This weekend Jay and I travelled to the Fetish Fair Flea Market in Charlotte to present a class on Kinky Phone Sex for Couples. We had a great time and met some great friends that we had previously only known online. Catalina and Marky were kind enough to open their home to us and we spent Friday night with them. I wish I could say that we had some hot sex to tell you about (I mean, I *really* wish) but we were all beat and after eating pizza and talking about blogs and sex and random kinky stuff we all got to bed pretty early.

However, Catalina and Marky are amazingly cool people and both brilliantly fun, smart, and sexy. Know how sometimes when you are meeting someone for the first time it can be weird and you get uncomfortable because they aren’t exactly what you expect them to be? Well, this was *not* one of those situations.

On Saturday they both attended my class along with a small group and I got to have a great conversation/workshop with some lovely people about how to improve communication in their relationships and share fantasies with phone sex. After my class, it was time to go shopping since that was what the Fetish Fair was about.

Jay and I saw tons of cool stuff from some great vendors but we were most swayed by the amazing assortment of canes from The Kink Shop. We picked out three pretty thick ones and I can’t wait to try them out.

Our friends Liz and Alex had come to see us at the Fetish Fair and after we got our canes, Liz ran up to me in a gorgeous under the bust corset. She hadn’t been wearing it when I saw her just a few minutes before and I quickly complimented her on it. So, just for kicks, she said she would show me the vendor she had got it from.

Bear in mind that I had absolutely no intention of buying a corset. They are certainly gorgeous but it seemed like a lot of money to spend on a single item of clothing. However, the owner of Passional was really lovely and sweet and cinched me into a few just to try them out. This brings me to my tutorial on how to get your boyfriend to buy you a corset. Just follow this simple procedure:

Step One: Try on corset and let boyfriend see.

Congratulations! You have just successfully gotten your boyfriend to buy you a corset. I wish I was kidding but Jay’s hand was on his wallet before I even made it to the mirror. Sure, it was a lot of money to spend but he rationalized that it was a gift for both of us. So, how does it look?  How about you tell me.

More pictures are right on Flickr.

Anyone that has been following my Twitter lately knows that I’ve got a pretty serious crush on Thursday’s Child. Sure, all of us flirt on there, but this one is real. I am so lucky to have met Thursday and D and to count them as close friends. I’ve watched them go through struggles and growth over the last few months and I’ve been honored to be a friend to them. Jay and I hope to meet them very soon – plane tickets will be ordered one of these days and we will have them to ourselves.

Lately, Thursday and I have been leaving each other fun little voicemails to titillate and amuse. I’ve mostly been playful, sexy, and tried to have fun. This morning, though, I woke up and had a message from her. It had come in the middle of the night and I had a feeling it would be special. I was right. I knew I couldn’t do the sexiness of this message justice by just describing it. No, my dear audiophiles, you deserve to hear it. Grab the headphones!

Thursday’s Voicemail to Me

You back? Shaking like I was? When I first met Thursday I was instantly attracted to her, we are so similar in so many ways and she felt like the sister I never had. Except, I suppose most people don’t want to do to their sisters what I want to do to her. I have the same curiosities about her skin and her body. We have already warned the boys that they may have to sit calmly in the corner as we focus on each other. They might whine but it will be worth it.

Download Bedroom Radio 16.5: An Open Call to Clients of Sex Workers

I was so happy to see this article from Violet Blue that has an in depth discussion of the clients that keep sex workers, well, working.

Another excellent resource on this topic is the great Letters from Johns blog that is run by the amazing Susannah Breslin. The blog is a brilliant concept exercised with simplicity and grace. I just wish there were more letters. They range from clueless to compassionate and everything in-between.

Honestly, I gave up on writing this entry a few minutes into it and recorded a podcast instead. Please download it – it is my thoughts on sex work and clients and the interactions between them. It is based on limited experience. I am sure I said some things that will offend people. I didn’t mean to but I want to start a discourse on sex work that includes the voices of clients as clients.

My email address is lumpesse AT gmail DOT com and the number to call with your ideas is 206-339-5939 (To be 100% clear, this is not my phone sex line – it is just a voicemail box, it won’t cost you anything beyond long distance and your time and I won’t answer the phone).

I really want to collect audio so you can leave it as a voicemail or email it to me. Or upload it on your own blog or talk about it on your own podcast. I do plan to make another show (or more! many?) out of the comments that I get so if you don’t want your comment included, please state that very clearly in your message to me. Please pass on the word about this to anyone you can think of that might be interested.

Download Bedroom Radio 16.5: An Open Call to Clients of Sex Workers

. . . About phone sex! I would love to see what would have happened if Em and Lo and pulled me aside to ask:

I think that the last woman sums things up pretty well. It isn’t for everyone but when it is right, it is just right. I’d assert that there are definitely times it can be as intense as the real thing.

I’ve been reading everyone’s Sex 2.0 wrap-ups the last few days and been trying to decide if I should podcast my thoughts or write them. I figure I’ll do both and you can hear more detail in the podcasted version that I’ll get to a bit later.

The event was an interesting one for me personally because I have never appeared publicly in relation to this blog or my work in phone sex. I was both excited and nervous but luckily I met some of the most amazing people during the process and therefore felt totally safe.

The weekend began for us on Friday afternoon when Jay and I arrived at our hotel, I had time for a quick cleaning up after the car ride and then ran to the airport to pick up Melissa who I’ve been waiting to meet forever. You know how you meet some people and they are nothing like you expected them to be based on their writing? Well, this was not the situation with Melissa. She is bright, cheerful, sarcastic, and carries this amazing presence given her tiny frame. After getting Melissa to the hotel I met up with Match for a drink before the pole dancing party.

The pole party was a blast, again I expected to feel self-conscious and worried but everyone was gorgeous and sexy and uninhibited and that sort of thing rubs off on you. This is where I met Mistress Maeve, who happens to be one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do pictures but here is everyone at the party (excluding myself and Maeve.)

While I was pole dancing, Jay was at the Clermont Lounge with a bunch of people from the conference. The original plan was to head over there after the party was over but I was so exhausted that we headed back to the hotel instead. We went to a lot of trouble to get a nice hotel room with a whirlpool tub and all sorts of neat features but we didn’t use them at all and instead just crashed. I was surprised to realize that I had actually gotten sore from pole dancing. The front of my thighs were in rough shape because I guess that a lot of what I had been doing was basically squats.

We woke up bright and early, had some breakfast at the hotel, and headed to the conference. I got to see 1763 for the first time and was pretty impressed. When they said that the conference was happening at a dungeon, they weren’t just messing around. This place was, as they like to say on the internet, serious business. There were several rooms outfitted with lots of different equipment and the central space was huge and featured a giant shower in one corner (that Viviane quipped was the size of a New York studio apartment.) We arrived as Amber was giving the opening comments and then got to see Dacia give her keynote remarks. At this point it was time for the first session and I chose to attend Melissa’s. She trotted out her bag of tricks from being a sexual health educator and assigned us to perform roleplays of various sex and internet problems that people might have. I got the joy of performing a creative piece that Match and I developed to deal with jealousy that insignificant others might have over blog fans. I don’t remember much of it other than Match cracking everyone up with his request that I “@ him while I do it“. This was the first sign that Twitter was going to be a driving force of the weekend.

The next session I went to was run by Elizabeth Wood and was on Creating the Sex Commons. This was definitely the most thought-provoking and emotionally difficult sessions that I attended because we talked about responsibility. And I thought a lot about my responsibilities as a sex positive person when I step into a classroom and when I open a blog post and how (if ever) those two things are meant to interact. (I have written about this before). I also thought a lot about my responsibilities to my clients and friends and this session made me realize what important group of people were missing from Sex 2.0 – the clients. We were many of us there sex workers but none of us were paid consumers and I really wished that perspective had been present. Maybe next year!

After lunch I attended a session by the lovely Cunning Minx of Poly Weekly. Since Jay and I have struggled with our open relationship I thought that some tips might be helpful and Minx was encouraging and helpful while remaining quite realistic. I appreciated her sense of humor and grace in discussing icky emotions such as jealousy.

After this session, it was time for my own. I felt under-prepared but the vibe at the conference was so pleasant and open that I was really excited and confident anyway. In preparation, I had surveyed some phone sex operators and asked them about their personal phone sex habits and histories. I found out some interesting tidbits about the industry and how the average operator feels about phone sex. Some said that they regularly get off during calls, some said that they would never ever get off because phone sex doesn’t turn them on at all. Some said that they have NEVER done phone sex before being hired as a professional, others had done it recreationally for years. These statistics were interesting to my audience but what they really wanted to know was the nitty gritty of the job. How to get started, how to promote yourself, what to do to get the caller to tell you what they want and make them happy. I enjoyed sharing my expertise and it seems like there might be some more bloggers cum phone sex operators on the scene in the near future. Certainly a lot of women decide to do phone sex (as themselves or as a character) and the blog and promotional efforts come later. This is a logical way to go about things but I’m really grateful for the route that I ended up taking. This blog is too important to me to be reduced to a pure marketing effort. The minimal planning that I did for the session went out the window when I realized that we had run out of time just on me answering questions.

The last session that I attended was Viviane’s sex blogging session. Since I’ve been doing this for a few years, I had covered most of the ground that she did but it was amazingly informative. I can imagine that people just starting out with blogging got an amazing leg up because Viviane was sharing things with them that it took me *years* to figure out. Also, she is hot and amazing and brilliant so I wanted to bask in her presence.

Honestly, the day ended too soon. As it was wrapping up I was wishing that there was more but luckily the social opportunities had just begun. More on that later but for now check out Sakura Sarashi’s account of the evening and Sunday as she was with me the entire time.