Posted on by Miss Brook$

some things are universal

Drafted when I lived in Singapore, so sometime in 2009/10.

Children act like children, though the children in Singapore are generally better-behaved than children elsewhere (and Asian babies are so cute!).

Saw an ad for a local children’s daycare. All these cute little Singaporean kids and the one token white girl.

Gyms still pressure-sell and everyone gets suckered in, then regrets it—as evidenced by some discussion forums I’ve looked at.

Cabbies add unexplained charges to the meter, pretend to not understand you or just act lost.

Women, no matter naturally tiny they are, still want to lose weight. As evidenced by all the weight-loss products and advertisements here. Or maybe all this stuff really works and that’s why they’re all so skinny. Or maybe not.

Women with straight hair want curls, women with curly hair wish for straight. Take this one to the bank.

Asians flock to stores to buy branded goods, the more expensive the better. Westerners flock to markets looking for knock-offs, haggling for the best bargain.

Nobody likes illegal immigrants working in their country. And yes, the browner-skinned people are always the “immigrants.”

Technology is imperfect around the world.

Hotel maids move my stuff around too much for my liking no matter where I am.

Regardless of where I am in the world, when I travel alone, I invariably end up in the next room to a fighting couple. She always starts crying. Then he either leaves or starts hitting her. Eventually, it stops. In case you’re thinking this leads to hot make up sex, it doesn’t. Sex never follows these hotel-room abuses. Fortunately. I’m not sure I’d want to hear the sex that follows abuse.

non-universal opinions

I’m still not used to the metric system. It’s utterly meaningless. What is 100g of something? An ounce? A pint? A teaspoon? It’s just a number divisible by 10. Okay, so I’m very Imperial. I’ve been told Australia successfully switched to metric in recent history and I don’t believe anyone died. I still like Imperial. It means something. It was created to measure real-life scenarios. It’s not sterile.

The only metric measurement I know is the weight of my checked bag. I can guess it to within a kilo, though I still can’t guess its weight in pounds. My goal was 10-12kg, but it regularly clocked in at 12-15kg. No getting around it no matter how I tried to skim the weight down. Even now in the US, I’ll check my bag’s weight and ask them to change the scale to kilos for me. But I can’t weigh anything else in kilos, if it’s not my bag, then I have no idea how much it is in kilos (and really, not a very clear idea in pounds either).

I still love US greenbacks. They feel like money. They smell like money. They sound like money. I think we have the sexiest currency in the world, but maybe it’s just what I’m used to.

Australia and Singapore and other countries have plastic money. It’s slick but not papery. No smell. Singapore’s currency is graduated by size, each denomination is radically different in color, it has a clear plastic window on the bills (which is cool) and a Braille system so the blind can easily handle it. It’s as progressive as currency can get. But it’s not sexy.

Posted on by Miss Brook$ · 9 Comments

longer tweeting III

This has been sitting in the Drafts folder for so long that I no longer remember what I probably intended to say.

Created March 23, 2010
Tiger Airways is like Southwest but with fewer frills, like a jetway and legroom.

If you’ve ever flown Tiger Air, you know what I’m talking about. They’re even more barebones than Southwest or Spirit or Ryanair, as having all the parts of the plane is irrelevant while flying. They get bad reviews (though I can’t say I ever experienced anything I didn’t expect from a budget Asian airline), and funny reviews.

Tiger flew out of the “budget” terminal in Singapore (yes, they differentiate their terminals that way) and the security was so cursory it was clear they didn’t give a damn if the cheap and/or poor people got blown to bits. The terminal was basically an indoor hawker stand, and boarding was a mess. You walked outside to the stairs to the plane; they weren’t going to bother with weather protection of any kind, or a climate controlled jet bridge. Not for the lower class people having the temerity to fly. At least we were all leaving the island. I’m sure that was viewed as a good thing.

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Posted on by Miss Brook$

hobbyists offering business “advice”

This particular rant is something I’ve been wanting to say for years (and has been sitting in my Drafts folder for a while; written in 2010 in Singapore so many of the things I say here don’t apply to the US). Other than a few adjustments to reflect the passage of time, the essay is unchanged.

What sparked it was two things happening on a discussion board in one week. One was a thread where some hobbyists reacted badly to a touring escort charging $350USD/hr (the nerve! the gall! the audacity! the envy!) and another was a PM to me, an attempt by a hobbyist to “help” me navigate the Singapore scene and make sure I’m not charging too much. (Russian girls at Brix are the “cream of the crop” and I’m not so I can’t charge more than they do, which was $300SGD/hr according to him. I wonder if he knew there were two non-Russian indies charging right at $1000SGD/hr in Singapore at that time. I charged a minimum $500SGD/hr or $800SGD/2hrs, depending.)

Despite the hand-wringing and general disbelief of hobbyists, my clients are usually pretty happy with me. I’m personable, intelligent, interesting, beautiful, mentally-mature and fully focused on their needs. I don’t have a pimp hiding in the corner, I won’t phone-stalk them at 4am, I don’t try to manipulate them into becoming my “boyfriend” or desperately taking risks to make a few extra bucks to support my starving extended family in some poverty-stricken country. I don’t chase extra money or presents: clients pay my fee and that’s it. Their responsibility ends (sometimes they’re spontaneously moved to extremely kind generosity). I’m with them because I want to be — they’re with me for exactly the same reason. To me, that’s all cream. For everyone. [Insert sex joke here, if you must.]

Just because hobbyists can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it can’t exist. I’ve been fighting this stupid battle since 2002. The narrow vision and nosy desire to control a stubborn, independent cuss of a woman just keeps on keeping on. Sigh.

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Posted on by Miss Brook$ · 12 Comments

reactions ii

anti-porn parenting tips

A porn actress found Jesus and now finds Jesus for others. She provides helpful hints for parents as to why their little girls might become a porn actress. She and I agree that bad parenting (especially abuse), contributes to problems. She almost gets it in #4, except she decides to define prostitution vs pornography (in order to let everyone know she’s not a prostitute), instead of focusing on the fact that juvenile prostitution is nearly always caused by abusive parents or parents who have kicked their children out of their home. I’ve said it for years: underage prostitution could be eradicated almost entirely by focusing the law on abusive parents and having more readily available resources for abused or homeless children. (This would also remove underage trafficking and lots of people would be out of well-paying jobs and grant money.)

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Posted on by Miss Brook$ · 6 Comments

reactions

Since I often read things and want to comment but don’t, here are my comments. A lot of these links came from Tits and Sass since I no longer bother with my Google Alerts.

escort photo documentary

While the story is somewhat unique, the pictures of Eden working are completely recognizable to any touring hourly escort. Locales may differ, there may be a lack of cigarettes and wigs, but everything else is very, very true. Escort work really can be this boring and mundane. Just like stripping. Just like data entry. Just like anything.

Hong Kong escorts and review board exploitation

I remember Sex141.com when I went to HK. I was never on the site because it wasn’t a good fit for me. I was: too old, Western, English-speaker, outcall-only, had much higher rates than the local girls. I had no idea it developed into the terror it has. (TER is probably kicking itself for not figuring out the bad review scam Sex141 pulls.)

HK girls work in limbo. Sex work is partially decriminalized and partially illegal, depending on what, where and how. While the laws seem clearly defined on the surface, sex workers face almost as much police harassment as US sex workers. My firm belief is that anytime there is an illegal aspect to sex work, the workers will suffer. The public and police will exploit the illegal aspects as far as they can, nullifying any legality. This is why sex work has to be completely decriminalized across the board. No exceptions.

Because of this half-and-half system, they have no recourse against Sex141. Because of the market and the laws, the girls are regularly ripped off: unlike sex workers in the rest of the world, they’re afraid of getting the money upfront because the client will run away or call them a ripoff (I did not have that problem with the clients I had in HK — different market). They’re stuck with abusive clients and there is no legal recourse for them. After the murders in 2008, all the one-woman brothels had CCTVs installed and the images of bad clients are regularly printed out and circulated but there is no way to make sure every sex worker has that info. They have problems with clients every day, just like US sex workers.

This is not to say that the girls don’t want to work there because they do. It’s far safer than China and the money is better. The problem, as always, is illegality. The only solution, as always, is full decriminalization.

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