Q & A (March 2012)

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.  –  Claude Lévi-Strauss

This time I answer three questions from readers, and present a fourth which the reader answered herself before I could get to it, then shared the information with me.

Several times you’ve mentioned how Kegels keep you at ‘near-virginal’ tightness.  Please give us all the details of your routine and how it works.  And how do you tell when it’s working?  Do you consciously ‘grip’ your partner’s penis during intercourse?  (Don’t you get tired?) As an older woman who has had children, I’d sure be interested to know what I can do to restore vaginal tightness (without surgery).

I’ve never had a full-term birth, so I never had the extreme dilation required for it.  Also, I was always unusually small and tight, so I have a natural advantage in that department (though I would probably have needed a C-section if I had carried to term).  That having been said, the Kegels really do help unless your muscles are too distended to work on (such as if you had tearing or an episiotomy during birth).  I’ve been doing it since I was in my late teens, so I never let mine get very far along, but if you’ve never done it you may need to get a Kegels exerciser (it looks something like a dumbbell) to help you (they’re available online, or your gynecologist may know a place you can get one locally).  I don’t really have a routine per se; I just do them whenever I think about it, even in the car or while sitting at the keyboard (it’s almost like a kind of fidgeting for me now).  If you need the exerciser you of course won’t be able to do it “wherever” and you’ll need a routine; again, your gynecologist may tell you a “best way to do it” but I would think twice a day (say, before you get dressed and again when getting undressed in the evening) would be plenty.  You might also be interested in this Wikipedia article on the exercise, which includes descriptions of the different exercisers available.

Since mine are very toned, I can actually feel the flexing, and obviously I get feedback from my husband; when I was still working, the reactions of my customers gave me constant feedback that I was indeed accomplishing something.  I don’t constantly “grip” my partner’s penis during the whole process of intercourse, only when I feel like he needs extra stimulation or if I am faking an orgasm (I can simulate the rhythmic contractions by conscious effort).  But since you’re just starting out, consciously “gripping” in the early part of intercourse (until you become too “lost in the moment” to keep it up) might be an excellent exercise and also give you feedback from your partner (men will usually say something if they notice you’re doing it; one client teasingly called me a “show-off”).  If you’re very worried about not doing it correctly, some of the more expensive exercisers actually use springs and some kind of indicator to show the relative pressure you’re exerting.  The PCG is like any other muscle; when it’s in good shape, exertion is not tiring unless you do it very strenuously or for a very long time; when it’s out of shape, exerting it will be tiring at first (but you’ll build up strength quickly).

Did you ever, heaven forbid, have a run-in with a client or co-worker who was HIV-positive?  If an escort were to find she was HIV-positive due to an unscrupulous client, would she leave the field or continue working so her income doesn’t immediately end?  Though I’ve always used protection with escorts, I’ve become a bit paranoid about it lately.

Though it’s extremely important to use protection when having sex with anybody outside of a committed relationship, the greatest danger isn’t from HIV but rather from syphilis and gonorrhea.  HIV is especially scary to most people because it can kill and is at present incurable, though modern therapeutic regimens have greatly reduced its lethality.  But despite the damage it can do to a person’s immune system, HIV is actually an extremely wimpy virus; studies have shown the chance of transmission from male to female via unprotected vaginal intercourse may be as low as 0.1%, and the chance of transmission from female to male under the same circumstances is lower still.  In fact, the sexual transmission of HIV from a woman to a man is so incredibly rare some have described it as a “myth”, though I’m not prepared to go that far.  Repeated unprotected intercourse with infected partners obviously increases the chance of transmission (though some African women appear to have natural immunity), and the chances are higher in heterosexual anal sex, higher still in homosexual anal sex and highest of all with needle sharing…but even that gives only a 10% per incident chance of infection.

I’ve never met or personally known of an escort who was HIV positive, though I’m sure they exist and one does occasionally read of streetwalkers who are.  Because such cases are far more likely to have been transmitted through IV drug use rather than sexual contact, I suspect it’s likely such a woman would keep working to feed her habit, so if you’re extremely paranoid about HIV you might not want to hire a hooker whom you suspect injects drugs.  But aside from that, considering the infinitesimally low female-to-male HIV transmission rate I honestly don’t think it’s anything you need to be concerned about, especially if you always use condoms and only see escorts who do the same.

One of the things I’ve worried about as a client is the notion that a lot of hookers were molested as children; do you think that’s accurate?  Also I quit seeing one addicted provider because I do not want to help her buy the drugs which are apparently killing her.  Do a large percentage of providers have such a habit?  Lastly, do you think many or most providers are lesbians when it comes to their own sexual fulfillment?  

The idea that a disproportionate number of whores use drugs, were molested as children, etc is propaganda used by prohibitionists to imply that our decisions are not valid ones due to “trauma”, and that the state therefore has the right to overrule those choices “for our own good”.  Most of these pseudo-statistics are drawn from studies of streetwalkers in prisons or drug rehab facilities; it’s a bit like interviewing unsuccessful hot-dog-cart operators and then using the results to make pronouncements about all restaurants from McDonald’s to 5-star palaces.  I discuss the syndrome (and provide links to evidence) in “Out of Context“.

The number of escorts who are addicted to drugs is roughly the same as the number of salesmen, lawyers and other professionals of similar income level who are.  If you feel uncomfortable contributing to such a habit, by all means use someone else’s services…but do the same if you discover your lawyer, contractor or whoever have similar bad habits.  As for lesbianism, I’ve never perceived it as more common among escorts than in the general population (and I’ve known quite a few escorts).  I believe the majority of women are bisexual to one degree or another, but many are afraid to experiment with it due to social pressure.  Since whores are already sexual outsiders, more of them are likely to experiment with bisexuality (and certainly it makes a nice change if one sees a lot of clients).  But the number of personally exclusive lesbians among pros is not, in my opinion, any higher than among amateurs.

I’m trying to find the Japanese term for Western girls who go to Japan to work in the sex trade.  I know about Miss Gone-Overseas, but need the reverse term.

Longtime readers may remember that the term karayuki-san (“Miss Gone-Overseas”) was applied to late 19^th century Japanese girls who went to work as prostitutes in China, Korea and Thailand; by the 1910s the Japanese government began to see this as harmful to Japanese prestige and so enacted a series of initiatives designed to discourage it and to encourage the girls who had already gone to come home.  I didn’t know the opposite term but promised to look for it, but before I could make good the reader discovered the answer herself and shared it: the term is japayuki.

One Year Ago Today

“The Scarlet Letter” discusses the drive toward increasingly vicious anti-whore and anti-client tactics, including unconstitutional shame-based punishments inflicted without due process.