The question you’re not supposed to ask is the important one. – Mason Cooley
Our first question was posted in a new comment on an old post by a reader who resides in the Netherlands: Just today, when we were coming back home from a restaurant, my 8-year-old daughter, out of the blue, asked: “Daddy, what’s a prostitute?” Before I could answer, my mother-in-law (who went with me, my wife and my daughter to the restaurant) launched into a short description of the standard stereotype (“pariahs…” “dirty…” “horrible lives…” “bad women…”). Since I don’t think it’s a good idea for adults to fight in front of children, I let her go and kept silent. I’m still thinking about what I should tell my daughter later on… and how long I should wait. Any advice?
At her age, you might try something like this: “Sometimes men get lonely when they don’t have girlfriends, and a prostitute is a lady whose job is to keep them company for a little while so they won’t feel so lonely.” It’s inexact, but it covers the basics in terms an 8-year-old can grasp. I wouldn’t wait too long; since your mother-in-law has already said something you might explain that some people think prostitutes are bad because they think they’re trying to fool the men, but that isn’t really true.
If your daughter responds with something like “That sounds nice, I want to be a prostitute when I grow up,” you might say something like, “Well, it’s sometimes hard work, and some people might think you’re bad if you do it, so it’s probably best to wait until you’re grown up to think about that.” After all, you wouldn’t want her going around telling people her daddy said she could be a prostitute when she grows up!
I don’t see escorts very often, but I treated myself the other day; she was a polite and reasonably attractive brunette, a little older than me. Unfortunately she wasn’t very tight down there, so with a condom on it was hard to get any friction going to keep it hard. I was able to finish but it took A LOT of work on my part. I’ve never experienced that with any woman before; I know each person is different but when you ran your own agency did you get complaints of workers being “too loose”?
Everybody is indeed different, and some women are large to start with, but the degree of looseness you describe almost certainly resulted from having babies (especially if they were large or the births were difficult). Contrary to popular belief no amount of intercourse can loosen a woman permanently like babies can, not even several times a day for years. The lady you saw could probably have restored much of her tightness with Kegels exercises, and if that proved insufficient there is plastic surgery which can do the trick. Either way, if she intends to stay in the business she probably should do something about the issue or she’s going to get more complaints than she might like. I never received any complaints like that on any girl I employed, and certainly not on myself! But then, I was small to start with, never had babies and perform my Kegels religiously.
I’m a new reader to your blog with a question, and I was just curious as to what you would define as a slut? Is a slut just a promiscuous woman who isn’t a whore or something else? Also, is a slut the same thing as a nymphomaniac?
I don’t really care for the term “slut” myself because I feel it’s both pejorative and imprecise, but if I were going to define it I’d say a “slut” is a woman who is promiscuous without a profit motive. I think, however, that the average man uses it to mean any woman he wants to insult (regardless of her behavior) and the average woman uses it to mean any woman who is more promiscuous than she is! Given that, I just don’t feel it’s a really useful term even if it weren’t so judgmental.
However you use it, though, a nymphomaniac is definitely something different; nymphomania is a psychological disorder which causes the sufferer to be obsessed with sex and to have a sex drive so high that it causes her distress and serious problems. Nymphomaniacs are usually unable to maintain relationships for obvious reasons; the behavior is compulsive and thus results in trouble like any other compulsive behavior. Therefore, you might say a nymphomaniac is to a slut what a kleptomaniac is to a thief and a pyromaniac is to an arsonist. Incidentally, the term “nymphomania” applies only to women; the corresponding disorder in men is called “satyriasis”.
What does it mean on a escorts ad if it says willing to see basic plus one or two?
Preferred 411 (P411 for short) is a verification service which does a background check on its male members, so if you’re even a basic member girls know you aren’t a cop or other type of liar. Whenever an escort member sees a client member she can give him an “okay”; the more “okays” the more girls he has seen who will vouch that he’s an acceptable client (not abusive or scary). So “basic plus two” means she’ll only see a guy who has two or more okays.
My husband wants to try anal sex but I’m afraid it will hurt. Is there a right way to do it so it doesn’t?
There sure is; you’ve got to relax. Ask your man to follow your instructions exactly, and use plenty of lubrication (I don’t care what you’ve read, spit is NOT enough). Make sure he’s rock-hard; semi-soft won’t work for anal. Tell him to put it inside you just until you start feeling discomfort, then stop and hold it right there; this is the part where trust comes in, because a man’s natural instinct once he’s inside is to start stroking and if he does it will hurt you. Remain in that position, breathe regularly, and calm yourself; within a minute or two your sphincter will relax and the discomfort will pass. Then tell him to start stroking, slowly at first until you adjust to the feeling, then give him the go-ahead and tell him not to hold back. This form of sex is VERY intense and you won’t want it for more than a few minutes. Done correctly, it is very pleasurable for both partners and can be an interesting variation on your regular lovemaking.
A note to my male readers: If your wife or girlfriend doesn’t want to try anal, don’t coerce her because if she gives in just to placate you she will NOT be able to relax and it will be a bad experience for both of you. Tell her you would like it, ask her to consider it and even show her this column, but beyond that leave it alone. If she agrees, follow her instructions exactly and don’t hold back once she tells you to start stroking, but climax as soon as the urge strikes you; anal sex is like cheesecake, best enjoyed in small servings.
Would you rather have a guy who was well endowed but so-so in bed or smaller but a studly lover? I’ve always wanted to ask a lady who knew what she was talking about and I consider you a subject matter expert.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! It’s hard to answer that because it really depends on so many factors. I personally am not really a connoisseur of male sexual skills; I just enjoy being “screwed into the mattress” as Amanda Brooks says. But many other women do appreciate technique. Plus, if I’m in love with a man none of that matters two cents, and I’m not remotely alone in that opinion. In the final analysis, only guys with really, really tiny cocks need to worry about the issue at all, and even a man like that could be compatible with a woman who loves cunnilingus above all else.
This, my friends, is 100 times more useful than any number of years of textbook sex education … and tolerance.
Thank you, Listener! 🙂
Wow, you discussed my question in a post! I feel like I’m becoming famous.
In case you didn’t see my answer on the comments thread to that old post, I’ve had this conversation with my daughter already, who didn’t manifest any big interest — just an ‘OK, I get it’ — and went on drawing Winnie the Pooh. (At that age, there is a lot she doesn’t understand about work in general — not so long ago, she said she would want to be a “zoo worker”, meaning, I suppose, the people who feed the animals.) A few hours later she asked why her grandmother didn’t like it, and I answered that some people think this work is dangerous and don’t like people doing it. She said OK again and went back to watching TV.
I wonder where she heard the word “prostitute.” Probably TV, since she said it in Dutch (“hoer”) in the middle of a sentence in Portuguese. I taught her the Portuguese equivalent (“prostituta”). (On second thoughts, it might have been at school. Maybe I should ask her.)
Ah, that explanation for the dislike is better than mine! I was trying to convey the idea of “stranger sex” in 8-year-old terms.
I guess my personal definition of “slut” would be “a dishonest, unofficial prostitute.” There’s definitely a profit motive, but she tells you it’s because she’s just so damned horny, or because you’re so damned studly, or because she loves you. She wants all she can get out of you, and perhaps considers it a point of pride to promise you Pleasures Such as You Have Never Known while actually putting out as little as possible. Different than the Gold Digger in that she has no intention of sticking around to work the mine over any long period of time. Nope, she takes you for all she can, as quickly as she can, and then moves on to the next poor dupe.
IOW, she’s an unofficial prostitute whose goal is to cheat her customers while convincing them (and herself?) that they aren’t customers at all.
Nymphomaniacs…
Your description is the accurate one, but my favorite definition of “nymphomaniac” is “a woman who wants sex once more than you do.” It says a lot more about the guy using the word than it does about the woman he is applying it to, especially if pared with the following definition of “frigid”: a woman who wants sex once less than you do.
That reminds me of George Carlin’s definition of assholes and maniacs; an asshole is someone who drives more slowly than you do, and a maniac is somebody who drives faster than you do. 😀
Really, Sailor Barsoom? I had thought any promiscuous woman, no matter how what reasons she had for being promiscuous, would be automatically called a slut… What’s the colloquial English for a woman who had many lovers without necessarily having wanted to exploit or manipulate them?
Well, I did say that it was my personal definition. What you describe would match most people’s idea of “a slut.” Or perhaps of an “ethical slut.”
Oh, sorry — I missed the first three words! 😐
In case you’re curious, I found some etymological information on the word slut, which, interestingly, has an unclear origin. The more recent semantic evolution seems to have been from ‘untidy’, ‘dirty’, ‘idle’ to ‘having loose manners, hussy’. Here’s my summary of the OED and of etymonline.com:
slut n. First attestation in the 13th century, meaning ‘dirty, slovenly, untidy woman,’ probably cognate with dialectal German Schlutt ‘slovenly woman’, dialectal Swedish slata ‘idle woman’, Dutch slodder ‘idle woman, slut’ (less common; the most frequent Dutch word for ‘slut’ is slet). The ultimate origin of this word is doubtful. Chaucer uses sluttish (late 14th c.) to refer to the appearance of an untidy man. Also found with the meaning ‘a kitchen maid, a drudge’ (in the mid-15th c., hard pieces in a loaf of bread from imperfect kneading were called ‘slut’s pennies’). With the meaning ‘woman of loose character, bold hussy,’ this word is attested from the mid-15th century; playful use of the word, without implication of loose morals, is attested from the 1660s, e.g.: Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily. [Pepys, diary, Feb. 21, 1664]. In the 19th c., this word was sometimes used as a euphemism for bitch to describe a female dog. Ultimately, slut may be seen as part of a group of North Sea Germanic words in sl– that all mean ‘sloppy,’ and also ‘slovenly woman,’ and that have a tendency to evolve toward ‘woman of loose morals’: cf. English slattern, also dialectal English slummock ‘dirty, untidy or slovenly person,’ 1861; Middle Dutch slore ‘a sluttish woman.’)
It’s amazing how even “bad” words have such interesting histories. Real etymology is a fascinating thing. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of fake etymology out there, and while these can provide amusing stories (my favorite in this category would be the notion that “fuck” originated as an acronym of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”), they aren’t much help if someone wants to know a word’s true origins.
Folk etymologies usually ignore cognates; the German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian words for “fuck” are almost the same as the English. They’re all derived from a Germanic verb meaning “to strike”, but I’m sure our resident linguist can give us more detail. 😉
Maggie is of course right, folk etymologies are a problem; just because something ‘sounds similar’ it doesn’t follow that it is (‘offer’ doesn’t come from ‘off’). Also, there are many urban legends about the origin of colloquial words as acronyms; read this cry of desperation from an amateur etymologist with respect to legends of an acronym origin for the word ‘shit.’ It’s hilarious, and vary informative (and ‘fuck’ is also mentioned there, both the idea you mentioned, Sailor, and also an alternative, Fornication Under Consent of the King).
Ah, etymology. Language, languages; words; histories; connections; peoples; ‘what it is like to speak that language’; ‘how did it become this way’… This is my calling, like prostitution to Maggie. More than that, it’s my deepest intellectual love, the thing that makes me face the world with a smile, the thing that makes me really feel like a child.
On the word ‘fuck’, here is a little report I did once for another website. It is indeed highly entertaining, and true — the OED backs it up (the text itself is from Dan Harper’s Online Etymological Dictionary, who has the OED and other reputable dictionaries as his main sources).
fuck v. Until recently a difficult word to trace in English, in part because it was taboo to the editors of the original OED when the F volume was compiled, 1893-97. Written form only attested from early 16c. OED 2nd edition cites 1503, in the form fukkit; earliest appearance of current spelling from 1535: “Bischops… may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit” [Sir David Lyndesay, “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits”], but presumably it is a much more ancient word than that, simply one that wasn’t written in the kind of texts that have survived from Old and Middle English. Buck cites the proper name John le Fucker from 1278. The word is apparently hinted at in a scurrilous 15th-century poem, titled “Flen flyys,” written in bastard Latin and Middle English. The relevant line reads: Non sunt in celi quia fuccant uuiuys of heli, ‘They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of [the town of] Ely.’ Fuccant is pseudo-Latin, and in the original it is written in cipher.
The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norwegian dialectal fukka ‘copulate,’ or Swedish dialectal focka ‘copulate, strike, push,’ and fock ‘penis’ (dialectal). Another theory traces the word through Middle English fyke, fike “move restlessly, fidget,’ which also meant ‘dally, flirt,’ and probably is from a general North Sea Germanic word; cf. Middle Dutch fokken, German ficken ‘fuck,’ earlier meaning ‘make quick movements to and fro, jerk, flick,’ still earlier attested meaning ‘itch, scrach;’ the vulgar sense is attested from 16th century on. This would parallel in sense the usual Middle English slang term for “have sexual intercourse,” swive, from Old English swifan ‘to move lightly over, sweep.’ But the OED remarks these “cannot be really shown to be related” to the English word [basically because the vowel in the German word — i — should have been u or ü, and the Dutch o should have been u, for these words to be clear cognates of English fuck; if the words are indeed related, something weird happened to their vowels at some point]. Chronology and phonology also rule out an interesting attempt, made by Shipley, to derive it from Middle English firk ‘to press hard, to beat.’
French foutre, Italian fottere, Spanish joder, Portuguese foder look similar to the English word but are actually unrelated, deriving rather from Latin futuere, which is perhaps from a Proto-Indo-European base *bhaut- ‘knock, strike off,’ extended via a figurative use “from the sexual application of violent action” [Shipley; cf. the sexual slang use of bang, etc.] Popular and Internet derivations from acronyms (and the “pluck yew” fable) are merely ingenious trifling. The Old English equivalent was hæman, from ham ‘dwelling, home,’ with a sense of ‘take home, co-habit.’
Fuck was outlawed in print in England (by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857) and the U.S. (by the Comstock Act, 1873). The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI: “It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, ‘Get your —ing rifles!’ it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said ‘Get your rifles!’ there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.” [John Brophy, “Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918,” pub. 1930]
The legal barriers broke down in the 20th century, with the “Ulysses” decision (U.S., 1933) and also “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (U.S., 1959; U.K., 1960). Johnson excluded the word, and fuck wasn’t in a single English language dictionary from 1795 to 1965. “The Penguin Dictionary” broke the taboo in the latter year. Houghton Mifflin followed, in 1969, with “The American Heritage Dictionary,” but it also published a “Clean Green” edition without the word, to assure itself access to the lucrative public high school market.
The abbreviation F (or eff) {one of the funniest applications of which I’ve seen in the anti-Christian website Jhuger.com: “Effing the ineffable since 1996” — Asehpe} probably began as euphemistic, but by 1943 it was being used as a cuss word, too. In 1948, the publishers of “The Naked and the Dead” persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead. When Mailer later was introduced to Dorothy Parker, she greeted him with, “So you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck'” [The quip sometimes is attributed to Tallulah Bankhead]. Hemingway used muck in “For whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). The major breakthrough in publication was James Jones’ “From Here to Eternity” (1950), with 50 fucks (down from 258 in the original manuscript). Fuck-all ‘nothing’ first recorded in 1960.
Verbal phrase fuck up ‘to ruin, spoil, destroy’ is first attested around 1916. A widespread group of Slavic words (e.g. Polish pierdolić) shows the same semantic evolution, meaning both ‘fornicate’ and ‘make a mistake.’ Fuck off is attested from 1929; as a command to depart, from 1944. Flying fuck originally meant “have sex on horseback” and is first attested around 1800 in broadside ballad “New Feats of Horsemanship.” The apparently unkillable urban legend that fuck is an acronym of some sort is traceable to an old Usenet posting in 1995, though it probably predates that. Agent noun fucker attested from 1590s in literal sense (see above), by 1893, attested as a term of abuse and/or admiration. (“DUCK F-CK-R. The man who has the care of the poultry on board a ship of war.” Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796.)
“or Swedish dialectal focka ‘copulate, strike, push,’ and fock ‘penis’ (dialectal).”
I realise that this is a year old post, and I have not seen Asehpe for a while, but since this passage mentioned my native tongue, I got curious. I had never heard those words used with that meaning before. I searched Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB), the Swedish counterpart of the OED, and found no reference to this meaning. There were two entries for “fock”, one is the Swedish nautical name for ‘fore’ in fore-mast (and its sails), which was the meaning I knew beforehand, and the other named a kind of mushroom (noted as being dialectal). Nothing on intercourse.
Undaunted, I then reached for Rietz’ dialect dictionary, it is dated but still the most comprehensive collection of dialectal words in Sweden. It does not list “fock” at all but the alternative spelling “fokk” is listed and indeed means “penis”. Rietz notes that this usage is from Bohuslän (which borders Norway in the north-west) so it seems to corroborate Asehpe’s description.
Rietz also lists the verb “fokka”, and though Rietz is prudish enough to write the meaning in latin (“coire”, of which another verb-form is “coitus”), it does, basically, mean “fuck” (again, this usage is from Bohuslän).
Interesting, I’ve learned something new about Swedish! 🙂
This is the only blog I know of where the comment threads often are as educational as the main post! Even on the best science-blogs, the commentaries usually degenerate into rubbish within half-a-dozen comments.
I’m very proud of my comment threads, though I don’t know what (if anything) I did to encourage them to develop as they have other than just writing the way I do and refusing to allow trolls free reign in the same of some misguided notion of “free speech”.
My guess is that you bring out the best in us.
Do you have to prune off commentators a lot?
Not at all, actually. I honestly think the total number of non-spam attempted comments which I have refused is in the double digits, though as of today there have been almost 14,000 comments posted.
>>swive, from Old English swifan ‘to move lightly over, sweep.’<<
I found this interesting, since in modern Italian slang, the verb "scopare" (literally, "to sweep" – a scopa is a broom) means “to fuck.” The usage is considered crude and not for polite company. There’s clearly no etymological connection, but a definite link in, shall we say, visualization? 🙂
Oh, it definitely predates that; I first heard “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” when I was in my freshman year of high school, autumn 1979. And since the man who told it to me was in his 40s at the time, he could’ve heard it as early as the early ’40s. I first heard “Fornication Under Consent of the King” from a 28-year-old boyfriend in perhaps 1985, and he knew it from high school (early ’70s). I suspect both date to the ’40s or ’50s, when acronyms were first commonly used in American society.
Indeed; Harper mentions similar anecdotal evidence for previous occurrences; it’s just difficult to trace them to a date because you need written attestations for this, and urban legends tend to be oral tradition. E-mail and the internet makes them more traceable, but then again only down to the beginnings of e-mail in the 1990’s.
There are older versions of such dissemination called “faxlore” and “copierlore”; the former goes back to the ’80s and the latter to the ’70s (when photocopiers first became cheap). I have a few jokes and such spread thus from the mid-’80s, but no folk etymologies.
I suppose that somebody must eventually mention Van Halen, so I will. In fact, I just did.
I don’t really care for the term “slut” myself because I feel it’s both pejorative and imprecise
I never like to be imprecise, but speaking perjorative is useful.
I define slut as a woman (or man) with psychological damage to themselves or others, resulting from promiscuous sex.
“I wouldn’t wait too long; since your mother-in-law has already said something you might explain that some people think prostitutes are bad because they think they’re trying to fool the men, but that isn’t really true.”
Ah, bless my parents–instead of waiting for the question to arise, they took hold of the issue actively when I was 11 or 12 or so. One night I was tossed in the car to go for a drive (a routine family amusement). That night, however, the destination was not a park or a museum or even the pretty evening lights around the monuments, it was “the Block,” Washington DC’s sex district at 14th and I. (Like Times Square and the Combat Zone, The Block is long gone, done in by VCRs, DVDs, the Internet, and aggressive zoning. In addition to peep shows, movie houses and stage shows, it also had the best pawn shops, at which I bought all my early camera equipment. Sic transit gloria mundi.).
We cruised the neighborhood for a bit and looked at the gals and the johns while my parents discussed prostitution with me. I seem to recall that the key point they wanted to convey was that “the girls are not to be despised, they are unfortunate not evil.” OK, so it wasn’t prostitution as empowerment, but hey, we’re talking about a vanilla suburban couple who antedate the baby boom and the sexual revolution. Pretty progressive parenting in context.
I never did forget that night. I never have thought of prostitutes as anything other than people since.