Stuff you must read today (Fri, 4 Oct 2013) – The Erotic Services Edition

Fri, 4 Oct 2013
2 min read
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Fortunately or unfortunately, the only service provided here is education.

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  • The Awesome Sex Worker Who Loves Disabled Clients | Jezebel
    Eye-opening; hadn’t even been aware about this issue until reading the article and watching the video.
     
  • True Stories: I Was A Receptionist In An Australian Brothel | Nerve
    “Sometimes they ask me if I’m tempted to jump the counter, make $250 an hour instead of $30. My Australian blue-collar boyfriend angrily asked me the same question when I first started work… . The guys who call, overwhelmed by all the choices I offer them, frequently say, “You sound nice. Can I just have you?” I laugh and tell them no”.
     
  • Adventures in Ideas: Sex Workers of the World, Unite! An Interview With Maxine Doogan | Freakonomics
    “…I met several exotic dancers who didn’t think of themselves as sex workers… . It was important to them to protect their legal work status and not admit that some of their activities inside the dance clubs involved sex… . Then there are those who call themselves specific names like escorts or courtesans as a means of separating their activities from prostitutes because they don’t want to be associated with something that carries so many negative social stigmas and results in so much discrimination… . That’s why I named our organization Erotic Service Providers – it speaks more specifically to the fact that our labor is erotic in nature without using the hot button ‘sex’ word, but still calls out how our respective sub-economies have intersections that [a]ffect each other”.
     
  • The Year I Spent As A Phone-Sex Operator | Nerve
    “Being a phone-sex operator was a lot like sitting in a confessional when the priest is away. You hear private things that should probably be told to someone else, but they need to be told to someone, so it might as well be you”.
     
  • Storytime with… A Happy Endings Masseur for Women | Nerve
    “Women aren’t generally known to be the recipients of happy ending massages. Is there a hidden demand that you’re meeting?

    Absolutely. Clients’ attitudes are, when it comes to happy endings, why should men have all the fun? With nearly 300 individual clients to date, many of whom are regulars, there’s obviously a strong demand for this kind of thing”.

Propriety

Tue, 1 Oct 2013
2 min read
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Young, thundering herd

So I had just commenced my Literature lesson yesterday when one of the boys (Boy A) abruptly walked into the classroom.

I eyed Boy A irritably, annoyed that he was late but I didn’t make a fuss about it.

Until Boy A went right up to another boy (Boy B), casually handed him a homework assignment that belonged to yet another boy and had a very congenial and drawn-out tête-à-tête with Boy B before returning to his place, all while right in front of me.

By then, I was pointedly glaring at both boys but they didn’t notice anything amiss, until I said in a sharp tone, “Eh, you all don’t even have a sense of propriety, is it?”

Because the point I was going to make was about how they needed to have the courtesy to:

  • Be punctual for the lesson;
  • Greet the teacher when they enter the classroom;
  • Be polite and not disrupt the lesson, etc. – good manners, in other words.

But there was somewhat of a long silence and a bit of uncomfortable squirming in the classroom before Boy A piped up to ask, “Sir – what is ‘propriety’?”

“…”

I eventually pointed out to them the need to learn about decorum and etiquette.

Before that, we did a bit of vocabulary: I told them that “propriety” has the same root word as “appropriate”, where both are derived from the Latin word for “proper”.

On a separate note, the class has a class flag on which is inscribed the words “Young, thundering herd” (it’s on the left-hand side of the picture).

It cracks me up; I always break into a grin whenever I see it, because it proves my point about the universality of pigletry.