Regent

Back pain is very complicated and we don't know a lot about why it happens or how to effectively treat it. For severe, acute pain, go see a sports medicine doctor, to rule out an injury that requires medical intervention, if nothing else. This article provides an easy to read summary on the evidence around lower back pain https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/4/15929484/chronic-back-pain-treatment-mainstream-vs-alternative

He sounds dangerous. That is a level of controlling creepiness that's just over the top. Clients who don't seem to fully grasp that it's a business relationship and that they are one of many clients will often push all kinds of other boundaries. Firing him as a client would probably be the best course of action, but I also know that many workers don't have the financial security to fire clients, even bad ones who do scary things. I've been out of that industry for a while now, but I hear from almost all of my dancer friends that it's getting harder and harder to make good money. Financial precariousness is really disempowering. :(

I would highly recommend you and your friend read The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. It's an incredibly valuable resource for knowing how to assess situations and respond in a way that will keep you safe. https://www.amazon.ca/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198

I totally understand aversion to the snakes, though if you're in the area at the time I would still highly recommend going (unless you have an outright phobia.) They're so busy breeding that there's very few on the paths, so it's very easy to avoid coming into contact with any, and it's really quite a spectacular sight :) Winnipeg also has Folkfest, Fringe Fest, and Folklorama if you like festivals.

One of my favourite places is Manitou Beach in Saskatchewan. It's a tiny resort town on a lake that's saltier than the Dead Sea. Totally charming, and there's a large lake-fed indoor pool that's really lovely. Around Thunder Bay I'd suggest Ouimet Canyon, Sleeping Giant Park, Kakabeka Falls, and Eagle Canyon for the suspension bridges. If you're interested in camping, in Manitoba Nopiming Provincial Park is much nicer and less busy than the Whiteshell, particularly great if you like back country camping. The Wellman Lake campground in Duck Mountain Provincial Park is really quiet and lovely, and borders Glad Lake, which is one of the clearest lakes I've ever been on. Spirit Sands in Spruce Woods Provincial Park is an amazing day trip - huge rolling sand dunes. And if you happen to be coming through at just the right time in spring, the Narcisse Snake Dens are really something else - millions of garter snakes. http://www.naturenorth.com/spring/creature/garter/Narcisse_Snake_Dens.html In Winnipeg, Segovia has world class tapas. I've travelled a lot and it's still my all time favourite restaurant. The owners also have a breakfast place, Clementine, which is amazing too.

HSV transmission is not limited to mucous membranes. Prior to gloves being a standard in medical care, herpes on the hands (herpes whitlow) was not uncommon. Re HSV testing, it will vary from province to province. Manitoba does have a herpes blood test, however they will not serotype except in very specific circumstances, rendering the value of asymptomatic testing pretty much nil. Even where serotyped blood tests are available, there isn't evidence to suggest that asymptomatic testing results in changed behaviour or better outcomes, so it's not recommended as part of standard STI testing.

Porn is not inherently harmful or unhealthy. Porn and sex addiction are not real disorders. They are not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM-5, nor by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT). https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201212/sex-addiction-rejected-yet-again-apa https://www.aasect.org/position-sex-addiction Rather, the concept of sex and porn addiction is primarily used to pathologize the range of normal and healthy human sexual behaviours. This comess from a place of moralizing, not evidence. Consumption of porn, even when it's problematic for the individual, does not have the same effects on a person as real addictions do. The belief that one is addicted to porn or sex is highly correlated with religiosity and having religious values that conflict with the sexual behaviour. Feelings of guilt and shame are strong predictors of identifying with porn addiction, regardless of how much or how frequently porn is used. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140212153252.htm If the amount of time you're spending consuming porn is truly creating problems for you, absolutely do something about it. However, given that religious conditioning is sticky and can run deep, I can't help but wonder how the time you're spending consuming porn compares to the time you spend with other forms of entertainment or procrastination, such as video games, internet browsing, or watching TV. I appreciate your concerns about ethical porn consumption. There is certainly porn that is being produced in unethical ways. It sounds like your concerns are twofold: That some BDSM acts are too extreme for genuine, healthy consent, and that porn is produced under unethical conditions. For the former, it sounds like, in spite of saying that you don't empathize with performers, you are actually over empathizing and projecting your own experiences and desires on to the performers. Even if the things you enjoy watching are things that you wouldn't actually want to do, I think for your own peace of mind, it's important to realize and really believe that there are people who genuinely enjoy those acts, including things like extreme pain or degradation. People pay me very well for that experience. The experience and motivations around extreme pain can also be very complex. You may not see enjoyment on the face of a performer, because extreme experience are often not enjoyable in the same way that strictly pleasurable sensations are. That is not to diminish the full consent or the rewards of such an experience, but extreme BDSM is often a physical and psychological experience less like vanilla sex, and more akin to running a marathon. In situations where people choose not to use safewords, or commit to being a lifestyle slave, there is still on going consent. These types of situations certainly have the potential to become abusive (as is true of all relationships), but healthy BDSM power dynamics are always built on the concept of on-going consent. A slave can always leave; even without safewords the bottom can always say no. In fact, both playing without safewords and lifestyle slavery place a heightened responsibility on the top/dom to know the bottom/sub extremely well, prioritize their safety and well being, and have the awareness and self control to avoid doing anything that would harm the bottom/sub. Obviously with the extremely limited context of what you see on screen it can be difficult or impossible to assess how healthy an interaction is or how genuinely consent is being given. Which comes to the second point, on ethical porn consumption. Ethically produced media can mean a lot of different things, but when I think ethical porn, I think of porn where the performers are all paid well, their consent and boundaries are respected throughout the whole production, they have a say in what they do on screen, their health and safety is well attended to, the set is free of sexual harassment, and concepts and language that would be harmful outside of the scene are avoided or explored with care inside the production (particularly around racism and transphobia.) Maybe there are other criteria that would make porn ethical to you. I'm really pleased to see that you pay for porn - without people willing to pay for porn there can be no ethical porn industry. Particularly for small producers who are looking to do right by their performers, piracy is a huge issue. If you're considering buying a membership, a rental, or purchasing a video, do some research on the production company, director and performers first. What are their values? Do performers think highly of them? Do the directors and performers have a good reputation? Do they do before and after interviews on screen? Do the performers have a social media presence where they can communicate directly with the public? There are also many reputable independent porn producers - perhaps they will have something in their collections that appeal to you. Googling "feminist porn" may be a good starting point. I hope that being deliberate about your porn consumption and adjusting your framework for thinking about it helps ease your internal conflict a bit. There's no reason that porn can't be consumed ethically and be a health part of your sexuality.

Kink toy: Violet wand Vibrator: Wahl - even better than the Hitachi Insertable: Njoy Pure Wand - the holy grail of g-spot & prostate toys

I suppose you could always ask a provider if they are open to using them and then bring some of your own? They're pretty expensive, but can be obtained for free from some places (I could provide suggestions for Winnipeg but I'm not familiar with other cities.) Though they are better once you've had some time to experiment and get used to them, so I could understand not wanting to try them for the first time with someone who is also trying them for the first time, particularly with an average length session.

Possibly. I'm a bit more optimistic. I do agree that most clients and many workers aren't going to do anything to draw attention to themselves until stigma has been addressed. However, there's a growing number of mainstream public health and human rights organizations that are taking a rights and evidence based stance on sex work. They have both resources and credibility to push decriminalization forward. As we've seen, globally there is little appetite for openly taking a morality-based stance on sex work, and most organizations and governments would prefer to cast us all as victims of trafficking and exploitation (still a morality based stance, but one in denial of itself.) While this is still bad for clients and sex workers alike, it does make it a bit harder to justify legislation that is designed to harm us. The desire to ostensibly save us from harm provides a point where we can apply pressure toward better laws (much harder to do if we are all just cast as immoral, social deviants.) In addition, while sex work is stigmatized the world over, there have been some significant successes, most notably New Zealand's 2003 Prostitution Reform Act, which decriminalized sex work and was developed in consultation with sex workers. While not perfect, it's pretty damned good, and was accomplished without a large movement of clients applying pressure. It's going to take some time, C-36/PCEPA in the wake of Bedford was a pretty big blow, but I think we'll get there.

Given that there are ongoing sweeps and stings in many Canadian cities, non-enforcement is not a reality. This includes recent stings in Winnipeg airport hotels and body rub parlour raids in Toronto. The city of Montreal is looking to start cracking down on erotic massage parlours as well. While indoor workers may not be a law enforcement priority, it's naive to think that law enforcement is taking a harm reduction or hands off approach to indoor sex work. That's inaccurate. Most of these groups are members of the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform which is working for broad decriminalization, and work with a diversity of sex workers, which may include but are not limited to street-based workers. And while you may see street-based sex work as a public nuisance and significantly different from indoor sex work, the sex workers' rights movement does not. Zones of tolerance and other legislation that pushes sex workers into areas that are more dangerous to work (such as industrial areas), or where they are removed from where the clients are will always fail. These types of laws continue to criminalize sex workers and to my knowledge are never created in consultation with the sex workers who will be impacted by them. Street-based sex work cannot be excluded from the discourse or movement for sex workers rights. All sex work occurs on a continuum, and if we want to make things better for sex workers and their clients, we need solutions that do so for all sex workers and their clients. Addressing legal barriers to working indoors will help address the "nuisance" of street-based work. Beyond that, a more holistic push to address the social factors that drive people to "survival" work will have further positive impact on street-based sex work - so addressing poverty, an insufficient social safety net, housing insecurity, lack of affordable education, economic factors that push people to leave their home communities for bigger cities where they lack a support system, employment discrimination against trans people, etc. Clients don't have to support the organizations and work that already exists, but it would be prudent to do so. Sex workers have been organizing for decades, and have created a vibrant and robust global movement. I have yet to see any meaningful movement toward clients organizing for decriminalization. While you may view the work of sex workers rights organizations to be a failure, there have been many successes in an uphill battle against stigma and moralizing. If clients don't want to support sex worker orgs, how are they going to show up and advocate for decriminalization? How will they participate in applying the public pressure that definitely is necessary to create change?

Sex workers are already extremely active in lobbying and advocating for decriminalization. If you're a client who cares about decrim, consider donating to your local sex worker organization, that is already doing this work. These groups do amazing, important work, usually with next to no money. Unsurprisingly, grants and government funding are thin on the ground. https://www.butterflysw.org/ http://maggiestoronto.ca/ http://chezstella.org/en/ http://www.pivotlegal.org/ http://www.pace-society.org/ https://sunshinehousewpg.org/ http://www.shiftcalgary.org/ http://steppingstonens.ca/ And many others.

These things concern me more than anything else you've mentioned. Your consent around what types of substances are used on your body is really important. If you ask for no fragrances you should be able to count on no fragrances being used on you. In addition, whether or not the fragrance itself is an issue for you, scented wax is not a particularly safe choice for wax play. The different additives for colour and fragrance can make the melting point higher than expected or just unpredictable, which could result in burns (beeswax is also not recommended for this reason.) Plain, unscented cheap paraffin is the best choice for wax play. Marks should also be something that is negotiated, not a surprise discovery when you get home. While bodies can be unpredictable, and all BDSM play comes with some risk, unnegotiated marks should be a very rare occurrence for a skilled practitioner who is familiar with their tools. And when an unexpected mark happens, it would be more like a single mark from an entire session, not leaving a client covered in them. It sounds like this provider is perhaps a bit out of her depth when it comes to BDSM skills and safety knowledge, and that's always concerning. We call it play, but many activities carry the risk of serious injury or even death if not done right, so safety should always be taken extremely seriously.

Just be aware that Paypal is an extremely sex worker-unfriendly business, and many people have had their accounts closed and their funds held just for being sex workers, even if they never use Paypal for their work. If you do use it, make sure you withdraw all your funds immediately, ever time, to reduce the risk of them being held indefinitely. Use an email address that's not associated with your work name, and make sure clients are very discreet about what the money is for. For Canada, Interac email money transfer seems to be the safest way to transfer a deposit.

Skyns are great. Polyisoprene is nicer than latex. FC2 female/internal condoms are also fantastic once you get used to them.