June Gloom in Review

Where did this month go?

I've been very busy hence my lack of posting. I've been doing a lot of reading, exploring and kinky reorganization. A few of my favorite snap shots of the last few weeks:

--hot, hot, hot photo shoot with Jenny Demilo where I discipline a naughty school girl (to be posted soon! a few sneak peeks can be found on Facebook and Myspace.)

--beat the hell out of a Marine; lots of intense CBT with weights and spiky things. Consider it my contribution to the war effort.

--teasing and denying a sub at my feet for hours; smacking him for indolence, rewarding him for obedience.

--deep psychological torture of an all too willing participant; don't play mind games with me darling, you'll be up way past your bedtime.


I'm feeling very athletic these days and seek to work out some frustrations.

Perhaps you could be of some service?

Ms. Justine goes to Miss California

I confess that I went to the pageant fully expecting to hate it. Even on my way to the event my friend said, "Now you be nice to those girls!"

In spite of myself, I actually had a good time. The last time I had seen a pageant must have been when I was a child and wasn't really sure what to expect. I had a running commentary on Twitter throughout the pageant. However, what I most definitely did not expect was how dressed up everyone else was in the audience. I felt too casual among cocktail dresses and strappy heels with my, it must be confessed, dungarees. I didn't think that for many attendees, that this would be a big event for them too, something that perhaps they wished to participate in someday.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talent competition forgetting how much I loved opera and ballet. I continued to enjoy the so-called physical fitness competition. Slightly horrified and dismayed with evening wear and I realized, this was awesome! I got to see very talented, sexy women in many different outfits in a matter of hours! Then came the Q&A and I was incredibly disappointed. The questions were great: how do you see the role of women changing? How has the recession effected you? The answers? Pure drivel. But they are tough questions that could occupy the space of a thesis and I too would be hard-pressed to give an excellent answer in a few minutes.

Several questions plagued me during this event. Why is this an event only for women? I can't imagine men competing this way and I realize it's because they don't have to. Should we continue to objectify ourselves for the sake of scholarship money? Should we perpetuate the ideal that women should be talented, sexy and smart? What is the fetish equivalent?

At the end of the night, I told my date I sure had a swell time. He responded a little too quickly, I can get us tickets for Miss America in Las Vegas!

Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica" ~ Book Review

I picked up this book because the cover reminded me of Méret Oppenheim's Object, the infamous fur lined tea cup.

The subject matter was fascinating, save the private collections of toys amassed by myself and similar kinky individuals, I had not given much thought to serious collectors of erotica. It was an amusing read, though a bit rambled and disorganized. Geoff Nicholson concentrates on only a handful of collectors and dedicates about a chapter to each. He almost always notes that this is an expensive hobby and most of the collectors are of a certain age. Perhaps because this, its never quite revealed about the personal sexual preferences of the collectors, but I think its a given one cannot be so taken with collecting erotica, if one wasn't specifically interested in the actual subject matter.

He visits the Kinsey Museum, possibly the most interesting thing to do in Indiana, which reminds me I should really read the Kinsey Report too and see the movie. Kinsey collected everything he possibly could about sex in addition to his extensive interviews. Nicholson touches on one such interview of a man who has countless sexual encounters with all beings of all ages, which was truly sickening and sad, but how Kinsey as a scientist could not turn him over to the authorities because he was merely recording (or collecting) his experiences. It pointed out a good deal of vintage erotica books that I would like to read.

This was a pretty amusing, quick read.

My First Professional Sex

Check out my interview on My First Professional Sex about my decision to go into sex work. This is a fairly new site about all kinds of sex workers and their introduction to this line of work.

Enjoy!

Indecent: How I Make it and Fake it as a Girl for Hire ~ Book Review

I knew we were not going to get along the moment I read "Hemingway still sucks" in her acknowledgments.

It begins with her adolescent realization that working minimum wage jobs suck and that she could still be a feminist and be a sex worker. So she wanders into a sexy place and fills out an application. I found it really amazing that she never even knew what she was applying for. I could understand that she being a punky feminist living in grunge Seattle had never shaved or owned anything overtly sexy like thongs, but her acting surprised that she would have to do these things if she wanted to work in this sexy place--what would she be doing--was amazing. I thought the language was a bit overwrought and chatty, much like the bowels of livejournal tends to be.

I read a bunch of reviews on Amazon and found them all suspect and like they were clapping for someone in the special Olympics. Why do you think she is intelligent? Is it because she was capable of post-modern thought while simultaneously being a sex worker? I wouldn't really classify her as intelligent, but wouldn't go so far as to say she was stupid either. However, saying her writing about sex work is interesting is about as obvious as global warming. Duh. It's about SEX. Of course it's interesting. Could someone ever write about sex work and be boring? Let's stop clapping. Thanks.

But then, despite of myself, I actually started to really like this book. She so accurately describes the stench of sex worker institutions--thick with perfume, stench, cum and disinfectant, thick with thickness. If you have never been to one, this is as accurate as its going to get. Imagine people doing their dirtiest of functions in a place that never opens the windows and must saturate every surface, even the air, with chemicals to mask the smell and risk. Once I went out after a session and my friend frowned at me and said, You smell like the dungeon.

She nails the smell, she nails the waterlogged magazines constant in dressing rooms, she nails the napping--some of my fondest memories of working in a dungeon are taking naps on the bondage bed. I never really thought about how similar lives of other sex workers were to the ones of me and women in my dungeon. Until recently, I've never even been exposed to sex workers other than Dommes.

Are we all so similar? We do feast when money rolls in, and sell our things when money's tight. We're in a constant state of overly made-up and teetering off the edge of sanity. I never felt the same sense of competitiveness as she did with her co-workers nor have I felt like my stuff was going to get stolen, and I agree with her that most women choose to do sex work for obvious and good reasons, however, in a certain sense you have to be a little nuts to be in this business at all. Even if you are not before you start, you're going to be a little nutty doing this work. Yes, there are truly amazing people you meet, but at the same time you are constantly exposed to depravity, sadness, and fragility. What really struck me is that management seems to be more fucked up than the women actually doing the sex work--they admonish her for posting her own ads, they are upset when she protects her health, they are happy when the girls fight. Bad management is a consistent problem throughout the labor market, but it is beyond me why managers of sex workers, one of the most lucrative businesses with little overheard would deliberately hurt their profit makers. I wonder, are there any memoirs by those who ran sex worker institutions? Beyond "Madams" that is.

She's remarkably perceptive regarding what her clients want and how best to extract the most money from them. I'm glad she touched on how so many men seem to either not care about being in another man's filth or cum, or might actually enjoy it as she describes how they would lick the glass at her peep show obviously fraught with cum. She begins unshaven in Seattle and ends up stealing from a client in New Orleans. I enjoyed her ten year journey in the sex industry--I recommend reading this book both for the client and the sex worker.

I liked her "point system" when she's assessing her worth next to another stripper; being white gets more points, having lots of tattoos loses points, etc. But what I loved most of all, was her correct assessment, that in the end, being beautiful in this industry doesn't make you the most money, being the smart girl does. :)