housecleaning.

30Oct08

I desperately need to clean house, clear out old history, bad memories and assorted detritus.  Used clothing.  I’m also in the midst of moving this blog to a new location with, I think, a new template (same-ish domain). As I’m preparing to do that, I’m going through the hundreds of drafts I never posted, either because they felt too raw or because I never finished the thought.  And god, there’s a lot of them.

I’ve been reposting some of the old stuff, mostly previously published posts that I pulled down for reasons that no longer apply. I think one of those posts appeared briefly as a new one for some reason, though it was actually well over a year old, something about my engagement and my fuckbuddy.

It all reminds me of how much things have changed in a year.  This time last year, I was breaking off an engagement.  Or pseudo-engagement.

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sunday morning.

20Oct08

Sunday morning, I was walking through Williamsburg when I saw a book lying in one of those patches of dirt that pass for a bit of urban greenery. From a distance, it looked like a bible or a copy of the DSM-IV, maybe because it was thick and hardcover, but when I got closer, I saw that it was a copy of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir.

I walked by, and after a few steps I decided to turn back and snap a photo.  I’m not sure why – maybe it was just the weirdness of seeing a classic text lying in a patch of dirt outside of an appliance shop. After I took the photo, I bent down to see if the last owner took any notes in the margins (they did), and before I knew it, I was engrossed, squatting in the dirt-square (or urine-patch), sipping coffee and holding the book open with my fingertips.

Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy has influenced me the way it’s influenced most women, whether they realize it or not, but I also admire Beauvoir as a brilliant woman who chose to live a very unconventional life. She followed a path of difficult choices, and some of those choices worked, and some of them left her conflicted, including her open marriage with Sartre. I respect her fearlessness.

(The American edition is famously fucked, so much so that a group of scholars pled with Knopf to get its act together and release a new translation.  Since Knopf owns the distribution rights in the US, we’ve been stuck with what we’ve got, a clumsy fifty-year-old translation by a zoologist who misunderstood key philosophical concepts (because he was a zoologist), and translated accordingly.  Plus, a large chunk of the original text was cut out completely. More here.)

While I was reading in the street, my phone vibrated with an incoming text message.  It was from Gabriel; Colin Powell had just endorsed Obama on Meet the Press.  It made me eager to get home so I could read about the endorsement (here), and since the book had no suspicious stains (liquor, urine, blood), I decided to take it with me so I could read it on the subway.

While I was standing on the platform, the woman beside me asked if I’d just come from church.  I looked around to see if she were talking to someone else, and then said, “Me?”

She smiled and pointed to the book under my arm.  “I saw your Bible,” she said.

*

I think I’m making progress on this social site of some sort.  There are a few options, and I’m leaning toward the options that would be simplest and easiest to execute, though I’d like a little more than a forum (if possible).  I’ll keep you posted.  In the meantime, I’m reading and re-reading your comments and emails.

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orgasms and active verbs. and an open question.

10Oct08

I just read this: A man should always give a woman an orgasm before he lets her please him. Nice sentiment, but it bothers the hell out of me.

There are plenty of things about that sentence that make me uncomfortable, but I’m especially hung up on this word “give.”  I don’t think orgasms can be given.  Maybe other people feel differently, but to me, they’re more alchemy than entity.

I think that sentence bothers me because it puts the responsibility on men to make that orgasm happen, to “give” it (and it suggests that it’s theirs to give), when it’s also a matter of being physically sensitive, responsive, and receptive as a woman.  It makes me think of the men I’ve been with who seemed so stressed at the prospect of sex; they approached my pussy like they were defusing a bomb.  I think we tend to do that generally, as a culture, teach men to think that our pussies are dormant and dependent on their fingerwork and/or cockplay to come alive.  Which I don’t want to downplay — my sexual world revolves around those cocks and those hands, and wrists and forearms, and… mm. But I imagine that we shift the responsibility to men because we encourage women to be sheltered from sexual knowledge, something I strongly disagree with. It does nothing for communication between the sexes when one is supposed to know everything and the other is supposed to remain ignorant.

My first orgasm was great and certainly memorable, but I didn’t really come, not really, not in the epic mind-blowing sense, until I’d fucked and masturbated and combined the two, and a lot.  I guess it was like learning an instrument, in that it all came together very suddenly, and it’s been easy and natural ever since.  And that wasn’t the doing of any one man, or men.  It was mostly me, as I learned how my body worked, how it worked with men, and, eventually, how it worked with men who make me feel uncomfortably vulnerable.

Another thing I don’t like about that sentence up there?  The idea that sex is just a sequence of acts or, worse, a bartering system where perfectly good sex acts are reduced to tit for tat (unless you’re doing some hot secretary/boss roleplay). The best sex I’ve had has never been a sequence of anything.  Just a deeply satisfying, bruising blur of motion.

But hey, what do I know…

*

I’ve got a question for you.  I’ve been getting mail from some really great people, male and female, all of whom seem to be very sexual (by the way, bear with me with my response time).  Some are experienced, some inexperienced, some curious, some very clear on what they want and need.  I’m tempted to do some matchmaking back here, through my inbox, but I’m wondering if I should just hire a developer to throw together a space where some of you likeminded hedonists can meet and mix and perhaps go forth to have a productive, sexually gratifying connection, since I’m kind of a shitty matchmaker and I’m generally better and happier as a facilitator.  If that’s something you’d like, let me know.   In my mind, I’m visualizing a simple, free site, and I’d do some light vetting to keep the douche quotient low.

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romance.

06Oct08

I’m still getting calls from clients, several of whom I haven’t heard from in over a year.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe the economy.  Maybe the time of year.  Maybe they figured out that I’m ‘debauchette’ and they’re just feeling me out.  Most of them just want to talk, about their lives, about their work, about the economy, about our past, and it’s all fine until they start talking about a relationship.

Something I love about client relationships is the clarity and sanctity of the boundaries. Take that transaction away and it changes everything.

And I have all the relationship I want.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and the first thing I did when I resurfaced was fuck Gabriel.  We’ve been seeing each other for seven or eight months and he makes me happy.  I love his sexual aggression and his perma-erection and his great, expressive face and his soothing demeanor.  Some people progress down a road of increasingly lovely lovemaking, but I think we’ve just been fucking harder.  And by “we” I mean “he.”  I just take it, lovingly.  (And I love it when he growls, “take it.”)

There’s something in shared rush of endorphins.  Bitemarks, exhaustion.  Intimacy, trust, affection, for me it’s all grounded in the ability to feel wide open, physically, with someone.  Spread.  Sex doesn’t follow intimacy, for me; intimacy follows sex.

When I first met Gabriel, I could sense that he was sexual, so I liked him.  And it’s funny because it was winter and we were both bundled up in layers of wool and he was sweet and a little shy-seeming on the surface, but I could just feel it when I sat across from him at the cafe that he was someone who maybe relates to the world through his hands and his cock.  I wanted to fuck him immediately.

After we first fucked, he said, “I feel like I should manhandle you more,” and I wondered then if he felt like he needed to compete with the invisible men I’ve written about here.  But he did manhandle me more.  I could feel this expansion in Gabriel over time, of confidence, maybe trust.  He fucked me from behind, my hair in his hands, and he pushed my head down, cheek to mattress, and he wrapped both arms around my waist until I was bruised from throat to cunt.

I associate Williamsburg with my post-fuck limp, where I’m so raw and bruised that I become perfectly female, just sex and pheromones in a skirt. And the thing with all that hardness and fucking and bruising and the way he pulls out and covers my skin with his come, is that it’s more than that; it’s definitely more than that.  There’s an ineffable something, a deep affection, a kind of love that comes out from all that rending.  As I’ve felt Gabriel become more confident in the way he fucks me and feels me and uses my mouth, I’ve felt myself open up in ways that make me slightly more human.  And sometimes, when he bears into me from behind, I feel his hands close over mine until we interlace our fingertips, and I feel bliss.

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a short note.

24Sep08

It’s a bad time to be an high-paid/over-paid prostitute in New York.  I think I said that last year when the future of high-paid whoredom was a recurring topic of conversation (“something’s going to break,” a client used to say) and I think I said that again this spring when the Spitzer frenzy set off a wave of police attention.  But now it’s bad enough that I’m getting phone-calls from clients.  They’re worried for me.

“I’m fine,” I said, for the third time this week.  I’m fine.  I saved.  I saw it coming. I live modestly.

“Do you need money?” one asked.

“Thanks, but no, I’m okay,” I said.  I was tempted to say, do you?

I can’t read anything in the news without thinking about the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with clients about short-selling.  Short-selling and private equity strip-mining, which, I suppose, is separate issue.  I’ve been thinking about all those finance clients, from the distant past to the present or near-present, and I’m wondering how they’re doing.  Financially they’ll be fine – that I know.  But I’m wondering what’s going through their minds right now.  I’m tempted to call one of them to ask.

*

I’m swamped until early next week, with virtually no time to write.  In the meantime, short notes.

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more updates.

17Sep08

I’m going through an excruciatingly busy period, so I’ve fallen behind in pretty much everything, especially email.  If you’ve written to me, please bear with me a bit.  I’m getting there.

Something else about email: every once in a while, I get an email or a comment that leaves me speechless.  When someone tells me that I inspire them, or that I’ve affected them on some level, I don’t know what to say.  It makes me happy, sometimes it makes me want to cry (in a good way).  So just know that if you send me an email like this, I always remember it.  I don’t know if I deserve it, but I always remember it.

Here’s something: Christene Barberich interviewed me for Refinery29.  It’s about books and whoring.

And somewhere on my site, I have a half-written post on advice to clients.  I wrote it a while ago but left town before I could post it.  So I’ll get that up.  As for Republican clients, it’s tough.  It’s tough because there’s a lot to say and given how politically charged the atmosphere is, it’s hard to say it. In the meantime, Bree briefly touched on her experience in the comments.  I’ll get on it, though.

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miscellany. (erotic awards, between my sheets)

12Sep08

I should be in London.  I wish I were in London.  I had a trip planned to hit London and then Paris this week, but it had to be postponed for several reasons.

I was supposed to attend the Erotic Awards tonight, and I’m so, so sorry that I can’t be there.  For those of you finding this blog by way of the Erotic Awards, enjoy your evening and do something dirty for me.  Better yet, do something dirty and then tell me about it.  Better yet, send pictures.

There’s a lot going on in Europe right now.  I just got word that a friend is opening a play space in Paris, which I’m dying to see, and with all this excitement, New York is feeling especially incestuous and slack, while Paris and London are feeling increasingly expansive and dynamic.  And Barcelona.  And Berlin.

While I’m on the subject of sex, many thanks to Rori at Between My Sheets for including me on her list, Top 100 Sex Bloggers of 2008.  I’m honored, and in such great company.  I’m looking forward to visiting the other blogs on that list, much needed for when I feel like the subject of sex is poised to regress with all the fundamentalist rhetoric in the air.  We need these writers to keep these subjects open and discussed intelligently.

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sarah palin.

04Sep08

She fails to separate her religion from her leadership.  And, as we learned last night, she has the terrifying talent of speaking in a way that commands attention while distracting listeners from the content of her words.  She could read from a phonebook and command attention.

This country is supposed to be about the separation of church and state.  Our beginnings are based in choice and freedom, the idea that we’re free to do as we will, to make our own way, worship as we like (and if we like).  But this woman stands on a platform defined by religion, and her own religion at that, a platform that restricts personal freedom rather than protect it.  It’s defined by the highly subjective and easily abused notion of ‘morality,’ where things are right and wrong and good and evil and anyone who raises questions is unpatriotic.  This is the sort of rhetoric that girds fascists.  Look at history.  Look at recent history.

Americans are notorious amnesiacs.

A good friend of mine used to be an admissions officer at Princeton.  She once said that she started getting applications with the acronym WWJD in the essay sections, one after another.  Whole chunks of the application were supposed to be devoted to unpacking complex issues and she was getting a lot of white space – a sea of white space – broken by this single acronym.  Thinking it was some kind of objection to the nature of the question, she gathered the applications up and took the stack to the dean to ask him what this acronym meant.

“What would Jesus do,” he said.  “That’s their answer to the question.”

“But the whole point of the question is to display your ability to think critically,” she said.

The dean shrugged.

That story really struck me because it wasn’t about belief systems or spirituality or religion.  It was about mindless obedience, so much so that when called to address a complicated issue, the response was an acronym, like a secret handshake.  No thinking involved.  Just a passive nod of the head.

Palin scares the crap out of me because her platform requires no real thinking either, and plenty of blind obedience.  Gays are deviant.  Books are dangerous.  Abortion is murder.  Evolution is wrong.  War is right. And all it takes to win with a platform like that is charisma.

Filed under: pressing thoughts   |  66 Comments

notes: scents. & writing.

26Aug08

I’ve just received some very interesting books, including one called I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire (thank you). I’m very curious to read what she has to say. I know if I were to pick my own historical model for marriage, it would be some variant of cicisbeismo, but much less fey.

*

My space still smells faintly of my perfume; my body still smells like him.

He doesn’t really have a smell, and that’s strange because most men do. Even when we’ve rolled and rutted across his bed, we both smell like me, my cunt, my sweat.

So the next morning I shower and he showers, or he showers first, then me, or we both shower, and when we towel off, I use his deodorant. And that’s when I smell like him. He smells like whatever he’s saturated with, and since I smell Ivory soap everywhere, it’s his deodorant that I associate with his body.

It feels perverse to think that I’m now physically aroused by a scent manufactured by Unilever or Procter & Gamble, but I guess that’s how our associations work. I breathe in and it triggers an avalanche of sexual memories.

*

I’ve been writing offline, the old-fashioned way. I wanted to retrain myself to write without filtering out the details so much. Gabriel and I talked about this a bit, how I don’t seem the write the way I used to — I just know that there are topics I avoid now, for various reasons.

Writing offline started as an excavation. I’ve been piecing together old experiences and filling in the gaps, fleshing out the impartial descriptions. Something I didn’t expect was the way I’ve been willing to revisit the negative experiences. I remember a few years ago, maybe two blogs ago, someone wrote and said that they preferred my first blog because “it was much, much darker.” And it’s true – the blog she was referring to was written when I was still starting out, and it was tough then. It was dark. And blogging was new for me. It felt like I didn’t have an audience, though I did, and when you don’t feel like you have an audience, you tend to write as though nobody is looking. (Which is why a client was able to find me and then out me to my madam.)

I don’t know when I started to tune out the negative experiences. In part, I just adapted. The things that were jarring in the beginning weren’t so tough a year or two in, so those things just didn’t seem relevant or worth revisiting. I think it was also a matter of responding to the sense of being visible. When things are tough for me, I don’t usually share those experiences with other people. The darker the experience, the less likely I am to share it. So when my blog started to feel especially public, I felt, and maybe I still feel, like I needed to keep the ugliness to myself.

But writing offline, it comes easily. I have this strong desire to be honest about everything, from every angle, and it’s coming more readily and quickly than I would have expected. Whole memories I thought would be buried under gauze are still very visual and fresh.

The worst was always abstract, like the loneliness of a double life (though that much I did blog about). And on that, the term “double life” doesn’t feel right. I feel like it should be “fractured life,” a life divvied up among false identities and partial truths. It’s true that it starts in double, and that’s when it’s still interesting, even exciting, but it never seems to stay that way.

And for the less abstract subjects, the writing process has been elliptical, like I’m pacing in long, loose loops around difficult memories, carefully avoiding a few pivotal moments that still make me wince when I remember them too clearly. I never really wrote about the day I decided to leave the agency and what happened as a result. I never really wrote about why sex is so valuable to me, and why I’m more comfortable naked than clothed. I haven’t really written about the stalker, either, or what happened last year.  Some of these memories are a little tough to think about head-on, but this offline writing has made it easier.

The easiest memories to confront are the clients. There were several times when I was on some travel gig, trapped in some stranger’s plane or hotel room, thinking to myself, I can’t fucking do this. Sometimes I was just burned out, sometimes I was just with someone who was absolutely intolerable.  But rather than blog about them at the time, I learned from those experiences and eventually found ways to work around them. Now, though… I want to write about them.  Now I have distance.

And I suppose that’s the difference between writing and blogging. When I blog, I tend to skip over whole swaths of experience, maybe because it’s all too in-the-moment or it’s too personal or fresh or raw or just something I’d rather not revisit right away, but writing offline, I feel like I want to cover everything.

On some level, I’m hoping this process will make it easier for me to blog openly again, with more detail, to do what Gabriel suggests and blog as though nobody is looking.

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advice for aspiring call girls.

19Aug08

So, I’ve been getting mail. Maybe you’ve been inspired by Belle de Jour/Secret Diary of a Call Girl, or maybe it’s the media surrounding the Ashley/Spitzer spectacle, or maybe it’s Radar’s recent “Secrets of a Hipster Hooker.” You want to be an upscale escort.

I’m not going to encourage it and I’m not going to discourage it, and I’m pretty sure it’s a crime if I tell you how to do it. But if you’re going to do it, here’s some advice:

1. Know what you’re getting into. There’s a good chance that it’s harder than you think, so it’s best to go in knowing as much as you can.

2. Don’t drink and don’t do drugs. You need to keep your senses sharp, so stay away from any sort of intoxicant during a gig, and don’t develop a habit on your own time.

3. Don’t allow payment to validate, or invalidate, your sense of self-worth. It’s just a transaction for your time. Your sense of self-worth needs to come from another area of your life.

4. Don’t feel competitive with other women. Clients are drawn to you because of qualities you possess, other clients are drawn to other women for their own qualities. See #3.

5. Be professional. Arrive on time. If a client tells you something in confidence, keep it to yourself.

6. Be compassionate. You think it’s about sex, and it is about sex, but it’s also about empathy and the ability to listen.

7. Don’t hesitate to walk out if a client treats you badly. Don’t assume that because he’s paying, you’re obliged to do something against your will. Always have a plan for a worst case scenario. Know your boundaries and protect the shit out of them.

8. Treat people well in all areas of your life. You may not believe in karma, but move through the world as though you do.

9. Be dignified.

10. Have a life that is your own – a career or an interest or a goal – and protect it. It will keep you sane.

11. Protect your body. Be healthy, exercise, get tested, and be sexually safe. Stretch your hamstrings.

12. Protect your emotional well-being. Clients are going to take a toll on you, so pay attention to the warning signs of burn-out, like exhaustion, depression, and numbness. When that happens, take time off. If you work for an agency, make sure they respect your need to take time off. If they don’t, get the fuck out of there.

13. Fight the impulse to be bitter, hateful, or regretful. Some clients will disturb or upset you – let it roll off and move on. And while we’re at it, don’t hold onto anger. All of this just hurts you in the end.

14. Protect your privacy. Use disposable mobile phones. Don’t let people know where you live. Be careful of what you tell clients. Be careful of what you tell the people in your life. If you feel like you’re being followed, hire a P.I. to find out if someone has you under surveillance, and then take steps toward securing your privacy.

15. Save your money. There’s a lot that goes into upkeep, but if there’s money left over (and there should be), don’t blow it. Save it and put it toward a goal.

16. Never allow yourself to become financially dependent on the clients. You absolutely, positively must be able to walk away at any time, for any reason. If you can’t walk away, your experience will be very, very different.

17. Pay your taxes. This is important. (Thanks Josephine).

And a few rules I’ve lived by personally: No frat boys. No ‘hobbyists’ (men who see prostitutes for sport). No reviews or review sites. No haggling. No drama. And, ideally, a few Democrats for every ten Republicans.

Filed under: personal notes   |  38 Comments