Phaedrus

Well, I'm late... but hope you had an awesome day!

Happy birthday, Ashley!

realnicehat, I'm intrigued to see this hat of yours and find out if it's as nice as all that. Actually, do you own the hat... or are you actually some kind of sentient headgear?

That's not a service MAs offer - and even if they did we wouldn't be able to talk about it here 'cos it's illegal. But we have plenty of SPs who do - have a look through the SP ads and I'm sure you'll find someone...

No, it means they're going to have a conversation with their friends about proxies and VPNs and the appropriate usage thereof. There is no reason to sell your Kleenex shares just yet, folks :)

Personally, I don't like them much. I prefer to be able to put an introductory email together on my own, and to arrange it and add bits as I see fit. The form seems... impersonal. I hear what you say about not getting the information you want, or just getting one-line mails, but.... you could always use that as screening :) I believe many ladies do.

Thanks for your advice, Katherine. I will certainly schedule an appointment with Miss Manners as soon as it can be arranged. And thanks also for letting me know that I'll need to BONE up... I'll do my best! Do you think she'll write me a reco?

This is a close-up of the hairs that make up the suction pad on the end of a beetle's leg. One of the winners of this year's Nikon-sponsored photomicography competition. You can see the rest of the winners here; they're worth a look.

We've dressed up sexy, as always :)

Look what just happened in France!

And where do older women fit in? Obviously I have no clue about the demographics of your sample and how well-balanced it is (or isn't), but I can't help but wonder if the difference isn't at least somewhat age-based. After all, the older folks among us remember what it was like to be young, but the young have no concept of what it's like to be old. I don't suppose many forty-somethings have the vigor and stamina and powers of recovery they did in their twenties (in many spheres of life, not just sex) but I suspect they'd appreciate that there are compensations that their twenty-something selves never envisaged. Yes and yes. It helps to personalize things, and even more if you can put names to those people. This is especially true when that name is "you", as in when you're talking to a guy who has visited a strip club and gone home with a smile on his face. As I said earlier, that's true for most of us guys, I think. I'm inclined to agree, given that the general trend these days seems to be happily towards less preaching and more tolerance in most areas of life. But I think there's a very strong parallel with the GLBTQ movements, which is the existence of a closet, and the enormous power of people coming out of that closet; not just the sex workers, but the clients too. I suspect many people won't care all that much about the stigma if it relates to faceless people, even if they accept the fact that those faceless people are no different from the ones they know and love; but when that stigma suddenly applies to your parent/child/sibling/cousin/friend and you see them suffer as a result of it, the problem suddenly acquires an urgency that it didn't have before. So as MightyPen said, communicating the message that "clients are just like guys you care about" is definitely effective, but what would be more effective would be if that were unnecessary because your interlocutor would already be thinking, "Yes, just like <insert name here>. Hey, I wonder if they've met...?". And that's NOT something that sex workers can do for us; sure, more sex workers going public will help as the negative stereotypes of both them and their clients tend to feed off each other, but ultimately if clients are going to be destigmatized it's going to have to be the clients themselves who do it by outing themselves to their friends and families. Obviously the ease of this varies enormously depending on personal circumstances; the current client who's single has far fewer obstacles than the one whose currently-happy marriage wouldn't survive the revelation, and I'd image it's possibly easier for former clients to talk about things that happened some time ago than for current clients to be open about things that are happening now. So, I don't think it'll happen quickly - I'm inclined to think it's more likely to be decades than generations - but I think it'll happen.

The storm that hit northern Europe today.

Congrats! That's some particularly prolific posting! Quiz question for the day: how many boobies has Miquelon posted in his first three thousand posts? Do I have any volunteers to go and count?

OOI, is this girls? Guys? Both? Just curious. I think something that most folks don't appreciate - or perhaps just don't want to think about - is how common the exchange of a sexual service for some other consideration actually is. How many guys have bought drinks or dinner for someone in the hope (or possibly even expectation) that she'd give us something in exchange later on? Pretty much everyone, right? Maybe we got lucky and considered it a worthwhile investment; maybe we didn't and felt rather bitter about the money we wasted on doing shots with that goddamn prick-tease. Ultimately, it doesn't matter: it's the same as the difference between seeing a good SP and getting caught by B&S. Or, if you want to protest that no money actually changed hands... most of us guys have been to a strip club on occasion, as part of a bachelor party if nothing else. Most of us have had at least one lapdance, which was presumably paid for by someone. I'll concede that not everyone necessarily enjoys lapdances (I have a couple of friends who, I'm genuinely sure, don't find them much fun at all)... but nevertheless: it's a sexual experience, it's paid for with cash, and most guys have been there and done that. But that's not the same as seeing an escort? Well, maybe not, but that's a difference of degree, not of kind. After all, when you started learning to drive you didn't go on the highway on day one, did you? No, thought not. I'll concede that more of us get to driving on the highway than get to seeing escorts... but the difference in numbers is probably less than many imagine, and very hard to measure in any case. So, if we're going to destigmatize clients, I think the most important thing is to realize that these clients are... pretty much everyone, really, whether they think of themselves that way or not. I don't mean "just normal guys"; I'm going further than that, and saying "almost everyone". If there's one thing I'd like to get across to the world at large it'd be the level of self-awareness required to see what you and all your friends and family are probably doing (or at least, have done in the past) and how that fits onto the same sliding scale, rather than being anything very different.

Using https is generally a good idea. I use the Firefox HTTPS-everywhere plugin, so I don't even have to think about it; I'm pretty sure there's a Chrome equivalent. I'm not sure about IE and Safari. However... it won't help much in this case. It sounds like what Bell's planning on doing is mostly based on seeing which websites you visit, and https only encrypts the content you exchange with those sites. So although they might not know what you're doing on CERB, they still know you spent time there. The way to screw Bell over on this one is to use a VPN or some kind of anonymization service. A VPN encrypts everything between your machine and the VPN server; even if it's in the clear thereafter, all Bell can know is that you've set up a VPN connection and how much traffic goes over it. Unless the VPN provider is also on their network, which is unlikely (especially if you pick one based in another country :) ) they can't see where you're going. Downside: a VPN service will cost you a few $ per month. Upside: it also means you can browse CERB from work without your employer knowing either. Other upside: websites will believe you're located where your VPN server is, so if you choose a US-based provider then you'll be able to click links to extracts from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report without being redirected to Comedy Central. The second option is to use anonymization services such as Tor. Upside: it's free Downside: download speeds can suck at times Downside: the NSA will take a lot of interest in what you're doing online, because obviously all Tor users are terrorists. Why else would you want to be anonymous? Upside: The NSA will still find it really hard to find out what you're doing online, which will piss them off greatly. They HATE Tor :) I use Tor a lot these days. I don't actually care who sees what stories I'm reading on the CBC news website, but I love to think of the expressions on the faces of the NSA's minions when they work out that the encrypted browser session they've just cracked was just reading about Mike Duffy's latest political woes.

It strikes me that it may well be worth asking about this in any case. I'm not getting at Cleo here - more riffing off her post - but "anywhere in Ottawa" is a somewhat nebulous concept, and it may mean different things to different people. Places like Navan, Metcalfe, Stittsville and Richmond are within the City of Ottawa, but they're a fair distance out and I'd be surprised if a central-Ottawa-based SP did outcalls there for no extra charge. Hull and Gatineau are definitely not part of Ottawa, but are nevertheless close to downtown, and a centrally-located SP may do outcalls there for no extra charge. Places like Barrhaven, Kanata and Orleans are... grey areas - as Cleo said, some SPs might charge extra to go that far, some might not, and some might be local to them anyway. The point being: if in doubt, ask when you book, and if the SP's ad/website mentions this stuff then at least let her know that you've read it and you're just asking for clarification. Full disclosure: I don't do outcalls myself, so I don't know how much of an issue this actually is in reality...

I thought about going today, but I ended up at the beer festival in Parkdale Market instead. Nothing I've read here is really making me think that was a bad decision...

Eccentricia Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. Some say her erogenous zones begin four miles from her actual body (a former client reckons it's more like five). The Big Bang may just have been one of her orgasms. Sorry, I don't have her contact details...