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Newspapers are awesome, we’ve learned that well in their ongoing coverage of the escort trade. But as it happens, there’s more than just escorts that journalists like to dabble in when it comes to titillating, and sort of informing, their loyal readers as to what’s afoot in the world of sex.

Since marriage seems to never go out of fashion (the act that is, not the actual institution which, according to divorce rates, goes out of fashion all the time) there’s plenty of bachelor parties going on all year round. And while some guys probably enjoy sharing a bundt cake and watching Harry Potter with friends, others guys are more traditionalist in their approach and just want tits and booze. They’re what bachelor parties were founded on.

Thanks to the media, and newspapers like the SunHerald out of Biloxi-Gulfport and Southern Mississippi, we need not have to hold on to stodgy, old traditions like having strippers at bachelor parties. Oh no. We can have lots of fun without them. How much fun? The paper compiled a list of 20 possibilities. 20! Can you believe it? Let’s see what 20 things are more fun than naked women.

#1 – Hunting. No seriously. Why watch naked women when you can be in the woods, camouflaged, with your friends and firearms.

#2 – Poker. God knows why this excludes strippers. Vegas? Anyone?

#3 – Camp. Like with a fire and tents and shit. This is like hunting, only not including the guns, the only semi-manly aspect of the hunting trip.

#4 – Golf. Because that’s what being a bachelor for one last day is all about. Old man pants and white gloves.

#5 – A Whiskey Tasting. Because wine would be gay or something.

#6 – A Roadtrip. They suggest three destinations. One of them is Graceland. Fuck.

#7 – Herd Cattle. I’m not even going to make a joke about that.

#8 – A Video game party. Probably an awesome idea if your bachelor party coincides with your 13th birthday.

#9 – Ski. They have the nerve to say a bonus is the ski bunnies. Ya know…women who don’t get naked and in fact wear parkas.

#10 – Rent a beach house. Yep, a bunch of guys hanging around shirtless together. Why can’t strippers come again?

#11 – Paintball. This makes more sense than the video game party and will also work great for your 16th birthday party.

#12 – White-water rafting. Who needs tits when you could drown instead?

#13 – Fish. To spice it up, have a nap, then fish again!

#14 – Taste cigars. Could you imagine your buddies taking you out on our last night as a single guy and all they do is give you a fuckin Cuban? That should, at best, be a half hour out of a night, just before the strippers arrive.

#15 – Skydive. Why not drop the same amount of cash you would on an army of strippers to take a long safety lesson then spend 2 minutes falling from a plane?

#16 – Box seats at a game. If it’s a baseball game, you can still schedule that nap from the fishing trip.

#17 – Rent dirt bikes. Shit yeah, we’re all the way up to an 18th birthday celebration.

#18 – Go to Mexico. I assume this relates to prostitutes but the author simply forgot to write it in.

#19 – Eat a steak. This is awesome if the groom is actually a hobo used to eating shoe leather.

#20 – This is where the writer mocks what he thinks is a stupid idea for a bachelor party – an advice and blessing party for a Christian bachelor wherein all your buddies help you fill a book with personal and scriptural advice on marriage and child rearing. I will also agree that sounds about as fun as setting your balls on fire and having your friends stomp them out.

After 20 suggestions, what have we learned? Some dudes have shitty bachelor parties. Not all of those ideas were awful, but not all of those ideas where bachelor parties either. Those were nights with the guys, or afternoons, or, ya know, birthdays for teenagers. The thing you really want at any bachelor party is the give the man of the hour what he wants. And if he wants strippers, get him some strippers. Then play video games.

Few people want to put much effort into pondering their own mortality. That shit’s depressing. And what does it get you? Nothing more than it gets every other person who’s ever lived or will live. Just dead. Fuck that noise.

Unfortunately, since it does happen to everyone, plans must be made at some point, even if it’s just hastily arranging to have grandma’s remains stored in a Domino’s box before you scatter her across her favorite bowling alley toilet.

Prostitutes, like the rest of us, have to shuffle off this mortal coil sometime and for most the work they did probably doesn’t reflect on them in the afterlife. For most of them. But for some, well…if you’re good at something make sure the world knows it, right?

In Germany, where nothing is quite the same as it is over here, prostitutes are able to achieve a level of fame that gets them to be something akin to a celebrity. Sure, we’ve got the odd madam who makes the news like Heidi Fleiss, but who’s going to design her an epically raunchy epitaph? Not Charlie Sheen.

Domenica Niehoff, a woman who achieved fame for not only having a massive rack but also for campaigning on a variety of shows back in the day in favor of legalizing prostitution recently went to the big brothel in the sky. Naturally someone who’d touched a lot of people, in more way than one, her absence caused a friend who was an artist to want to pay tribute. His plan? A giant rack monument. Two pink, marble boulders in honor of her pink, marble boulders. It’s nothing but class in Germany, kids. Nothing but class. Still, it’s a nice gesture in its way and what’s the harm?

Sluttiness. That’s the harm. Niehoff is buried in the Garden of Women cemetery, which probably isn’t nearly as creepy as it sounds, and is a resting place for many of the most famous and influential women in Hamburg’s history. There’s room to go off on a tangent about segregation of the sexes after death, especially when dealing with an ex-prostitute, but whatever. The folks who run the cemetery felt that a giant pair of stone titties is not really in keeping with whatever image they’re trying to get across with their cemetery. Odds are it has something to do with serenity and respect but this is Germany after all, and it’s possible they only have a problem because they’re not wrapped in a studded-leather bra with holes cut out for the nipples.

The official reason for rejecting the tombstone was that it was too slutty. Not that it was in poor taste, not that it was inappropriate, that shit was slutty. And that’s how German funeral directors roll. No time for beating around the bush there. The dead won’t bury themselves.

The artist was understandably displeased and likely something a little more subtle will go up now, but it gives hope for us over in America who may never have thought of such things before. Europeans are funny in the ways they’ll be so open one way and stick to tradition in another. But in America, in the death industry, the industry that lets you get buried in your car, or turned into artificial diamond, or be blasted into space there’s no doubt that, for enough money, you can spend eternity under a pair of pink, marble boobies. Something to think about, anyway.

Continuing with our monitoring of the media’s coverage of and response to prostitution, a topic that is no end of both amusement and frustration is legalized prostitution. If you’ve never looked into it for yourself, try Googling it, you’ll spend the rest of the day smacking yourself in the head.

The problem with “facts” on legalized prostitution is that very few people tend to use them. This wonderful article on the faily dispatch, which boasts in its banner that it actually won a journalism award, is curiously devoid of citation. We just have to take it on faith when the author states that prostitution, when legalized, makes the world worse. When they say that, when decriminalized, most prostitutes still do not use protection or access health services, in the same paragraph that started by talking about South African prostitutes, we have to assume that this is correct. The author can’t be full of shit, right? Or even misleading us by mentioning Africa and then a health claim, right?

Oddly enough, the World Health Organization said that when safe sex campaigns were introduced in Kenya “reported condom use by sex workers has since increased to over 80%.” 80% seems like a significant number, though I’m no math whiz. There’s also been “a significant decline in STD rates among sex workers and pregnant women between 1991 and 1996.”

On the subject of crime, and this may be just spitballing or more misreading of facts on my part, but the data presented on this website showing crime statistics indicates lower violent crime rates and lower disease rates in countries that allow prostitution. Is this directly related to prostitution? Probably not in the slightest, but it is related to the society. The more forward thinking the society, the more liberal and educated in its world views, so too follow its citizens, who are likely to be more responsible when it comes to having sex and using protection, and more level headed and humane about how they treat other human beings.

There’s a funny thing no one ever mentions about the sex industry when they talk about the numbers. Be they true figures or figures inflated and bandied about by like minded people who want the act abolished altogether, when they start talking about human trafficking and assaults and rapes and so on, the geography and origin of the criminals in question is rarely mentioned. Are these men locals, from the country where the act is already legal, or from abroad?

When people lament sex tourism in Asia, who are the people causing the problem? When they insist there is human trafficking in Amsterdam, who is benefiting? Are the sex tourists not the people who can’t legally acquire these services in their own country? Is the demand not being fed by the prohibition of the act worldwide?

No one can definitively state one way or the other than legalized prostitution around the world would solve any problems. It can be definitively stated, however, that a prohibition does not solve problems. The argument, then, is that even if it’s illegal now, it wouldn’t get better if it were legal.

Statistics indicate that Germany, where prostitution is legal, is also very big on trafficking in women. But is this necessarily an argument that legalized prostitution leads to human misery or that, by having one country as a free zone in the midst of many others that make it illegal, like gambling in Vegas, the country becomes a beacon for excess?

There’s no right or wrong answer at the moment because there is not enough information. Isolated instances of legalized prostitution cannot possibly reflect the world climate. Like oases in the desert, they’re bound to attract a disproportionate share of individuals. The only way to know for certain if prostitution can function across the board is to legalize it everywhere and remove the need for sex tourism as an industry and from there determine if an underground element is still in play. And if it is, guess what? That is not the fault of prostitution any more than illegal trafficking in prescription narcotics is the fault of the pharmaceutical industry, it is the responsibility of criminals and that is why we have law enforcement.

I may be coming down too hard on the world of journalism lately and if that’s the case, I apologize, but it really is kind of fun to see how they present prostitution as a whole to their audience. Like Indiana Jones uncovering a secret temple thought to be only legend, the press delves into prostitution as though discovering it for the first time, sharing stunning facts and figures with their readership that we, in our unique position, can read with an arched eyebrow and a bit of a laugh.

Down in Knoxville the local press has been hard at work on a series, no less, covering aspects of prostitution in their neck of the woods. And of course it’s all valid news for them, the figures may be stunning to the locals who really don’t know how many prostitutes operate in town, how many arrests are made and so on, but when you do a three part series on a topic, you need to ensure that you actually have material to fill out an entire three part series. It seems entirely possible the folks in Knoxville did not have enough.

In our latest installment on Knoxnews.com, we learn, again, how technology and prostitution work together to make the world a more nefarious place. Why do journalists love this topic so much? We may never know. Perhaps they’re pandering to that demographic that still haven’t bought cell phones and are mildly afraid of computers, though one wonders why the article is printed online. We’ll have to assume it also went out in hard copy to the 1950’s.

The article tells us “Gadgets like pagers and cell phones as well as the Web have made it easier than ever to buy and sell sex.” Naturally we have to agree. Those of us who still have pagers leftover from when they were used in the late 80’s are probably buying and selling ass like it’s our job. Back in the day before all that technology when we had to send a singing telegram to a prostitute’s house and wait for her to reply with some kind of Morse code message life was a bitch.

Later in the article, it states “The online ads are explicit, often including nude photographs and descriptions of the sexual activities women offer, couched in acronyms and euphemisms.” One has to assume this information is being relayed to educate readers who would otherwise not know such a thing which, again, seems to indicate the readership of the paper may be entirely peopled with people who either have no computers at all, or have AOL as a service provider and may as well be trying to surf the internet on a Speak and Spell. For the rest of us, those even marginally familiar with the internet, the idea that an escort may (gasp) have nude photos is about a shocking as finding out CNN.com carries news items.

There’s a second article in the same paper and on the same website detailing some negative feedback this series on prostitution has received from readers, who don’t understand why this is “news” or why it gets front page coverage. And honestly, it’s a valid point. Is this news? Prostitutes use the internet? Didn’t everyone learn that with the Craigslist fiasco a short time ago? Cell phones and pagers? Honestly? Why not tell us drug dealers use pagers too, or that someone disguised as the milk man may be casing your house to burgle it. This isn’t really news, even with throwaway facts about how many arrests are made each year thrown in. This is trying to appeal to the seedy interests of the “respectable” readers who would never visit a prostitute, but would love to see mugshots of them and read about some BBBJCIM. Assuming that’s what will be covered in tomorrow’s article.

There’s something at once disturbing and charming about sex on the internet. Sometimes you find a German fetish site full of fisting videos and decide you never want to visit Berlin. Other times you come across a forum where someone’s seriously asking if anal sex can lead to pregnancy complete with a full list of responses on dribble down insemination and two guys who think sodomy is evil. It’s kind of cute in its innocence on the one hand, and god awful in its explicit what-the-fuckness on the other.

Sites that try to be moderate, helpful and in between, still have their pitfalls, especially when a random, semi-jaded and worldly blogger such as myself stumbles upon them. Sites that offer up blunders to avoid while having sex. And surely this information can be useful to all of us, as sex is the vast part of what brings us all here after all and, even in a provider/hobbyist scenario we likely want everyone to have a good time. So let’s review some tips offered up by a fresh-faced, sincere blog about sex and see how they stack up to our experiences.

#1 – Most people tend to avoid kissing. Ahh, there’s a pickle for us. Out in the world of high school prom, back seat of dad’s car humping it may behoove you to try to remember to use your lips here and there to ensure the romance of the moment, but what are we to do? Pay for the GFE and of course there’s much kissing to be had. Get a provider who watched Pretty Woman and then what? Best to bring some gum or something so your mouth doesn’t go numb.

#2 - Do not get into the aggressive mode before your partner is aroused enough to enjoy it. This amusingly goes into detail about biting your partner and when the right time to bite them actually is. This is where charming mixes with slightly confusing. Sure, some folks enjoy biting but…really? Is “(b)iting any part of you partners body before they are aroused may lead to pain and discomfort” really advice anyone needs? Beyond a sociopath, I mean.

On the other hand, if you’re paying for some BDSM or a domme, you may want her to bite you before you even say hello. It’s an individual taste thing. Either way, it’s probably bets to work out the finer details of gnawing on your partner well beforehand, lest fears of rabies present themselves.

#3 - Do not just concentrate on the genitals. Yep, there’s another tough call for us. By and large that may be decent advice, you should probably shake hands or high five or something at some time too. When it comes to a provider though, this may be a grey area. If you want to pleasure her as much as she’s pleasuring you, certainly you’ll want to go exploring, but knowing a woman likes to have the back of her neck licked is generally the sort of thing one learns in a relationship. Unless she’s your ATF and you have a degree of familiarity with her, again, you’ll just have to ask or make sure she’s very vocal and lets you know ahead of time.

#4 - Having control over the climax Everyone needs to cum. That seems pretty straight up, though honestly we must have all heard a million and one stand up comedians prattle on about men rolling over and falling asleep after they cum by this time in our lives to realize it doesn’t always work that way for some people. And, as we’ve gone over before, can you ever really be sure with a provider? Some yes, but some no. They’re putting on a show, after all.

#5 - Do not treat your partner like a porn artist – Unless you’re paying for it.

#6 - Nothing can be more frustrating than silent sex - This inexplicable final point is somewhat more relevant to us, as hobbyists, than any other point on the list. Part of what drives someone to visit a provider is the fantasy. A new person who can be or do anything we desire, and one of the most important parts of that is her ability to communicate. To ask what you want, to tell you what to do, to say utterly filthy shit (if that’s what you want) that no one else you’ve ever been with would ever say. So hell yeah, fuck silent sex.

That was the end of the list, and of course if you make jokes it can be amusing, but the point here wasn’t really to make fun of another site and their take on sex. Surely that information can be quite useful to some people who are nervous or unsure about sex and what they want to do. But it does serve as an example of how, for us, for the hobbyist/provider sexual relationship, there’s not much out there. We’re unspoken and ignored by and large in the vast resources of sexual information available on the internet. So when you find yourself unsure or with a question, one of your best resources, beyond this delightful blog, is our very own Naughty Reviews forum. What better place to find like minded people, hobbyists and providers, to help you work out whatever issue you have on your mind?

Naughty Reviews is, of course, an immensely helpful website that comes complete with a stunningly handsome blogger. We offer a place for providers and hobbyists to mingle and relationships to burgeon. It’s good times. Sometimes, however, a review may not encompass everything you could possibly want to know about a potential escort. Sure, you can see her picture to tell if you find her attractive, see what services she provides to know if you’re interested and read how other guys enjoyed the experience, but is that all there is?

By and large, that will be enough and we’re all the happier for it. But every so often something comes right out of left field. Something we couldn’t even have fathomed a box for when we developed the HTML for this website, so there’s no way you could have known about it. The only way you could learn this valuable, amazing, unexpected piece of information is being in the right place at the right time when it happened, or reading about it in the paper.

If you guessed I’m talking about a prostitute who puts out for potato chips, congratulations, you may be psychic. If you did not guess that, don’t worry, who the fuck could have ever guessed something like that?

This is the kind of thing none of us want to hear. Well, we do, because that shit is funny, but at the same time it casts the whole of the hobby under a very dim light. Earlier this week, a 36 year old prostitute was arrested and charged after being caught with a man who, apparently flat broke, offered to pay for her services with a $30 case of potato chips he had in the back of his truck. If you’re wondering why he had the chips, it’s because he works for Frito-Lay. If you’re wondering why she took $30 worth of chips for a blowjob, your guess is as good as anyone’s.

To start with, if you can barter sex for salty snacks you may think you’ve won a victory of value and good business skills, but it’s likely no one wins in a situation when sex is traded for Fritos. The old saying “you get what you pay for” has to have some kind of social relevance still. In any event it’s a good rule of thumb that “interesting trades” are not the sort of thing you really want to get into with a provider. Admittedly, many of us have likely heard of some women trading for items or services, but those are generally much more impressive things like a new car or body work on the old one; something more substantive than fried potato.

A more serious issue, as mentioned above, is what this means for the hobby as a whole. For you as a hobbyist, for providers who would not do such things. Maybe this woman was in a very bad way, we don’t know the circumstances that made her think potato chips were worth this sort of act and there’s probably a serious and sad story in there somewhere, but your gut reaction to that story was felt 10-fold by the public at large. People who read that felt ashamed for that woman, but disgusted at the same time. And in their heads, that woman is any provider. That Frito Lay employee is you.

If we would all endeavor and hope that one day prostitution could be legalized in America, that men would not face a stigma and providers would not face violence, disease and exploitation, this sort of thing needs to be overcome as well. Sex needs some respectability if we expect anyone to respect it.

Half a world away it’s surprising to see what it takes to make a government take action. Taiwan, which only outlawed prostitution 11 years ago, just decided to bring it back. Because prostitutes asked them to.

It’s something of a numbers game in Taiwan and that makes it all the more amusing when contrasted with North American prostitution. One of the quotes in a recent article on the topic was that “It's something the public has wanted for 12 years.” The internet tells us that there are about 84,000 full time sex workers in America, based on various estimates, though arrest figures would indicate it’s over 100,000. 15% of men in America, according to a survey, have admitted to paying for sex, meaning in actuality you have to assume that number is higher. How high does the number have to be in America for prostitution to qualify as something the public wants?

No matter what people say, what argument there is against prostitution, it’s all amazingly wasted breath because, for everyone with eyes and ears, you’re not fooling anyone. Prostitution is in every major city in the country. It has been here since the country was founded.

Back to Taiwan a moment. The government, for a time, had made it illegal for prostitutes but not their clients, a law that is reflected in other places around the world as well, either through act or omission on the part of lawmakers. Rather than rolling it back to make it illegal for the customers as well, lawmakers are going ahead and decriminalizing it across the board as it’s not really justifiable to punish one party to an act but not the other.

Along with decriminalization comes the desire to actually build specific red-light districts in some parts of the country, a move which will arguably increase tourism to those parts and will ruffle the feathers of everyone who’s positive that sex equals evil.

The funny thing about prostitution, from its origins until now, is that there’s never been a real concrete argument against it. We’re not talking sex trafficking, or child prostitution, or violence against women, or drug use, we’re talking prostitution. Those other things happen when something is forced underground because it’s illegal and like felons sharing tips on how to commit crimes, illegal activity tends to breed illegal activity. However, in Las Vegas brothels, or New Zealand and German brothels, you almost never hear about that kind of thing. Because it’s legal and controlled and monitored. Barring a crooked brothel owner, who wouldn’t stay in business for long if it were something being monitored by the government, you wouldn’t be seeing rampant drug use, or violence and certainly no child prostitution.

People are against prostitution based on personal morality. It’s not really a criminal issue, a public safety issue, or anything like that. Any argument against prostitution should be equally as valid against sex in general but no one can go that far. The closest argument would be against promiscuity with no safety controls – rampant pregnancy and disease spread, both of which can be controlled by responsible people who think ahead.

So Taiwan has made a bold move, recognizing that those who buy and sell sex are not, in fact, contrary to the norm. People want sex. We do it to survive and there’s nothing wrong with doing it recreationally as well. Will that ever change here? Give it time. You never know.

The secrecy inherent in the whole world of escorting is kind of amusing when it’s torn away and becomes public knowledge. Not amusing for those who want to keep it a secret, of course, but the thing about skeletons in the closest is that if you don’t want to have any, don’t do anything to put them there. Any time big bombshell news about someone’s personal life gets exposed publicly you can see the anguish on the person’s face, but have to wonder how they didn’t see it coming.

Today, with Eliot Spitzer not too distant from our memories, another high profile madam, Michelle Braun, has been caught and has a list full of names that she has finally agreed to turn over in exchange for a lighter sentence. Names of people who paid upwards of $50,000 a night to be with one of her girls. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, that had better have been the best fucking sex ever in the history of all time.

So now some knees are shaking and gossip journalists are salivating like starving dogs outside a butcher shop. No names have been released yet but word is it’s “shocking.” I bet. While the madam claimed some of her girls included Hollywood actors, Playboy centerfolds and fashion models, you have to keep this in perspective. For instance, Hollywood actors include the people who co-star in direct-to-dvd Steven Seagal movies these days. Very likely many of those people have to escort to make ends meet. Playboy centerfolds are just regular women from around the country who happen to be attractive. No shock there. And fashion models? Aren’t most of them famous for loving heroin? Maybe that was a few years ago, who knows.

Point is, the list of clients, of prominent men who paid these bajillions of dollars to be with her girls, is soon coming out. But is it shocking? In all honesty, how many name could be on that list that would actually be shocking? It’s a given that the Pope might raise some eyebrows, but who else? Is there an actor left in Hollywood that people would gasp about if they knew they’d seen an escort? A politician? Short of Barack Obama or George Bush, neither of whom would be that shocking if you thought about it for a few minutes given that JFK was shtooping Marilyn Monroe in the Lincoln bedroom, you’d be hard-pressed to be surprised by any politician paying for sex. So who could be on the list?

Sadly “no one cares” is not the answer. No one should care if you pay for sex, no one should care if Charlie Sheen, Eliot Spitzer or the Dalai Lama pay for sex. But they do anyway. And when the list comes out, people will be shocked. God knows why, but they will pretend to be. How could so and so do such a thing? I thought better of them! Any time news like this comes out, the world at large reacts as though sex was not unlike eating food out of the garbage. Sure, some people do it but…eew. Not us.

So keep your eyes open for the news as it develops, but remember. You may not be famous yourself, or paying as much as you’d pay for a Lexus to get laid, but if you’re interested in this, someone may be interested in what you’re up to. Until we can all get past this morbid fascination with other people’s sex lives, until we can stop thinking of it as juicy gossip or something illicit, it’s always going to be a skeleton in the closet.

Oh Hollywood, you lovable scamp you. You can always count on Hollywood to be so ironic and subversive that it’s very nearly mind blowing when they stumble on an idea and bring it to the small screen in an edgy new dramedy. And now HBO is taking on prostitution.

Being HBO< the new show is obviously not about ladies. It’s about a dude who sells his sausage to hungry lady folk and it’s called Hung because the dude has quite the epic penis. Sounds like run of the mill stuff so far, right? Well, it’s all edgy and new because it’s a male prostitute and you never see those and HBO is always cutting edge and never makes bad shows, unless you count everything it did before the Sopranos started. But that’s neither here nor there.

The interesting thing about the show is that, for starters, it’s HBO. And that means even if halfway through each episode a monkey comes out and picks its ass for the remainder of the episode, critics are going to love it and it’s going to be nominated for awards. It’s going to be huge.

So here we have a huge new show and it’s about prostitution. Thoughts? Comments? Indeed, while it could be argued Sex and the City was a show about 4 old, ugly prostitutes, the fact is a show featuring a male prostitute is probably not going to really gain much attention beyond its critical acclaim and in the right wing religious camp who hate anything not on PBS. But for the rest of us, we’ll be forced to forever wonder how we live in a society that so comfortably embraces double standards.

Shows and films about escorts and prostitutes, that in any way glamorize or even remotely accept that lifestyle, are vilified. Horribly. The trend lately has been to demonize the profession and show that stark, lonely reality so the viewer can disapprove of the lifestyle but still sympathize with the woman because she’s so hard done by. If Pretty Woman was made today she’d have a heroin addiction.

If you make a show about a male prostitute, however, it’s edgy and new. He’s not a victim, he’s not glorifying sex, he’s zany and outside-the-box. His day job is as a basketball coach. You know, based on that, he’s going to end up fucking the mother of one of his players at some point, guaranteed. The creators of the series said this – “We approach it as Ray's journey to reclaim his manhood by joining the world of women.” Try to imagine, for even a second, someone making a show about an escort using that kind of description to accompany it. It’s about this waitress who moonlights as a high-priced callgirl. We tried to approach it as a journey to reclaim her womanhood by joining the world of men. Please send death threats care of HBO.

The fact is this would never fly if it were about a woman. It would be torn apart and stomped into the mud. No one likes sex and prostitution in the media, except they do. They just can’t say they do. So the only way to tolerate it is if it’s packaged in a fun, new way. Don’t give us Pretty Woman, give is the Girlfriend Experience. Don’t give us escorts, give us male prostitutes on HBO.

Anyway, may be worth watching. Maybe not. It’s about a dude after all, who wants to see that?

Every so often it’s good to take a look behind us to see where we came from. Or see who’s trying to fuck us. But for now we’ll just look at a bit of history, because it’s fun and informative and sometimes even a bit enlightening when contrasted with the world today. Of course, any history lessons has its merits, but the history of sex is just that much more interesting and worth looking into.

For instance, the much maligned profession of prostitution was not always so. In fact, in the area now known as the Middle East, prostitutes performed an important service for society at one time. Soldiers going to war were often off on long campaigns that rivaled what our soldiers currently have to deal with, and it wasn’t just battle that was a danger, but the treacherous and unknown terrain, long distances and travel by ship or by foot. When the men finally returned home, the world they knew could have vanished entirely as families, friends and neighbors disappeared, cities prospered or fell and new governments emerged. The result could be a massive culture shock and the cure was sex. Prostitutes, often sacred prostitutes who worked in temples, would help ease the soldiers back into their old life by offering them comfort and someone they could connect with. And by that, of course, we mean boning.

Sex itself was a powerful force in many ancient cultures. From Egypt and Babylon and Europe before the rise of Rome, the power of sex was very likely the power to do all sorts of shit if you could convince a woman to go for it. It was magic. If you wanted a fertile crop, you best have some sex magic in your back pocket, as the link between human fertility and the fertility of the Earth was a simple connection for people to make. It’s been speculated prostitution also had a valuable role in this from time to time as, when in need, those looking to cast some spells probably weren’t choosy on what partners they worked with.

Japan, a land which is vastly different from North America in so many ways, has long had a fascination with sex and sexuality dating all the way back to the emergence of Geisha. Geisha have long been thought to be prostitutes, if of a high class and somewhat theatrical variety, but that is not actually the case. A Geisha’s true purpose is to entertain, so something more of an artisan or even a burlesque performer who does a variety of things to maintain the attention of her audience, but sex is never offered or implied, though this is often not understood and, in some cases, has been perverted with the creation of actual Geisha-like prostitutes. Much of the confusion arises from the fact Geisha were sort of born from actual prostitutes called oiran who both provided sex and entertainment, sort of like the best stand up comedian ever.

In ancient Rome, sex was a huge part the entire culture and often simply a method of exercising power, which is why homosexual relationships were as normal as heterosexual. No one cared who you fucked, it was the fact you were either fucking or being fucked that showed your place in the world. Prostitution was so valuable and important statesmen had been quoted as saying they couldn’t understand how the country could function without it. These days the world outlook on sex has changed for some, but obviously not all. Many of us would appreciate an escort who can do magic tricks before she goes down on us, or state supported prostitution but hey, times change. That’s why we look back.