife (who becomes a Madonna as soon as she becomes pregnant), and not a mere date (who is still just a whore); by “girlfriend” I specifically mean a woman with whom a man is in love but has not yet had children.  His sexual attraction to her classifies her as “whore,” yet his love makes her a “Madonna.” It’s a strange and wonderful mixture which has great power over the male mind, enough to make him give up his bachelor freedom and commit to her in marriage despite his knowledge that she will eventually age and lose the sexual appeal which attracted him in the first place. And, I suspect, it is the intoxicating nature of that combination which drives many men to seek the elusive Girl Friend Experience, the whore who gives him not merely sex but companionship, understanding and real affection, yet will never turn into a demanding (and possibly even asexual) wife. Once he finds it, he will generally hire the girl who can provide it again and again, becoming that most welcome of clients, the regular (more on these in a later column).

But even with a man one has never seen before, there is sometimes an instant connection. I don’t mean a sexual attraction, though certainly that happens sometimes.  I said above that I always tried to find something I could sincerely love or admire in a client, and though I usually could it was much stronger with some men than with others, and on those occasions created pure magic. I have gently coaxed sexual response from the impotent or inhibited, or those sexually shell-shocked by disastrous relationships; on a multitude of occasions I have provided a man with some sexual outlet he needed, yet for which he could not or would not ask his wife (usually because she had turned him down cold when the subject was mentioned).
I have given much-needed intimacy to men so deformed most women couldn’t bear to look at them, held men while they cried because they were too ashamed to do it before their wives, and played mother-confessor for a host of sins. I have lent a sympathetic ear to clients’ problems, given them relationship advice, comforted them when they were in pain and reassured them when they were overcome by uncertainty. In short, I have for an hour or a night played the role of the understanding girlfriend, calling upon the whore or Madonna aspects of myself as needed, usually in combination.

And I’m not remotely alone in this; any high-class professional girl who was in The Life for any amount of time will know whereof I write. I saw many girls who merely tolerated clients, who did the minimum required and got the hell out as quickly as humanly possible; once I realized a girl was like that I would not employ her any more than was absolutely necessary, because even if I were not going to see a client myself I didn’t want my name or agency associated with that sort of attitude. I’m not trying to insult those girls; they behaved as their psyches and hang-ups dictated, just as we all do to an extent. And really, that’s all the majority of customers are looking for anyhow. But every business has to carve out a niche for itself if it is to survive; it must establish a “brand”, a reputation which will distinguish it from its competitors. And since there were already a number of agencies in New Orleans dedicated to the “get as many new calls as possible and forget about repeat business” approach, I was free to follow my heart and my calling and establish a service dedicated to providing a truly special experience to those gentlemen who wanted or needed it.

Read Full Post »

Wanna Date?

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on July 12, 2010| 17 Comments »

 A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say-“Come, be my wife!” With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way.   –  Olive Schreiner

I have said many times that sex is the only activity that it is legal to perform for free, but not for pay.  I must also point out that it is the only arrangement that is legal on a long-term basis but illegal on a short-term one.

What is the basic definition of a whore?  A woman who agrees to have sex with a man for compensation.  But if he gives her money or gifts without any direct discussion of sex, indeed is not sure whether she will provide it or not, society does not call the act prostitution.  In other words, it is perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable for a woman to agree to date a man whom she knows will give her gifts, money or expensive entertainment, and perfectly legal for a man to court a woman whom he knows by reputation will “put out,” even if neither of them intends to continue the arrangement beyond a single date.  The only thing prohibited is the honest discussion of the arrangement.  Oh, she can “fish” for details prior to accepting the date; she can even wheedle specific gifts out of him if he is sufficiently generous.  But none of this is guarantee for the man that he will get what he wants.  In other words, it’s OK for her to demand compensation for the possibility of sex, but not for the certainty.

Now, I’m not saying that ALL dating is prostitution.  Maybe I’m somewhat naive on this subject, but I believe most people still use dating as courtship, with intent to find a mate.  That’s certainly not everyone, though, and there is no law against a man (even a married one) using dating simply as a way to get sex with absolutely NO intention of marriage, nor against a “party girl” using it as a way to enrich herself with equally non-marital intent.  The arrangement only becomes illegal when they are honest with one another.  I know it seems counterintuitive that honesty should ever be illegal, but there you are.

My first experience with this was in college.  Living on my own for the first time presented me with a host of expenses I had never had to consider before, and like most university students I often found myself with bills due and no way to pay them.  While I never actually turned tricks for the money per se as one friend of mine did, I used my “bad” reputation to my advantage.  When a guy called for a date (and plenty did!) and I needed money, it would go something like this:

“Gee, Tom, I would love to go with you, but I’m kind of depressed.”

“Oh, what about?”

“Oh, it’s stupid really.  My phone bill is overdue and they’re going to cut it off if I can’t pay by tomorrow, and I have no idea where I’m going to get the money.”

“Well, how much is your bill?”

“Only a hundred, but it’s a hundred I don’t have.”

“Tell you what, why don’t I just pay that for you?  Then you won’t be depressed and we can go to the concert.”

“Oh, would you?  You’re such a dear!  I’ll make it up to you, I promise!”

And of course I always did.  The word of that got around as well, and I’ll bet some guys even began to figure out when they should call to get the cheapest bills; maybe that’s why nobody called me around rent day!  Just kidding.  This raises the question, though:  Was I (legally speaking) a prostitute then?  Was I technically soliciting for prostitution by the legal definition?  I never promised a one to one exchange (a blow job for a hundred, intercourse for two, nothing like that) and when I had no bills I didn’t charge at all.  Does working on a sliding scale with a small group of regular clients and no specific discussion of services free a girl from the possibility of a prostitution charge?  I would suspect so.  I knew the guys, the price varied, the reward varied; technically I was dating.  It would have been hard for a DA to make a prostitution charge stick.  Yet, I was certainly trading sex for money…but then, so does a wife; she just does it on a long-term basis.

Traditionally, men work to support women.  Feminist historians like to imagine marriage as an arrangement invented by males for males, but the biological and historical evidence is that it was really the other way around:  Marriage was invented by women to corral those males in whom the urge to spread their seed around was very much stronger than the urge to protect and care for women, and accepted by men because it gave them a guaranteed source of pussy.  From a purely biological point of view, the man’s contribution to making a baby is done in five minutes, while the woman’s takes at least thirteen or fourteen years in a primitive culture and eighteen now.  When we lived in small, communistic hunter-gatherer tribes this didn’t matter, but once we developed large, complex urban societies with land ownership and wealth it became important that an individual woman have an individual man to protect and provide for her and her children, and marriage did that very well.  Eventually patriarchal raiding cultures slowly subverted marriage into a male-dominated institution which turned women into chattel, and most women accepted this for the same reason that most men accept domination by leaders:  Being a slave is psychologically safer than personal responsibility and self-reliance.  For the vast bulk of humanity of both genders, doing what one is told is easy, but thinking for oneself is difficult.

There are some people, however, who cannot accept such domination.  Men who feel that way are often good at “working the system” until they reach the top, and others have the drive and focus and talent to chart their own course to prosperity and independence.  Some women can do this as well, and more power to them.  But many women are temperamentally unsuited to a Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, punch-the-clock-and-kiss-the-boss’s-ass-in-hope-of-climbing-the-ladder drudge job.  Some of these women grit their teeth and work at such jobs until they can get a husband to support them, but others can’t handle it even for that long or have no intention of being dependent on a husband merely to avoid it.  There are also some whose long-term plans preclude commitment to either a man OR a job; I know a lawyer, two doctors, a nurse, a biochemist, a criminologist and a physicist who put themselves through school via prostitution.  All of them lacked wealthy parents and were either unwilling or unable to secure sufficient student loan money, and none of them wanted to lose valuable study time in some minimum-wage student job that wouldn’t even pay the rent, nor did any of them want to commit to a husband before they even got their careers off the ground.  Whoring paid the bills for them and still left plenty of time for study.

But even if she has no long-term educational plans, and can handle a male-like career job, why should she have to if she doesn’t want to?  Nobody bitches if a man gets out of the rat race and makes a good living by doing whatever it is he’s good at for whoever will pay him for it, so why is it different for women?  Because control freaks are envious of others who can do things they can’t, is why.  Heterosexual men cannot make a reliable income from sex at all, and most women are far too sexually repressed to even consider it.  Therefore, these dogs in the manger habitually combine forces to attempt to stop those women who CAN do it.  This is the way it has been at least since Classical Greece, and there are no signs it’s going to change any time soon.

When a whore sees a client, what she is essentially contracting is a very short-term surrogate marriage.  She gives him a little of what a wife gives a husband (sex and/or companionship), and he gives her a little of what a husband gives a wife (financial support).  There are whores who do this poorly and those who do it well, but the same can be said for wives.  There are men who treat working girls poorly and those who treat them well, but the same can be said for husbands.  Whores of course get very little in the way of husbandly companionship from clients, which is why most of them also have boyfriends (or girlfriends) on the side, but that is a subject for another day.

A successful working girl.

So, we’re back up to where we started.  The exact same arrangement (man contributes support, woman contributes sex and/or companionship) is completely legal in the long-term form we call marriage but illegal in the temporary form we call prostitution.  Now, don’t start screaming that marriage is different because it involves love; where is it written that a couple have to love each other in order to make marriage legal?  Throughout most of human history love had absolutely nothing to do with marriage.  Love certainly makes a marriage more pleasant; in fact, I am married now myself and eventually left the profession for my husband (or more accurately, entered into a long-term exclusive contract with him).  But any reader who asserts that nobody ever gets married for the bare-bones reasons mentioned above is hopelessly naive and might as well stop reading right now, because it isn’t going to get any better for him.  Many, many men marry women whose only attractions are sexual, and an equally large number of women marry men whose only attractions are financial.  Hollywood actresses make prenuptial agreements that include a certain cash sum paid them every year as long as they remain married, and they are not unique in this.  Very old men marry very young women with whom they have nothing in common (other than mutually fulfillable needs) all the time.  Men leave older wives for trophy wives; women stay with rich men for a few years and then sue for divorce to get half of everything.  A television show features a woman who agrees to marry a total stranger specifically because he is a multi-millionaire.  From a moral standpoint these are all identical to prostitution, but for some reason the law chooses to ignore this.  And so once again the woman who is honest about what she wants and what she will give for it is legally persecuted and branded with the name of “whore”, while she who is dishonest and cloaks her prostitution by hiding it in a venerable institution is not only rewarded both socially and financially, but is actually allowed to use the machinery of “justice” to collect her fee.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »