Wow, it's 2009 - first post for the new year. I got together with a number of my closest friends to see the old year out. We missed a few pals who had to be elsewhere (hi, Candy and MC!), but otherwise, it was a lovely, champagne-y evening with bondage, naked people, needles, and people getting pantsed. Of course, we had a lot of really gorgeously-gowned women and sharply-attired men, in addition to the naked people. I myself find the contrast between the two extremes quite charming.

And I'm ready for January. A lot of good things are going to happen this year, I feel sure of it. I'm going to start 2009 off with a super-busy day today, catching up with some people I have missed because of the snowstorm. So while I do that, please enjoy the latest installment of the polayamory web-series by the Seattle-based film group 3 Dog Pictures: Family, Episode 4 "10 O'clock News"

Happy day - it's a new podcast! (Finally, right? I know.)

First, Monk does a crazy 30-second riff on what a porn movie would sound like - on radio. (You’ll just have to listen to it.)

And then we address a letter from a reader who asks “Since monogamy is not an option, how do you make your primary partner feel special in a polyamorous relationship?” Monk and I have some thoughts about that, so listen and enjoy! About sixteen minutes.

Monk and I were sitting in the hot tub at Banya5 last night, talking about someone we know who lately started a business selling BDSM gear. It isn’t someone either of us know very well, so we can’t say if they will succeed in this or not. We certainly wish them good luck.

But privately, we tend to be a tad skeptical. It’s simply that, over the years, we’ve both seen a lot of people start kink-related businesses… And then, in a fairly short amount of time, they go out of business.

Most small businesses fail, that’s just a statistical fact. Both my parents own their own businesses, and it’s a lot of work. You have no idea how much, until you start doing it. So even though being a pro domme is quite different from the things my parents do, I knew from the start what being self-employed would entail.

Monk knows that too. It’s funny - people who are interested in our businesses ask us a lot of the same questions about how to succeed. And we give them more or less the same answers. “It’s going to take some time, and you’re going to have to work really hard.”

Naturally there are a lot more subtleties and complexities to both our careers than that. But if you don’t have the takes-time/work-hard part going on, then the rest of it doesn’t matter, because you won’t get that far.

One of the things I’ve observed about kink-businesses is this: if what you’re selling mainly appeals to dedicated, lifestyle BDSM people, you better have an awesome and unique product, and you better be a super-duper marketer. Because that’s a fairly small pool of customers, and there’s a lot of competition for their money. I think in some circles, there’s a belief that just being a kinky person means you’re well-suited to run a kink-related business. Or maybe that other kinky people will recognize you as one of their own, and unfailingly support you with their dollars. Neither is true. You have to learn it, and you have to earn it.

But no matter what you’re selling, there is one thing I think is indispensable to success. That is: you have to believe in what you’re doing.

No, I mean really, really believe in it. Take me: I believe that being a sex worker, specifically a professional dominant, is the single best job for me. I love doing this. This is who I am. Yes, there are down-sides and annoying things, and aspects that make it tricky, but I would not swap it for any other career I can think of. I get a charge out of what I do, and I think I’m creating something really cool every time I do it. It sounds a trifle melodramatic to say I was born for this, but it seems that way sometimes. I think Monk feels that way about running his company, too.

And it’s that passion for what you do that gets you through the tough times. The times where you aren’t making much money, the competition is nipping at your heels, and every snafu that can befall a business owner is happening to you. If you don’t have the passion when those times come around, you are going to fold up your tent and leave. I suppose it’s like being in a relationship, and your business is the lover. If you’re not really in love, you’ll walk out when it gets hard.

I have a sense that most people who set up shop as kink-related businesses are not passionately in love with what they do. And in an already-tough market, lack of passion will doom your small-business love affair.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it!

I am planning on staying pretty close to home today, but I think I'll have a lovely, mellow day with people I love, and that's something worth doing any day of the year.

I hope you have a happy day, too, wherever you are...

Sigh. I have been frustrated, since last Thursday, by being unable to achieve anything of any satisfaction or import whatsoever that involved leaving the house. And yet, even though I have been doing nothing except dealing with the most banal necessities of life, I have had no time to do anything such as, for example, write more. It's amazing how much time and energy it takes to be stir-crazy.

However, yesterday saw some definite improvements in the snow situation, and I think that today I might actually get at least some portion of my normal life back. At which point I will undoubtedly start complaining about how busy I am am and how I have no time to stay quietly at home. Because that's just how I am, apparently.

Monk very carefully navigated my car downtown last night, and we saw Frost/Nixon. There were exactly three other patrons in the theater. Apparently not many people were willing to brave the ice-slick sidewalks to watch ninety minutes of two men talking.

However, we liked it. The whole cast did nicely, but Frank Langella did a masterly turn as Tricky Dick. You got a sense, that I had never seen before, that Nixon had a bizarre, slightly intimidating charm. Perhaps not charm, exactly, but something that attracted you, even as it made you uneasy. Not sexy - no, never that. But a personal power, and something compelling. I kept watching Langella, remembering him as the 1979 Dracula. This was in some way a negative image of that character. In both roles, there's a depiction a man who has power, and who is willing to be savage in the pursuit of more, and who feels justified by his circumstances in doing so. But Nixon is not a romantic figure to anyone, perhaps because of his unease, his palpable dislike, for most people.

Think snow-melting thoughts for me, please.

Okay, the word "shibari" has now officially jumped the shark. Not that this isn't a very cute dress, because it is. I'd wear it. But when Saks Fifth Avenue is selling something called "Shibari Shift Dress", it's no longer an in-group sort of word.

A mere $1495. But I'm sure there will be knock-offs soon. I think it's highly amusing!

I was snowed in all day yesterday, which was slightly annoying, since I had a date I wanted to keep. But there was no way I was driving anywhere. True, I do have a four-wheel drive Audi, but four-wheel drive doesn't really help if all four wheels are on ice, a fact seemingly lost on many Seattle drivers I have seen spinning like roulette wheels on the slick hills.

However, I made the best of a quiet day at home. And I am proud to say that thus far, I have not verbally flayed anyone who started chirping at me about pretty the snow was. That has not always been the case, in winters gone by. But I am learning to be both compassionate and self-disciplined about the views of people who actually like this stuff.

However, if this snowbound nonsense keeps up, I would not push that with me. If I wanted non-stop Winter Wonderland, I'd have moved to Chicago instead of Seattle. I have a life to live, and places to go. Thus, when it snows, I would advise you to not discuss the weather with me, unless you're prepared to endorse my view that vast quantities of frozen water falling from the sky is only slightly better than, say, a rain of frogs.

Puck and I are so mean. Look what we did! But you know, if someone buys you a box of sixteen-gauge needles and gives them to you, well - what can one do? One has to use them. It would be a crime not to!

Click on the image if you dare. It's a big, big needle! That black thing is a clamp, by the way. Because if you're putting needles that big through nipples, it's important to get some tension on the flesh. Otherwise, it's hard to push the needle through quickly, and you get a sort of dragging effect, instead of the quick punch through the flesh that I enjoy.

Of course, I'm told there are people who like putting needles in really slowly. Now that's mean!

The latest in a web-series about polyamory, called "Family." This one has nudity, so it's not work-safe.
I will also remark that if one was conducting an secret affair, I would think that one would not talk about it loudly in a Pilates studio, in front of one's (clearly disapproving) trainer, as if she were a post or something. Regardless of the subject matter, I'd do something painful to someone like that just for the rudeness of acting as if I weren't there. I forsee this guy getting some comeuppance in future episodes.

Today I'm off to spend a few days with a friend, so while I finish preparing for that, here's a book I've been reading that I enjoyed greatly...

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer

From Booklist: Trust your hunches, for intuition does have an underlying rationale, according to this accessible account from a German scientist of human cognition. Permeated with everyday scenarios, such as picking stocks, schools, or spouses, the book adopts an evolutionary perspective of how people act on the basis of incomplete information (usually successfully). He sets the table with an example of a baseball player pursuing a fly ball, who relies not on conscious calculation but on an evolved "gaze heuristic" to make the catch. Definitions of such rules of thumb dot the text, which Gigerenzer embeds amid his presentations of studies that indicate, for example, that financial analysts don't predict markets any better than partially informed amateurs. Explaining this as an outcome of a "recognition heuristic," Gigerenzer argues that knowing a little rather than everything about something is sufficient to take action on it. He forges on into medicine, law, and moral behavior, succeeding in the process in converting a specialized topic into a conduit for greater self-awareness among his readers.

Anyone who reads me knows I love books about how we make decisions, especially ways that aren't strictly rational. Sociology geek that I am, I'm a total sucker for any book that uses the word "heuristic" a lot. Talk academic to me, baby!

So yes, this is a more scholarly book than Malcolm Gladwell's stuff, although Gladwell says he was influenced by Dr. Gigerenzer's work. So while it doesn't click along at Gladwell's pace, it's still absorbing, if you enjoy learning why we do the things we do, and how we know how to do them.

It's Thursday, and the new column is up at The Stranger. It's about sex work and the economy, and it would not have been possible without help from some very cool Seattle sex-working ladies, who took time to answer a bunch of my nosy questions about how much money they were making. I regret that due to the space limitations of the column, I could not publish all of the wise and witty answers I got. So thank you very much, ladies, I really appreciate your input! Keep making money!

EDIT: Please know that the names used in the column are NOT the "real" professional names of the ladies in question. Everyone quoted got an alias!

Man, a lot of store-front sexy places are either getting busted or closing up - perhaps to avoid a bust?. What is this, the last hurrah of SPD vice squad before the budget cuts really kick in?

(Not that I'm saying the X-otic Tan ladies did handjobs, because I had pals who worked there and they said nope, they didn't. And they have no reason to lie to me. But there was definitely sexy stuff happening.)

The Lavender Salon place was right across the street from where I get my nails done, and I could tell at a glance it was a sex work business. Monk and I did a podcast, soon to be aired, about how I could tell. One tip: people, do not paint a sex work establishment a really lurid, eye-catching shade of purple. I'm not kidding - the whole building was vividly, painfully purple. It did not blend, in genteel old Madison Park. And Madison Park is a terrible place to put a store-front sex work business, anyway, so that was a bad idea all by itself.

Overall, I'm just glad I'm not taking new people these days, it seems a little weird around town right now. However, the New York Times is quite mistaken if it thinks the recession is going to put an end - or even a really serious damper - on the sex industry. Look for my column in The Stranger on exactly that topic tomorrow.

I’d like to make some clarification about my stance on “sex work in the news” stories. It’s one thing to comment at length on certain types of stories. But several people have sent me links to recent news stories about a fetish model who suffered a horrific attack and lost someone she loved, and asked me what I think about it.

The answer is: I think it’s a terrible tragedy. What else could anyone think? An unbalanced man targeted her for his obsession, killed her boyfriend and kidnapped her. Thank God she survived. I can only imagine how devastated I’d be if I was her. I think we should shut up and leave her decently alone to recover as best she can.

Thus, I have nothing else to say about the matter, except that I’m rather appalled at the “news” stories that took the opportunity to post galleries of sexy photos of her in fetishwear, as if they were somehow germane to the story. Voyeuristic vultures. No, I’m not going to link to them or say her name. You can find the stories if you want to, but really, there’s nothing there that hasn’t happened before.

And that’s the really tragic part – that this sort of thing happens to all kinds of women, and to some men, too. I don’t know if anything anyone might have done would have prevented this. But please, please, buy and read this book: The Gift Of Fear. It is the best resource I’ve ever come across for recognizing and avoiding dangerous people. They do walk among us, and they don’t just prey on pretty models.

Fun Stuff To Do This Weekend!

There's some good sexy stuff happening around town this weekend. First, on Saturday, it's PLAYDAY! What's that, you ask? Playday is a once-a-year event at Seattle's historic 1st Ave peep show, the Lusty Lady.

What is a peep show? Is it like a strip club? No, it's a place where one stands in private booths and feed coins into a slot to watch sexy nude girls dance through a glass window. Remember that Madonna video, "Open Your Heart"? Kinda like that. Only naked, and definitely sexier.

What events go on for Playday?
Normally at a peep show, the ladies don't ever come out from behind the glass. But on Playday, the dancers will out from the glass box for a day to play. Special events include: dressing room tours, "hot seat" dances, multi-girl shows. Meet and take a photo with your favorite performer, and much, much more. Special events are held though all day and night from 10am-3am this Saturday, December 6.

Here's the cool part: Unlike other sex workers, the girls at the Lusty Lady are legal employees, and they get paid an hourly wage. However, all money spent on Playday goes to them. The proceeds from Playday are split between all the dancers - it's their holiday bonus. Which is a very cool thing. When I danced at the LL, the Playday check was a really nice thing to get! So go down, see some sexy action, and give some money to the hard-working girls at the Lusty Lady.

The ladies have a MySpace page here, check it out if you want more info.


See you there!

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Call For Questions: Monk and I are going to record some more podcasts Thursday. (I know, I know - finally. Hey, we’re busy, people!) So now’s the time to send me those looooooong and complicated questions. Fire 'em off, we'll try our best to answer, with a few dirty jokes along the way.

***

On an entirely separate subject…

I am on several polyamory email lists and web-groups and communities, and there’s something I see over and over again than I’m going to try to summarize here. And then give my opinion about.

It starts when Well-Meaning Person* posts for advice about a poly relationship they are having with someone who is, to put it succinctly, emotionally unstable. Like, seriously unstable. The manifestations I see most often cited are things like: the person has wild swings in their feelings of self-worth, an inability to identify internal preferences (including sexual), and a tendency to become involved in intense and unstable relationships, often leading to emotional crisis. The unstable person can be extremely charming, but also extremely insecure, is prone to making recurrent threats or acts of self-harm; they experience chronic feelings of emptiness, and they display excessive efforts to avoid abandonment.

And the Well-Meaning Person wants to know how to do poly with someone who is like that.

The answer is: NOT. You can’t do it. A person who behaves like that is not equipped to handle the emotional challenges of polyamory. None of those behaviors are fun to be around, but it’s the last one that’s really a killer for poly. That’s why I italicized it. The phrases are taken from a textbook description of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Now, BPD is a diagnosis that some people think is valid and some people don’t. I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone, but I have met people who act exactly like that description. So I can’t say if it’s inappropriately slapped on people who don’t warrant it, but I do know there are folks running around who fit it.

So, what such emotionally unstable people should do about how they are is outside my scope of expertise. But I know something they should not do, and that’s try to be polyamorous. The part about insecurity and excessive efforts to avoid abandonment? Yeah. I think some of the unstable people think if they have more lovers, they’ll feel more loved, and thus safer. But it never seems to work out that way. (I suppose if they were polyamorous and all their lovers were monogamous, maybe. But that’s usually not the way it is.) Polyamory requires an ability to tolerate and self-soothe some short-term emotional discomforts, and to trust that one isn’t going to be abandoned. This kind of unstable person does not possess those traits.

In these situations, I sometimes try to suggest that this simply isn’t going to work. Well-Meaning Person usually doesn’t want to hear that. There’s an idea that WMP could stop the unstable person from manifesting those behaviors, if the WMP person just knew how to comfort and reassure the unstable person properly. That’s what I call the “I Can Love Them All Better” fallacy. No. You can’t. You can love someone in spite of the behaviors, but no matter how much or how well you love them, you will not love those behaviors out of existence.

The “Love Them All Better” thing is often bolstered by other people on the list making suggestions for what kind of med/therapy/ect the unstable person should be doing. None of which is bad information, and if the unstable person wants resources, I’m all for giving them. But to me, the way the situation is expressed, and the way the advice is given, it often subtly reinforces the idea that the WMP person should be fixing the unstable person.

I really don’t agree with that. Adults are responsible for their own physical health. Unless you fall unconscious on the sidewalk, if there’s something wrong with you, you are the one responsible for either dealing with it yourself, or getting someone to help you deal with it, like a doctor. I think the same is true of mental health. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. You should, definitely. But you have to be the one doing the asking, and then doing the work it takes to get fixed.

However, I’m definitely not going to argue with anyone on the internet about their relationship. I’m not Sigmund Freud or Dr Phil or anything – what I say is based only on my personal observations. And no one stops doing anything – including having relationships with emotionally unstable people – until they’re ready to. It’s sometimes hard to watch Well-Meaning People run around and around in a hamster wheel

But I can vent about on my blog. So I did.



*Yes, I know I have posted before about how "help" is sometimes just a nice word for "control". But today, we’ll give the WMP the benefit of the doubt.

Nothing like seeing one's community skewered on video, as only a member of that community can.

Laugh/wince inducer #1: the next installment of the polyamory web-series, Family. Yikes. Okay, it's a little over the top, character-wise - but only a little. It's set in a polyamory potluck. I've been to events like this, and they definitely aren't all this bad, but... yeah. Those people and those conversations are not unfamiliar to me.


Laugh/wince inducer #2: Even though it's days after Thanksgiving, I have to mention this video Monk embedded on his blog. It's so funny, just because it's also painfully accurate. I've met that top. I've seen that whole scene before. Okay, not with a plucked fowl, but still. As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I may have even been that top at some point. (Before I had ten thousand hours of practice, of course!) And the Asian-style jacket he's wearing - oh, it's priceless. I wish this guy would do a whole series!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it!

And my deepest sympathy to all the people suffering in Mumbai. I am thankful for many things, but I am very thankful today to just be safe. Terrible.

***

And on a completely non-holiday-ish topic, here's the new Stranger column. I have a feeling I'm going to catch some heat about this one. Or maybe not? But I did get some extra word-count this week to talk about my view, which is great. Boiling that down to 500 words would have been extremely difficult. The Stranger page has comments, so you can talk amongst yourselves there, if you have an opinion...

More book stuff...

I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and it's interesting. I liked Blink a great deal, and Tipping Point was also thought-provoking. I'm generally inclined to like Gladwell's ideas and think they have some merit, even though he certainly has his critics.

But I'd like to quote you a lengthy passage because it supports what I feel about being a truly high-ranking dominant. It's a neat refutation of that nonsense I occasionally hear about how So-And-So is a "natural" dominant, and thus doesn't need to educate themselves or practice their craft. It just happens, like magic. Hah. You may have talent, my friend, but the way you get to the Carnegie Hall of kink is practice, practice, practice.

"In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy's professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely "good". The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

This is true even of people we think of as prodigies. Mozart, for example, famously started writing music at six. But, the psychologist Michael Howe writes in his book Genius Explained, by the standards of mature composers Mozart's early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang's childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that contain only music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No9 K271) was not composed until he was 21: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for 10 years.

To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that time: it took him nine years.) And what's 10 years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice."

Now, that's not to say that ten thousand hours of practice automatically equals world-class expertise. But I will think about this next time I see someone who arrived in the scene about five minutes ago flouncing around - either virtually or in reality - styling themselves Sir Lord Master Domley-Dom of All He Surveys, or High Goddess Dominatchya Von Meanbitch, and scoffing at the notion that they might need to go to school and do their homework. If you don't like BDSM enough to do it a lot and really learn it, then why do it at all?

Since you asked: things and places from my life lately, as requested via email and Twitter...

The restaurant I went to last night: ART, in the new Four Seasons Hotel. It's very good. True to it's name, it's artsy, and I usually view artsy food with suspicion. But given that I ordered a shrimp appetizer, a steak, and French fries, and little baby doughnuts with vanilla ice cream for dessert, I would say that my relentlessly middlebrow food tastes were more than amply satisfied. (There is trendier stuff as well, if that's your liking.)

I'm pretty sure my friend enjoyed his dinner too, although he may have been distracted from the dining experience by my playing with this. Heh.

For those that asked about shoes: Nordstrom didn't have the shoes on their website, but here's a link to them on Zappos. So cute, just what I wanted for casual-but-feminine looks. And then we found some pretty black boots from Barney's.


Last week, Armani and I were here: Ummelina. It's a very nice spa, and the massage was divine. It's a bit woo-woo, but not to a point of complete absurdity.
I believe I'll not say where we had dinner, though. I think that's best. I did grab a quick phone-cam shot of the dress I was wearing, which does not really do it justice. It's a berry-pink satin Dolce & Gabbana number, and very low-cut. I have serious cleavage in this dress, and it's highly entertaining to wear it someplace swanky and observe the well-trained male staff very politely not stare at it. I would not be offended if they did, since I myself often look at women's cleavage. There's just something alluring about the curves.

And here's a bit of jewelry-porn for you: Armani gave me this for my birthday. Isn't it gorgeous?