I'm off to Atlanta today on a family visit. I'm flying home next Weds, so between now and then, I'll get to email as best I can - but don't expect lighting-fast replies.

Meanwhile: the new Stranger column.

Bye!

Whenever I have no writing inspiration, it is a comfort to me that I can reach in the mail file and find something to talk about...

I got a letter from a reader who said nice things and observed all the I-know-you're-really-busy amenities, and because she did that, I will answer for her some questions that she might have been able to answer for herself, if she'd done a bit more searching of the archives. This blog needs a design overhaul anyway, and one of things it needs is the Top Ten Most Asked Questions List. "How To Be A Pro Domme" would be high on that list.

What's a fair range of prices to ask for an hour long session? How do you determine what your time's worth, how much to ad for extras outside my norm(if I decide to do so). Do you have any tips for how I could determine that of my time? And last but far from least, when you were just starting, how did you protect yourself? I'm well read, fairly involved in my (sparse) local scene and I broke my teeth in on the larger London clubs and parties like Torture Garden, but nowhere I've looked has helped me figure out how to price or organize this.

Okay, here's my standard advice: First, go here, enter this blog's URL and search for "sex work" and "pro domme" and read all the tons of advice I've given about that in the last five years. Some of it will apply directly to you and some won't, but it's all information worth having.

Read this. And then read this book, in it's entirety.

Then read this one, too. ("But I'm not going to be an escort, I'm going to be a pro domme!" For the vast majority of your purposes, the difference is immaterial. Read it. Information is never a waste.)

Because the writer mentions London, I suspect she might be in the UK. Or maybe not, I don't know. But if she is, I am badly positioned to give her much more advice, because both the legal and the social system around sex work is entirely different there. She'd need to talk to a pro domme in the same country.

But perhaps she's in the US. Even if she isn't, someone else will want to know the answers to those questions anyway. So let me just step all of you through this as simply as I can.

Say we want to sell something - something we know is of value. In this case, it's our time and attention, but it could be anything at all. How do we determine it's value? We go and find other people who are selling the same thing and see what they are charging! Aside from a few stints waitressing, I have never had a job that didn't involve someone getting naked. But surely this is how you non-sex-workers determine what's a fair wage for your labor, or a fair price for your product? It's no different for us.

It is my policy that I do not tell other people how much money they should charge for their time. And since this reader didn't tell me where she lived, I can't do her Googling for her. But she - and anyone else - can type mistress, pro domme, dominatrix + the name of her city, and Bob's your uncle. Look at the sites, see what the existing ladies are charging, charge the same.

One point: I don't recommend having a menu of fees. Decide what you will and won't do, set an hourly rate for your time that assumes all those activities, and that's it. I think it's unseemly to mess around with the nickel-and-dime add-ons. Per-activity rates also suggest that you could be wheedled down in price. "How much if I just want a spanking, with no nipple clamps?"

Also, in the US, extra fees are legally risky. Ask a lawyer why.

Protection: This kind of question about protection always makes me roll my eyes a bit. The myth that sex workers live in a state of constant peril was created by people who want to control what we do with our bodies. Certainly some sex workers get assaulted. Women get assaulted by their husbands and boyfriends, too - and by their friends, their co-workers, members of their family, and total strangers. That seemingly common-sense notion that nice girls aren't assaulted as often as bad girls is just a tool to keep you nice girls scared and in line. The idea that there's a way that sex workers have to make themselves safe that other women don't is fallacious.

So, how have you protected yourself in your life so far? Whatever you've done, ask yourself: has my way of doing that worked out well? Or do I need to get better at it?

There's a lot of stuff about safety in the archived entries here about sex work, so read them. And read The Gift Of Fear, too, it's the best handbook I know on assessing and dealing with dangerous people.

But I can't say, "Okay, here's the ONE rule that will always prevent you from assault." There are a hundred thousand rules. Some of them you'll need and some you won't, and just based on this letter, I can't tell you what you need to feel safe.

You will have to decide. Remove the money aspect from it and think: what would I do if I was just meeting a guy for fun? How would I protect myself in that situation? And do that.

Certain kinds of sex work questions there are right/wrong answers to. But if you want to operate your own business - any business - you need to be able to look at a problem, reason it out, and make a judgment call by yourself. The best advice I can give you is: Get used to thinking like that.

Dear Mistress Matisse,

I've been reading your blog for several years now, and I always enjoy your columns. I've been curious about something: do you see transmen as clients? I know you take a hard line about not seeing women as clients, but I also know that your understanding of queers and the queer community is rather nuanced (and you were once married to a transman, no?).

Point of clarification before I go on: transman means someone who started out female and transitioned to male. I know we can get into a discussion about whether transmen were ever truly female, I’m not questioning anyone’s feelings on that. Let us say: they were assigned the female gender when they were born.

Now then...

Some letters that I get, I think “I don’t know how to answer this without sounding like a twit.”

Well, in a way I can answer this. I don’t have any female-to-male transexual clients. In fact, I’ve never had anyone who told me he was transexual even ask me for a professional session. And since I see 99% of my clients naked, yes, I’d know if one of my guys was trans. The surgery for female-to-male transexuals is not nearly as advanced as it is for male-to-female people.

So, the issue has not arisen.

I’m not sure what I would say if a transman did ask me, though. Because the situation is, as you say, nuanced.

Yes, I was queer-identified for most of my twenties. My lovers were female and I socialized in mainly queer spaces. And then I did indeed marry (and subsequently divorce) a transman. 

In my experience, a woman who is lovers with a transman occupies a very curious social space between queer and straight. But my former husband looked very, very male indeed. He used to resemble a shorter Mike Ditka, in fact. Looking the way he felt - male - was precisely what he wanted, although on occasion it complicated matters. Like the day I took him to the hospital for his scheduled hysterectomy.

He was understandably a bit anxious about having this major surgery. And it seem like when you’re waiting for surgery, every yahoo with a lab coat just wanders by at random, picks up your chart, and reads it. Picture Mike Ditka in a hospital bed. And his chart says he's having a hysterectomy. The possibility of having a gender “Who’s On First?” sort of exchange was strong.

I was not going allow that to happen. I stood at his bedside poised like a jaguar, ready to spring at the throat of any clueless medical staff who looked at him, and then looked at his chart, and then said something stupid. There were several moments when various people looked like they were trembling on the brink of a throat-tearing remark, but - they refrained. Perhaps it was the I-will-kill-you look I was giving them.

This is all my way of explaining that I am aware of the incredible complexities and challenges transmen have to deal with. *

But that’s a lot of complexities to deal with in just sixty minutes, in a dungeon. With a not-a-transexual man, I have a head-start. I can safely assume a lot about where he’s coming from, culturally, and what the some of his hot buttons and wet dreams and taboo fantasies are likely to be. I know how to do the traditional male-female dance, and I know how to twist it sideways, lube it up, and jam it into someone’s sweet pink ass.

My experience of transmen in intimate situations is that they are emotionally vulnerable in a way that I can validate and sympathize with, and they are just tremendously complex. The social/psychological dynamic is all over the map. He’s a man, which in a patriarchal world means he has social power - but he’s a transman, which means that power is actually as fragile and as permeable as a tissue.

Often he has lived for part of his life being seen as female, so he knows what that’s like. But straight transmen don’t usually want to relate to women as someone-who-used-to-be-female, they just want to be a guy. So there’s this knowingness there - but one mustn’t make too much of the fact that this guy knows exactly what menstrual cramps feel like.

Transmen’s relationships with their bodies is tricky, too. I have never had any uneasiness about interacting - in a BDSM context, or sexually - with a transman's body. I’m good with bodies. I don't care whether your body looks exactly like other men's bodies, I just want to know how you work. If I can look at you and touch you, I can figure out your body pretty quickly.

But, understandably, a lot of transmen are not super-confident about their body. They are not always comfortable being seen and being touched. Stripped naked, their vulnerability is often, to me, heart-wrenchingly intense. One can learn how each individual transman wants to be looked at and touched, and teach them to trust you, but that takes time.

And one hour simply isn’t enough, in my opinion. It's completely different from dating a transman, where you go as slow as you need to. For me as a professional – wow, I’m daunted by the idea of trying to create a scene for a transman that I’d feel really good about in that short of a time. Since I have some personal history there, I’d feel extra-frustrated by doing a scene I didn’t think was as good as it should be.

What’s also true is that my professional time is not cheap, and most of the transmen I have met were not rich. I suppose if I met a transman who was wealthy, and he wanted to see me a lot and develop that type of BDSM relationship with me, and I felt we were well-suited as play-partners – well, I’d do that.

I would bet that’s a decision I will not have to make, though.


*Of course, everything I say is a broad generalization that only reflects my view from the outside. Every transexual person has his/her/hir own different and utterly valid experience.

I wasn’t going to upload this last podcast. But Monk says I’m being silly. And lord knows, I need the blog-content, I've been way too busy to write much lately.

So, I am ignoring a voice in the back of my head that says it is slightly undignified. Unladylike, in fact.

Yes, I know – I don’t feel the slightest qualm about posting photos of myself sticking needles in people. That's perfectly dignified. It's kinky, but it's not undignified.

But I do feel that it is a trifle undignified to post slightly-tipsy rants about one of my pet topics: Crazy People And Sex Work.

Just to be clear – thank you, President Obama – I am not disclaiming the basic opinions I express here. I just wish I had voiced them a little less profanely and a little less… stridently. Whoops.

There's also a whole side conversation about fisting, in which I make an ill-advised personal disclosure.

Thus, I bring to a close the era of cocktails while podcasting. So enjoy us in all our ranty, TMI glory, the next round will be far more calm, sober and public-radio-esque. (Well, I will be, at least. I cannot speak for Monk.)

Notes From A Party

I was at a lovely party over the weekend, with a lot of my usual kinky friends and also, a bunch of people I am not so acquainted with. Many interesting things happened.

At one point in the evening, I was standing in a hallway, talking to various people. If I looked to the left, I could see some strangers fucking in a dimly-lit bedroom. If I looked right, I could see Monk doing a suspension-bondage scene in the living room. It was a nice location.

Observation connected to that experience and a lot of others just like it: if you mix swingers and kinky people at a party, the swingers will eventually go find a bedroom (or someplace) to have sex in. The kinky people, on the other hand, will start doing BDSM – although not sex – right in the living room.

***

I am fortunate enough to have some very attractive friends who really like to run around naked. It’s a charming trait.

***

A man I did not know walked by me and accidentally stepped on my toes. Such things do happen, and he apologized instantly, and there was certainly no permanent injury. But I wasn’t able to arrange my facial expression into anything that resembled understanding forgiveness – at least, not quickly enough. After he’d moved away, I felt a little bad about the frosty glare I’d given him, as it was a bit disproportionate to the crime.

Coda: the next day, my hostess told me that he was mortified by the incident, and apparently jokes were made about him dying his hair and changing his name before the next party. To which I say: dear man, your party foul was a trifling one. I was just having a bitchy moment, it’s an occupational hazard. All is forgiven and forgotten.

***

Other Opportunities For Mortification: Occasionally I’ll be standing alone, watching a BDSM scene, and someone will walk up, stand next to me and watch with me, and strike up a conversation. That’s fine, but sometimes – perhaps because I’m not wearing a leather dress or carrying a flogger – they will assume I don’t know anything about BDSM. And they start explaining the scene to me. That is highly, but highly, amusing to me. Especially when they get it completely wrong. Especially when one of the people in the scene is Max or Monk.

When I am feeling kind, I will politely clue them in right away. When I am not, I’ll let them go on for a while before I casually mention that yeah, I'm a pro domme, and that guy is actually my boyfriend.

***

Speaking of Stepping: in spite of the fact that I had arrived with no intention of playing, Jae succeeded in goading me into standing on her chest. I did some pushups with my elbows planted in her pectoral muscles, too. And then Puck and I then determined that with pressure, Jae’s legs would almost, but not quite, rotate enough for us to form a perfect T-shape with her body. Jae’s remark: “Jesus, I feel like a cross between a sex doll and a Gumby!”

***

My slightly-awkward moment for the evening? When I wanted my purse, which I had carefully stashed in the bedroom - where people were now fucking. I certainly don't have any problem with that, it's just... "Oh, sorry, don't mind me, I just need to grab my lipstick, here. No no, it's fine, don't stop. I have a girl in the living room I should be beating up, gotta get back to that. Carry on, please."

The new Stranger column. It's about a common bit of sex-industry infighting, and I see in the comments that the stripper version of this argument is also getting some airtime.

I'm not surprised. As a former stripper myself, I have known many strippers who spent a lot of time and energy trying to control the behavior of other strippers, and that always baffled me.

For one thing, trying to get a bunch of strippers to do anything at all is like herding cats. (No pun intended.)

But trying to get a bunch of strippers, many of whom are not exactly deeply invested in strict professionalism, some of whom are chemically altered in some fashion when they're at work, and all of whom are actually in financial competition with each other to adhere to a highly-interpretable set of behavioral boundaries just because you want them to - you're kidding me, right? Never gonna happen.

The amount of blood, sweat and tears some strippers will put into policing whether some other chick put her hand on a guy's thigh or his crotch, whether she brushed up against him or she rubbed up against him - you know, you could put all that energy into getting a job where there really are strict rules about how people are supposed to act. That seems like what you want.

But sex work? This is the wild wild west, baby. We ain't got no sheriffs, and we don't need no stinkin' badges.

I’m off to Vegas until Friday, so while I jet away, enjoy a new podcast. This one is letters from readers with questions about polyamory.

First letter: when to disclose to a potential new partner that you are poly, if they don’t know already.

And then: dealing with weirdness from your partner’s other partners. (AKA “metamours”.)

It’s a lot of unbridled snark with (hopefully) some nuggets of wisdom. And all admittedly somewhat fueled by alcoholic beverages. I am wincing slightly as I listen to myself tipsily hold forth on these, so I think that means I must make a ban on drinking + podcasting in the future.

But I will not be podcasting in Vegas! Bye!

EDIT: The formatting is coming out weird on the podcast page, not sure why. But it downloads okay, just click on the little icon.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A new podcast! First there’s a lot of silly banter about needles and being naked in bed, and then Monk reads a letter about how to do fast, easy rope bondage during a resistance play scene, and I make some comments about securing a bottom who is larger than you.
After that, I both scold and encourage a reader who is exploring BDSM, but who wants me to do their kinky thinking for them. About 16 minutes.

A few comments on blow jobs. Well, a whole column's worth, actually, in The Stranger. Now excuse me while I run around like a crazy girl, getting to fly out of here tomorrow!

I was talking last night to a woman who is new to sex work, and it was interesting to hear how my advice on various matters differed from the advice she is getting from her co-workers.

For one thing, they’ve been advising her to say things about herself that aren’t true. Such as, “I don’t have a boyfriend.” But, she does. Actually she’s poly, so she has a couple of people she’s seeing.

I understand why they’re telling her to say this, and a few other things like it. I understand the fantasy that they are trying to create for the guys. Fantasies are great. But telling a guy a bunch of stuff about yourself that isn’t true only works when you just see him once or twice, and the relationship you have with him is extremely superficial. After that, it’s a struggle to remember the lies and maintain them. Plus, the fact that they are lies is going to get very obvious after a while. Like, here’s a really cute sexy young woman, and month after month, she has no boyfriend? Come on.

What is true is that any system where a group of women work together and are assigned clients by a third person is a system that's geared towards superficial encounters. It is a valid system, if that’s what you want to do. But I have a name for that. I call it, “McDonald's sex work,” because it’s a low-end, fast-turnover situation. The quality of what someone working in a sexual McDonalds can create is not very high. Of course, if you’re at a sexual McDonalds, your expectations should be pretty low.

When you’re new, working in a sexual McDonald's can be good boot-camp training - if it’s busy enough to be profitable. I have certainly done so myself. There’s some safety in numbers for the ladies, and you do learn valuable lessons from your co-workers. (Even if it’s by bad example, which often - it is.)

But once you’ve mastered the basic mechanics of how to do whatever it is that you do (be it escort work, sensual touch, domination, or whatever else) , then there’s not much reason to hang around, in my opinion. It is my firm belief that working independently is always better.

I said to her, “The truth actually works amazingly well. And your truth is pretty damn sexy anyway. Tell the truth.” Creating a good, sexy experience for someone you met five minutes ago – and feeling good about doing it - is challenging enough all by itself. The least of the fringe benefits should be not have to remember a bunch of porn-story lies about who and what you are.

Another podcast! This one's about polyamory. First, Monk and I answer a question about time-management for poly people: how many partners is too many? And then: the difficulty of finding polyamorous partners when you're very young. (Meaning: in your twenties.)

I feel compelled to note: In this last round of podcast taping, Monk brought alcoholic beverages to the studio. That's a switch - usually we're drinking Rock Star or Red Bull, or else just tons of super-strong coffee (him) and diet Mountain Dew (me). I have no idea why he decided we should have cocktails instead of caffeine while we taped this batch, but we did.

So we had great fun, but I fear they made us even less inhibited than usual. Which is not very much, anyway. Thank god we we don't do video blogging.

But if you're offended by anything I say in this podcast (or any of the next three), just remember: it's Monk's fault. Really!

I was going to write something clever, but the Stranger column ate my brain. So I'm not.

However, I got a sweet email asking me about buying one's first flogger, and that's a question I can answer even with no brain. Nervous beginners, what you want is a deerskin flogger, with tails that are not too long, no more than sixteen inches.

Deerskin is very light and soft, and I swear to you, you are not going to really hurt someone with a deerskin flogger. (Unless you poke them in the eye with the handle or something, so don't do that.)

I recommend this one. The Bare Leatherworks guys make lovely floggers. I’ve bought a number of them over the years. I find them very well made, pleasing to use, and they have held up very well to frequent – and often not gentle – action.

One step up in intensity from deerskin would probably be this one, the cowhide flogger. Still pretty soft and pleasantly thumpy, though.

Anything with rubber tails is going to sting and be more intense, and be more likely to leave marks, so I generally don't recommend rubber floggers for a beginner.

Happy thwacking!

Complete and unedited text of a recent email...

Would you consider doing me with a strap-on? A big fantasy of mine and she's just not into it.... Can you host?

Sure, come on over. Right now, baby. I mean, what else could any girl possibly need to know other than you have an orifice you'd like me to penetrate? That's all that matters to me. Lord knows, my opportunities to use my strap-on are so very, very rare. It's really tragic.

Only, you know, I sort of wish you'd attached a close-up picture of the area in question, because you know how we ladies love that.

Right.

Can I host? Wow, that's a term I haven't heard for a while. The only people I ever heard use the word host - and the companion term, guest - in this manner were swingers, in print-magazine ads of the 80's and 90's. The brevity of it made it useful for cutting down one one's character-count in the ad, thus saving money. Can host meant "You can come to my place" and Can guest meant, "I have to come to yours." I wonder if I'm dealing with an old-school swinger here?

At least he spelled everything right, I'll give him a point for that. But still, whoever he is, he will not be hosted or guested or anything else by me.

Updated Availability

Hey Seattle people: If you’re think of trying to see me, this coming week is a good time to do that. I have some time free, and I’ll be traveling a good bit in weeks to come. So, drop me a note soon if you want to get time with me.

For long term planning, here is my travel schedule through November.

I’m out of town, at Folsom Street Fair, from September 25th- 28th.
I’m in Vegas from October 6th to the 9th.
I am in Atlanta from October 23rd through Oct 28th.
And I am in Vegas from November 3rd through the 6th.

(Note: I mention cities only because my pals like to know where I am. I’ll be with an intimate friend on all of these trips, except for Atlanta, which is a family gathering. But either way, I am not available to do private sessions. Sorry!)

After way too long of an interval - blame it on our busy schedules - Monk and I got together in the usual zombie-proof sound studio and recorded some silly rants.

This one is a little short, only about seven minutes, but we hope it makes up in entertainment what it lacks in length. It's a letter from a reader who asks about sustaining BDSM energy in a long-term relationship. Enjoy!

Old Attachments

I did something significant lately. Significant to me, anyway. I cut off my old phone number.

It’s the one I got when I first became Mistress Matisse, in 1997. It was a land line then, and I recall that the landlord of my apartment inquired why I needed a second phone line – because of course I already had one.

I told him it was for my dial-up modem. He looked slightly confused – he was definitely not a techie guy - but just shrugged and nodded his head. I had a cell phone as well, but I think it was much cheaper to add a second land line than get a second cell phone, so that’s what I did.

When I moved out of that apartment, I was successful enough as Mistress Matisse that I could, in fact, get another cell. I arranged to have US West seamlessly forward the phone number to it. This was apparently not something most people knew you could do at the time, and it led to some amusing calls from phone-predators who, because it looked like a land-line number, would try to spook me by claiming they could trace me, find my address, and menace me somehow. I’d laugh and hang up. Good luck with that, halfwit.

It’s certainly the phone number that I’ve had the longest in my adult life, and I kept it until about a month ago. You see, for a sex worker, keeping the same phone number is highly desirable. That way your guys can always find you, without having to hunt down a print ad - or now, a website. If they have to look too hard to find you, they’ll probably give up and find someone else.

But truthfully, I have not listened to a voice mail from it in - oh, a year? Maybe more. And I haven’t routinely answered it for about two years. I very rarely see new people anymore, and the few I do meet contact me through email, with a referral from someone I know.

So I didn’t have time even for the perfectly-nice guys, and I was simply tired of dealing with the annoying and time-wasting phone calls. The reasonable thing to do was get another phone, and give the new number only to people I know and like. So I did.

Still, I was reluctant to let the old one go. What if my income suddenly dropped off and I had to start drumming up new business? That’s not how I want to structure my career anymore, but… better keep it, so if I had to, I could activate things at a moment’s notice.

It’s that Cinderella fear – the idea that wow, this is all going so well, and I’m happy and successful and busier than I can handle – but what if the clock strikes twelve and it all vanishes like a soap bubble? Better keep all the old options open, even if you don’t need them now.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping one’s options open – to a degree. But at a certain point, links to the past become anchors, not options. They weigh you down. You have to trust yourself, and trust the universe, that you’ll keep moving forward. Life looks a lot different for me than it did even a couple of years ago, and I’m trusting that I will never need that phone number again.

Polyamory in Pop Culture

MTV aired its "True Life" documentary titled "I'm Polyamorous." Poly in The News blog has a write-up of it.

And another episode of the web-cast series about polyamorous people, "Family."

Also: Monk and I are (finally) recording more podcasts tonight! Send us your questions about poly, kink, sex work, or anything else weird, and we'll answer them together - while making a lot of dirty jokes, of course...

From The MailBag

i wanted to ask your advice, about a punishment that i feel i deserve. i know you have lots of experience with punishments (spankings). i graduated high school in 2000. :) in 2000, i was 19 years old, ready to graduate. :) i was very excited about graduating. :) during the school year, it was about April 2000, when we were in art class, and the teacher went out of the room, and what happened was, i walked over near her desk, there was a can of spray adhesive, and i have no idea why, but what i did, was i sprayed the teacher's plants with the spray adhesive. it was very wrong of me, and i regretted it. i did get called to the principal office. i was originally gonna be suspended for 3 days, but i talked the principal into letting me give up my senior dismissal, so that i wouldn't be suspended. We had a school assistant who was there, her name was Mrs. X. She was a very strict woman. deep down, i knew i deserve to be suspended. a few days after i was given the punishment of, no senior dismissal, i began to wonder what it would be like, if i was punished by the school assistant, Mrs. X. i thought about how if she called me to her office, and was gonna punish me. i graduated, and continued to have these feelings of needing to be punished. i thought about how i deserved to be punished, and really wanted her to punish me. i began to imagine myself going into her office, closing the door, and her putting a paddle and cane on her desk, and me bending over her desk, and being severely spanked by her. 9 years later, i still have those feelings, of needing to be punished. i don't believe Mrs. X is working anymore, she left my high school, but i looked online to see if i could find her email address, so that i could tell her how i wish i had been punished by her.
i still feel very guilty about the whole thing, and i feel, i do deserve a very severe, and sound spanking. i've heard self-spanking can be affective, and i want to set a day, where it's a punishment day for me. i have a leather belt, a thin whippy bamboo cane, a wooden spoon, and i also have a butt plug. i was wondering, if you could sentence me to a punishment. Thank you, so very much. :)

Little known fact about me: I have, in my possession, an unusual and highly specialized machine. This very rare machine – normally not seen outside of FBI offices and the chambers of certain Supreme Court Justices - rivals anything you ever saw in a Batman or James Bond movie. It is a device so cunning, so technically advanced, it can analyze writing samples and detect whether something was written while someone was masturbating! Yes, it’s true! I have a Wank-O-Scope!

Normally a member of the public, such as yourself, would not have access to the findings of such a classified piece of technology. Wank-O-Scope read-outs are extremely hard to understand if you aren’t a highly trained professional like me. But just today, I’ll feed this sample through the Wank-O-Scope and interpret the results for you.

So okay, let me just insert this little doohickey here, push these buttons, and enter the secret code. Then I’ll don my protective headgear, and flip the clear plastic cover off the red button that says DANGER - DO NOT PUSH - WANK-O-SCOPE!

Now, stand clear, everyone. Children, do not try this at home. And for God’s sake, do not look directly at the Wank-O-Scope blast!

Zap! Bzzzzz....Ka-bam!

May I have the envelope, please? (And would someone keep Kayne West off the stage?) The Wank-O-Scope sez: congratulations, you’re a wanker! So your punishment is: take some remedial writing classes and let go of any now-creepy teenage obsessions you had with school officials. Then find someone in real life to spank you and stop bothering busy ladies.

A fashion post, for those of you who like such things…

I could not find a good picture online of the dress from the Twitpic yesterday! I’m surprised, even Barney’s doesn’t have it - on their own website! But I see that the designer, Derek Lam, also has a white version that is very similar – a little lower-cut, I think – and also super-yummy, at least in the pictures. A good little black dress is great, but I like wearing white dresses as well. It messes with people’s heads when I wear white.

So I liked both of them, but I think I’ll defer buying them.

Speaking of color: I did find this picture of a Derek Lam dress that would be very hot – except that it’s a terrible color. They call that mauve? Uh, no, that’s mud, is what that is. Ew. Too bad, the cut and style is lovely. (Designer Rick Owens does this a lot as well – good styles, but in terrible, ugly colors.)

What I may have to go back to Barney’s and buy is this skirt. The designer, Dries Van Noten, calls this fabric “reptile”, and that’s a good description. It’s got texture and shine, but it’s not puffy, or crunchy. And it fits like a skin, too! Really gorgeous. And a girl just can’t have too many pencil skirts, can she?