Sunny

For a recent article in The Real News, interviewer Taya Graham starts off, “We all know men like to pay for sex.” Seriously?

I’d say that a far more acceptable generalization would be, “We all know men like sex, and some are even willing to pay for it.” But that is still a generalization, because while some of us may care very deeply about the exploitation involved, others simply want at least some bit of romance in their hookups. Some really believe it is sinful, or at least a bad idea. And others are simply too poor or too cheap or too afraid of getting caught.

I forget when I first learned – probably from TV – that some women traded sex for money, but I suspect I first thought more deeply about prostitution while reading The Catcher in the Rye, through the characters of a pimp, the elevator operator Maurice, and a young hooker calling herself Sunny. As I look back, it was quite an accomplishment for the reclusive JD Salinger to have permanently soured a sexually curious young high schooler on the idea that there was any glamour in paying for intercourse.

After my freshman year of college, working for the county, two of us summer interns were surveying the police offices, and saw a woman handcuffed to a chair, awaiting her turn before a magistrate. She could have been there for any reason, but somehow from her dress and demeanor we had the idea that she was a prostitute. My coworker couldn’t stop staring at her until she scared the bejesus out of him by flashing a big, toothy smile.

A year later, during another summer job for the Corps of Engineers, I first heard prostitution – along with drug abuse – justified as a victimless crime. My fellow intern Alan was just as young and callow as I was, but he seemed confident that it was simply a blameless business transaction.

The following year, at another summer Corps job in Southern VA, I was at a crowded bar with three fellow college interns, when a good old boy offered to introduce us to some whores. “If you want,” he said. “I don’t give a shit.” We all laughed a lot, and I thought, “Uh, no,” but one of my comrades wanted to know more. “Are they pretty?” he asked. Now the GOB had a thick local accent, so we thought he replied that they were fat, but when my friend said, “We don’t want fat!” he clarified, “No not fat, fair! They’re fair.” Fair. What an elastic term. We laughed some more and let the subject drop.

In the Real News article, Kate D’Adamo takes the mainstream liberal viewpoint that prostitutes, now called sex workers, are primarily just workers, and should enjoy the protections of society. She admits that trafficking is bad, but believes that the decriminalization of prostitution in New Zealand has resulted in the, “healthiest sex industry in the entire world,” with low rates of violence and sexually-transmitted disease. The International Union of Sex Workers asserts that sex work is an empowered choice.

The mainstream conservative viewpoint is that prostitution is a sin, but a lot of them are sinners. In practice, when a prominent conservative is caught soliciting, he must claim to be truly sorry, return to the arms of family and religion, and hope that the prostitute mysteriously hangs herself, all of which happened with former Senator, and now lobbyist, David Vitter. That was before serial sex consumer Donald Trump was president, of course. More recently Robert Kraft simply relied on his lawyers to have the video evidence suppressed. His massage parlor madam was not so lucky.

A third viewpoint is the so-called Swedish or Nordic model, in which the customers and pimps are vigorously prosecuted while the sex workers are referred for counseling and job training. This viewpoint considers prostitution a form of male violence. As reported in The Guardian:

A statement signed by 177 verified sex trafficking survivors from Sex Trafficking Survivors United (STSU) suggests that: “Without the buyers of commercial sex, sex trafficking would not exist. If we start penalising and stigmatising the buyers, we could end sex trafficking in our lifetime … prostitution is not a victimless crime; it is a brutal form of sexual violence.”

A few mornings ago, I turned on my cell phone to find two similar text messages, supposedly from young girls (21 and 23) who supposedly live near me and supposedly want to find older sexual partners. Seriously?

Don’t Do That

In the old joke a patient says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor replies, “So don’t do that.”

I’ve been swimming with a masters team for almost two months. I haven’t had a coach on deck since I swam in college, and it does make me try harder when I know she could be watching. But I still concentrate on technique. After I started practicing in April, I thought to reconnect with the Total Immersion website. When I used to follow rec.sport.swimming in the late 1990s, I was strongly influenced by posts by their founder Terry Laughlin. His ideas about “slippery” swimming – modifying one’s swim posture and longitudinal balance to slip through the water more efficiently – made sense to me. I defended him online, and attended a TI swiminar at the Madeira School near DC one weekend.

I’m not sure I would have kept up with swimming without Terry. I used to have a difficult time getting back into any sort of practice after some sort of life break. Several years after college, I started swimming again because I wanted to do a triathlon. I was in pretty good shape from running and biking, but some voice in my head was always finding excuses to stop at the next wall. And this repeated itself, getting worse as I got older. It would take weeks to get in any sort of shape, and I would inwardly dread going back into the pool.

But since learning better form and particularly better breathing, I have found that I can get back in the pool and manage a thousand yards or meters of steady swimming without feeling like I’m desperate for air, or feeling like my arms were too heavy. So I was stunned to read on the TI website that Terry had succumbed to cancer two years earlier. I met with him once in New Paltz, and we used to read each other’s blogs, but even with social media we lost touch.

Only two of us showed up for a recent swimming practice, and coach had us swim an 1800 meter set of freestyle in a light rain: 3 x 200 build; 6 x 100 mixing fast and easy, and 12 x 50. As usual I tried to remember to hide my head, press my buoy, enter the water with patient hands. Our coach had suggested I try a four-beat kick instead of my TI-style two-beat, so I do a very light flutter kick between rolling to breathe on each side.

In the showers my lone teammate, a proficient and strong swimmer despite his big belly, complained, “After all this I should be losing weight, but now I’m going to go home and fill up on junk.” That, but for the influence of my wife and stepson, could have been me. I thought, “So, don’t do that,” but quickly realized just how long it took to get to where I wasn’t doing that any more.

I recently thought I had reached my goal of losing fifty pounds, but realized that my old Taylor scale had become inaccurate. Since getting a new EatSmart Precision CalPal scale, I have lost fifteen pounds more, though I am only ten pounds lighter than my previous goal. So I’ve lost at least sixty pounds. My wife thinks I am melting away, but I know that I am still thirty pounds heavier than my lightest adult weight. That, however, was when I was still under thirty years old, running three to six miles every day, and getting no upper body exercise except tennis. So being that light again isn’t a goal. I figure I will reach a balance point between diet and exercise.

I’m not sure what to call my diet. A few years ago I was trying to follow Dr Terry Wahl’s paleo diet, eating lots of greens and some meat. Then my stepson and my wife were trying to do a keto diet. Though I used to follow Nathan Pritikin, and am still suspicious of the word ‘ketosis’ I have inched closer to what they eat. I just watched a video by Joel Fuhrman, who calls his approach Nutritarian, and it sounds familiar, too. Fuhrman compares eating poorly to hitting your hand with a hammer, complaining about the swelling, but then doing it again day after day. “So, don’t do that.” [Note 2019.06.18: My stepson now describes himself as Nutritarian. Keto, he believes, is for big people trying to lose lots of weight and he is just trying to stay healthy.]

Essentially I eat the same three meals every day:

Breakfast:  Steel Cut, Non-GMO oatmeal. I have recently switched from the 365 Brand to the more expensive McCann’s steel cut oats, or maybe Bob’s Red Mill. I cook two cups of oats, and eat it all week with a small dollop of real maple syrup. I drink filtered water with a touch of RealLime added. On weekends I will make a four-egg omelette with farm-raised eggs, gouda cheese, tomatoes, finely chopped lettuce and sometimes ham.

Morning Snacks: Organic bananas

Lunch: Sandwich of Dave’s Bread, one slice of organic cheese, two slices of Applegate luncheon meat, a slice of organic tomato and some sort of green or reddish lettuce. A half-quart salad with slices of apples, that may also include asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, peapods, scallions, zucchini or the like depending on what I have. I add in some dried cranberries, too. I drink water from the office dispenser. Then I eat some fruit like, red grapes, navel oranges, peaches, nectarines or an apple.

Dinner: Sometimes a grass-fed ground beef or buffalo burger with cheese, tomato, pickles. Sometimes organic chicken thighs with steamed carrots or broccoli in Kerry butter. Sometimes I finish with fruit in vanilla Siggi’s or Brown Cow yogurt. For some reason it is getting harder to find vanilla yogurt. On cold days I will make whole wheat spaghetti with organic red sauce. I love alfredo, but it is too rich. On weekends I treat myself to a Red Oak beer or an Angry Orchard hard cider with dinner. Also sometimes on weekends I will snack on Boulder Canyon potato chips while watching millionaires play tennis.

I have stopped eating restaurant food unless it is an office or social event. I have stopped buying frozen pizzas, or any other prepared food, too. I have also switched from Whole Foods to a local coop called Deep Roots Market. Since Whole Foods was purchased by Amazon, it has become really difficult to tell what is and is not organic in the produce section. They simply post signs saying ‘grown in Chile’, or ‘imported from Canada’.