I start out whoring for fun but not long after my eighteenth birthday graduate to whoring for profit. Which is how I meet Josh, my first and only pimp.

It’s also when I start drifting away from my straight friends until, after a couple of months, I’m earning real money doing something I’m very good at and my only friends are other whores and the pimps who live off whores.

Being with Josh helps me understand why whores need pimps. (And I don’t mean the scum who kidnap underage girls, force them into the game and hold them by violence. Instead, I’m talking about your average common-or-garden pimp who runs a stable and, as the prissy saying goes, “lives off the avails”.)

Pimps, you see, aren’t there just to find johns for whores, protect them from bad dates and take their money. It’s much more complex than that.

To oversimplify perhaps — whores need pimps because whores are women and women need to love and be loved. And it takes an exceptional straight man to love a working whore.

Most of the women in the game have low self-esteem (I was always different, of course). And unlike everyone else around — boyfriends and johns who use them and leave them — pimps are there when you need them most, always ready to sweet-talk you, flatter you, make you feel needed, wanted, desired, loved.

It’s strangely easy to believe pimp-talk. Like “honey, the other girls don’t mean a thing to me. I love you. We’ll get out of the game as soon as we have enough money and marry and have lots of lovely babies.” It’s even strangely easy to love the pimp like — at least for a while — I loved Josh.

Pimps don’t have to buy a whore’s love, like johns do. The women give it eagerly, willingly. They’re women and when you’re in the game there’s nobody but pimps to love and be loved by.

Every woman needs somebody, even if that somebody is an immoral, lying, exploitive, sometimes violent scumbag like Josh, from so very long ago.
 
 
(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist who’s published her erotic memoir “My Life In The Great Sexual Window”, available at www.lulu.com and Amazon.)

Some delicious and very undiplomatic excerpts from a farewell report to the British Foreign Office from retiring British High Commissioner to Canada, Lord Moran, back in 1984.

It's titled "Last Impressions of Canada" and much of it remains relevant today.

• Prime Minister Trudeau treated provincial premiers with contempt and provincial governments as if they were town councils.

• Main reason for Canadians joining political parties is to acquire power or a lucrative job. So political patronage flourishes. Politics runs on “jobs for the boys.”

• Level of debate in the House of Commons is low: the majority of Canadian ministers are unimpressive and a few we have found frankly bizarre.

 • The Canadian public expects very little from politicians and tends to shrug its shoulders when the press or television report yet another scandal.

• Canadians are a moderate, comfortable, people … very sensitive, especially to any expressed or implied British sneers about Canada as “boring", and perhaps somewhat lacking in self-confidence.

• Anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once.

• Canadians have squandered some of their resources. Clearly they have regarded them, in this vast country, as limitless. But they are wrong.

• Inuit are mere pensioners of the state. Canadians are filled with feeling of guilt about the Indian people. Canadian policy has been to give them a special privileged status and pay them vast subsidies which often cause them to give up working.

However, Lord Moran was generous enough to add "We shall miss in their different ways, the cry of the loon, as characteristic of Canada as the fish eagle's is of Africa, and the cheerful shopgirls and waitresses…who send us on our way with 'Take care' or 'Have a nice day'."

His Lordship's report ends:

I am Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Moran


(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist whose erotic memoir, "My Life In The Great Sexual Window", can be downloaded from www.lulu.com or Amazon.)

Want to know why most TV and radio news anchors and reporters do a really lousy job — which is the reason you can hardly remember anything they say after the broadcast?

Here's the answer. Most broadcast journalists secretly believe that their real selves, their real personas, are inadequate. That the way they communicate in real life isn’t good enough.

So instead of trying to communicate like human beings talking to other human beings, they imitate other anchors and reporters they regard as professionally successful.

Instead of communicating, they pretend. And act. Badly.

They confuse speed, volume and bad acting with energy, authority and sincerity. It doesn’t work. They hardly communicate at all. And they don’t fool anyone except, maybe, their mothers, stoned teenagers and the people in charge of broadcast journalism.

These anchors and reporters seem to think they’re addressing large crowds and behave appropriately to addressing large crowds.

But TV works best when the performer talks to just one person about things that matter. Someone who the performer knows and respects. Someone to whom the journalist tries to bring knowledge and the understanding of that knowledge.

Even in the worst TV sitcom, performers are expected to try to see the scenes, think the thoughts, feel the emotions in whatever the hell they’re talking about.

But most broadcast journalists just read. Usually loud. And usually fast. And reading loud and fast at people is the least efficient form of communication humans have ever invented.


(Samantha Jones is the Canadian TV journalist who wrote the erotic memoir "My Life In The Great Sexual Window" on sale at www.lulu.com and Amazon.)

North American Journalism schools pour out thousands of graduates every year.

Maybe one out of six of those graduates actually get jobs in the rapidly shrinking journalism world.

Which means that those who do get jobs are desperate to hang on to them. Which, in turn, means that their only loyalties are to their bosses and they’ll do what they’re told because of all those other journalism graduates pushing booze in bars just waiting for a chance to grab those jobs.

Now, journalists who just do what they’re told by their bosses aren’t journalists. They're employees. They don’t buck the system, they become part of it. They have no dedication to balance, fairness and integrity, no sense of journalism as an essential cornerstone of democracy.

Instead, they see journalism as just a job, like selling shoes. Their loyalty is not to a higher cause, but to whoever pays the cheque.

At the same time, these recent  graduates certainly aren’t ready for prime time journalism. It takes a minimum of ten years before recent graduates can genuinely earn the title of journalists by proving that their first loyalties are to the people, that they’re truly servants of the people and dedicated guardians of the free marketplace of ideas.

So here’s the problem — news organizations get rid of senior journalists (mentors) to save money and don’t train  younger ones coming in. As a result, the entire culture of newspaper, TV and radio newsrooms changes. Newsrooms  turn into mere offices.

And I’m terribly afraid that without older, seasoned journalists who truly believe in the honourable profession of journalism and its ethical base, free and democratic journalism as we know it will disappear and all our democracies will be in very grave danger.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian TV journalist publishing her erotic memoir My Life In The Great Sexual Window at www.lulu.com)

I’ve never worked the streets, but back in my wayward youth I earned a living in three different brothels and a fair number of sweaty hotel beds. So, naturally, I got to know a lot of cops, sometimes professionally, sometimes as opponents.
 
We had a lot in common. Neither whores nor cops have friends outside the profession. Each is a separate, distinct, paranoid, suspicious clan — a guarded, secret, hidden sub-culture. Both whores and cops have values that set them apart from the rest of society, define how to behave, how to dress, who to trust, what to believe in.

Both whores and cops get paid to hire themselves out in the service of others.

Cops use power, the awful power of the gun, to do their jobs. They sell protection, see themselves as the righteous thin, blue line that protects the lives and property of respectable people — those who have — from the less-than-respectable people who haven’t, but would like to have. Cops feel misunderstood and under-appreciated.

Whores, in turn, use power, the awful power of the pussy, to do their jobs. And whores, like cops sell protection. They see themselves as righteous, unfairly stigmatized outlaws who protect society from the violent, animal lusts of men who, if it isn’t for them, will undoubtedly murder and rape innocent wives, mothers and children. Like cops, whores feel misunderstood and under-appreciated.

Gun power and pussy power are brother and sister. So what will happen if society gives either cops or whores more freedom?

Cops with more freedom will naturally and instinctively become more authoritarian and aggressive. It’s in their nature, their training, their code, their DNA. The thin blue line will become thicker, more powerful, more and more eager to turn democracies into police states.
 
Whores with more freedom will come in from the outlaw cold, become normal, unafraid, tax-paying members of society. And as a result, some of the world’s most violent criminals who live off whores — particularly the Mafia, biker gangs and crooked cops — will lose millions of illegal dollars and eventually be forced out of business.

It’s simple. For a better world, tighten control of cops and free our scarlet sisters to do their thing in safety.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian TV journalist who's written an erotic memoir available at www.lulu.com and Amazon.)