Phaedrus

Congratulations, Boomer!

Awesome, Kyra! Congratulations!

I have mixed feelings about this. In principle I'm all for letting people make their own mistakes and learn the hard way if they can't learn the easy way... but it's perhaps sensible for government to step in and protect people from the worst excesses of their own folly. Similarly, yes, the market will stop banks making stupid loans to clearly irresponsible people anyway... but the market's way of correcting things is frequently swift and bloody, and I'm not sure that most of us would be terribly keen on having the entire economy suddenly tank. Again. Some time, certainly. But they'd end up paying less interest as a result, so who's to say they're worse off at the end of the day? Depends on interest rates, obviously... but I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Also, I have a horrible feeling that the generation that will be most impacted by this really needs to learn that sometimes you can't have everything you want, right now. But that flies in the face of not letting the government dictate to you what you do with your money, hence my conflict on this. In Ottawa: not much, I suspect, compared to the effect of the federal government eliminating 17000 positions, or whatever it is. You can't legislate a decrease in interest rates on unsecured debt. If the govt were to try, the lenders would either simply stop lending to all but the most credit-worthy consumers, or demand collateral (or both). Neither would be pretty. Bear in mind that *nobody* has to pay usurious credit-card interest rates; a credit card is a useful and convenient tool, but carrying a balance is simply foolish. If you need to borrow money there are much better options available. But that comes back to the woeful lack of financial education...

I'm permanently conflicted on this. There's a constant tension between wanting to meet new people who have piqued my interest for some reason, and going back to see the ones who I've met in the past and had an awesome time with. And most of the time, the new people I meet then end up on the list of people I want to see again, which just doesn't make it any easier next time around! So I tend to end up going through phases of seeing new people, and seeing people I've seen before. And then changing my mind about what I want to do.

No. Too much potential for fallout, and second-guessing myself about whose benefit it was for. If you bumped a parked car, and put a minor dent in it, and there was no-one around to see... would you leave a note?

Mileage simply reflects the fact that SPs, MAs and dancers may do a little (or a lot) more for people they like. This may be something as simple as not watching the clock too much, or perhaps a little extra (as an example, SPs may do things they don't actually advertize with someone they know and trust). It also reflects the fact that people with hygiene issues, who fail to behave like gentlemen, or who a lady just plain doesn't like will tend to get less bang for their buck. On BJs in CRs... I'm sure it's happened in the past, and will do again in the future. But AFAIK SC owners will swiftly get rid of dancers who do things like this, as if the long arm of the law finds out about it they'd probably get shut down, and like most business owners they'd prefer to remain in business. Also, most dancers *don't* do this (that's why they're dancers, rather than anything else), and asking them is far more likely to piss them off (resulting in less mileage; see above) than getting you what you want. If you want a BJ, go see a SP. There's plenty of awesome ones here.

I know this probably isn't the reaction you were looking for, but... that made me laugh. Sometimes, the crassness and stupidity are so spectacular that incredulous laughter is the only possible reaction. On the topic of the thread... I've never met a pair of boobies I didn't like. Alas, I consider the sample size too small at present to draw any statistically valid conclusions, so my research continues...

Medicine Hat, AB. I've always thought that was a cool name for a place.

PM to Mod, I think. Although I've never done it myself, so I don't actually know :)

[URL]http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/05/how-internet-killed-porn[/URL] In a grand suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac in California's San Fernando Valley an actor is having a problem with her moans. Aleksa Nicole (her professional name) is playing the role of a Latin beauty in A Love Story, a pornographic film about an author of romance novels suffering from writer's block. They are shooting a fantasy sequence in which Aleksa wanders the darkened corridors of the house in a white nightie, carrying a large candlestick. She stumbles into the arms of her forbidden lover, Miguel, played by rising star Xander Corvus, clad in leather trousers, frilly blouse and waistcoat. Helpless in the heat of passion, they make love on the chaise longue. But there is a small issue. Aleksa's rapid high-pitched squeals of pleasure aren't up to the exacting standards of the film's director. "Less porno," he says. By way of illustration he offers a different read â?? less urgent, more ladylike. "Yes, yes, yes!" Then he announces his keyword for the day: "Romantico!" A Love Story is a new title by the high-end adult movie studio Wicked Picture. And for the world of "adult", the emphasis on the moans is a giveaway that it is not a typical sex film. For years the porn industry was dominated by an anarchic anything-goes attitude to sex. Directors competed to see who could stage the more outrageous stunts, pushing the performers to the limit of what their bodies could take. The scenes could be hard to watch, as I discovered for myself when I visited sets for a book I was writing in 2004. The sex acts seemed to owe more to reality shows where people eat live worms and pig vomit than anything conventionally erotic. But some time around 2007, the "business of X" started going into a commercial tailspin. The arrival of free YouTube-style porn sites meant that consumers could download pirated scenes from the vast backlog of old content for free. The phenomenon of DIY amateur sex â?? part-timers uploading their videos on sites such as clips4sale â?? also put a dent in the professionals' pay cheques. Suddenly an industry that was a byword for easy money, raking in billions by exploiting the anonymity of point-and-click purchasing, was fighting for its life. Making the problems of "adult" even worse was that where consumers might feel enough loyalty to, say, Radiohead to buy their latest release rather than download it illegally, porn users don't have the same feelings about the Dirty Debutantes series. In essence, as with every other media evolution of the last 30 years, from VHS to DVDs to the birth of the internet, porn was once again leading the way, only this time into obsolescence. And as goes the industry, so go the performers. It's well known that many of them come into porn looking for validation, fleeing lives of damage and abuse. They then sign up to a lifestyle that inflicts stress and illness, not to mention embarrassment, on its young foot soldiers, while offering nothing in the way of pensions and health insurance. Now they find themselves out of work, looking for a Plan B, when the only experience on their resumé is having sex for cash. On the business side, the porn industry has been desperately trying to adapt. Partly this has been a simple case of cutting back massively. In the early 2000s, a typical issue of the industry bible, the monthly Adult Video News, might have contained hundreds of reviews of new releases. One recent example had just 14. Numerous companies have gone out of business. Those movie companies that remain are focusing increasingly on high-end product, trying to beat the illegal sites by providing something like a cinematic experience. There is a flight into "quality". In an uncanny echo of a recent BBC slogan, they are embracing the idea of "Fewer, Bigger, Better". For some, this means more female-orientated scenes with less angry sex. Hence A Love Story. For others, it means parodies â?? of popular TV shows and recent blockbusters. One of the unlikeliest figures in the new reinvented industry â?? and a one-man indicator of how much it has changed â?? is Rob Zicari, better known as Rob Black. In the 90s, Black was one of the most notorious provocateurs in porn. He specialised in tastelessness; his films were more like grotesque exercises in taboo-breaking than anything anyone might conceivably watch for sexual pleasure. In 1997 I interviewed him in his office in LA and visited him on the set of a production entitled Forced Entry, a film about rape. He was only 23 at the time and I was struck by the strange contrast of his being a friendly, intelligent guy â?? albeit in an over-caffeinated way â?? while making porn films that specialised in degrading women. Six years later, Black's provocations caught up with him during George Bush's "war on obscenity" (the war's two other casualties were Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, when she exposed her nipple in a dance routine during the Superbowl). Black and his wife and business partner Janet Romano (better know as Lizzie Borden) did a year each in federal jail for obscenity. Post-prison, a chastened Black has put his Sadean grotesqueries behind him. Now he directs superhero parodies for a mainstream porn company called Vivid â?? Captain America XXX, Iron Man XXX â?? in glossy two-disc sets, some of them in 3D. "Where the business is going now is it's acceptable to sit down with your wife and girlfriend and introduce her to pornography," he tells me during a visit to his new offices. "But the stuff you're going to introduce them to is the stuff I'm making." He shows me the suit he had used for his Iron Man parody. I remark that in porn terms, it is an impressive prop. "Dude, the suit cost like four grand!" he says. Then, picking up one of his CD cases, in mock-awe at its resemblance to a "real movie", he says: "Look at that! That's a porno!" Black is adept at putting a positive spin on the retrenchment that porn had undergone. But he appears somewhat ravaged and looks older than his 38 years. He has the air of someone who has been through something that hasn't killed him, but which hasn't made him stronger either. If times are hard for the Rob Blacks of porn, they're worse still for the men on screen. Even with the superhero parodies and the couples films, and the lower-paid work doing scenes for pay-sites, there is still nowhere near enough employment for the hordes of performers who hope to make a living getting paid to have sex on camera. At one of the top LA agencies for performers, LA Direct, the accountant Francine Amidor laments the "devastating" impact of piracy. "There's less work, and there's an abundance â?? because of the economy â?? of performers. There aren't enough people shooting to give everybody a day's work." I put it to Amidor that she owes it to the young aspirants who still make their way to the LA Direct offices to explain the consequences of their decision. She demurs. "Because then I would talk three quarters of the girls out of the business and then we wouldn't be in business." Fees for scenes, not surprisingly, have taken a hit. "Some girls get $600 [£390] for a scene now," the retired performer JJ Michaels tells me. "It might be $900-$1,000 for a big-name girl. It used to get up to $3,000." For guys, rates can be $150 or lower. Women supplement their income by stripping and doing live shows over the internet, shot from home on their webcams. One evening I visit one of LA Direct's top performers, Kagney Linn Karter â?? star of Rack-Tastic and Pound the Round â?? at her house as she prepares for her bi-monthly live show. Her boyfriend and full-time assistant Montae is hanging up her dresses while Kagney bathes and puts on her makeup. Montae and I then retreat to the kitchen where he tidies and wipes down surfaces while Kagney strips on her bed and masturbates in front of the strangers viewing her through her laptop. Forty-five minutes later, she emerges. "Well, I made a hundred dollars," she says brightly. It's an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by "hooking on the side". It's also called "doing privates", as in private bookings. The official industry line is that it's dangerous (because clients aren't tested the way performers are) and irresponsible (because the women could then infect the closed community of professional performers). But the women can make far more money having sex behind closed doors than doing it on film and, in fact, the practice is widespread. For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution. Male performers do not have the same options. For a tiny subsection of top talent, there is still a regular pay cheque, albeit a shrinking one. But work has dried up for many of the journeyman-performers in the lower ranks and there is a great deal of anxiety across the board. In the 90s one of the best-known male performers was Jon Dough â?? birth name Chet Anuszak. He was on contract with Vivid â?? the only man in the business to be exclusive to a company at that time. He had a reputation for being a dependable "woodsman" and was well liked in adult circles. I interviewed him in 1996 on the set of a remake of Debbie Does Dallas. But when he killed himself in 2006 at the age of 43 it was widely assumed that the woes of the industry â?? and specifically declining DVD sales â?? played a role. Jon Dough's widow is a fellow performer whose stage name is Monique DeMoan. They met on the set of Dr Butts 3: The Anal Asylum and eventually had a daughter together. No one in the world of porn knows Monique's whereabouts but I tracked her down to a conservative state many hundreds of miles â?? physically, culturally â?? from Los Angeles. Standing in the low-ceilinged basement flat in an insalubrious area, she says that her husband killed himself over his cocaine addiction, and the instability and sense of failure that went with it, not because of the pressures of the industry. Still, the perception among Dough's peers that DVD sales were a factor reflects an emotional truth: people in the world of porn were all too ready to believe that a top performer might have killed himself over the decline of a media format. Still they arrive, the cohorts of aspiring performers, looking for new lives of wealth and stardom in a world that can no longer offer either. If Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian can make sex tapes, they ask, then why shouldn't they? They tour the production companies for meet-and-greets with casting agents and directors, tick boxes on questionnaires about what they are willing to do on camera. They make one or two low-end scenes for the internet, before being chucked back into anonymity. On a rainy day, back on the same spacious suburban house on the quiet street in the valley where A Love Story was filmed, another production is under way. This time, it is a more modest affair â?? a few scenes made for an internet site. One of the male performers is a young man on his second shoot, performing under the name Tony Prince. His partner for the scene is called Stefania. It is her third shoot and she seems excited to have press around. "I'm trying to become one of the big porn stars," she says. She asks to take a picture with me, which she later tweets. The scene is supposed to look like a real-life boyfriend and girlfriend sex tape. One advantage of this is that there is no need for a cameraman. The performers shoot the action themselves. While they got down to business, to alleviate any possible performance anxiety on Tony's part, the director and I make ourselves scarce in the kitchen. He has been in the business since 1998, and he too is pessimistic about its future. "It's like I tell guys all the time, you better make this your side gig," he says. A few hours later, the two performers are laughing and showering together, both happy with how the shoot had gone. In a reversal of the usual order of things, they are flirting and becoming friends after sex. Where the industry will end up is hard to predict. Clearly there is still a market for softcore movies made by companies such as Penthouse and Hustler, available on subscription channels. The parodies may continue for a while, too. But it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don't want to pay if they don't have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do. "The way it is now, within five years I don't see how there could be a professional porn actor," Michaels tells me. It's not easy to sympathise with the porn companies, which made so much money for so long by embracing a tawdry business and a dysfunctional work-pool. But it is worth sparing a thought for the legions of performers, qualified for nothing much more than having sex on camera, who have no money saved, and no future. And there is also the wider question: do those who use porn not, perhaps, owe it a little something? Should those who download it not be ready to pass on a little cash incentive to the business? And if not, why not? Does the stigma attached to porn make it OK to steal it? These questions underpin a much bigger dilemma being faced by all media: how do you sustain an industry that provides a certain standard of product â?? be it journalism, music, or mainstream movies, or X-rated movies â?? when more and more consumers are in the habit of downloading content for free? In the world of porn, the answer is: you can't.

Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

Thanks for your thoughts, all! It's sounding like Android is the way to go. I must admit, I don't trust either Apple or Google to have the slightest bit of respect for any kind of privacy... I fear the only solution to this is to not tell your phone things (and not use it to log into FB, etc so it can't harvest data from there). And yes, I'm well aware that whatever I get will be obsolete within a month. 'Twas ever thus.

This explains a lot...

This has never happened to me, fortunately. But it'd certainly piss me off if it did. I think this happens to us all on occasion (and avoiding it is one of the main reasons I tend to be biased towards ladies who post here). I don't think there's anything you can do about it; sometimes the chemistry just isn't there, and when it isn't it can't be forced. All you can do is shrug and move on.

Shorter sandimoon: douchebags exist, and there's nothing you can do about it :) The real problem here is that a non-trivial segment of the online population has issues with basic reading comprehension and common courtesy. All I can suggest is to just use the block button, as backrubman said earlier - I'd be surprised if the people giving you hassle are the ones who actually contribute to the site, so you probably won't be missing anything by doing so.

Er... no, sorry. You're paying for the time, no matter happens during that time. And if a SP's policy is that she'd like to chat for a few minutes to break the ice before getting naked, or if she'd like you to take two minutes to have a shower before she puts your nether regions in her mouth, then our choice is simple: either go with that or see someone else. Anyone who really cares about this stuff can easily ask the SP before booking. In the context of this thread: I wouldn't expect this from someone who offered 15/30 minute appointments as short meetings just don't leave time for much beyond getting in, getting off and getting out, even without conversation and showers. However, as a general point, there do seem to be quite a lot of us guys who actually enjoy talking to the ladies we meet and getting to know them somewhat, and consider that to be good use of the time we're paying for.

Can't comment on Berry, or even on CMJ, having never been there. What I can say, however, is that from what I've heard CMJ are careful about who they hire, and train them before they're let loose on their own. And many of the better MAs around here seem to have worked at CMJ at some point in their careers.

No. :) I foresee an impromptu CERB social, conducted entirely via knowing glances...

It's new-phone-time. Any thoughts on the iPhone vs Android debate? I'm currently leaning towards Android as it's a more open platform (even though I don't trust Google further than I can spit), although the iPhone does seem to have more apps, and probably a better UI 'cos Apple are just *good* at that stuff...

And for everyone else: Mod is currently tweaking this stuff, so further changes may happen. There's a certain amount of trial and error....

Well... it varies. Useful, huh? It's a combination of things. Since I've been here for a bit, and check in regularly, the personality of the ladies who post regularly is a big deal for me, and I'm somewhat biased towards them in any case as I feel that they're not complete strangers. I should say that I'm not counting the daily ad here - I use ads mostly just to find out practical details *after* I make a decision. Particularly inventive ads will get attention in the same way that good posts will, but in practice that doesn't make much difference as the two seem to be strongly correlated. Recos matter, but far more so for the ladies that don't post as I have no other means of evaluating personality apart from what other guys have said. And then sometimes, all that goes out the window and the process can be boiled down to simply: "Nice ass. WANT!" And there's a time and place for that, too... pics aren't everything, but they do matter as well. The one thing that *doesn't* make any difference in principle, for me at least, is services offered. If the person I want to see happens to be a MA, I'll be getting a massage. If she's an SP, I'll be getting whatever it is she offers, within whatever limits she works to. This hasn't always been the case (I dipped my toes into the water by seeing just MAs for a while), but it's how I work now. Finally: I seem go through phases of wanting to meet new people, and wanting to revisit ones I've seen before. And I can't see anywhere close to as many ladies as I'd like as often as I'd like, so there are always people that I've never met but would like to, and others that I feel slightly guilty about not having seen for too long... but guess there are worse problems to have.

Awesome job, RG - and well-deserved! Here is your new truck :)