I travel over the Blue Mountains regularly. A fair amount of the bush that I ride through over toward Lithgow was burned in the fires at the end of 2013. I have been startled by the stark beauty of the resulting landscape, and now the contrast of the regrowing foliage on the trees.
So, on a trip back around Christmas I stopped and took some photos of the charred bush and my bike which I thought I would share.
I was really delighted with how true to life these images are.
John.
On Sunday I was lucky enough to participate in the Sydney Skinny, for those who don’t know it, it is an open water nude swim in Sydney Harbour at Cobbler Beach. It is run each year around late February.
You can see the website here: http://www.thesydneyskinny.com.au/
The swim has two distances: a 300 meter swim and a 900 meter swim. It is arranged in “waves” of about 50 swimmers each and this year they ran more than ten waves. It’s really popular! It is also really fun. The atmosphere of the event was truly delightful. Everyone was very respectful, very relaxed, and appeared to be enjoying themselves. It’s not a race, there is no timing and no prizes, it’s a challenge only to yourself, to swim, to be nude in public, to accept yourself as you are. Not always an easy thing to do.
I am lucky enough to have been comfortable with my body, with nudity, for pretty much all of my life. Not so for everyone who was there. But I didn’t see anyone back out. Everyone stripped off and everyone swam. There is a real comfort in seeing other people around you happily taking off their clothes, and not treating it like a big deal. Just doing it. And having fun while they are doing it. It’s such a different celebration of nudity and the human body (in all shapes and sizes) than the one that is given to us by the media and the rest of society every day.
It is how I think that nudity should be treated. Not good or bad. Just natural. Something that doesn’t have to be commented upon, sexualised, or demonised. So I think that at the end of the day, this is the value of The Sydney Skinny. It lets us be ourselves and be comfortable with who we are when there is no barrier between us and the world.
If you want to try a different form of self expression and to get out in the open air then I highly recommend The Sydney Skinny. It may be challenging for you. It may be easy. But I am sure that it will be fun.
John.
You can see the latest installment in the Guardian here:
These are all good questions to be asking and the debate is always worth having. But I believe that it falls short, because I have never seen anyone discuss the merits of pubic hair in regard to actually having sex. Neatly trimmed pubic hair versus a wild bush may may give certain “signals” to a potential partner, but what about when the signaling is over and you are in bed with someone?
Well, the short answer is that pubic hair or the lack there of can make sex a very different experience for both partners. There are other factors involved too of course, like the amount of lubrication involved (natural or artificial) and condoms.
If a woman has no public hair on her outer labia, then it changes the sensations of penetration for both her and her partner. For her partner (assuming adequate lubrication) it creates a much smoother, more slippery sensation. Not more intense, not less intense – or better or worse even necessarily – but different. For the woman there may be less stimulation of the outer labia, since there is no hair to be pulling on them.
Pubic hair and its lack can become quite significant in longer sex (say more than 15 or 20 minutes). Depending upon the position/s that you are having sex in, pubic hair above the genitals (so on one’s pubic mound) can be problematic. If you have it and your partner doesn’t, or vice versa, then over time it can become abrasive. Having “neatened” pubic hair in this region I have found on occasion that I will get a little skin irritation in this area if my partner has more public hair than I do. Of course this is only really a problem when having sex in missionary position or similar where there is very close contact.
At the end of the day, I am not inclined to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t have. But I will say this: experimenting can be fun! If you have never shaved, then I highly recommend giving it a go. Try it and see what you think and don’t let fashion or anyone else tell you what is right for you.
If you do decide that being partly, mostly, or completely bare works for you, then I highly recommend laser hair removal. It is quick, mostly permanent and getting to be quite cheap these days. It has worked well for me and once done avoids the difficulties of ingrown hairs and the need for regular shaving.
John.
I have been a cyclist of varying degrees of fitness for most of my life, but in recent years, I haven’t ridden as much as I would like to. Other exercise, like Pilates, free weights, walking, and interval sprints have been the norm.
But today I felt like cycling. So, seizing the moment I donned the appropriate clothing and headed for the garage. Only to find that some inconsiderate person had managed to steal the frame pump off my bike which was locked up inside my security cage in the garage! Disappointing doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.
It is upsetting to have stuff that you have worked hard to buy stolen from you. But it’s worse having good habits like exercise interrupted. Things can be replaced, but that ride is lost to me forever.
Thankfully I was able to walk and do some interval sprints instead, so I got my exercise for the day, but I was really looking forward to going for a roll.
John.
As Justin Timberlake’s character said in the movie In Time: “You can do a lot in a day”.
It’s true, you can do a lot in a day. You can do even more in a year. And we have a brand new one ahead of us. The hard part is knowing what to do with it. All too often in life we find ourselves trapped in the mundane requirements of existing: work, bills, stuff that never seems to add anything meaningful to our lives beyond day to day survival.
All too often we are suppressing the things that we really feel and want, to allow ourselves to get along. All too often one of those things is our sexuality. It is almost inevitable that sex will come last given the way our society treats it – something that is wrong, or that we should be guilty about. But it’s not.
Our sexuality is a core part of who we are. When we deny that part of ourselves we distort our personality and our lives, often in unexpected and detrimental ways.
When we explore our sexuality, enjoy it, and give it a fair share of our time and energy then we can relieve hidden pressures, feel happier, and actually be able to engage with the world more effectively in other areas of our life.
Why not make this the year that your sexuality is a priority? You can do a lot in a year. Or even in a day.
John.
Welcome to a brand new year. It seems to me (via observation of friends’ comments on Facebook) that 2013 has been a hard year for a lot of people. It was a challenge for me too on a number of levels. But I got through it, and along the way met some fantastic people, had a lot of good experiences and I would like to think, grew as a person.
The challenges that I went through have made it hard to write regularly for a few reasons, but I hope to be able to get back to more regular posts this year.
So in saying farewell to 2013 I would like to thank everyone I met, or continued to see through my work. At the end of the day, it’s all about you and you continue to make this the best job in the world.
Thank you and I hope that 2014 is a great year for you.
John.
Everyone knows that: “women want sex less and are less promisuous than men – and men all want sex all the time and with anyone available”.
It’s a standard assumption about male and female sexuality in western society. It is also untrue. When you work in my industry your come to realise fairly quickly that most of what society tells you about sex and other people is wrong – you probably felt that it didn’t apply to you anyway, but there is always the suspicion that you might be the odd one out.
Well, thanks to science we have a chance to look beyond the assumptions, beyond the religious dogma, indoctrination, and social expectations.
I read two different articles recently – linked below. One of them explained that when women answered questions about their sexual history and experience more honestly (when they didn’t feel a social pressure to give “acceptable” answers and thought that lying would be detected) they reported having, on average, 4.4 sexual partners in their lifetime. Men on the other hand reported only 4.0 partners on average.
This turn our normal perception of men as sexually promiscuous and women as sexually conservative on its head. Continue reading
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Daily Life column has an article about sex work today. You can see it here.
http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/debunking-the-myths-of-sex-work-20130429-2iodn.html
I think that the article is a reasonalbe and sensible wrap up of sex work. In summary “sex workers are people too, so why not be nice to them”. Ok, that might be a little glib, but you take my point I hope.
For the first time every I have managed to get a comment published. I was prompted to firstly by the question raised in the article of whether male sex workers (like myself) and their clients have a different experience of the industry and the general “shaming” that goes on against sex workers.
What has delighted me constantly over the years that I have worked as an escort is the huge amount of support that I have had from both clients and from the few people in my life who I have told about what I do.
So here’s my point, amplified by the many mindless comments on the artile linked above that dismiss prostitution out of hand: being able to come to someone like me for companionship, intimacy, and sex is a vital option for both men and women to have in our society. Why? Because all too often the nature of our society doesn’t provide those things for people. Perhaps they have been in an abusive relationship (emotionally, or physically) and need someone they can absolutely trust to help them repair their self-esteem, or accept intimacy again, or have a disability that prevents them from forming a conventional relationship in the first place. Or perhaps they just want and need physical company right now, but don’t have a socially acceptable relationship to provide it.
The reasons are many and varied, but you can be absolutely sure that when people start making blanket statements about prostitution being bad/demeaning/imoral etc that the person has never worked in the industry, and probably never actually needed the services themselves (“need” being distinct here from just having indulged).
This isn’t to say that a person has to have a specific need to use my services. But it begs the question of why can’t we treat sex as something fun to do? People in relationships have sex for fun all the time, so why shouldn’t someone who isn’t in a relationship choose to buy sex for fun?
At the end of the day I like seeing discussion of sexuality in the media. It may attract the trolls and nutters to denounce it as evil, but every article raises questions and gets people thinking and talking about the issues. Which has to be a good thing.
John.
As you can imagine, condoms are my best friend (and at the same time my worst enemy). I am very familiar with all of the different brands, styles, and thicknesses. Some of them are great, some of them don’t suit me, and some are not so great.
They are however all pretty much exactly the same. At least in so far as how they work – close fitting, lubricant on the outside, reservoir tip, roll on, pull off. The “technology” of condoms hasn’t really changed in centuries, only the materials, we now use latex and silicon instead of animal gut.
So today I came across what is possibly the first real innovation in condoms in well, a very long time. It comes from a company called Origami Condoms. You can see their website here:
http://www.origamicondoms.com/
They have a range of three different condoms – for heterosexual sex for men, for heterosexual sex for women, and for anal sex for either gender. This is very interesting because it shows that Origami understand that desires for pleasure, contraception, and STI prevention require different solutions depending on your gender and what you are doing.
Here’s a video demonstrating the male condom …
The Origami condom for women allows a woman to take complete control of contraception using a barrier method (like a condom where there is a physical barrier preventing unsafe contact). This is not something women have had before (if you discount the horrid “Femidom” which – having tried them – I would not recommend). This “condom” is inserted by the woman before sex, so she has complete control over it and its use.
The Origami condom for men is quite similar to the women’s version, but it is fitted by the man over his penis. It is different to regular condoms in that instead of clinging tightly to the man’s penis and being lubricated on the outside, it is a looser fit and lubricated on the inside. This means that when you are having sex the condom stays still inside the woman’s vagina and the penis moves in and out of it (although I believe that it holds onto and moves with the base of the penis).
I can imagine that this arrangement may well make sex with a condom feel more natural for the man. I don’t know if it would be better or worse for the woman. Given Origami’s aim to improve the experience of protected sex I am hoping that they are considering this, as they are clearly considering men’s pleasure.
One thing I note that is a potential downside is that their condoms are made of silicon. Personally I don’t much like the feel of silicon, but that may be different in these condoms.
As for the anal sex condom, this looks like a real winner. Giving control to the partner receiving, providing a strong condom that reduces the risk of breakage and a style of condom that is impossible to “lose”. It may also help to prevent potential damage by reducing friction.
Now the bad news: they won’t be available until somewhere in late 2014. These things have to go through FDA approval in the US sadly, so don’t expect to see them any time soon. That said, the year is flying by once again and 2015 will be hear before you know it!
Ultimately time will tell if these things are any good, but honestly I think that it is GREAT that someone out there is taking condoms seriously and looking for ways to improve them.
John.
When Google Analytics tells you that the current visitor to your web site is viewing you from the International Space Station!
[Edit] It appears that the current crew of the ISS are six men … So I am doubly guessing that this a hoax.
John.