Porn and same sex marriage

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I don’t think that this will sway the “anti-porn” campaigners out there, but you never know. Those who also support same sex marriage are going to find themselves on the horns of a particularly uncomfortable dilemma.

A study, reported here has shown that men (especially with low levels of education) who watching porn regularly are more likely to support same sex marriage. That is undoubtedly a surprise to many people, but a welcome one.

The question of course is “why?”. There isn’t a good answer to it, but the authors surmise that men regularly exposed to porn are simply being given a broader education in sex and sexuality. Exposed to different kinds of sex (lesbian, gay, group, bi etc) these men appear to lose some of the prejudices that they might otherwise have held.

As I pointed out in my post titled Pawn Sacrifice last week, education is what lets us make better choices in our lives. Who would ever have guessed that mainstream porn would have fallen into that category of education? Certainly not me – I see most mainstream porn as boring though, not inherently bad.

So, hurrah for science, and discovering that a daily dose of porn is helping men accept the fact of same sex relationships!

John.

Times change – women seeing sex workers has becomes much more common

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February and March are typically quiet months for me. Christmas is done and everyone is back at work, summer is ending, and it’s all a bit glum perhaps, so few women contact me.

This year however, it’s been busier in February and March so far than it was even before Christmas. Something that is quite unprecedented for me!

What I do know though about this industry is that it is constantly changing. In all of the years that I have worked as a male escort no two years have been the same. Early on, many of my clients were women who had divorced a year or two earlier and were looking for an experience to let them build their confidence in themselves to start dating again. Later, it was predominantly women still married, who wanted to fill a gap in their lives, while maintaining their relationships. Then for a while there were many women looking for a more therapeutic service and the opportunity to learn in a safe environment and increase their skills and knowledge.

The list goes on, as the years go by society changes little by little, knowledge of, and interest in the services of male escorts changes and the job that we do and the service that we can provide becomes better known and more widely accepted.

As a result different groups of women seem to come forward at different times, making my job ever changing and forever interesting.

What is most notable though is that over the years more women each year seem to be ready to seek out the services of sex workers like myself. It seems to me that slowly the imbalance in our society – and the myth that paying for sex is only for men – is being addressed.

More and more women are realising that they can choose the sex they want, when they want it, and even to pay for it is ok and in can be a powerful way to find pleasure, address fears, take control, or just have fun.

John.

Abandoned places – Helensburg No. 4 tunnel

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tunnel-1I have a fascination with abandoned places. Perhaps in part because there are so few of them in Australia – and Sydney in particular – and also because they seem to be so contradictory to the economic doctrine of “growth at all cost” that our globalised economy is wed too.

Things that get old get torn down and replaced. Not left to decay.

But that isn’t always true, even here in Sydney. Case in point the Helensburg railway tunnel. It was built in 1888 as part of the Illawara line carried one track. It was abandoned in 1915, replaced by a newer double track on a different alignment altogether.

So it has been sitting there for over 100 years now, occasionally useful (for water storage), but mostly forgotten, overgrown, filled with mud and silt, and ignored as the world moved on.

Things like this never stay hidden forever though, and eventually rail enthusiasts and historians unearthed the tunnel, drained it, and cleared it of water and debris.

tunnel-2

Now it’s rather become a tourist attraction and even a destination for professional photographers. When I went there, I had to share the place with over a dozen people!

When I arrived though the place was deserted. The tunnel was an impenetrable blackness – with a somewhat creepy light mist flowing slowly from it! The true stuff of movie nightmares…

The shape of the tunnel is really quite beautiful, not round, but built (to allow the passage of steam trains) in a delicate oval shape. It is graceful and just a little otherworldly surrounded as it is by lush greenery.

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The end of the line. Apart from the tunnel, there’s not much left.  On the right is where the old Helensburgh station once stood

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The lush foliage that adorns the cutting walls is quite a sight

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The beautiful egg shape of the tunnel is unlike modern round tunnels. It was built this way to accommodate steam locomotives

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The tunnel is 650 meters long. There’s a lot more very dark tunnel down there…

hb-4 hb-5 hb-6 hb-7

John.

Pawn Sacrifice

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I just watched the movie Pawn Sacrifice – a brief history of the life of chess grand master and world champion Bobby Fischer. It’s a lot less dry than one might think at first glance. Fischer was arguably the finest chess player ever, twice defeating the Russian grand master and world champion Boris Spassky. Fischer was also mentally unstable and increasingly paranoid. Something that would lead him to retire from public life and competitive chess at the age of 32.

It was strongly implied in the film that Fischer was used as a political tool by the US government against the Soviet Union in the middle of the cold war. The defeat of the best Russian chess players of the era by a boy from Brooklyn was a huge blow to Soviet pride I am sure.

Sadly for Fischer his mental health issues and antisemitism eventually bought him into conflict with his own government. His unofficial rematch with Spassky in 1992 lead to his US passport being canceled. Eventually Iceland offered Fischer asylum in 2005 and he died there in 2008.

The movie paints him as eccentric, irrational, paranoid, and truly a genius. It didn’t show the side of him that many people claim was kind and compassionate.

Earlier in the movie the comment is made that there are about 318 billion ways that the first four moves of any game can be played. That is a vast phase space to even try to consider, and it makes the game of chess effectively endlessly variable – to the average human mind like me anyway.

However, at the end of the movie, having beaten Spassky, Fischer makes the comment of chess:

“It’s almost all theory and memorisation. People think [that] there’s all these options, but there’s usually one right move. Of course in the end there’s no place to go”.

It’s unlikely that these are Fischer’s own words, but it’s a poignant moment and the artistic license seems fair. While there may be 318 billion options, most of them are to be ignored or dismissed outright, much reducing the phase space that a genius like Fischer would ever need to consider when playing.

At the end of the day, this is much life for the average person. We live in a world vastly more complex than an eight by eight board with 32 pieces on it. However the choices that we have available to us at any one time are always limited to a relatively small number of options. What our politicians and leaders do every day effects this range of options.

When a politician or a religious leader stands up in front of our nation and tells us that same sex marriage is unnatural and harmful (as they seem to be doing regularly in recent times), they reduce the possible phase space for a happy life for people who don’t identify as male or female and heterosexual. For many (especially young) people in the LGBTQI community they reduce it to nothing, leading to a life of bullying, harassment, exclusion, and for some, suicide.

Viewed from this (mathematical) perspective – an envelop of options or choices that can lead to happiness – “morality” as defined by our society and especially religion begins to look cruel and needlessly limiting.

Fischer perhaps saw a truth in the world. To defeat Spassky in the fourth game of the match in Iceland in 1972 (according to the movie), he took Spassky outside of the chess game phase space that his opponent expected him to play within (and had studied and knew). When he did that Spassky was lost and unable to respond effectively. And Fischer won.

When people tell us that enjoying our sexuality is wrong, or dirty, or bad they are limiting our opportunities for a happy life – limiting the phase space of our happiness and well being. When we fail to educate children properly about sex and sexuality and give them the chance to develop in a safe and non-judgmental environment, we are limiting their chances for a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently talked with someone who described how she has dealt with the subject of sex with her daughter who is almost a teenager. What I heard was the exact opposite of what most people seem to experience. That was a parent who never hid, or denied sex, who didn’t make a big deal out of it, but provided reliable information when her daughter was ready for and wanted to hear it. It was one of the best pieces of parenting I have ever come across.

In doing so I imagined the phase space representing the possible futures of that child opening up, blossoming, becoming richer with potential and pleasure and pruned of danger, of pain, of suffering – not entirely safe and secure of course, but she now has the tools and knowledge to avoid the worst pitfalls perhaps.

Nothing we do can keep children – or anyone – entirely from harm, but when we educate, when we put aside dogma and prejudice, we give people the opportunity to make better choices in their lives and allow them to avoid the bad ones.

John.

Pain and pleasure

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Contrary to what the title might suggest, this isn’t a post about BDSM or Fifty Shades of Grey.

It’s about life and how we exist in the world as human beings, as social creatures. And how we experience a world where all too often the things that really matter are lost to the things that are expected of us.

I had an experience recently that was the catalyst for me writing this post. I have lived with “a bad back” since I was 15 years old and it’s been a problem that has gradually gotten worse over that time. Recently my GP recommended that I have a CT scan guided injection of cortisone in my lower back to help reduce inflammation and make me more mobile. I had never had such a thing and in spite of my innate mistrust of needles, I went to the radiology clinic and had the injection.

It was – to say the least – a profoundly traumatic experience. Very painful, downright scary really, but worst of all, it was an experience that was disconnected from the rest of humanity – and this compounded the unpleasantness significantly. The staff who performed the procedure were competent and perfectly nice, but the experience was exceptionally isolating physically and mentally. Laying on the bed of a CT scanner, unable to see anything, and not being told much of what was going on was hard. The accumulated effects of isolation and the very real pain of my back, the needle and the injection actually brought me to tears toward the end of the procedure.

The radiographer, seeing this (I assume), put her hand on my arm to comfort me. Until that point I didn’t really appreciate just how alone I felt. The simple action of a comforting hand on my arm was almost overwhelming. A visceral flood of emotion that nearly carried me away.

I believe that in that brief period I had an experience that is similar to that of many of the women who come to me. Deprived of touch, of human compassion, and living with emotional and sometimes physical isolation, it can be a profoundly moving experience to have someone do something as simple a be nice to you. It’s little wonder that like me, some people end up in tears when they come to see me – which is always, to my mind a sign of progress and a good thing, even if they may feel embarrassed.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that it is very, very difficult to understand another person’s pain, be it physical, or emotional. If you haven’t been there – and recently – you can only guess. We have evolved the ability to forget just how bad pain can be for good reason – remembering all of our pain vividly would be crippling.

But empathy combined with the shadow of our own experiences is a powerful social took. It allows us to value someone else’s suffering even if we can’t quantify it exactly ourselves. Unfortunately not everyone empathises well – witness much of modern politics.

Being on the receiving end of a lack of empathy, from wider society, friends and family, or a partner can be profoundly isolating and damaging. I see it too often in my work, but I do like the fact that I am in a position to give women a non-judgmental environment where they can be themselves without fear and start to take back their lives.

I’m likely to need more cortisone injections in the future, and I am most definitely profoundly grateful for what modern medicine can do for us. But I think that a little more attention paid to the human aspect of the treatment would have given a better result. Likewise, I would like to see our society spend less effort and time on the material and invest more of itself in the social and the compassionate.

John.

Sex and mathematics are hard

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If you were like me growing up, then the subject of mathematics at school was hard. Dare I say even impenetrable.

I wanted to like maths. I wanted (desperately) to be good at it. But the simple fact was that while many of my fellow students worked hard and learned the material and got good marks, I simply couldn’t – my brain refused to understand. Maths used in physics was no problem for me (oddly). if you needed to calculate vectors, acceleration, or the voltage drop over a circuit, then no problem. I could do all of that. Or write an essay on Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, or a 20,000 word creative piece. But maths simply eluded me. To this day, I don’t know why.

It’s become an item of almost faith in our society that “children learn far more easily than adults”, we hear that their brains are like sponges, able to soak up much more new information than adults, and learn much better. This may be true, but I think that it leads to a kind of over-reaction, whereby we assume that as adults, things that we couldn’t learn as children are going to remain forever impossible.

This is simply wrong. You only need to look at mature age students in higher education. My mother (at age forty something) studied horticulture and received high distinctions across the board – much better than the average young adult in her course.

The point is that things that once may have stumped us don’t have to stay out of reach as adults. I recently decided that I wanted to understand calculus. I took to Google and found a slew of “introduction to calculus” pages. And guess what? Grasping the fundamentals was simple. I mean really simple. Something that felt impenetrable as a teenager made perfect sense to me – granted, I did have to go back and refresh my algebra knowledge, but that turned out to be a simple enough task as well. Now – amazingly – I understand and can use calculus. I even signed up for a mathematics newsletter that I stumbled across during my research and the first issue I received today taught me something new and even gave me a chance to have some minor insights of my own about numbers. Hurray for adult learning!

Of course we learn all the time as adults, we often just don’t see it as “education”, rather we treat it as just part of our work.

Sex of course never gets a look in when it comes to learning. It’s not taught in school. It’s not taught at work (well for most of us). In fact, it’s never taught at all. It’s something that you might go and learn about on your own, or perhaps, if you are lucky, then you will get to explore with a partner.

For most of us though, it’s sink or swim, pick a few things up here and there, watch some porn, read some articles in magazines. Hardly a rigorous process and one that is as likely to mislead as it is to inform. And of course it is compounded by the comfort of finding out what “works” for us, then never taking the opportunity to learn new ways of experiencing sexual pleasure.

So what does it all mean? It means a few things to me – firstly: your pleasure and knowledge of sex is in your own hands. No-one is going to teach you, so you need to find out how to make it good yourself. Secondly: it’s actually good and important to be sexually knowledgeable. The more you know about sex and sexuality the more chance you have of enjoying it and being able to give your partner pleasure, and being safe.

Lastly: knowledge is power! I now know how to solve certain mathematical problems that once eluded me entirely – and I also know how to reliably give almost any woman an orgasm.

John.

Harm reduction, not abolition – is the moral and humane thing to do

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This article is a little different to my usual writing. I have been in an introspective and philosophical mood in recent times and when I heard the news that California had recently refused to implement new rules that would reduce adult films shot in that state to little more than this:naked-gun-safe-sex

I felt compelled to write about it. While it may not directly touch on what I do as a male escort, I hope that on reading it people will understand the broader point and how it relates to sex work – and in fact pretty much all of our lives.

The Californian Occupational Safety and Healthy Standards Board recently failed to pass new regulations that would force porn performers to use condoms, dental dams, and even goggles to protect them from the risk of sexually transmitted infections while making films and images about sex.

It was a win for that most elusive of beasts: common sense and incidentally for the concept of “harm reduction”. Even if only marginally (the board failed to achieve a four to one majority by just one vote).

The adult film industry in California already has a system for ensuring the health and safety of its performers. It is called PASS (Performer Availability Screening Service) and is administered by the Free Speech Coalition. It provides bi-weekly STI testing for performers, the results of which are held in a secure, private database, and allow producers and agents to see the availability of performers (but nothing detailed about their health information). It also provides performers with access to both testing, and – in the case of an infection being detected – support and treatment services.

It’s a good system. From what information I can find online, it works. Under that system there hasn’t been a case of HIV transmission on the set of an adult film in California in over 10 years (2004 was the last recorded time in California, which prompted the shift to bi-weekly testing with higher sensitivity testing methods).

There was an on-set transmission of HIV between to male performers in Nevada in 2014, however it appears that it happened under less stringent testing standards – which really just re-inforces the point. PASS works, less rigorous testing does not.

So what has all of this got to do with sex work and my blog? The short answer is: the PASS system is a good demonstration of sensible, tolerant attitudes toward dealing with a real risk (STI transmission between performers).

It accepts that there is a risk and that it needs to be taken seriously, and it sets out to minimise that risk without creating unintended adverse side effects. This is classic “harm reduction”. Continue reading →

Performance anxiety – it’s not just for men

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Today I read an article in the local paper written by sexual health therapist Matty Silver. You can see it here.

It’s a good article focused on male sexual performance – or lack there of. It’s something that rarely if ever sees the light of day in the media. After all much of the time the media wants to paint men as either macho machines, or one dimension slaves to their penis, so talking about men feeling intimidated by, or unequipped for a healthy sex life rather breaks the stereotype du jour.

In reality men have their own issues around sex. Plenty of them. Personally I fought premature ejaculation for many, many years. I was lucky to come across a book by Canadian doctor Sy Silverberg. Along with some assistance from a kind partner, it changed my sex life forever, and allowed me to enjoy sex in a way that I had never been able to before.

All in all, I think that this article is a step in the right direction – it demonstrates that we are all complex, emotional, and more or less fragile beings. Something that should be respected.

What jarred for me though was the second last sentence:

Women don’t need to perform – they can just lie down and don’t need to do much – they can even fake an orgasm!

I understand what Matty Silver was trying to say with this, yes, there is a very obvious difference between men and women, women don’t need to get an erection to participate in sex, yes they can “just be there”.

But really?  An otherwise sensitive article that accepts that stereotypes about male sexuality are damaging then goes and drops another unhealthy stereotype on women. It seems wrong.

Not all women can just “lie back and let it happen”. Nor should they. And it’s a bad message for anyone with a platform like a major newspaper to be sending.

What I would rather see is the acceptance that women and men both can have performance anxiety. It may not be so clearly evident in a woman as in a man, but for a caring lover it should still be obvious through body language, through lack of vaginal lubrication, and lack of relaxation. These are all things any partner who cares to look for them can see.

I often meet women who come to me because they need a chance to explore their sexuality and build their confidence in themselves and their body and their ability to enjoy sex in a non-stressful, non-judgmental situation. It is something that I can offer, being an escort that (to many people’s surprise) women often can’t get in a relationship.

This really is the problem though, for both men and women, often regardless of age. We are never given the opportunity by life to develop the skills and confidence with our bodies that we need to have a healthy sex life. I do what I can through the services that I offer, but really there needs to be a community wide change in attitude to sex, sexuality, and relationship.

Personally I think that it is time for these issues to be given as much attention and priority in our society as learning maths and (in Australia) English.

John.

Oh Joy and John Oh on vaginismus

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My favourite sex blog Oh Joy Sex Toy has a fabulous article today about vaginismus. What is it you ask? Sounds painful right? Well yes. It can be. But I won’t go into detail. Read the post for an excellent description of this entirely fixable problem of painful vaginal penetration:

http://www.ohjoysextoy.com/vaginismus/

What I wanted to say on the subject is that it is one close to my heart. Over the years of me working as a male escort I have been contacted by a number of women who had diagnosis of vaginismus or issues with painful penetration and were looking for a safe, professional way to treat their condition. Some had spent time working with a therapist, doctor, or physio prior to contacting me, others had not.

The Oh Joy article has it right though, vaginismus is usually a mental condition with a physical symptom. So the first thing to do is talk. Try to understand its origin. After that, progressive gentle stretching exercises that allow you to retrain the automatic muscle spasm that is vaginismus are the key. This can be done using medical dilators that get progressively larger, or something as simple as a partner’s finger (and eventually fingers).

Some women would rather have the assistance of another person (such as myself) to work through the physical stretching exercise. I usually recommend that we arrange a number of short (one to one and a half hour) sessions to work slowly and allow you to relax progressively to the point where full penetration is possible.

For some women just one session can be enough. For others it may take several. But the important thing is that no matter how bad your vaginismus is it can be fixed! See your gynecologist and they can start you on the right path. If you would like the help of a professional with the actual exercises and to allow you to even try sex when you are ready with the safety of someone that understands your situation and the need for care and patience, then please feel free to contact me.

John.

The Futility Closet

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Twitter has a habit of bringing interesting things into my life, such as the Scarlet Alliance sex work conference late last year, interesting people, the occasional client, and today, a new podcast!

Introducing the Futility Closet podcast.  It is an interesting mash up of historical stories and facts.  Here’s the synopsis for todays episode:

An amazing tale of interspecies friendship

The lyrebirds of Australia were highly mysterious and rarely seen until one fell in love with an elderly widow in 1930. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll trace the development of their surprising friendship and how it led to an explosion of knowledge about this extraordinary species.

We’ll also learn how Seattle literally remade itself in the early 20th century and puzzle over why a prolific actress was never paid for her work.

It was the story about the lyrebird that caught my attention, but on closer examination there was a lot more interesting information to be had too.  I have had it playing in the background most of the morning as I have worked my way through my list of new years tasks (like catching up on banking).

If you have a more science oriented mind, then you could also check out the Radio Lab podcast.  It’s one of the best that I have ever heard, but then I am a bit of a science geek/nerd!

John.