MightyPen

I've considered writing various long posts as my contribution to this thread, but what it really all boils down to is: Sometimes: yes. Other times: no. Most of the time: sorta. I've got some stuff about me and my life that's bugged me right from the start. I've fixed a lot of those things over time. Now I'm working on the rest piece by piece, and some of them are the hardest. That I have the means and opportunity to continue overcoming them, even those I long feared I never would, is one of the things that makes me happiest.

I saw Joss Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing a few weeks ago at the Mayfair theatre. Really, really fun. Loved watching his simple, home-grown production, with lots of talented actors plainly just enjoying themselves for a few days among friends. And Nathan Fillion stole every scene he was in (no surprise there). Plus, it really was straight-up a well done, low-key version of the play. Nicely shot, well acted. Probably the best part of the whole spell was that, being familiar with a lot of these actors from Whedon's other work, I kind of felt like I was among friends the whole time. (Plus, I actually was among friends the whole time so, you know, that kind of helped.) Still, Amy Acker is the latest to solidly capture my heart. Now THAT's someone to spend your life with. (Dreamy sighs.)

Thanks! My only concern with the article is the sort of hand-waving dismissal of the issue of sex trafficking. I instinctively feel it's a genuine problem that needs to be taken more seriously than that. But then, I don't have any direct experience to prove my view is any better informed than hers.

Forest Rangers! Hahaha! I remember that from after-school reruns. I'm a fan of Murdoch Mysteries, which is cute for being a period piece but also isn't afraid to have fun with its own premise. The Mayday air crash documentaries are really interesting, and made right here in Canada. The Nature of Things is still cool when I stumble across it. I'll still watch reruns of DaVinci's Inquest whenever I find them. I was sad to see TVO's "Saturday Night at the Movies" end this year, though I understand why. I have a completely unfair and irrational hatred of "Hard Rock Medical", purely because it was so pervasively hyped (as much as TVO can hype anything), so I've refused to watch a single episode... sort of the same thing that made me swear not to watch "Low Winter Sun" which was so desperate to win the Breaking Bad audience. :/

I agree with the first part, but not entirely with the second. You're right, any age cutoff will be somewhat arbitrary. It's the same thing about, say, the voting age, the drinking age, the driving age, or when you become criminally liable as an adult. Do some people cross those milestones at different points in their lives? Absolutely. Sticking with those numbers rigidly guarantees you'll be wrong some of the time. On the other hand, the reason those numbers get chosen for voting, drinking, etc. is because there's an expectation that, most of the time, that age roughly corresponds to a certain readiness. This evidence can itself be completely objective, even if it means there are lots of people younger than X who really are ready for Y. It's not about certainty, it's about probability. And that's why my own number of 21 works for me. I'm pretty sure that if I ever started considering younger companions of 18 or 19, that in the vast majority of cases I'd decide not to proceed once I got to know her and got a sense of her maturity level.* On the other hand, I think there would be significantly fewer such cases after 21 and almost none after 25. Picking 21, widely considered the age of "okay, now you're a complete adult and totally responsible" for other purposes, means that's the point where I'm personally comfortable with the probabilities as I understand them. (* And furthermore, there might very well be times when I'd miss a cue, choose to proceed, but find out afterward that I was wrong, which would be absolutely devastating. It's just not worth the risk to me.) At the same time, I don't judge others for choosing a lower, legal number for themselves if they're comfortable with it. After 18, it's a strictly a personal decision.

Personally I'd never, ever see anyone under 21. I understand that maturity varies, but I can imagine lots of otherwise very mature and capable young women of 18-20 still misjudging their ability to foresee and navigate the pitfalls of acting as a paid companion. Practically I tend to see SPs in their 40s and up, as I'm in my late 40s and prefer to see women somewhere around my own age. There are exceptions; a few years ago I saw a very bright and insightful woman in her late 20s and had one of my best experiences ever.

Aw, that's so sweet! Here ya go RG, I know you want one badly: Also, who knows, now that our beloved couple has had a chance to consummate their relationship, maybe they'll achieve that great ambition of every couple and take another step toward (re-)achieving RG's fondest dream. Yes, that's right... if we're lucky, RG and GL will be able to announce... IT'S A BUOY!

Yup! The surface can be beautiful in lots of different ways, so put your best forward with a smile and you'll always find admirers. Every woman on CERB fits well with someone's desires. And in the end it's really is the substance beneath the surface that matters most, makes two people click emotionally, intellectually, and sexually, and keeps clients coming back.

I will engage with you one more time, and only one more time, on this subject. Beyond that I'm not interested in conversing with anyone who defends having sex with minors. Pamela Smart is an excellent example of the dynamic at work in underage relationships, specifically the power imbalance. Note in the wiki article that she was accused of "seducing 15-year-old William "Billy" Flynn and threatening to stop having sex with him unless he killed her husband," which was supported by Flynn's own testimony. Smart had sex with Flynn specifically to make him emotionally dependent and groom him for murder. Of course very few relationships include murder as the endgame; but it does demonstrate the unhealthy power imbalance inherent to such relationships, where the younger partner is completely unready for its emotional impact. I started with a 12-year-old example because that's the earliest age at which sex might not be a crime in Canada (specifically, when it happens between two people of that same age), and since you're proposing that age limits should be relative and negotiable, you need to deal with that case in your own arguments. Our laws allow same-age juveniles to have sex with each other without going to jail not because them having sex is a good idea, or because they're remotely ready for what they're doing, but because in such cases both parties have messed up equally and shown the same poor judgement. We let them off the hook precisely because we recognize their ability to judge and understand their decisions hasn't developed yet. Simply being young and stupid isn't a criminal offense; instead it requires parental intervention. However, when there's sex between a minor and an adult it's not only much more stupid, but the older party has a legal responsibility to know better. Failing to display any such judgement, and so endangering a child the adult should instead be caring for, justly earns serious punishment. I don't consider the case you link to -- of sex between an abused, 35-year-old teacher suffering from manic depression and her 12-year-old male student producing two children -- to have "ended well". I can at best describe it as the "least disastrous outcome." We'd need to know these two people personally to fully understand their situation; as it stands, we can't know who else the 12-year-old boy might have become under different circumstances. We only know that much later he decided to continue the relationship with the woman, the mother of his two children, once she was released from prison. How can the man in that case really judge his relationship and situation against another had his life unfolded normally? And the exaggerated, childlike terms the woman continues to use to describe their ongoing relationship -- "eternal and endless" etc. -- suggest she has a badly under-developed understanding of real adult relationships, the nature of their current situation, and the gravity of her role in initiating a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old. Still, there may be an oddball case somewhere of a young person who was particularly well developed emotionally and intellectually, conducted a relationship with someone significantly his/her senior, and some happy relationship did ensue. But I think it's impossible to tell ahead of time which children this might apply to, and this remote possibility is no reason to lessen the fixed protections we have in place for the vast majority of still-developing minors who are not remotely ready for such things and will be irreparably harmed should they occur. As I said in my first reply: better to set an arbitrary bar that may inconvenience the, say, 1% of minors who could survive such a relationship but better protects the 99% who cannot, than to treat the cutoffs we have in law just as loose guidelines, impose on ourselves the burden of examining and proving each child's mental state in detail for every offense, and offer handy new arguments for use in a pedophile's defense.

That's interesting. I've been watching an old TV show set in the 70s (the UK's "The Sweeney") and it's got me thinking more than usual about the pervasive differences technology has made to society in the last 40 years. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s when I first started out (and I was the very definition of naive), the only source of SP or MA information was ads in the back of The Sun or a more limited list in the Citizen classifieds. Plus, there was just the beginning of desktop publishing and there were some really cheap home-printed "local sex industry" guides on the shadier news stands. But... does anyone know how this worked in, say, the 70s? How would yo go about finding an SP... did people still consult classifieds in newspapers, and look under "Escorts" in the yellow pages? Was it all just word of mouth? Did you go to strip clubs to get close to the information? Heck, I don't even know what the laws were then.

I'm stunned, now that I've seen reference to specific phrases in the chant, that a) anyone could sing this without dropping dead of shame, and b) women in particular could actually sing along. Before I found the words involved (literally "underage" and "no consent"), I though the song might be, I dunno, "cheeky" or something vague. But it's so obviously horrible. There's something powerful at work here having to do with the burning desire to conform, be accepted, not rock the boat, and just go along to "succeed" within the prevailing social dynamic, whatever that may be. So my question is: how does a chant like this get made up, propagated, accepted, and sung aloud for years? How can anyone sing this without revulsion? I think there are valuable things about society to be learned here, and especially lessons on the entrenched obstacles to really confronting the kind of misogyny that remains pervasive and unremarked upon, even here in supposedly progressive and enlightened Canadian society. Additional Comments: No, I disagree. It's certainly possible for someone who's 12 to utter the phrase "yes". It's even possible for them to really mean it, in order to please the person making the request. What it's not really possible for them to do is fully grasp the weight of the thing they're agreeing to. The law says that people who are underage are considered incapable of the kind of will, judgement, self-awareness, and required agency to give meaningful consent to what's about to happen. Maybe a shorter way of putting it is, when you wrote "there might be ethical problems," THOSE are exactly the problems the laws are there to address. Granted, people vary, and some are ready for sex a little sooner than others. But I'd rather commit the sin of being arbitrary and picking a number we all must follow, than putting ourselves in a position where we'll have to evaluate the participants separately for each case of underage sex, after the fact, to determine what they're cognitively capable of. I can't control where other societies choose to put that line, but here in Canada the age of consent is encoded in law and must be obeyed: 16, 18 if there's involvement by an authority figure, and some special rules for close-in-age partners. And, much as young boys might fantasize about their teachers (I did!), they're equally unready for the powerful emotional consequences of the relationship, and can be badly damaged by it and its ensuing collapse. And, let's face it, if it's conducted by a significantly older woman at that age... is fundamentally fucked up on her part to begin with, so things aren't going to go well. For an extreme example of that dynamic at work, see Pamela Smart and her victim Billy Flynn.

First, decide what kind of domina persona you want your site to project. If you want to go with traditional "dark and threatening" then go with some kind of black background, white text, red highlights. Images are stark, black and white, with lots of shadows. You're evoking "dungeon". This approach can absolutely hit home with a certain segment of your market... but personally I think it's a bit limited, and doesn't make any kind of unique statement. It's hard for me to imagine getting into a kind of trusting D/s relationship, even a paid one, with a cliché. Are you also/more a sensuous domina who can play with power exchange without the stern remote persona? Then take an approach that's a bit softer and feminine, but still makes clear where the power lies. Here you're evoking "bedroom", but one that's the dark shade of lust, sexual power, and indulgence, rather than girly or a cheap "honeymoon suite". Personally I'd find this more enticing. From that first page you need to clearly answer within one click the basic questions your visitors will have: a) who are you? b) what services do you offer? c) where are you? d) how much does it cost? These are pretty straightforward and there are plenty of examples to follow for content and presentation from other providers. But I'll add a particular word about b). Your service caters to a complicated mixture of psychological and sexual desires in your clients, and they'll be happiest if they see some explicit attention paid to their specific, "treasured" kink or fetish. Sure, a simple, stark list sort of works, but you'll do even better if you can devote space and imagination to each one: say, a page apiece for several common classes of interest, and some pictures and text on each. I think one of the questions on the mind of new clients is: "sure she can dress the part and talk a game, but will she really 'get' my particular thing?" Paying specific attention like this to different aspects of BDSM on your site is hard work for you, but it will reassure clients that you're someone who does understand their kink more than just superficially, and that you offer an experience that's worth investing some time and money in. (Incidentally, I can quite clearly imagine a site that would be structured like a house, with material themed to D/s for each of several rooms. This gives you a chance to explore different BDSM themes and settings in a fun way, starting with the initial introduction in the foyer, and moving through the house from there... through living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, closet... and yes, down to the dungeon. This approach also lets you avoid including a context-less "gallery" of pictures, instead playing with the opportunity to present a version of yourself in each of these settings. But... how much of that really applies would depend on you and the nature and scope of your service! :) )

I dunno... I love the awesome experiences I have with SPs, but sticking to that would be like eating dessert all the time and never cooking and enjoying a whole, balanced meal. :) Sex and even intimacy aren't the only rewards of relationships; there's also being always present for each other, building something together, challenging each other, taking risks with each other and making the compromises that being with someone full-time requires. As awesome as the women of CERB are, they can't provide that as a service. Life's about growth. The SPs I've seen have taught me a lot, but there's a lot more potential in relationships than the SP experience can offer to a client. That's what motivates me to keep working on conventional relationships, much as I really, really, really enjoy dessert. ;) Additional Comments: Also... I can't see a Bruno Mars reference without thinking of Bad Lip Reading's "alternate version" of his Lazy Song video, with contributions from others...

After a gap of several years, I got out to Stratford in June and saw one miss, and one more-or-less hit. Measure for Measure was a bit strained and didn't gel very well... performances varied widely in quality and ultimately, I just didn't care. Blithe Spirit was energetic and very pretty, everyone did their jobs well... but it was a very mannered performance, as I suppose a popular play from the 40s almost has to be. I plan to check out some local (Ottawa) theatre this fall, since I really enjoy seeing actors doing their work live instead of through the many, many layers a movie puts between you and a performance.

The problem is, the way you've posed the question leaves out anything at all about a really critical part of that sentence -- "I". Without knowing more about you, it's impossible to answer you. Let's start more generically: is seeing escorts inherently shameful? And the answer is: NO. Particularly with regard to the women you're likely to encounter here on CERB, escorts are smart, attractive, talented and capable women who know exactly what they're doing and why. They can offer a wonderful intimate human experience. How you make use of that experience, and the role it plays in your life, is up to you. That said, there can be issues associated with paid companionship. Most importantly: is the companion in control of what she's doing? Beyond that there are issues of playing safely, the impact your activities can have on other parties, and your overall conduct with regard to "hobbying". But all of those hinge on YOU, and your judgement, and so nobody can really answer your question yet with just the information you've provided.

It's so, so broad. All I can come up with is: if two people interact in a way that intentionally produces sexual arousal in at least one of them, it's sex. It doesn't need to result in orgasm, and no clothes need to come off. There doesn't even have to be touching; one person could just be speaking, or putting on a show, and to me that still falls under the wide tent of "sex". That leaves aside masturbation (still a kind of sex, but not really what we're talking about here); unintentional arousal (that's sexual, but it's the interaction and intention that constitutes "sex" to me); one person just lusting after another person who's there, but unaware and not participating (that's just solo fantasy, not sex); and poly play which just increases the quantity of people involved.

Yes, but I think that's what makes the airing of the bit you saw more necessary. We've all seen so much more violence on screens these days, simulated or real, that implied violence has mostly lost its power. If the news wants to make a point, it has to be very clear about exactly how awful and brutal an act really was. A still picture of men on the ground, a guy with a gun in the background, and a voiceover saying "a dozen men were executed yesterday..." would lack the power it might have had in 1970, and today's viewers might barely register the weight of what had happened. So though I would have found the scene you describe hard to watch, I understand why the news team thought it necessary to make their point. Sadly, though, I'm also reminded of this exchange from the movie Hotel Rwanda: Paul Rusesabagina: "I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene." Jack: "Yeah and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show?" Paul Rusesabagina: "How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?" Jack: "I think if people see this footage they'll say, "oh my God that's horrible," and then go on eating their dinners."

Yeah, I can vouch for this -- in my time I've dated women who had been trained from youth to find sex shameful and dirty, and who saw masturbation as unladylike, perverted, and simply a thing that good girls didn't do. These same women tended to be very passive during sex so that, even when they enjoyed themselves, they could on some level assign all the agency to the man and thereby "forgive" themselves. With a lot of caring and patience, some learned their way at least partly out of this needless sexual prison. Others never did. People who are sexually comfortable with themselves no doubt find this incomprehensible. But I assure you that there are lots of otherwise very fun, interesting, and grown-up people who nevertheless find sex shameful, and can't bring themselves to take an active role in their own pleasure. SPs and MAs, don't underestimate the surprise, delight, and relief some of your customers experience when they find themselves at last with a woman who is sex-positive, receptive, and engaged.

"These are not the companions you are looking for." *waves fingers Jedi-like*

Good point! The whole equation changes if this card is active in my play area:

Oh yeah. Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. Did absolutely terribly when released (I was one of the very few, it seems, who saw it when it came out...). But it's got a cult following now. I can quote ridiculous amounts of it verbatim. And hey, it's got a pre-Sex and the City Kim Cattrall! Huh! YouTube summary sorta does movie justice: While kung fu warriors and otherworldly spirits battle over the fate of two women, Russell's swaggering idiot manages to knock himself out or underestimate the forces he's dealing with. Jack Burton, a tough-talking, wisecracking truck driver whose hum-drum life on the road takes a sudden supernatural tailspin when his best friend's fiancee is kidnapped. Speeding to the rescue, Jack finds himself deep beneath San Francisco's Chinatown, in a murky, creature-filled world ruled by Lo Pan, a 2000-year-old magician who mercilessly presides over an empire of spirits. Dodging demons and facing baffling terrors, Jack battles his way through Lo Pan's dark domain in a full-throttle, action-riddled ride to rescue the girl.

I'd stop. I don't want me, or other drivers, obeying traffic laws only when we personally think it's warranted. It's everyone's safety at stake. The question is the same as: if you really, really think in your heart of hearts that tonight's stranger is clean, should you really bother with a condom? Uh.... YES.

I have always thought that "open minded" meant non-judgmental. So, you could be open in asking about something a little off the conventional, "vanilla" sexual map. It didn't guarantee she'd say yes, but it does mean she wouldn't give you a hard time about the request. Lots of guys have quirks and fetishes and offbeat interests they might be yearning to pursue but nervous to ask about. To me, open-minded means "don't be afraid to ask". I *don't* think open-minded means "willing to renegotiate my stated boundaries", or secretly open to doing something unsafe.

Totally depends on the nature of the session. Most of the time I'm after some mutual affection and a sense of connection at least as much as any sexual "release". For these GFE sessions there's lots of gentle intimacy, strokes and cuddles, and laughter -- humour is one of the most important parts of a human connection for me and lets me know I'm comfortable and in a natural shared headspace with my companion. Plus kisses, cuddles, and just curling up and feeling each other breathe. But that said: sometimes I'm after something a bit more purely lustful and irrational, a little darker and fetishy, maybe with some roleplaying that makes the situation purposely artificial. In that case... sometimes that shift in context is part of the point, and affectionate strokes and cuddles would get in the way of that other emotional space you're actually aiming for. It's a matter of: which part of my sexuality wants to come out to play today? What I can tell you is that if I'm after that second kind of encounter, the lady will know in advance so we're both on the same page from the start (!).

Yep, I'm big on keeping that whole area as clean and smooth as possible. My advice: - soak the region well with soap and water during a nice, long shower beforehand - then apply plenty of shaving gel/foam to the "work area", and let it sit there for a few minutes so everything gets nicely moistened and lubricated. It, uh, doesn't hurt to manipulate the whole area and gently rub the foam against the skin to, uh, you know, help the process along. Ahem. - Then use a good, sharp razor for the shaving part. This ensures you don't end up tugging and tearing the coarse hair and stressing your follicles. I hardly need to say: don't rush. Be thorough, and enjoy the process and exploring one of your favourite landscapes up close. - Rinse and then apply moisturizer afterward (for as long and, uh, vigorously as you "need" to...) to the whole shaved area to soothe any stressed skin. That's my routine and it's never given me any problems. If I skip steps (other than the fun ones), I end up with a rash, soreness, or worse. :/