If you have been wondering what it might be like to book me, or just feel like treating yourself to an early Christmas present, then I am free and available this Saturday night!
John
Saturday night – December 13th
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Author Archives: John
It’s been a while! And cauliflower soup…
So the last time I posted here it was all the way back in (checks notes) Early August! Well. That’s very slack of me and I’m sorry for being so tardy. In my defence I had to move out of the apartment that I had lived in for over thirteen years in July (I moved in to my apartment on March 24th, 2012 and oh boy has a lot of water passed under the bridge since then!).
So, the last several months have been a slow process of getting myself set up again and finding a new routine (not to mention the joy of unpacking boxes!) and unfortunately writing blog posts here has been very low down my list. I intend to change that going forward!
One of the things that is becoming part of the new routine is working on improving my diet and losing some of the weight that inevitably creeps on as we get older. To that end I generally try to maintain a low to zero carb diet these days and when combined with intermittent fasting (for eighteen to twenty hours per day) then I find that I can lose weight effectively.
One of the things that I have been doing in aid of that diet is making cauliflower soup. Now that may not immediately appeal to everyone, but after seeing it on a menu recently then making my own I have to say, I’m really enjoying it! This is my recipe:
Ingredients:
- 2 large heads of cauliflower
- 2 full heads of garlic
- 2 large onions
- Five large sticks of celery (including leaves)
- 500ml liquid stock (vegetable, or chicken) or equivalent
- 2 tablespoons spoons soy sauce
- 200ml cream
- Butter
- Olive oil
- Pepper (I prefer fresh cracked)
Additional ingredients to serve:
- Grated hard cheese (I prefer Romano, but any strong flavoured hard cheese will do)
- Sour cream or natural yoghurt
- Pepper and salt
- Sour dough bread
Instructions:
- Heat the oven to 170 degrees C
- Trim the leaves from the cauliflower heads and place them whole in a large baking dish
- Add the whole heads of garlic to the baking dish as well
- Cover cauliflower and garlic with olive oil, salt, and pepper
- Place in oven and cook uncovered for approximately one hour or until soft (you should be able to break it up with a spoon easily)
- Check every 15 minutes to make sure that cauliflower doesn’t burn – it should brown though! Apply more olive oil, or baste with drippings in the pan to help brown the cauliflower
- While the cauliflower is baking, chop the onion and celery small, not fine
- Heat a large pot on medium heat
- Add approximately 100 grams of butter and a generous amount of olive oil to the pot, allow butter to melt
- Add celery and onion to the pot, stir, then cover and allow to cook until soft
- Remove pot from heat
- Add stock, soy sauce, to the pot with the celery and onion
- Break up the cauliflower and add to the pot – don’t forget to include any scrapings and the olive oil from the baking tray!
- Chop the tops off the garlic heads to expose the tops of the cloves, then squeeze the roasted garlic out of the head into the pot with the other ingredients
- Add the cream to the pot
- Purée the ingredients in the pot with a stick blender. If you don’t have a stick blender you can use a potatoe masher to mash the ingredients roughly to combine them, then transfer them in batches to a regular blender. Blend until smooth
- Add water to reach the desired consistency. I like a thicker soup, but it can be thinned with water to your preference
Serving:
- Finely grate your hard cheese of choice
- Toast the bread and butter it generously while hot!
- Ladel the soup into bowls
- Add a dollop of sour cream, or natural yoghurt
- Top with grated cheese and cracked pepper then serve with the toast on the side
This recipe gives eight to ten generous serves. I like to let the soup stand in the fridge overnight to allow the flavours to integrate fully before eating it, but it’s fine straight off the stove. I usually keep four serves in the fridge and put the rest in the freezer.
John
A refuge from the cold and rain!
Are you thinking about getting away from the city for a day or three? Would you like to spend some quality time relaxing with no pressure to be anywhere or do anything?
Would you like home cooked meals, a glass of wine, a wood fire, and good company?
Then I have just the place. Two hours from Sydney in the Southern Highlands. A comfortable house with garden on a pretty little farm. Where I can cater to your every need without the expense and hassle of an AirBNB.
Watch the kangaroos grazing along the fence in the morning, see the birds on the lawn all day.
We can take a walk if the weather is nice, of stay inside in the warm if it’s not!
Just a thought…
John
Email outage
Over the last two weeks there has been an issue with my email and I haven’t been receiving emails sent to me. My apology to anyone who has been trying to contact me. The problem has been resolved now. If you sent me an email and are waiting for a reply could you please resend it and I will reply asap.
Once again, I am sorry for any inconvenience!
John
One woman’s story
I recently met a woman who had never had sex. I don’t think that I can say anything about our experience better than she can, so I’m sharing a very generous testimonial that she wrote for me after our first date together…
Getting out of my head
I had been checking out John’s website for years. About five, actually. I first stumbled across it as I went down internet rabbit holes on virginity as an older woman. I was mid-forties and feeling very, very isolated.
Mostly, my life is great. I am university-educated, at the peak of my career, I have a wonderful job, my own home in the city and a holiday home near the ocean. Sure, I have a mortgage, but I have enough disposable income to travel widely. I have many wonderful friends – people who care about me and who seem genuinely baffled by my decades of being single. I have never been in a relationship and have never had sex with another person. [I also never use the term virgin, except in those internet searches, as I believe virginity is an archaic concept, from a time when the purity of women was commoditised by men].
Somebody I’d once confided in assured me that ‘when the time comes, he’ll be a very lucky man!’. Whilst they meant well, actually that was part of the problem for me. I didn’t want a guy fetishising my age and lack of experience, or thinking I’d ‘saved myself’ for him. Even if I did meet someone, to me it would have felt excruciatingly more vulnerable to tell him that I’d never had sex, than to actually have sex. I wanted him to know, because it did matter to me; but I also needed it to be ‘no big deal’ to him.
I have been working with a psychologist to unpack how exactly I ended up in this predicament. As always – it’s complicated. One of John’s videos brought me to tears when he addressed this: it felt like he was in my head, he was describing me so accurately. [ShortTake – Virginity] Add some family dynamics, a career with gruelling hours, societal and religious shame about sex, and life was just passing me by. One of the things we often talked about in therapy is how I need to learn to get out of my head and into my body. Massage, yoga, meditation, being in the ocean – all of these helped, but the underlying ‘problem’ remained; and as the years passed, I was becoming increasingly reluctant to even discuss it.
As well as reading everything out there on virginity, I also explored the concept of asexuality. I could relate to the description of people who identified as asexual, saying “it was as if everyone else had a switch that flicked on as teenagers – but not me, somehow I didn’t get the message to start wanting relationships and sex”. I’m not sure if I feel sexual attraction, which is a definition of asexuality, but I do have a healthy libido and have a respectable number of sex toys. I have great orgasms. Ultimately I’ve realised that for me, a label doesn’t actually matter. What matters is knowing what I want (intimacy, kindness, companionship and a good sex life) and who I want that with (men, I think). It feels strange being 50 and trying to figure out stuff that most people have sorted by the time they’re through adolescence; but here I am: better late than never!
I began to realise the harsh reality that I needed to either do something about my situation, or accept that I might never have sex and just get on with my life. Staying in limbo was doing my head in.
When I contacted John during a holiday in Sydney, I wanted to talk with him about all things sexuality, to learn about myself and what all the ‘stuff’ in my head means. Of course, I knew he wasn’t a therapist, but he clearly had experience in talking with more women about this than any licensed therapists would ever have. I very nervously hit the send button on an email:
“….I’d be keen to meet with you for a couple of hours, actually mostly to talk and maybe a massage. Not planning to go all the way this time but considering in the future. …”
My heart jumped when I got a reply within a few minutes:
“….Thank you for contacting me. It would be my pleasure to see you. … Talk and a massage is perfectly fine. I understand not wanting to go all the way and there is no pressure to.”
From the moment I met John, it was clear that his website is a totally accurate portrayal of who he is, his values and how he works. He arrived on time, we started chatting and, in the absence of a sofa in my hotel room, moved to the bed to lie down and talk a bit more. Within half an hour, we’d gone from being complete strangers, to me telling him all of the above, and lying on a bed together, kissing (something I’d also never done, but he offered to teach me, without judgement). Then he asked if I’d like a massage – at that point it dawned on me that in our talking, I’d once again been fully inside my head, and that getting into my body was what I desperately needed to do.
Each step of the way the massage was done with utmost respect, kindness and consent; it also flowed naturally as he read my body. I had no idea how much I would enjoy nipple stimulation…. I had already decided I might be ok with oral sex at the end of the massage, so when John asked about removing my underwear, my answer was an enthusiastic yes. I got very close to climaxing, but after a (very) long time wasn’t quite there yet. I made a decision: “Um John, I think I need you to fuck me properly”. He promptly stopped, put his head up and with a kind smile responded “we can do that!”. And so we had sex. Then we chatted some more. And he asked if I’d like to have sex again (yes please, didn’t know you could do it again so soon….), he asked if I wanted to put the condom on and showed me how. I chose what position I wanted, and we had sex again. It was very, very good….
More talking, more cuddling and eventually our evening together came to an end.
I slept like a rock. When I woke, I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt in-control and empowered. As I left the hotel, I wanted to shout to the people walking the streets of central Sydney “I HAD SEX LAST NIGHT! And it was so much fun!”. For the first time in my life, despite not having had children (not by choice), despite being in a bigger body, despite having had a hysterectomy, I felt like a woman. A sexy, complete woman. I genuinely didn’t expect that a couple of hours with a stranger could feel so overwhelmingly good – both in the moment and in the change that I feel in myself afterward.
I know John says he can’t work magic, but I’m prepared to accept that something in me changed in a way I can’t fully explain: and it was wonderful. That switch that didn’t get activated in adolescence? It’s now dialled right up. Now, I feel like I’m walking around with the lights on and my eyes open. Life really does feel that different – even a few months later.
If someone had told me 30 years ago that this is how I would have sex for the first time, I would have been shocked, and to be honest, quite embarrassed. I spent years tortured by uncertainty about whether I was fundamentally ‘abnormal’ or if I ‘just hadn’t met the right person yet’. I feared what it meant about me if my ‘right person’ never existed. I hadn’t considered the possibility that perhaps my own body had wisdom to listen to. I certainly hadn’t given myself permission to just have a whole lot of fun with my body!
My only regret is that I didn’t ditch the dream of the white picket fence earlier, but I am grateful that I can now move ahead and fully embrace this one precious life that I have. Yes, my way of having first time sex was definitely unconventional, but so was my journey to get there. My mind was tying itself in knots trying to think its way out of this. Getting the hell out of my head, and into my body was one of the best decisions I have ever made. No regrets. And yes, I have another booking planned.
D.
John
A sexual revolution in 600 pages – The Hite Report
I was recently sent this link to an article in The Conversation:
It talks about Shere Hite and the book that she wrote in 1976 about women’s sexuality:
It did something nobody had considered worth doing: investigating women’s sexuality by asking them to share their thoughts and feelings, then relaying those reflections to readers in women’s own words.
It’s hard to imagine the importance of women’s orgasm being so misunderstood in this day and age. It’s also hard to imagine that it is only fifty years ago that Hite’s work was considered controversial. We have come a long, long way just in the span of my life.
And it also has be recognised that we live in a time where gains that we have made in that time are starting to be unwound – something that I never expected to happen, ever!
I think that now is an excellent time for us all to consider finding a copy of The Hite Report to read and reflect of how far we have come and how much we have to lose. Even here in Australia.
For instance the Queensland government has blocked trans people under 18 from “accessing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones” (https://equalityaustralia.org.au/qlds-hormone-ban-for-trans-youth-slammed-by-medical-experts-and-human-rights-groups/). Which is a backhanded way of denying young people the ability to control their lives and their bodies. Not because there is a demonstrated risk or harm:
“Only last year a review in Queensland found that practices in the state’s gender clinics were safe and evidence based, recommending increased funding and capacity to reach regional areas.
“Governments should stay out of these deeply personal decisions and leave it to young people, their parents and the expert doctors treating them.”
We live in dangerous times where populism and political expediency are being set above people’s well being and healthcare. We must recognise that and respect the risk we face.
John
When you have a bad first experience with a male sex worker
The vast majority of women who come to see me are seeing a straight male sex worker for the first time. Most of those women will see me more than once. Which is great – I think that it is fair to say that when someone comes back for a second, third, fourth booking that I must be doing something right.
But not everyone has good experiences the first time that they see a male sex worker for women. I have met several women who “tried it once” and had a bad experience. From guys turning up stoned, to having poor social skills, to having poor sexual skills.
I am always disappointed when I hear about these experiences. Disappointed for the women and disappointed for the industry – because while a bad experience at a restaurant is unlikely to put you off eating out forever, having a bad experience with a sex worker may well put a woman off ever seeing a sex worker again. Which I think would be a terrible shame because for the right person, seeing the right sex worker can be a powerful, even transformative experience.
There are a lot more male workers in the industry now than there were 15 years ago when I started. This is good in that there is more choice for women to find a man who suits them best. However there is a downside too in that too many of the men who get into the industry do so for their own gratification, not understanding – or caring – that their clients’ pleasure, and welfare must come first.
So, what to do if you have had a bad experience with a male sex worker?
The first thing is to request a refund. If you aren’t happy with a service then by law here in NSW and most of Australia you are entitled to at least a partial refund and possibly a full refund. Any serious, professional male sex worker will acknowledge and respect the fact that you weren’t happy with his service and provide a refund.
The second thing to do is know that just because it didn’t work with one guy doesn’t mean that it won’t work with another. We are a very varied group with often very different takes on sex work, what it means, and how we go about providing our service.
So the key is to take however much time you need to get a good feel for the next worker that you choose to see. If he won’t invest the time and effort to talk to you and let you get to know him, then walk away. If he is difficult to contact and doesn’t reply promptly, then walk away. If you have any kind of “bad feeling” with him, then way.
Lastly I would suggest that if you have had a bad experience previously and want to try again – then tell the new worker that you choose that you had a bad experience. He should be respectful of that and work with you to make your next experience with him better. Telling him will also let him know where you are at emotionally and allow him to connect better and be more responsive to your needs.
If you have had a bad experience and a finding it hard to find another worker, or to trust another worker, then drop me a line. I am happy to talk and take the time to build the trust that you need to be able to enjoy seeing a sex worker.
John
Sunday photography
Since I’m in Sydney on a Sunday afternoon with no commitments I thought I’d pull out my camera gear and try some more self portraits. This time I wanted to do some standing shots, but that required a proper backdrop and most of all a remote flash. It’s remarkable the effects you can achieve with flash photography.
I hope you enjoy the photos…
John
Cinq à Sep
I was recently introduced to a new term “Cinq à Sept” – specifically the French meaning (not the Quebec, Canada meaning).
From Wikipedia…
“Cinq à sept originally referred to a time for a tryst, and consequently is a metonym for a visit to one’s mistress, an extramarital affair, and the mistress involved. It derived from the time of day French people would make such a visit. It is still commonly considered as the time of day to meet one’s mistress or lover, and the term implies a sexual liaison (as opposed to the Québécois habit).”
Here in Australia Cinq à Sept has never really been a thing. We are far more likely to be voluntarily putting in overtime, going to the pub after work, or playing sport, but not ducking off for “a tryst”.
Which is a bit of a shame really. I’ve often said that as a society we don’t prioritise sex in our lives and that we are all the more poor for that. So I love the idea of a society that says “we finish work at 5.00pm because overtime would cut into sex time!”
That is something that I can get behind.
John
Breast screen NSW
I wasn’t aware that here in NSW (at least) Myer helps out Breast Screen NSW and NSW Health in providing location for mammograms.
This is a truly great program that they are supporting and it comes highly recommended.
If you haven’t had a mammogram in the last two years, then this is your reminder ladies!
John