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Ashley Madison

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 30, 2011| 92 Comments »

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. –  Marcel Proust

As a whore myself I have to admit the Ashley Madison Agency ads with slogans like “Don’t pay for an escort, find cheating wives in your area!” irritate me a lot more than the ones which simply say “Life is short. Have an affair.”  But not by much.  As I’ve said before, while I accept that male infidelity is extremely common, I think it’s reprehensible for a married man to have sex with amateurs without his wife’s permission. A whore is a professional who wants nothing more than her fee; she is scrupulous about protection and will not disrupt a marriage by calling her clients, demanding they leave their wives, whining “you don’t spend enough time with me” or any of the other behaviors which make a mistress a danger to a marriage.  So as you might expect, I find the idea of a dating service which specifically markets itself to married people looking for affairs to be repellent in the extreme.

Before Thursday night (when I wrote this article) just about everything I knew about Ashley Madison appears in the paragraph above.  I suspected that, like most dating venues which emphasize casual sex without commitment, the ratio would be dozens of men per woman, that most women who did join would not be the sort whom men pay attention to in real life, that the agency disguised the male-female disproportion by posting hundreds of fake woman-seeking-man ads and paying women to pretend to be customers, and that just about every other female ad which didn’t fall into one of the above categories was placed by an escort.  As it turns out I was right (no big surprise), but what I didn’t realize was just how far this scam goes to part horny guys from their money; from what my research revealed, “chat lines” are bastions of ethical business practice by comparison.

I’ve seen Ashley Madison ads online for a number of years now, but never thought much about them until I saw this article about the agency attempting to purchase an ad during the Super Bowl.  You would have to have lived under a rock for the past few decades not to realize how incredibly expensive Super Bowl ads are; a couple of million dollars a minute now, unless I’m very much mistaken.  So the fact that Ashley Madison could afford such an ad made me sit up and take notice.  I therefore decided to do a little digging, and what I discovered disgusted me even more.

Ashley Madison (named for two popular baby girl names of 2001, the year it was created) is the brainchild of a Toronto lawyer (why am I not surprised?) named Noel Biderman, who apparently thinks laws are more important than morals because he goes around saying things to interviewers like, “Adultery is the only thing in the world people think is immoral but a consensus still do it…What I’m saying is don’t have an office romance and risk losing your job.  Don’t start a relationship with an unsuspecting single person and definitely don’t visit an escort service and risk breaking the law…We’re secure, anonymous and it was created exactly for people like you.”  Because, you know, breaking an arbitrary law (which doesn’t even exist in Biderman’s country) is so much worse than risking destroying your marriage because you’re too cheap or too proud to call a whore and would rather risk entanglement with an emotionally damaged woman instead.

But that’s only the beginning of Biderman’s attacks on hookers and only the tenth part of his self-serving sleaziness.  Do a Google search for any phrase like “Ashley Madison scam”, “Ashley Madison fraud” or “Ashley Madison review” and you’ll find websites stocked with testimonials for the agency and either insinuating or outright stating that escorts carry venereal diseases.  Of course, as my regular readers know this is a crock of shit; escorts have a vested interest in staying clean, and promiscuous amateurs have far higher rates of every known STD.  Why are these sites so eerily similar and why do they all carry praise for the agency when their names suggest otherwise?  Because they’re all owned by Biderman, of course, as a quick whois search will reveal.  It took me a bit of diligent digging to find any REAL criticism of the agency, and what I found is pretty much summed up on this site (there were a few others but this had the most and best-written critiques).

In a nutshell, if you’re a woman Ashley Madison is just fine because ten seconds after you sign up the men will be all over you like white on rice.  But if you’re a guy it’s a total scam; you buy “credits” which are needed to do pretty much anything on the site (send a message, receive a message, start a chat, etc).  The agency employs a number of shills and/or robots which bombard male members with fake messages that cost credits to open, and sending messages to the fake “too good to be true” ads costs credits as well and goes nowhere.  If a man lucks out and picks an ad which actually goes to an escort he’ll get laid (after paying her fee, of course), but he could’ve made the same connection on a hooker board, Backpage, etc for free and without the hassle of trying to figure out which ads were for whores, which for fakes and which for real women twenty years and fifty pounds ago.  Everything is set up like a casino or a carnival con game, enticing the poor bastard to keep throwing good money after bad in a futile effort to get something for nothing.

One of my serious university boyfriends (he was 28 when I was 19) once told me, “Maggie, nobody can take advantage of you unless you have larceny in your heart.”  It took me a while to understand what he meant, which is this:  There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.  Ashley Madison holds out the promise of something for nothing:  Extracurricular sex without monetary cost, commitment or risk.  But as with all such offers, it’s a lie:  Pussy costs, and free pussy is the most expensive kind.  And Noel Biderman, AKA “Ashley Madison”, has figured out a way to tack on a hefty surcharge.

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Harm Reduction

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2011| 80 Comments »

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. –  Emma Goldman

My column of January 9th spawned a lively debate about male infidelity among several escorts and other interested parties; the central issues seemed to be whether a husband’s infidelity is different whether he sees a whore or has an affair, and whether it bothers us that we facilitate that infidelity.  Those of you who read that thread probably noticed that, with the exception of the factual issues of comparative frequency, I largely stayed out of the discussion; that was a conscious choice on my part.  When new reader Joyce made her very passionate post, I suspected it would inspire strong and interesting responses and so I decided to keep my big mouth shut for a change and let things develop without my influence.  I was gratified to notice that, despite personal variations on the details, all the prostitutes who contributed were largely on the same page as I am, and I think that’s a good thing for reasons which will soon become clear.

Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society. – St. Augustine (354-430)

“Harm reduction” is the modern name given to an ancient idea:  Since neither the world nor human beings are perfect, there will always be evil and misfortune, and all we can hope for is to reduce the level of harm caused by those negative factors.  In my column of November 26th I pointed out that the Catholic Church “recognized that human beings are imperfect and incapable of total adherence to any code of behavior.  So rather than setting up impossible standards which many if not most people would often fail to meet (as we do today), the Church fathers recognized the need for safety valves which would allow people to blow off steam and thereby avoid great wrongs and mortal sins by tolerating lesser wrongs and venial sins.”  This pragmatic view fell into disfavor after the Reformation, when Protestant views on “progress” and the perfectibility of man first appeared; those views, reinforced by the many scientific discoveries and technological innovations of the period, gained in popularity throughout the Age of Reason and by the 19th century practically constituted a cultic belief that tomorrow would always be better than today and that mankind and society could be “perfected” just as scientific theories or technological devices could be.  Tolerance for prostitution, alcohol and other “vices” were replaced by a rigid, punitive belief that these “social ills” could be eliminated entirely, and governments (which never pass up an excuse for repression) responded to the popular belief by prohibiting just about every “vice” imaginable and empowering police and courts to harass, arrest and imprison people for behaviors which were previously considered outside the purview of government.

So widespread did this belief-system become that the First World War was commonly referred to as “The War to End All Wars”; many people actually believed that it would purge the very desire for war out of mankind and result in a new world order of peace and prosperity.  Clearly, that did not happen, and many intellectuals realized it even before the war was over.  Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a growing number of people realized that just as the Great War had not eliminated armed conflict, and just as Prohibition had not ended the demand for alcohol, so the war against prostitution had not curtailed it in the least.  And out of that philosophical soil eventually grew the doctrine of “harm reduction”, the realization that our ancestors had it right in the first place:  Human beings are not perfectible and attempts to threaten and beat vice out of them do vastly more harm than good.  The philosophy of harm reduction was further bolstered by the growing popularity of cultural pluralism:  If people have the right to differing ideas, beliefs and political views, what is the moral basis for banning behaviors which harm nobody else and are not even viewed as vices in some cultures?

Those mired in the traditional Protestant or secular authoritarian mindsets argue that harm reduction is defeatist; while they usually admit that neither humanity nor society is perfectible, they argue that giving up on restricting vices “sends the wrong message” and actively encourages such behaviors.  I’m not going to address this position’s underlying assumption that the prevailing idea of rectitude is the correct one, nor the abhorrent notion that any government has the right to enforce its ideas of “correct” behavior on citizens who do not harm others; either of those would be a full column in itself. Instead, I would like to call the reader’s attention to an aspect of game theory called “conditions of victory”; though this may sound esoteric it refers to the simple concept that the participants in any contest may have different criteria for winning that contest.  In a child’s game of tag, the condition of victory for “it” is to tag someone, and the condition of victory for everyone else is to escape being tagged.  More complex games such as war have much more complex differences; King Leonidas knew he could not possibly defeat the vastly larger Persian force at Thermopylae, so he did not try to do so.  His strategy was intended to delay Xerxes, not to stop him, and in that he succeeded.  Thus, though the Greeks lost the battle they won the game; the limited resources which would not allow victory under one set of conditions did allow it under another.  The United States has defined victory in its “Drug War” as the total elimination of all recreational drugs; under these unrealistic conditions victory is completely impossible.  But if those conditions were changed to “reduce the social and economic impact of recreational drugs below x level”, victory is not only possible but can be achieved at a very reasonable cost and in a fairly short time.

Because men are biologically programmed to seek sexual variety, most men will do so; at least two-thirds of married men will at least occasionally seek extramarital sex.  No woman has any way of knowing whether the man she chooses will be a member of the minority who is able to resist temptation, so if she defines a “successful marriage” as one in which her husband never strays she is playing Russian Roulette with at least four bullets.  But if she defines it as one in which her husband’s probable infidelities cause no overt damage, difficulty or social consequences, all she need do is keep him from getting involved with amateurs.  As I wrote in my column of July 21st, whores allow men to cheat in a managed fashion and thereby minimize harm to their wives and children.  Far from being a “social evil” as it usually referred to in the United States, prostitution is a positive good because it provides a controlled outlet for male sexual impulses which might otherwise cause tremendous problems, including (but by no means limited to) rape and broken marriages.  While it’s true that for a wife to discover her husband has been patronizing whores might damage their marriage, would an affair or constant pressure for unwanted sex do any less?  Prostitution is not a panacea for the differing sexual needs between the sexes, but it does greatly reduce the problems; it is the definitive example of the principle of harm reduction.

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Grow the Hell Up!

Posted in Current Events, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2011| 62 Comments »

Women cannot claim the right to be considered mature and responsible until they decide the course of their lives for themselves and refuse to be a “manipulated group.” –  Mary Barnett Gilson

Last Monday (January 3rd) Brandy Devereaux published a column in which she mentioned this recent article in the Sacramento Bee.  The story is the usual pap in which all prostitution is equated with the lowest segment of streetwalking:  blah blah blah pimps, blah blah blah used condoms, blah blah blah scum, blah blah blah property values.  The only good part about it is that it reports that the city of Sacramento, California no longer has enough money to set up prostitution stings, which means they only arrest those prostitutes on whom they receive complaints; that in turn means escorts and massage parlors are enjoying a brief respite from persecution by armed, violent busybodies.

Of course, that won’t last long if certain people have their way.  Brandy reprinted this “Ask Officer Michelle” column from Monday’s Sacramento Press in which a woman calling herself “Justme” referred to the aforementioned article and bemoaned the fact that the police are too busy with actual criminals to remove all possible opportunities for her husband’s infidelity:

I recently found out my husband visits massage parlors and he finds them on myredbook.com…Is it true that there are this many escorts, providers, massage parlors so easily available in Sacramento and in my own neighborhood?  And no, I don’t live on [a list of skid row locations]…These services are advertising for [a list of suburbs and neighborhoods]…the websites advertise “happy endings” and all of the massage parlors in town.  Today I spotted 12 parlors in just 15 minutes.  How do they get permits and not get caught?  Exchanging money for sex is still illegal right?  Or did I miss something…Sorry for unloading all of this, but I live in Sacramento to get away from this in San Francisco, New York, etc.

Surprise, Justme!  “Officer Michelle” and others like her have been lying to you.  We’re citizens just like you and we live and work in all sorts of neighborhoods, even in Sacramento; we don’t all stand on big-city street corners wearing Hollywood costumes, and most of us even know how to use the internet just like you.  As for “exchanging money for sex”, would it make you happier if he got it for free from some lonely chick in a bar who might then start calling him at home, and who might not be so scrupulous about condom use as a professional would?  Furthermore, I’d watch where you’re pointing that finger because unless you never give your husband sex and he never gives you money that line’s awfully hard to draw.  But perhaps I’m making an unwarranted assumption here; maybe you don’t give your husband sex, in which case it’s pretty obvious why he’s visiting massage parlors.

“Justme” is obviously pretty naïve and badly in need of a wake-up call, but does “Officer Michelle” give her one?  You’re kidding, right?  Notice she doesn’t even answer any of her questions:

I called Women Escaping a Violent Environment (WEAVE) to see if they had services for women that are in your situation.  They have people that you can talk to about this…They are there for women who are in crisis; not just for women that are going through abuse, but they are there for support including circumstances like what you are experiencing.  I have heard prostitution as been referred to as a “victimless crime.”  After hearing stories such as yours from other women as well, it is apparent that prostitution is not victimless at all.

Read that again.  This policewoman columnist is actually advising a woman who caught her husband going to massage parlors to contact an organization intended to help abused women; despite her prevarication about the group’s mission, I think the words “violent environment” are pretty clear.  I understand that for a naïve wife to discover her husband’s extracurricular activities could be disturbing, but it’s NOT the same as being beaten.  And since “Officer Michelle” opines that prostitution should be a “crime” due to male infidelity, I’ll be waiting for the column in which she endorses laws against adultery and gay bathhouses.  As Brandy said in her column:

Now this poor poor wife is the victim of a sex crime because her husband visited a massage parlor…Her feelings were hurt.  Let’s run around and arrest people for the crime of “hurting someone’s feelings”.  Oh wait a minute, but that would not be the fault of the massage parlor.  They didn’t hurt her little feelers.  The husband, who I am sure willingly walked into the place for a massage…is the one who hurt her feelings.  I’m sure the massage place did not know or even ask if he was married.  No that is his responsibility, not theirs.  Yet we want to persecute the massage parlor…for just being available.

Brandy has, of course, just smacked the proverbial nail dead-on.  A hundred years ago one of the chief propaganda arguments used to convince women to support prohibition of alcohol was that it caused husbands to neglect or abuse their wives and children; modern anti-drug and anti-porn activists use similar rhetoric.  Many women seem to find it much easier to blame the activities dissatisfied husbands replace them with (whether that be ball, booze or broads) than to blame the husbands for neglecting them, and it goes without saying that they find it vastly easier than examining themselves for possible husband-alienating faults or actually working at trying to understand their men and helping them to avoid temptation.  It’s not only scorned women who do this, either; modern culture encourages people of both genders to surrender personal responsibility for their actions.  It’s not the fault of the human for misbehaving; it’s the fault of the drugs/tobacco/video games/porn/guns/gambling/television/movies or whatever.  Even sex is called an “addiction”.

But since prostitution involves two people rather than a person and a thing, modern prohibitionists have turned the blame game into a version of “hot potato”; angry wives and advocates of criminalization like “Officer Michelle” say the prostitute is evil and leads innocent men into wrongdoing, while the “Swedish Model” and trafficking rhetoric blame evil males for exploiting innocent women.  And by this both groups demonstrate the fallacy of criminalization; consensual behaviors have no victim and are therefore not crimes.  The prostitute who offers a service is no more responsible for clients who come to her when they shouldn’t than an auto manufacturer is responsible for someone who is harmed by driving his car off of the highway, and neither can a client be held responsible for the free choice of a whore.  It’s time for people to stop allowing governments to treat them like children, and the way to accomplish this is to stop acting like children by running to Big Brother every time someone hurts our feelings, or expecting Nanny to remedy every consequence resulting from our own ill-considered actions.  It’s time for modern people to leave their state-run, police-guarded nurseries and grow the hell up.

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Wife Swapping

Posted in Call types, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2010| 44 Comments »

There’s only one thing wrong with wife swapping. You get another wife. –  Scott Roeben

The accepted and more politically correct term for it is of course “swinging”, but frankly I prefer the older term, and it isn’t just because I’m sexually submissive and it’s a lot more descriptive than the rather vague, bland “swinging”.  No, the main reason I prefer “wife swapping” is that it’s a hell of a lot more honest.  Blah blah blah “sexist”, blah blah blah “objectification”, blah blah blah “ignores the woman’s experience”, blah blah blah.  The fact is that, with a few exceptions, most women who swing do so to please their husbands, and so become whores whose price is exactly equal to that of all other women in the “swinging” community.  Rather than exchanging cash, a “swinging” wife accepts as her price the other woman’s services to her husband.  It is a barter arrangement, so “wife swapping” is both accurate and to the point in a way the mealy-mouthed “swinging” could never be.

The line between the two is narrower than you might think.  I’ve known a few married hookers who started out as swingers and then realized that if they were going to do strange men anyhow they might as well get paid for it, and I’ve also known a few retired hookers whose husbands missed the turn-on of their wives with other men and so suggested swinging.  Despite neofeminist obfuscation to the contrary, the real mental line which has to be crossed to become a prostitute is the barrier against having sex with strange men; once one has made that mental adjustment, being paid comes naturally.  Yes, there are sluts who will rant and rave and fume that they’re “better” than whores because they don’t take cash in hand, but since most of them expect gifts, vacations, spending money, etc their posturing is either denial or excuse-making.  And just let one of them get pregnant (because she was too stupid to take precautions, too scheming or fearful to take Plan B and too whatever to get an abortion) and watch how quickly she starts negotiating her price.

There is, of course, one other difference in the United States:  Except in locations where adultery is against the law, swinging is legal while prostitution isn’t.  Wrap your head around that, now:  Both involve women having sex with strange men in return for something, both are often arranged via internet or alternative newspaper ads, both usually involve male infidelity, both are considered shocking by prudes, and both could result in spreading venereal disease if appropriate precautions are not taken.  Yet the one which allows a woman sex completely on her own terms and enables her to directly fund her chosen lifestyle is illegal.  Let the prohibitionists make whatever excuses they like, because they have no clothes on.

Obviously, most women who swing will never officially become hookers; they aren’t brave enough to go solo, they don’t need the money, they don’t want to risk arrest, they like being picky about whom they see, they enjoy the “club” social atmosphere of swinger groups, etc.  And since swingers can be found among all types of people, most swapped wives are average looking just as most of the population is, so even if they wished to turn pro they probably wouldn’t really be able to make much of a living at it.  And it’s probably for the best they don’t or can’t; the professional community doesn’t need a bunch of enthusiastic but completely ignorant amateurs glutting the market and undercutting our prices!

But beside the few swinger/whores, the communities intersect in another way:  couple calls.  A couple call is one way for a husband to ease a reluctant wife into swinging; it also eliminates one potential human factor, and if the wife becomes upset at the sight of her husband with another woman the only consequences are financial rather than social.  Even experienced swingers might occasionally hire a call girl, since this allows them a freer (and usually higher-quality) choice of play companions with no strings attached.  In couple calls the woman’s reaction is usually the “X” factor (though I did have one experience in which it was the other way around), but in swinging trouble can go either way because both parties have to deal emotionally with “competition”.  I daresay everyone who has ever known swingers has heard horror stories of jealousy, drama and the like; there is no way to tell how often such things happen among neophyte swingers, though they would have to be rare among experienced ones or else they would never have gone that far.  The biggest potential cause of problems among established swingers isn’t jealousy but rather rules violations.

In an escort-client relationship, the rules are clear and firmly enforced by the professional, but when everyone involved is an amateur motivated only by emotions there is a great deal more potential for drama and even disaster; it is therefore absolutely imperative that everyone is on the same page and the expectations, etiquette and ground rules are firmly established from the beginning.  Like BDSM, swinging requires a high degree of trust between the partners, and either activity can intensify a strong relationship or destroy a weak one.  And though I do not know this for a statistical fact, I strongly suspect (from personal observations and anecdotal evidence) that in swinging it is the woman who is more often than not the weak link.  The reason should be obvious; while most men have no problem separating sex from emotion and can enjoy shagging strange women for the pure carnal joy of the act, many women have a tendency to become emotionally attached to men with whom they have sex (even some escorts have to wrestle with such feelings on occasion).  If her own marriage is strong this might present no problem as long as they avoid too many encounters with the same couple, but if her marriage is weak she may attach to her lover more strongly than to her husband, with serious consequences for both marriages.  And if she still harbors some resentment for being talked into wife swapping in the first place, those consequences might be catastrophic.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was rather a wild child in university; I experimented, was frequently invited into threesomes and became for a while (at her invitation) the mistress of an older girlfriend’s husband.  So as you might expect, I knew a number of sexually unconventional couples, and among them three with “open marriages”.  I think these are rarer now than they were in the ‘80s, probably because they don’t usually work.  An “open marriage” is essentially swinging without any rules; both parties are allowed to sleep with whomever they want, whenever they want, and as you might expect one invariably does it a lot more often than the other.  In all three cases I knew, the wife “wore the pants” and eventually became involved with a shy, easily-dominated boy in his late teens for whom she eventually left her weak husband; I discussed the aftermath of one of the cases in my column of August 19th.  The reason I mention this is because it demonstrates the need for mutually-acceptable rules to which both partners strictly adhere; obviously these marriages were all “flawed from the forge”, but even a good marriage can be harmed by swinging if the rules are unclear and feelings get hurt.

One final difference between swinging and “hobbying” is demonstrated by two news articles I recently read; the first reports that swinging clubs’ business is way down due to the bad economy, while the second claims that prostitution has actually increased.  Assuming both statistics are correct, I think we can pretty safely guess the reason for the disparity; while swinging also involves the wife (who is liable to nix money being spent on sex when times are tough), visiting whores only involves the husband, who may be no less prone to “let the little head do the thinking” when money is tight than otherwise.

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More Q & A

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 24, 2010| 13 Comments »

I am not bound to please thee with my answers. –  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (IV,i)

It’s time for me to answer reader questions again; keep ‘em coming, I’d like to make this a monthly feature!  This first one was imbedded in a long and fairly boring neofeminist diatribe:

If being a prostitute isn’t shameful, why don’t you use your real name and picture?

1)  Because there are far too many rabid lunatics like you around and I love my husband far too much to give any of you a chance to make his life more difficult.
2)  Because I don’t trust the self-proclaimed “authorities” any more than I would trust a dog to guard a steak.
3)  Because if I put a legal name and a distinctive face to my words I defeat one of my chief points, which is that prostitutes are no different from any other women.  If you know what I look like you also know what I don’t look like, and if you know my real name you also know what it isn’t; that allows you to mentally push me away, to pretend that I’m different and that you don’t know anyone like me.  But if I hide my identity I could be anybody: Your sister, your daughter, your friend, your neighbor or that nice lady you always see in the grocery store.  And that’s exactly what I want, because even if those women are not me they could share my profession.  We don’t have horns, cloven hooves or pointed teeth and we don’t abduct your children to sell them to “traffickers”; I guarantee you that unless you live in a town with under 1000 people there are at least a couple of us around, and if you live in an average-sized city there are dozens of us around, and there’s a good chance you know at least one of us by sight.  Let that sink in, and I hope it makes you very, very nervous because maybe then you’ll wake up out of this nightmare your brain appears to be trapped in.

What percentage of men see prostitutes?

It depends on who you talk to; estimates vary wildly, but the ones that sound about right to me claim that about 6% of men directly pay for sex “frequently”, 20% “occasionally”, and 69% at least once in their lives.  Considering that something like 67% of men have had extramarital sex at least once, those figures seem pretty credible to me.

What I find amazing is that so many people are so obtuse about the role prostitutes play in male infidelity.  Since only about 15% of married women cheat, many silly people conclude that either the men are lying when they say they have and/or the women are lying when they say they haven’t, because “all those men must be cheating with somebody.”  Just Google a few studies on infidelity and you’ll see what I mean; many commenters on such articles and even some of the educated idiots who compile the studies are so blinded by their monogamist bias that they are compelled to reach the incredibly naïve conclusion that each philandering man is paired up with one and only one adulterous woman, leading to the erroneous conclusion that either the male figures are too high or else  the female figures are too low.  None of these pundits can see the obvious explanation right in front of their faces; most male extracurricular activity is with prostitutes, each one of whom accounts for dozens of men!  In my busiest period (2000-2001) I alone had an average of 16 clients a week, at least 75% of them married.  And that’s just ONE whore; I can assure you the escort population of New Orleans could easily handle the 77% of straying husbands who weren’t paired up with straying wives.  This is actually good news for everyone; male readers can relax in the knowledge that, contrary to what the scare stories want you to believe, most wives really don’t cheat.  And female readers can take comfort in the fact that even if your husbands do get sex from somebody else, 77% of them are doing it with women who have absolutely no desire to break up anyone’s marriage.

Why does it matter what hotel I get to meet a provider? If I get a cheap hotel they don’t want to see me, but if I get an expensive one, there’s no problem.  Why is that?

There could be several factors at play here.  Part of it may be what I discussed in my column of October 9th:  If a man does not want to pay for a good hotel it could mean he cannot afford a good hotel, which means that the escort’s fee is also dearer to him than to a more affluent client and he will be more likely to try to get his “money’s worth” from her, thus making him far more demanding.  Also, allowing clients to hire cheap hotels attracts a poorer clientele with higher disease rates and less to lose socially if they cause trouble.

Another factor could be the escort’s belief in magic formulae (as discussed in my column of August 21st); some whores seem to believe that cops are too cheap to rent good hotel rooms and therefore cheap rooms are more suspect.  Nothing could be farther from the truth; police departments love to waste public money on prostitution “stings”, and the cost of even an expensive hotel room pales into insignificance beside the cost of taking a dozen cops off of real police work for hours so they can play sadistic sex games and ogle hookers.  And that’s assuming they actually have to pay for the rooms in the first place; some hotel chains let cops have rooms for free in the belief that it builds goodwill with them, and those with bluenosed management may actually let cops modify their rooms for “stings” because they want to discourage escorts from coming there once the word gets out.  Actually, in my experience mid-range hotels tend to be the worst; cheap ones have a “reputation” the cops want to avoid and some expensive ones refuse to allow police shenanigans because their upscale customers rightfully consider such activities objectionable and low-class.  If  you were a businessman paying $500 a night at a five-star hotel, would you want a mob of cretinous thugs playing “cops and robbers” down the hall from you?

Finally, snobby whores or those in the early stages of platinum pussy syndrome may think themselves too good to visit a Motel 6 or Super 8.  For myself, I wouldn’t see men who were staying in such places for the reasons already discussed in the first paragraph of my answer, but if a local client felt uncomfortable with an incall and merely wanted to rent such a room for a rendezvous I wasn’t too particular about it unless the place was a scary fleabag like the London Lodge or Tulane Motel.

You said most escorts don’t worry any more about getting HIV or other STDs by giving uncovered blow jobs, but what about colds, flu and other “regular” diseases?  Isn’t your risk of those higher without a condom?

As I discussed in my column of September 7th, the risk of oral transmission of HIV or hepatitis B is vanishingly low, and most other diseases have visible signs.  And while cold and flu-type diseases are transmitted easily even when there are no obvious symptoms, mere skin-to-skin contact involving hands, faces and other such areas will spread those diseases even if the man wears a condom from start to finish.  If you’re in bed with a guy you’re going to be exposed to his “common germs” no matter what precautions you take.  But since this does happen, I suspect escorts build up an immunity to such common pathogens; as a call girl I was in close contact with men from around the world, and I was sick less often than at any other time in my life.  I’ve never noticed escorts getting colds or whatever any more often than anybody else; in fact it seems to me that the people who get sick the most are the ones who are constantly “sanitizing” their entire environment with antibacterial products, thus robbing their bodies of the low-level exposure needed to build up antibodies.

That having been said, I did notice that I suffered from one particular condition more often when I was working than at any other times, and that was sore throat (and even laryngitis on a few occasions).  Part of this may simply have been due to abrasion during “deep throat”, but I suspect it was sometimes due to unknowing poor hygiene on the part of the client.  Think about it; we all know that the hands are the “germiest” parts of the body, and we’re told to wash our hands after using the toilet.  But I doubt many men wash their hands before urinating, so the bacteria on their dirty hands are transferred to the skin of their penises.  Thus, unless a man is freshly bathed when he visits a whore (or his wife for that matter) the exterior of his penis may in turn transfer that bacteria to the woman’s throat during oral sex and thereby cause minor infections.

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Flavor of the Month

Posted in Call types, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , on September 14, 2010| 34 Comments »

I know not what to do, my mind is divided.  –  Sappho

As I’ve said several times already, I am bisexual.  I suspect many more women are (to one degree or another) than let on even in these comparatively liberal times; we do, after all, tend to be creatures of the mean rather than of the extremes as men are.  When talking about women of my own personal acquaintance, it’s easier for me to name the women who are in no way bisexual than to list the many who are!  But most of these are more “bi-curious” than anything else; they enjoy looking at pictures of other women or fantasizing about them, and they may even have occasional lesbian encounters, but they’ve never been in love with another woman and probably never will be.  I, on the other hand, am about as bisexual as it’s possible to be; I’ve been attracted to both sexes since childhood and have had more relationships with women than I have with men (though my number of actual sexual experiences with men is far higher for reasons which should be obvious).

As I’ve already described in my column of July 16th, I respond differently to the two sexes:

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.

Because of this, it was inevitable that I would eventually settle into a long-term committed relationship with a man rather than a woman; though I feel differently today, back then I didn’t think aesthetics were as sound a basis for a relationship as what I considered biological and neurological complementarity.  But that view certainly didn’t evolve overnight; I had my first girlfriend in my senior year of high school, less than a year after losing my virginity, and since it illustrates a few points I think it’s worth a paragraph.

I’m going to call her Mae, because she was curvy and sultry like her idol Mae West.  She had black hair and her skin was even fairer than mine; some girls called her “Snow White” for that reason.  We had very similar eyes and were almost the same height, so when we went places together people often took us for sisters.  But there was nothing sisterly about our feelings for one another; we had been friends for two years and often joked about lesbian love in front of our schoolmates, but nothing had ever come of it until one day in September of 1982 when we were sitting on her couch after school.  We had been talking about the 1920s and the conversation had ranged from F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Dillinger’s legendary penis, and at some point the conversation just lapsed and we sat staring into each other’s eyes.  And then I kissed her, and she responded with great passion; a few days later I stayed overnight (in those days nobody thought anything of two teenage girls sharing a bed) and we went much farther.  The secret relationship continued until May, when she sensibly broke it off on the grounds that we were both going to different schools and her boyfriend just would not understand any more than anybody else would.  I don’t think she was ever in love with me, though I certainly was with her; consequently, I felt hurt and upset and depressed and all the other things one feels when a lover breaks up with one.  We talked a great deal that summer and even fell back into bed together once, but it was over; Jeff did his best to distract me and with the resilience of the very young I was largely OK by a month into my first semester at UNO.

Now, I’ve never been sexually aggressive; I have never consciously “come on” to a man in my life, and the very idea of actually suggesting sex to someone I’m not already involved with fills me with horror.  Honestly, I have no idea how men manage it!  But with other women the aversion to starting things isn’t quite so pronounced, so with Mae (and a few other girls over the years whose body language absolutely assured me of their interest) I was able to suppress my natural tendency toward receptivity enough to allow nature to take its course.  My first lesbian relationship also set another pattern which was never broken:  Every such encounter I’ve ever had was with a bisexual woman, and either she or I or both always had a separate relationship with a man.  To my knowledge, I’ve never been with an exclusive lesbian; I suspect the very fact of their exclusivity (not to mention the odd grooming habits so common among them) turned me off to the idea.

The one characteristic of my first lesbian relationship which did not continue in my others was its secretiveness.  I decided it was too stressful, and since I was now a young adult interacting with other young adults in a sexually tolerant environment I made no secret of my bisexuality.  I was delighted to find that not only was this generally accepted in the circles in which I moved, but also that it tended to inspire invitations to participate in threesomes.  Now that I think of it, my several years in that lifestyle may have helped to become more comfortable with the reality of prostitution, not only because people were calling me specifically for sex (without the trappings of dating), but also because I was the “other woman” many times over, even if the wife did know about it.

All that of course changed when I became involved with Jack; when we first started out I told him my philosophy of acceptable dalliances:  Fooling around with girls is cheating for neither, but fooling around with guys is cheating for either.  He claimed to be fine with that at first, but soon became so jealous of my then-current girlfriend that I stopped seeing her.  For the rest of our relationship my only lesbian encounters happened during our frequent breakups, and even those were rare because of the emotional turmoil inherent in the on-again off-again situation; when he finally left me in January of 1995 I was in no state to become involved with anybody, male or female.  Aside from one encounter with an old girlfriend in November of 1996, I had not been with another woman in the better part of a decade when I started doing two-girl shows while working as a stripper in 1998.

By that time I was living with Grace, who is absolutely heterosexual:  As she used to say to me when I tried to talk about two-girl calls, “Maggie, if you wanna rub muffins with somebody that’s your business, but I don’t wanna hear about it!”  This of course did not stop neighbors from making stupid modern assumptions; once when I one my way to a multi-hour dinner call one of them asked where I was going all dressed up.

When I told her I was going on a date (which was true; she didn’t need to know it was a professional one) she seemed surprised and said, “But I thought you and Grace were…”

“Lesbians?” I finished after she trailed off.  “No, not at all!  I’m bi, but she isn’t my type, and besides she’s only interested in men.”  She of course apologized profusely, but I was far more amused than offended.

For the next seven years I had plenty of lesbian activity; since many of the wives in couple calls were attractive I usually enjoyed them, and since I hand-picked my partners for two-girl calls I made sure they were desirable to me whenever possible.  I’ve already mentioned Cynthia and Dawn, both of whom were pretty, bisexual, as attracted to me as I was to them and great kissers beside.  But between and after them there were a number of other girls I found attractive, and though I could never bring myself to make advances on any of them I didn’t have to; I would simply offer the “Flavor of the Month” a two-girl call with me and observe her reaction.  Some were uninterested in such calls, and others accepted but were clearly just putting on a show.  But a few were themselves bisexual, and in such cases the client got more than his money’s worth!  “Flavor of the Month” was my husband’s term for such girls; many of them were just passing through town, or decided the business didn’t really agree with them, so they rarely lasted very long.  The title was therefore appropriate if not precise.  Unlike Jack he was not jealous of such girls; he knew I wasn’t going to become emotionally involved, and beside that he knew he was in for a really good time whenever I arranged a three-way for him with one!

In all that time, I only went on two calls in which a lone woman (unencumbered by a man) was interested in paying for sex with another woman.  The first such case was otherwise unremarkable; except for her gender it was really a lot like the typical call with a male client.  But the second was completely different; she was a few years younger than I was and very attractive, and she spoke frankly to me about how much she missed having a girlfriend.  It turned out she and I were in much the same space mentally; though we were uninterested in being unfaithful to our husbands with men, both of us liked having a girlfriend as well.  Unlike my husband, though, hers was too conventional to be turned on by such an arrangement.  I truly enjoyed the sex with her, and she called me several times that weekend; she was actually quite sexually aggressive and got both very vocal and excitingly rough when she was nearing orgasm (for example, she’s the only woman I was ever with who slapped me on the rump as men do).  It turned out that she was from a city not very far from my country place, so I suggested she try to sell her husband on the idea of a three-way, timed during one of my visits to the country.  She promised to consider it, but alas nothing ever came of that.  It would’ve been nice to have a regular girlfriend again, and think of the benefits to both of our husbands!

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