As has been noted, the Stranger column is now up...
And life is good today. The bank balance is high, the scale is low, and I've got two parties to go to tonight. A good day to be me.

Okay, I have no idea why my column isn't on The Stranger website yet. It's in the paper version, so I know it's not an editorial statement of any kind. As soon as I see that it is up - or if I get any new information - I'll post a link. But for now, I'm as clue-free as you guys.

In other news... Interesting note from a reader.

Dear Mistress Matisse,
I am a 32 year old butch top girl whose had lots of sex with women. I love to dominate, take charge, and "service" a woman for hours… For me, the intentionality, the planning, is wonderfully creative and incredibly sexy. These encounters have been beautiful and hot--and always safe, in that delicious, slightly dangerous way. (I swear I was programmed for this when I saw American Gigolo in my teens---remember how hard Richard Gere worked to make that one woman come?). My question to you: if I can figure out a way to provide this service professionally without running afoul of the law, do you think there are enough women (gay or straight) out there with the desire and the money to spend on it? My impression, from my years of unscientific research, is that lots of women fantasize about being dominated, but haven't found the right person to bring them there. I love being that person.

Dear Butch Top,

Short answer: No. Sorry.

Now, the longer version is: sure, try it, you might get a client once every couple of months. If you can put up a free web page somewhere and you have access to a dungeon, then why not? But don't invest any serious money in it, and definitely don't quit your day job.

Here are the problems. Number one: while I personally quite like butch women, it's not a taste that's shared by every woman in the world - or even most of them. Nearly all of those women who do like butches are lesbians.

Now, from that already-small group, subtract all the vanilla lesbians. The pool just got a lot smaller. What you have left: kinky lesbians (and the occasional kinky straight/bi girl who can appreciate butches) who aren't finding what they need in non-commercial settings and who are open to the idea of seeking out a sex worker to gratify those desires. My call would be: that's actually a pretty teensy group.

Then there's the money issue. Lesbians as a group spend very little money on sex workers. Some lesbians just don't have the money, period, but even more prosperous dykes don't do this in any measurable numbers. And straight girls do not pursue sex workers, of any gender or any variety, the same way men do, either. I recently wrote a column about gigolos, and a lot of it would apply just as much to you as it does to men.

So: a very small potential client base, who don't spend much money. That's not a recipe for success.

Then there are the potential clients themselves. I have played with many, many women in my personal life, and I have had three long-term female submissives, and that's all been pretty great.

But my experience with seeing female clients has been almost all bad - in some cases, really bad. Out of about twenty, I have had exactly one female client who was cool. The rest of them ranged from disquieting to downright whacko. I wrote about my experiences here,and also on this blog here and here.

So I've been stalked by women clients, I've been dissed, and I've had a lot of weird, unsatisfying scenes that didn't make me feel good about myself professionally. Thus, I will no longer see female clients. If you decide you want 'em, you can sure have mine.

(Aside to blog readers: the no-female-clients policy has been discussed extensively here, so please read through all of the columns, posts and comments before you post a question/remarks about my policy, because chances are it’s already been answered/explained.)

BTW, if you have any kind of sexual contact with your would-be clients, you'll be breaking the law. Your chances of getting busted are quite slim, but still, it would be a possibility.

Hope that answers your questions. If you try it and get tons of clients, drop me a note and tell me I was wrong. I'd be pleased to be mistaken about this, as I truly love the idea of a butch pro domme.

I'm devastated by this. I would have campaigned for him!

But I've got a very busy day lined up, so that's all for now...

Thought-provoking dinner with Miss K last night. She tried to explain to me why so many people seem to really want there to be a right and wrong way to be kinky.

I don’t mean the people who try to insist that everyone should do BDSM their way and only their way because it is The Only Right Way. That’s clearly ego and insecurity. We call those folks “One True Wayers” - or OTWs for short.

No, I mean all the people who write to me urgently asking what are the Proper BDSM Rules about how to kneel down/blow their nose/write a love letter/shave their genitals/whatever while in the presence of a dominant/submissive. Not my presence personally, you understand, just a random kinky person.

Is it okay to wear blue jeans while you do a scene, or do I have to dress up? Should I always address my top as "Master", even though he said I can call him Bob? Is it permissable to wear a collar even if you don't currently have a mistress?

What the heck? I’ve been saying for years “You get to do this however you (and your partner) want to.” Come one, people, do you really think there’s some great rule book in the sky dictating every single little activity in kink? Do you think you can look up “dominant nose blowing” and get some kind of spec sheet for that? Forget it. When it comes to configuring our kink, we’re making up most of this as we go along, both as individuals and as a culture. That, to me, is one of the coolest things about the BDSM community. I have never understood why some folks seemed to be begging to exchange one set of restrictive rules of behavior (vanilla culture) for another.

Miss K and I were talking about this and she said, “Look, the thing is, people are convinced that there must be rules, somewhere, and they just want to know what they are so they don’t break them and get in trouble. You try to tell them that they get to invent this, but they don’t trust that. It’s because somewhere, they broke a rule they didn’t know about and caught hell for it."

“Besides,” she went on, “there are rules in BDSM. Like, you don’t touch people.”

"That’s different. That’s etiquette towards people you don’t know well. That’s not about what you do with your partner.”

“I know you understand the difference, but not everyone does. You see having no rules as freedom, but for some people, it’s scary and hard to trust. What if we do it wrong? How will we know if what we’re doing is really BDSM?”

“What the hell else would it be if you put nipple clamps on someone and spanked them?"(I love that I can just rant with Miss K and she know how to take me.)

So I’m thinking about this. The reason that OTWs can convince people that there is a Real and True Way is because the idea that there are no rules scares them. Interesting…

This 'n That...

This is all very entertaining, and possibly helpful for CBT newbies... Except for number fifteen. The Mistress says: Do not twist a ballsack, ever. Pull, yes. Twist, no. You can damage the little tubes that carry sperm if you do that. (And no, it’s not really an effective birth-control method, either.)

Oh my God, do I so want to be his intern.

I thought I had weirdo phone calls. At least no one has ever tried to mail-order me.

Good communication is so important in poly. Or at least good timing. But I would have gladly paid 126 dollars to get out of some of my past relationships this easily. (Hell, I'd of had the triple-bypass operation.)

A snapshot from the party at the Abbey Saturday night. (No, no one else was allowed to take pictures, but, hey, I’m special. Plus it was really late and hardly anyone was still there.)



The picture looks a little weird because I had to turn the brightness way up high in Photoshop. But I kind of like the grainy, gritty look of the image. And the Abbey is an industrial space, so I think it conveys a sense of that.

That’s my sweetheart, Max, getting ready to suspend a sweet young thing, who can identify herself if she wants to. The girl in blue hanging out next to him was a certain bratty young lady who was bold enough to swat Max on the butt, and look what happened to her. Poor thing. We all felt so sorry for her. Not!

Max likes to play at parties, and he and I are frequently among the last to leave if he's on a roll, as he was Saturday night. I think he suspended four different women. They don't call my honey "the Death Star of evil" for nothing.

Other party tidbits: I ran into an old pal of mine, Danielle, who’s been living in Japan for the last few years and who was just in town for a visit. It was cool to catch up with her, and she mentioned that she has a friend there, a boy named Tim, who likes to read my blog. (I think she said he’s a university student?) It’s sort of wild to think of people in Japan reading me, but I like it. So: Hi, Tim! Thanks for reading.

Gord, of House Of Gord, showed up with a truckload of kinky machinery and gave us some dampness-inspiring demos of his nefarious bondage devices. In my fantasy world, I have Gord locked in a laboratory/workshop where he does nothing except invent new toys for me to play with.

The folks from TheThrillHammer.com brought over two really lovely fucking machines, which several women were persuaded to try out, much to our collective delight. I like my fucking machine that Mike made me, but now I think I may need another one.

You can read a few other accounts of the event here, here and I'm guessing there will soon be some remarks about it here as well… I have a few more photos but I’m waiting to get a green light from the people in them before I post.

It was a great party - thanks to Monk and Tambo for throwing it. And thanks a bunch to all the people, many of them blog readers, who volunteered their help to make it happen.

Had a lovely post-birthday date with Roman last night. I think we raised the general perversion level in Seattle a few notches all by ourselves. Knee sex! And needles. Woot. We were quite wiped out afterwards...

Read about other interesting social events in my life lately…

I saw a young woman walking down Broadway a few days ago, and it made me sad. I don’t know her, but I know who she is. I recognize her from her website photos, although she’s changed a lot since they were taken. And not for the better.

The photos I saw, beginning about a year ago, showed a thin, disturbingly young-looking woman posing on a bed. She called herself “a Lolita” and offered her services as an escort. Now, ya’ll know I support sex work and sex workers. But several things about this woman bothered me. Aside from the fact that I wasn’t convinced she was eighteen, underneath the artlessly brazen sexuality of the photos and the text, she just seemed…dangerously fragile somehow. Not someone I’d pick out as being well-suited to the job.

But I learned a long time ago that I can’t fix people who I think are broken. They have to choose to fix themselves. Or not. I could only hope that she’d take advantage of the resources sex work offers – more free time and more money – to take care of herself and work out the issues I suspected she had.

She hasn’t. She looked like shit, frankly. I’ve seen her a lot on Broadway in the last year, and she always looked a little…odd. But this last time, I would have thought she was a homeless person if I hadn’t just seen a post from her on one of the local escort boards a few days before. She was very dirty - the kind of dirty that takes days of not bathing to really accumulate. Her hair was straggly and matted, and it looked like she’d been hacking at it with scissors. Her clothes were stained and mismatched. And just the way she was stumbling along the sidewalk, slump-shouldered and vacant-eyed... If you looked up “junkie homeless person” in the dictionary, this would be the illustration.

Of course, I thought, I don’t really know that she’s a junkie. But it’s extremely likely. The other possibility is that she has some kind of undiagnosed/untreated mental illness. And it could be a double-header: drugs and mental illness.

I'd seen posts from this little waif - long, rambling, badly-spelled missives inviting guys to just come meet her at a certain rendezvous. Don’t try to call, she said, because by some mistake on the part of the phone company, her cell had been shut off. Yeah, a mistake. It’s just sad, because once upon a time she was a sweet, pretty little girl, and she lost her way somewhere.

Sex work isn’t the cause of her downhill slide, though. I’m quite sure that she was broken inside when she came into the industry. And it’s funny how doing sex work affects broken people in either one of two ways.

For some people, it sort of buoys them up for a while. They feel relieved from the pressure to try to be well, and they just relax into a state of somewhat-functional craziness. If they live modestly, they don’t have to work very much to keep the rent (more or less) paid and have food to eat. The rest of the time they can just feel however they’re feeling, and if that means talking to people no one else can see, or staying in bed with the covers over their head for two or three days, well, they can do that. No need to worry much about appearing normal and showing up for that eight-to-five thing. And even when they are actually working, a certain level of quirky weirdness is okay with clients, as long as one fulfills the job description.

I’m not saying this is a good thing in the long-term, you understand. But I’ve known a lot of women who were able to sort of limp through life in this way, never getting to a place of wholeness and wellness, but managing to avoid out-right implosion.

But for other people – like this little waif - it just speeds up the race to self-destruction. They have lots of time and money to spend trying to numb themselves to the pain they’re in, and there’s a lot of ways that can go badly. They remove themselves from places where people might say, “Uh, hey, honey – you don’t look so good. Maybe you should see a doctor or something.” Their isolation works against them, not for them.

It’s not that clients won’t say something. There are plenty of soft-hearted guys around who’ll try to help out a damsel who’s clearly in distress. But even if she’s willing to accept help from them – which is unlikely - there are limits to what they can do. Their first responsibility is to their own lives, and unless they have some training in dealing with her issues, their efforts are likely to be kindly-meant but ineffectual.

I myself have gotten burned trying to rescue people way to often too get involved with this young person. That’s been a hard lesson for me to learn in this life. But I have learned it, so she’ll have to work out her destiny however she chooses.

But it is sad.

What Am I Looking At?

Oh, I can see that these people meant well – but this just seems in poor taste somehow. (And no, I don’t mean the minty stuff.)

"What happens when a middle-aged man with a beer belly decides to mimic the poses of his models?" This so cracked me up. I’ve modeled for several male photographers who showed me the poses they wanted by doing it themselves, and most of the time, they looked about this silly. But I think it's impressively bold of him to do it and post the photos, and I do totally get the self-portrait thing. It’s handy when you have no models around.

I’ve had several people send me this link. It’s a little video of people’s faces while they masturbate to orgasm. It’s a cute concept, and it’s nicely executed, but I fail to see what makes people think it’s so fantastically hip and cool, exactly? I mean, I have no problem, but - is this really so revolutionary?

God, that was a nice massage last night. It's funny, I've gotten a number of professional massages from different LMTs over the years, and most of them have been pretty ehh. I mean, the part when they were doing my neck and shoulders and back was nice enough, but I was unimpressed with the rest of it. It just didn't feel that great, and I didn't feel particularly different/better afterwards. I thought maybe I just hadn't found the right person, so I kept trying different practioners. But it always seemed the same, and after awhile the idea of paying money for an experience I really wasn't enjoying that much seemed dumb. So I just stopped doing it.

But I have friends and lovers, who aren't trained professionals, give me massages that I loooooove. Go figure. Jae gives great massages, as does Malixe. And Max and Roman both rub me the right way, too. I have no idea why I so enjoy getting massages in that kind of context, but not a professional one. It's not like I'm hung up about having a stranger touch me. And I sure don't mind paying to get what I want. (Remind me to give the "money keeps it clean" speech here sometime.) But that's how it's been: I love getting massaged - but only by generous amateurs.

So last night was a first, although it was sort of a cross-over situation. Mark is a trained bodyworker - although he claims to be retired from massage - but he did this hour-plus massage just as a favor to me, which was very sweet. A little bonding experience with a new friend.

My apprehension was misplaced. Mark Yu sweetly massaged me into a nearly boneless state of relaxation. More later...

A busy weekend around here. We had bondage instructor and body worker Mark Yu up from San Diego, and he taught two cool workshops. I had to miss the Saturday class, but the Sunday one, Bondage Bio-mechanics, was very cool. It was basically about how to assess and cope with individual people’s physical abilities and limitations, in terms of range of motion and flexibility, and how to design rope bondage that works with their bodies instead of against it. I like learning about how to work with people's bodies.

And Mark is definitely a great body worker – he did some acupuncture on Max Friday night, and also some back and body adjustments on him both Friday and Saturday nights. I don’t know exactly what kind of therapy he calls the hands-on stuff – it’s Chinese, I think. I should ask him. But it seemed effective. Max wasn’t in any kind of acute pain, but his body gets tense and stiff, and what Mark did seemed to help. I think he’s going to work on me tonight. I'm looking forward to it, but I’m also slightly nervous, because this is not gentle Swedish massage, it’s pretty intense, almost like rolfing. Pray for me.

We all attended the Bondage Is The Point party at the Wet Spot Sunday night, which was fun. I taught Roman how to do play piercing. I've stuck needles in him, but he’s never been the piercer before. And his wife T. had never been pierced, so it was a first time for them both. I put just one in T, the first one, mostly to make sure if that she had a hard time with it, it would be with me, not him. It’s always harder to deal with your primary partner having difficulty than anyone else. But she was fine, and he did just great, as I knew he would. We went off into a side room with the curtains closed to do this, because we thought if things got intense, we might want privacy. However, we wound up having a really good time and getting very endorphin-high, and all of our friends said the sound of our laughter coming out of the room was very enticing.

Plus, I got a delicious foot massage. Who could ask for a better night?

Call for Volunteers

So, Monk is doing a kinky event next Saturday night - an event at Max and I will, of course, be guests - and he needs some staff. He's looking for smart, reliable people to help out with very basic stuff like being a door person, food and drink support team, and cleanup. In return, you get some fabulous handmade Twisted Monk rope, and you get to hang out at a cool party with me and Max and Tambo and all the rest of the weird, glamorous, sincerely perverted gang. If you'd like to volunteer, drop him a note...

Wow, it's hot. And I hate the Blue Angels. I don't hate them as much as my cat does, but still, we're united in our deep, deep dislike of this whole jets-screaming-right-over-the-house thing. In fact, I pretty much hate SeaFair in general, so I will be a cranky Mistress indeed this weekend. Luckily for you, you can just go read me. Bah.

Ah, the dreaded blogger fatigue.... I do feel this way some days. So maybe I'll take a break today. Back tomorrow...

PostScript: But wait - this is hopeful news. Goverment may back down on some parts of new adult entertainment regulations 18 U.S.C. 2257.

Still Catching My Breath

Whew. It’s been sort of crazy around here since we got back from Denver. Last week the gods of all things mechanical definitely frowned upon me, as first my car went dead and then my computer was infested. Luckily, I got both issues resolved fairly easily. (The car was easier to deal with than the flipping computer. I’m still plucking small bits of adware out the innards, but it’s way better than it was.)

And we’ve had Midori here as a houseguest for the last few days. She’s stayed with us so often, though, it’s now kind of a non-event. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that she’s become like one of the family, which is nice. I was too busy fighting viruses to go to a certain barbeque that she and Max stopped in on Sunday night, but he tells me I had some readers there. So: Hi, sorry I missed meeting ya’ll. But yes, that was MY Max. He said the food was amazing, BTW, so kudos to the chefs.

And no sooner will Midori leave us than we’ll have another guest. Bondage instructor Mark Yu arrives Thursday to stay with us for his weekend of workshops. It’s like Hotel Kink around here, I swear. But it’ll be interesting to meet Mark, since both Max and Roman speak highly of him at seeing him at ShibariCon. I’m sure his classes will be great, I’m looking forward to them.

And hey, ladies: Mark’s single, and he’s looking for pretty girls to tie up while he’s in town. I haven’t seen him, but Max and Roman say he’s nice-looking, and he certainly knows his way around a suspension point. So show up and bat your eyes at him, who knows what could happen.

That’s all for now, I think. I’m still getting caught up on my life. But I have a long post brewing in my head about sex work for later this week. It’ll talk about why doing sex work can be good for some people, but not so good for others.

I'm about to head off into my afternoon, but I had to put this up: If you go to college in Wisconsin, stop fucking! Unless you want to get pregnant and/or an STD. Contraceptive Rights Rolled Back In Wisconson.
Amazing. It won't stop there, either. Wait for it.

Okay, I think we have it under control. Finally. You guys were extremely helpful, thank you. Max liked your suggestions and booted in Safe Mode and twiddled some stuff, renaming and so on, and I think it worked. I'm being cautious and waiting before I declare certain victory. But I think we may be okay here.

God, spyware software writers are scum, aren't they? Maybe next time someone wants me to do a scene where I'm mad at them, instead of pretending they're Karl Rove or Rick Santorum, I'll pretend they're malware people. I'd tear them up...

We'll return to non-emergency blogging tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm going to do all the stuff I was going to do this past weekend, instead of wrassling with my machine.

The Perfidy of Spyware

All right, here's an appeal to the software geeks out there. Friday night, after I clicked on an ill-advised webpage, a huge flock of adware/spyware - and one Trojan virus - settled onto my computer and proceeded to wreak havoc. Grrr. (No, I didn't agree to download something - I'm not that stupid. It just leapt on me. I wasn't wearing a short skirt or anything.)

Now, after many, many tedious scans and sweeps with Norton and Spysweeper and Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy, I've quarantined and deleted nearly all of the offending parties. But there is one thing, though, that keeps popping up and throwing SpySweeper into a panic. It's something called "system service62". Every time I reboot - and there's been a lot of rebooting in the last 36 hours - up pops SpySweeper telling me oh, oh, oh this is something bad. But whatever it is, it craftily evades our attempts to isolate and kill it. Thanks a bunch, SpySweeper, you're a regular Cassandra.

What is this and why is it freaking out one of my spyware program ? I've googled it, but found nothing comprehensible. I've checked with these guys and they don't recognize it. But it seems like it's something nasty, because while I think I've mostly got things under control, there are still some little glitches that make me think there's some funny stuff lurking under rocks. I'm definitely running a little slow, and something keeps changing my desktop background, re-arranging my icons, and resetting my IE* home page to MSN.com, all of which is highly annoying.

Suggestions? Other than "get a Mac" or "get Linux" which aren't helpful at the moment.

(*Yes, I should try a different browser, yeah yeah yeah... Up until this moment it's not been an issue, okay?)

More reader questions answered in the column this week....

And geeze, who knew ya'll would be so curious about the Sunday post? I probably shouldn't have said anything, because I am not going to give you any more information, sorry. It was a purely personal event, and a rather minor one in the grand scheme of things. It was just a happy, pretty day, with many happy, pretty people saying happy, pretty things to me that made me feel good. And I just felt like expressing my good happy prettiness.