If I’m honest, in my moments of greatest pain, loneliness, rejection, perceived abandonment, what I want more than anything isn’t sex. No, it’s sex with someone I’m paying. This was true before I reined in my out-of-control behavior, and it’s true since. I’d rather dial a familiar number and see a woman I’m paying to [...]
A couple of questions: 1) Do you believe that one can make a positive, self-actualizing decision to do sex work? 2) (How) is sex work different from other forms of manual labor, or labor involving one’s body? Just to ponder…. One of the things that struck me in my years of sexually acting out, among [...]
Even more than sex, or commercial sex, during my days of “addiction,” I was compelled by web sites about sex, web sites that promised sex. There are a few categories of these, ranging from the utopian ones that promise free and easy sexual connections with an infinitude of willing partners (Craigslist’s “casual encounters” section, Adult [...]
I wrote the other day about how I sometimes use porn (and, incidentally, used commercial sex) not when I’m feeling intense sexual desire, but when I’m deep on the opposite side of the desire spectrum, when I’m feeling pain, numb, or worse, almost dead. I’ve been thinking more about this, entertaining a counterintuitive – and, [...]
The other day, I wrote a bit about the trajectory of most of the relationships I had during my CPOS days, when I was routinely paying for sex. Today, I don’t pay for sex. (As with all things, the truth is a bit more complicated – the nature of dating, even of poly/swinger/postmodern dating, especially [...]
In a couple of recent posts, I’ve written about “paid dating,” or “compensated dating.” I have a tag that is “commercial sex.” A reader asked if I wasn’t just sugar-coating what is, in fact, prostitution, by using other words. The answer, clearly, is yes. But I would say that it’s yes with a big “but.” [...]
A couple of the comments on my recent post on paid dating (a.k.a. prostitution) took me to task for “haggling” on a “date.” I fear I was unclear about either the general way such dates work, or what happened on this particular one. Money is rarely discussed – at least by me – before the [...]
I had a couple more thoughts after writing this post. First, I realize that in one little phrase – “if we hit it off” – I skipped over a giant portion of the process of reaching a mutually beneficial arrangement. In fact, I hit it off with very few of the women with whom I [...]
Some time ago, I wrote a bit about how trust evolves in virtual relationships. I thought I’d write a bit about how it evolves in commercial sex (or at least, how it did for me), since I suspect that’s actually an area with which fewer of the readers of this blog have extensive experience. Here’s how [...]
I’m in a bit of a relationship/sexuality jag, reading-wise, and right now, I’m reading The Erotic Mind, by Jack Morin. It’s a sort of pop-psychology guide to how to think about eroticism, desire, arousal, excitement, purporting to be a somewhat scientific study of people’s responses to a survey instrument. On the one hand, it’s clearly bad [...]
