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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t really have a response when I first heard that John Edwards cheated on his wife. Cheating is common enough, and I tend to presume all political leaders have extra-marital affairs. But what’s prompted me to write is the mania that’s followed, the outrage at his bad conduct, the fuss over his attempts to cover up such a personal screw-up (as opposed to a political screw-up). A quick search pulls up headlines like, “John Edwards fiddled while America burned” and “Edwards’ hometown dismayed by revelations of affair.” It bothers me because I’m not sure what it will take for the American public to recognize the disconnect between private life and political competence.

This story seems to exist not because Edwards has trouble with fidelity but because we’re a nation of gossips. A public figure’s private life isn’t our business, but we continue to insist that it is. Forget that our nation thrived under the presidency of a notorious sex fiend, or that it suffers under the presidency of someone who is ostensibly faithful. We shrug at the issues that matter, preferring instead to focus on the issues that are easiest for us to understand (or so we believe), issues that trigger the sort of knee-jerk response that will almost certainly be shared by friends and neighbors. Like infidelity. We’ve got a whole arsenal of platitudes on that subject.

If we actually cared about infidelity, we’d give it some real thought. We’d question why it’s so common. We’d look to other attitudes, attitudes we neither share nor understand. We’d allow for a more nuanced discussion, perhaps find solutions or new ways to think about intimacy and fidelity. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a prostitute, it’s that our attitudes toward marriage are simplistic, even naive, and that simplistic thinking is encouraged and exploited by the gossip media. But then, I’m not convinced it’s the cheating that matters to us so much as the power of judging and condemning strangers. That’s what keeps the gossip rags going – they feed the public with a steady stream of fallen heroes, the powerful at their weakest, the beautiful at their ugliest, the famous at their most damaged. It makes us feel superior when we’re feeling otherwise insecure. Gossip culture has surpassed religion as the ultimate opiate.

The Marquis de Sade, with his talent for weaving political commentary with necrophilia, feels eerily relevant here with his remarks on mass distraction in Juliette (1797). (And I suppose I’m invoking de Sade, rather than Huxley or Marx, because there’s something excellent in crossing de Sade’s filth with Edwards’ pretty, hangdog face.) In a lecture to King Ferdinand of Naples, Juliette denounces the king’s policy of keeping the subjects of his kingdom distracted. “You fear the powerful eye of genius. That is why you encourage ignorance,” she says. “It’s opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do not feel their injuries.” Ignorance is the opiate of the masses here, and since there is nothing to be gained from intelligent thought, “a taste for trivial things replaces a taste for great things.” Much like gossip, our own opiate. We skew our tastes down and shovel it in, one headline at a time.

*

I’m going to cleanse my brain with a picture.

By Akif Celebi

The beautiful Callie Simms tagged me for a meme on gratitude, a list of five things for which I’m grateful.  There’s too much to list, but for now, at this moment, it’s these:

1) New York, where I can live anonymously without ever feeling alone.

2) Owen, a reader, for his thoughts on PTSD.  He’s made it easier for me to take steps toward a normal night’s sleep.

3) Gabriel, for letting me let my guard down.

4) Inspiring women (Kasia, Dacia, Chelsea, Peridot, Susannah, and so many more) for their honesty and authenticity.

5) Freedom.

I collect rare books in three or four subject areas, and one of them is sexually graphic texts and prints. From the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And early sexological texts.

I’ve started to get interested in cheap paperbacks from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s with sex-specific themes, and right now I’m reading a book called Sex Habits of Single Women, published in 1964.

I’m transcribing the first page:

‘I’m a tramp — according to the standards of your generation.’ So the twenty-eight-year-old New York career girl told interviewers questioning her in connection with the forthcoming
Haynes-Goldman Study Analysis. ‘And my grandparents would have called me beyond redemption. I say that’s for the birds. I’m not a sexpot, a nympho or a retarded adolescent. I’m a normal, decent, honorable girl, with normal urges. Sure, there’s a difference between generations. My mother, who married in the 30’s, was a hypocrite about sex. My grandmother, who got married just before World War I, was either a complete innocent who suppressed her natural feelings and desires, or else she was too good to be true.

‘I’m honest, and so are the girls I know. We don’t pretend, and we don’t play polite little games that hide the truth. We’re single, but we have affairs. I can’t tell you exactly how many I’ve had myself. Who counts? After the first four or five, I stopped keeping tabs, and I’m sure my friends feel the same. What difference does it make?

‘When you’re hungry, you take on a steak and a baked potato. So when you want sex, why not take on a man? I mean, if a man wants you and you want him, you do something about it, you don’t just sit there. As long as both of you know the score and nobody gets hurt, I can’t for the life of me see what’s wrong with doing what comes naturally.

‘Eventually, when I flip so hard the world turns upside down, I’ll get married — and then it will be for keeps. But I sure don’t plan to give my husband a lilac-scented book called My Lurid Past any more than I expect him to give me one called The Confessions of a Casanova. If people will just leave girls like us alone, we’ll make out fine. We’re not asking for sympathy and we know better than to expect understanding. Just keep out of our hair. Remember these are the 1960’s — not the 1930’s or the 1910’s — and if you’ve got to talk about how corrupt we are, excuse us for laughing in your faces.’

God, I love that passage.

That could have been written today. Which means we’ve been running in circles, or cycles, for the past few decades. History chases its tail.

For me, it’s been a decent week. A reasonably productive, increasingly optimistic, satisfying and pleasant week. Things continue to be beautiful with Gabriel. I have no idea what to do with my sexual protégé, though I’m set to share drinks with her when I get back from the UK (I’m rushing in and out of the UK in a sort of drive-by, fly-through, whiplash of travel, though I hope to return for a longer stint in the near future). I’m missing an intriguing sex party in London, and that makes me unhappy, but otherwise, I have no complaints.

But friends of mine, they’re having a terrible week. I’m seeing break ups and I’m seeing career issues, and I’ve just seen the closure of a fabulous, witty, sexy blog: Chelsea’s pretty dumb things.

She writes that she’s just come to the end. No reason given, no reason necessary. She’s keeping her archives up, and if I pick a subject at random, like deepthroating, I’d point you to her deepthroat primer and her description of what deepthroating feels like. And then there are her strip memoirs, which are so addictive and touching and fascinating that I read them through all at once (and compared notes on client psychology). And then Chelsea writes about love in ways that remind me that I still have this massive fear of intimacy to overcome (and I’m trying, I’m trying). When she writes about love, she writes with honesty, candor, and courage. To my mind, that’s the greatest form of courage, the ability to write about the things that hurt us most, and the ability to write about these things honestly.

For Chelsea’s honesty and profound self-awareness, and her willingness to share that awareness with the world, she’s been rewarded with the worst sort of stalker. I suppose most sex bloggers attract their share of stalkers, but Chelsea has such an enviable talent with words that she attracts the jealous types, the kind that can’t function without harassing the women they find threatening in some weak attempt to ease their own insecurities and self-loathing. Chelsea’s always risen above it with grace, but me, I’ve been sitting here poised at the edge of a rant for a very long time. Because I have no fucking patience for stalkers.

I’d love to call this woman out, but that would drive traffic to her site, and I’d rather she suffer without an audience.

I mentioned that Chelsea hasn’t given a reason for ending ‘pretty dumb things,’ and I saw that some of her commenters have taken issue with this. But I don’t think she needs a reason. Sometimes there is no reason. Having blogged about my personal life for about five years, over several blogs, I know that sometimes you just need to shut it all down. This blog was up for about six months before I let people know where I was. During that period of quiet, I just needed to drop notes into a void, anonymously, with no traffic, no audience. I was under surveillance at the time, so I’m sure that was part of it, but I know I was also burned out, by clients, by the fiance, by an overabundance of drama. When I felt clear-headed again, I was ready to be visible.

I hope Chelsea just needs a little time and space, and when she writes again, it’ll be brilliant. In the meantime, we have the archives. It’s sad to see ‘pretty dumb things’ close down, but it also feels positive to me, the way break ups can be positive. It’s the closure of one experience, but it’s also the opening of another.

How do you write about sex that’s neither flawed nor complicated?

Sex with Gabriel is perfect. I feel absolutely comfortable – he’s forever hard and I’m forever wet and there are no hang ups, no mood swings, no neuroses. It’s seamless, uncomplicated and nice. I don’t know how to write about that.

I’m working on it.

*

Lately I’ve been flirting with girls. It started with a pang of lust for a girl in a summer dress, and then Gabriel and I started talking about arranging a threesome. I started paying attention to women again, and now there’s one woman in particular who’s caught my eye. Unfortunately, she’s young. Aggressive, pretty, vibrant, and young. I’ve been feeling her out slowly.

Today she said, “You’re everything I’m looking for. You’re older. You have more sexual experience.”

I do have more experience, more than she knows, but it made me pause when she said “older.” Older. I feel way too young to be the “older” one, but I’m older than Gabriel and I’m certainly older than this girl, so, of course, I am older. But older implies wiser, and I really don’t know if I’ve got anything useful to say.

In the previous post, monochromist posted a link to a Myers-Briggs test. I’m a solid INTP, the ’scholar’ or ‘architect’ type. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs a few times, and I’ve tried to throw the outcome by shifting my responses to some of the questions, but it always comes back INTP, or introverted, intuitive, thinking, and perceiving. It characterizes me as quiet and analytical, introverted when it comes to ideas and extroverted when it comes to intuition, strong at grasping complex systems and terrible at expressing my emotions to people (in writing, less so). As an INTP, it also means that I tend to ignore hierarchies or distinctions in authority, and I prefer to relate to people as an equal. So I don’t generally acknowledge people who expect me to defer to them. And I don’t know what to do with people who defer to me.

(Well, sometimes I do.)

This girl, this pretty, bright thing in her early early twenties, says she wants to be my sexual protégé. She wants a primarily sexual relationship, but she wants me to guide her down some path of outrageous bisexual debauchery. Which I can certainly do. But while my gut response is to pull back and point her toward a different sort of woman, maybe someone who’s naturally dominant, not naturally coequal, I might try to override my habits just so I can explore this girl a bit.

On some level, I’m just curious. I’ve never had a sexual protégé before and something about that idea intrigues me.

The other night, Gabriel made a comment about my “secret life.”

“What secret life?” I said.

I felt like I’d been so transparent with him that it hit me hard when he said it. Especially since I’ve been hearing this a lot, that there’s a lot I don’t reveal about myself, that I’m restrained, or evasive, or veiled. I’ve heard this about my writing and I’ve heard it from men I sleep with. When I try to express myself, I only express myself in fragments, and I wonder if I’m stuck in some perpetually impressionistic whore-mode. When I blog, it’s deliberate, but it isn’t deliberate in my private life. I need to get un-stuck.

Fuckbuddy used to ask me if I felt like the clients were changing me. He said that he had a hard time believing I could do what I do and not change, and we’d argue over this, roughly, until the arguing would tumble into his bedroom and we’d fuck it out. I’ve mentioned here before that with clients I needed to maintain strict boundaries while pretending that those boundaries didn’t exist, so I learned to switch on and off emotionally. But I’ve always been good at switching on and off, so it becomes a chicken/egg question: did the sex work change me, or was I just well-suited for the work to being with?

I had drinks with an ex the other night, so I asked if I’ve always been so evasive and distant. He’s known me for almost a decade.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve always done your own thing.”

“What does that mean, though?”

“I don’t know. I just never felt welcome, you know?”

That hurt. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I worry that I’m treating Gabriel like a client, in which case fuckbuddy might be right. But it’s much more unnerving to think that I’ve always been this way. And maybe I’ve just found comfort and an excuse in perpetual pseudonymity.

I used to write under my whore name for a short-lived collective of high-priced courtesans and among my notes was a blurb on etymology, specifically my dorklust for the history and transformation of words. That short post on etymology resulted in many gifts from clients, mostly old etymological dictionaries. It’s appropriate that I’ve just made use of those gifts to look up ‘pornography,’ a word rooted in prostitution.

Pornography

1857, “description of prostitutes,” from Fr. pornographie, from Gk. pornographos “(one) writing of prostitutes,” from porne “prostitute,” originally “bought, purchased” (with an original notion, probably of “female slave sold for prostitution;” related to pernanai “to sell,” from PIE root per- “to traffic in, to sell,” cf. L. pretium “price”) + graphein “to write.”

That is to say, in the beginning, which was not very long ago, the term ‘pornography’ referred to written (-graph) descriptions of prostitution (porno-) and all the dirty dirty acts that prostitution entails (the sucking of cock, the fucking of ass). Since I’m here, I should mention that the term and concept of pornography is a nineteenth-century invention, though what we now call pornographic is as old as sex itself.

Eventually ‘pornography’ came to refer to salacious written and visual material, or, if we follow the legal definition in obscenity statutes, pornography is devoid of artistic value and serves only to stimulate us sexually. Unfortunately, for some of us, it’s the artistic value that makes us wet.

Or hard.

The other day, after we’d hauled through our last day at the hotel, our photographer and friend turned to us and said, “So, how does it feel to be a pornographer?”

He was referring to the fact that we’d just made some dirty, pretty pictures, including a set in a room where Helmut Newton once lived, on a desk where he once worked, modeled here by Kasia:

My response was that it felt good.

*

Kasia and I met virtually, at first. This was a long time ago, years even, and since then we’ve come to spend a fair bit of time together with a shared interest in sexuality. We both have a background in the visual arts, we’ve both traveled extensively (maybe compulsively), we’ve both tested our sexual limits over the course of our lives. And we both have a strong desire to see something better than porn. She calls it postmodern porn. I call it art porn. Maybe it’s post-porn. We just know sex deserves something better.

We started working on a website in the abstract back then, and after several false starts with different designers, we’re finally at a point where we can actually conceive of a launch. We’re not ready yet – we’re still testing for bugs – but we will be. And I’ve been waiting a long, long time to be able to say that much.

While we’re still figuring all of this out, we know what we like and we also know that there’s so much that hasn’t been explored yet, and that’s what’s exciting. Our interest was in creating a space for expression that’s too explicit for mainstream media channels and too experimental/creative/beautiful/challenging for the adult industry. Our thinking was that if we built a space for it, then maybe we’d see more inspiring sexual content in the future, the sort of content that turns us on, makes us think, and leaves an indelible impression. Or to use Kasia’s words, “to house a space that gives permission. To publish kinky shit, beautiful cunts, dirty thoughts and unspeakable fantasies.”

(So if you have something that might interest us, please get in touch. Photo, video, audio, text, illustration all interest us. And we’re always looking for models.)

This is a long-winded introduction to an introduction. Or maybe just a long, decompressive post after our trip to LA. My mind’s still going and I’m flipping through some gorgeous photos of some beautiful naked skin, and that leaves me prone to rambling.

(You’re right, London Chick. It’s FGT. You’ve got a fantastic memory.)

I’m in Los Angeles with Kasia. Our space here is great and from our balcony the city is a shimmery, liquid mass. New York glitters at night. LA shimmers.

Kasia shimmers, too. She knows how to dress for LA, but me, I’m wearing black. Again.

We’ve been brainstorming with a likeminded friend; we’re here to work on a project – a website – that’s finally in its last stages of development, and it’s been a long, long, long fucking labor of love. I’ll tell you more about this soon. We both will.

And while I’m enjoying my surreal stay in LA, I really miss Gabriel and his full-body lust and his perpetually hard cock. I miss him like an addict; I have repetitive thoughts and distracting pangs of lust. My pussy throbs and I need to refocus my attention to the task at hand. It doesn’t help that the task at hand is largely sexual.

Gabriel, I miss fucking you.  The next time I bring myself off I’m going to think of throwing my head over the back of the sofa while you fuck my throat. By which I mean, I miss you. Sweetly and deeply.

*

A number of you have emailed me and I really need to apologize for my radio silence. I’ll respond soon. Whore’s honor.

You know that post about Dave Elms? Over the past few days, I noticed a few spikes in my site’s traffic coming from sites I’d never heard of. At some point, I clicked a few of the trackbacks, just to see what these sites were about, and discovered that they were review sites and the posts leading to my blog had to do with Dave Elms. What exactly, I don’t know — the posts were deleted by the site moderators before I had a chance to see them.

I figured I’d give these sites the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the posts were horribly offensive and the site moderators thought they would crack down on the rampant misogyny. It could happen.

Last night I saw another one of these sites sending a surge of traffic to my blog. This time I manage to see the post before it was deleted. It was extremely brief, mentioning only that I had written about Elms and it included a link. I shrugged, left the site, went off to brush my teeth, and decided to check again before I shut down for the night. When I did, I saw that the post had been deleted by moderators.

Why men give these sites any credence whatsoever is beyond me.

Here, I just want to repost Chicago Diva’s comment because it’s important:

Dave Elms is getting everything he deserves. He developed a site for reviewing the providers that started out cute and entertaining at first and turned into a huge opportunity to treat women like trash. I had several reviews up on TER and almost all of them where great. I had several clients tell me that they had submitted reviews to TER only to find out that they had been changed or totally erased. On many occasions I would post on the TER board to solicit new clients and would have negative post placed under it each and every time. One client tried to stick up for me and was banned and then TER accused us of self posting. I had no clue who this client was but negative rumors where spread that all the clients where comments from me. In addition all my reviews where removed from the site. I for one am sick of this site and the negative publicity it gives to providers for standing up for themselves. In addition, its even more sick and disgusting to know that this man has extorted sex from women to stay on the board. The other part is that women in the business need to stop letting guys like this gain so much power that we don’t control our own bodies and destinies. I feel men should not rely on this site for reviews and expectations for service, because many of the girls that have good reviews only have them because they have given away free sex to clients or the owners of TER. Please stop giving TER the power to control you business.

I couldn’t agree more.

He was kneeling there with his cock in his hand, his come dripping down the sides of my breasts. He looked puzzled.

“I came,” he said. “But I didn’t, you know, come.”

I was pretty dazed, so I was having a hard time processing confusing statements.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I came, but I didn’t have an orgasm.”

We both looked at his cock. I’d heard of the opposite, of someone having an orgasm without ejaculating, but I’d never heard of someone ejaculating without an orgasm. It sounded like a bad situation, like a really unsatisfying sneeze.

“That’s no good,” I said.

We continued to stare at his cock.

“I, uh… I could just put it back in,” he said.

As a general rule, if someone’s been fucking me and I’ve been enjoying it, they can always “just put it back in.”

And then he did come. And when he did, he ejaculated again.

Just when I thought I had a pretty decent grasp on the workings of the male body, something like this happens and I’m mystified.