After months of serious procrastination I FINALLY got around to doing my website house cleaning. There wasn’t much major work that need to be done, some grammatical issues, one or two spelling errors, a few dead links. I did need to add the lovely Miss Audrey to my site as a potential playmate for duos. So all told, coding learning curve aside, I should have been done in an hour. Alas, WHY I put off such tasks is that things never seem to work out that way.
I didn’t even hit any problems this time, like when my entire site crashed in the midst of a simple cut and paste edit. Luckily my site designer and coding genius was on hand to spot and fix the problem. Apparently you aren’t supposed to capitalize letters in html. Good to know.
No the problem is much more insidious. Any writer knows the danger of picking up an old piece of work…you can’t not start to tweak it and before you know it, its four in the morning. But…it’s DONE…for now. And having gotten on a creative kick with all that re-writting I’ve returned to my poor, much neglected, blog. Doesn’t hurt that one of the fixes was linking to my blogs shiny new home (kiss my butt, Livejournal!).
So in the interest of new stuff here’s a couple bits of random. First up a letter:
“Hello!
You, madam, are fabulous 🙂 I absolutely love the work you’ve put into your website, the humor you’ve injected, the intelligence that winds its way through every paragraph. Well done!
I’m just getting into the pro domme scene and have a question for you, if you’ve the time. Your FAQ page states”I am not a trained therapist or a licensed counselor(yet)” (sic) – should I take that to mean you’re studying psychology? If so, could you refer me to a good book (or many)? I’m looking to learn more about sexual psychology but also just general stuff. Brains are fabulously fascinating 🙂 I’ve also found that near every one of my subs, past and present, uses our process (either directly or indirectly) as a way to sort through brain-noise and have fabulous life transformations. That in mind, I’ll be going at this from a life-coaching perspective, so I want to be fully prepared for anything that comes my way. Time to study!”
And my reply:
“Thanks for the interest and admiration. The “not yet” comment refers to my plan to go back to school to get a counseling degree and my optimistic hope that one day the therapeutic benefits of my current profession will be recognized by the larger medical establishment.
So a lot of my training is from on-the-job work, years of industry experience can’t help but show you patterns of behavior with regard to the motivations, triggers and fears that most clients have around kink, interpersonal relationships and their bodies. But a surprising amount of it comes from my BA in theater which I self-deprecatiingly refer to as “a psyche degree for narcissists”.
As far as reading lists, everything that deals with kink/sex, even if its bad (like 50 Shades of Grey), even if its just supposed to turn you on (like erotica/porn), can give you insight into how people come to and process what does, and doesn’t, get them hot. Both fiction and non-fiction have things to offer.But here are some books that I’ve found extremely useful over the years:
Real Live Nude Girl and The Leather Daddy and the Femme both by Carol Queen
Pretty much anything by Susie Bright
>Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald
Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Ph.D and Cacilda Jethá, MD
Bonk by Mary Roach
When Someone You Love is Kinky by Dossie EAston and Catherine A. Liszt
Most things by Carl Jung (a million times more holistic minded than Freud at addressing sexual motivations, IMO) and Joseph Campbell, especially The Hero with a Thousands Faces (great stuff on ritual, patterns and paths). And an at least general understanding of most major religions because wether someone is a recovering catholic or a practicing Hindu, religion has an effect on the vast majority of people’s feelings about sex.
Lastly, read stuff by other sex workers, blogs, books, essays, articles it all can offer insight.
Lastly, if you aren’t active in the kink community…become so. Getting to know a wide sampling of folks who are at least okay enough with their kink to attend public events isn’t just a useful tool when interacting with clients who have yet to (or aren’t able to) do so, it will also be necessary so you can give them real world examples of what is out there for them if they were to pursue a more holistic, open lifestyle with regard to their sexuality.
Hope this helps”
And I like to end with a joke…and this time I’ll use someone else’s…this is a great on-line comic but its rarely safe for work. This particular strip does not include boobs.
