WordPress

Yes, the previous post is a mess.

Does anyone else fucking hate fucking WordPress and its fucking annoying habit of posting whatever fucking format it fucking wants regardless of what I fucking type? Four tries, I’m done.

Will it kill this blog if I just move the goddamn thing over to Blogger?

Reassessing Positions

Changes are afoot in Courtesan World… 

 

Livvy rethinks her rates, making herself available for shorter bookings and lowering the multiple-hour rate: 

So there you have it! The English Courtesan believes that after many months of minor tweaking, she has now found her equilibrium price, with a pricing strategy that is premium enough to place her as a Giffen good in the rockonomics league, equitable enough to encourage the like-minded and reasonable enough to encourage regular bookings where both parties are agreeable. 

Mandy also reconsiders rates, doing exactly the opposite – no short bookings at all, and everything more expensive, following in Kate  and Lara’s footsteps: 

I’m thinking more and more about this – how perhaps the whole point of moving into upscale whoring is that I can be me, I can be a lover whose time is purchased rather than a whore whose services are the product. What’s valuable about me is real me – Mandy is a lot more interesting and worth a lot more money for her time than the person I have pretended to be for my clients so far. 

Clandestine Call Girl hangs up the stilettos entirely: 

I don’t feel so anxious anymore. I don’t feel guilty, either. Telling the truth about where I am and what I am doing feels good, like a commodity I didn’t have before. Though I still have some personal issues to sort out, I feel emotionally available for a relationship. I don’t miss the nervousness and fear before seeing a client for the first time, in case he is a cop or worse. I would always wonder about it, second guess myself and often consider canceling due to nerves or turning around when I was half-way there. I am excited to no longer have to deal with fat, skid marks, sagging skin, bad breath, excess body hair, smelly crotches, stranger sweat, impotence, miniature dicks and old men. 

And Compartments switches focus to BDSM, so far having difficulty acquiring clientele (it’s early yet!): 

My phone number is not listed on my BDSM ad. Instead I’ve instructed anybody interested to send me a description of what they want me to do to them, along with the day and time they expect to meet. After that I send along my phone number.  

But it seems a lot of these guys just want to engage in kinky correspondence without ever meeting in person. 

Something’s definitely in the air.  

Trash, Disposal of

A number of bloggers have taken up the issue of working girl murders, suicides, and abuse and how often the victims are characterized as less-human, less-valuable, less worthy of attention than the “innocent.”

Amanda Brooks writes:

A young woman was arrested on prostitution charges in February. She was mentioned by name in the article (both printed and online) and apparently was lucky enough to get featured on the local evening news. Two weeks ago, she killed herself.

 Is it murder if the police hound a prostitute to her death?

Tom Paine addresses the issue from the perspective of Don Imus’ recent characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as (in other words) prostitutes with bad hair:

 As the father of two girls, I’m deeply offended at Imus reducing these women to a crude joke. But I’m more troubled that we feel the need to defend them as “not-whores.” As C. pointed out, even the “lowest” streetwalker was once somebody’s daughter, someone’s little girl. A trove of corpses turned up recently outside Atlantic City, and the women were all streetwalkers murdered by some sociopath who believed they were trash that could be used and thrown away. The police are working on solving the murders, but the tongue-clucking I heard was mostly about the degraded state these dead girls had gotten themselves into.

And earlier this year, Belle de Jour addressed a series of prostitute murders in the UK:

The sad irony is that the police advice to women in Ipswich – travel in groups, don’t go out solo, stay in safe, well-lit areas – directly contradicts the way streetwalkers are forced by law to work. Women in groups soliciting money for sex are more in danger of prosecution than those who work alone. They operate in dangerous areas because no one wants to see them at their work. Rather than letting women (and men) work in the relative safety of a brothel, we throw them out to whatever horrors await them on the street and turn a blind eye. We run them out of city centres, into the commercial districts and underpasses where there are none of the bright lights and CCTV that could save lives. We trot out statistics about the percentage of sex workers who are foreign, or drug-addicted, as if this is a reason to treat them as less than human.
 

In Canada, prostitution is legal. Working in one’s home, with a girlfriend, in a brothel with protection, with a driver, virtually anything that would increase the safety of the prostitute, is not. Streetwalkers in Vancouver disappeared for years - over 60 of them - before the police began seriously looking for the killer. They’re still digging up bodies at the pig farm.

Is it so important to believe that only people who deserve it are prostitutes that we must refuse them any safety, any shelter, any succor?

We’d like to think no-one uses drugs, so we outlaw drugs and deny their medicinal use to cancer patients and their pleasurable use to thinking adults.

We’d like to pretend our children don’t have sex, so we refuse to teach them about safe sex, even to the point of lying about the efficacy of condoms.

And we’d like to believe that we’ll never be homeless, friendless, penniless, and forced to sell our bodies for money. It’s a shame that it’s a remote enough possibility for us to assume that those who are, aren’t like us.