At a dinner party the other evening I sit next to a young and very attractive lawyer who asks politely (this is Canada, after all) if TV  newsreaders like me need any particular qualifications to read the news.

I blather about four years study at journalism school and years since covering stories as a reporter on radio and TV. And, of course, there's my considerable curiosity, an enquiring mind and an ability to write one word after another in a reasonably coherent fashion.

He listens patiently and when I'd finished asks even more politely "but to read the news you don't have to pass any exams, have a degree or anything like that? Not like a doctor or lawyer? Or plumber?"

"No" I admit "but …"

He interrupts. "And it probably doesn't do any harm that you're gorgeous?" His eyes linger on my cleavage which is particularly spectacular this evening. "And you've got this killer body?"

I laugh nervously. "Thank you, kind sir."

"So actually, anyone who can read English without stumbling or lisping or stuttering or falling down in a dead faint can read the news to me tonight? As long as she or he is good-looking like you?"

"I suppose so but …"

"I mean you don't actually have to know what you're talking about do you? Particularly foreign news? Or financial news? You just have to sound as if you know? Right?"

"Yes, but …"

"Then why should I trust you to tell me what's going on in the world tonight?"

I'm irritated. "Perhaps we could discuss this some other time?" I tell him frostily.

"Your place or mine?"


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

To viewers, he was Uncle Walter.

To other journalists, like me, he was Mr. Cronkite, sir.

When there was little reason to trust anyone in America (Viet Nam, rampant racism), he was the most trusted man in the land.

He wasn't actor-handsome like Peter Jennings. Or driven by demons like Dan Rather. Or seemingly omnipotent like Peter Mansbridge.

He was just the most trustworthy, ethical, decent man who ever anchored a TV newscast.

He was the gold standard in the honourable profession of journalism.

He was Walter Cronkite.

And that's the way it was.


Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

Michael Jackson was one of those accursed people who live on the honed and honeyed edge.

He was lost in his own private jungle with a horrifying past, no reality and no tomorrow.

He adorned a magical fantasyland where he was godlike and could do no wrong.

Where power corrupted absolutely and Michael was the blazing centre of the known universe.

Where the law of cause and effect didn’t apply.

Where everybody worshipped the sweet honey of fame and nobody ever acknowledged it’s price.

In such a world there is inevitably a monstrous price to pay.

And, from the very beginning, Michael paid it.

He sold his soul.


Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

I am lying on the Estero Ciego beach of the Sol Club Rio De Luna, located 72 kilometers from the town of Holguin in the Republic of Cuba.

I am drinking a rum with mango juice and have just taken off my bikini top. My breasts suckle the sun and my nipples are hard with warmth and delight. Men find it necessary to make frequent trips to the bar on the other side of me to admire my breasts which, even from this angle, look quite beautiful.The men try not to be obvious when they walk past but they are obvious. I adore my breasts.

None of the other women on this beach look at me or bare their breasts to the sun like me. Most of them are from the frozen North and are unhappy. You can tell from their faces that they feel somehow betrayed, that life has not lived up to their expectations, that the world has not delivered what they deserve.

There are no Americans here because American governments so fear the 11-million people of Cuba that they've blockaded their island for more than forty years. Instead of Americans, the women who come here are from Canada and Germany and France and England and other northern places where the sun has no warmth at this time of year. Compared to the Cubans who serve them at this resort, these women have unimaginable wealth. But they are not happy.
 
Their faces are tight, their mouths thin and their eyes cold. And when they talk to other tourists — and to the Cubans who serve them with great generosity and considerable grace — their voices are abrupt and chilling and without courtesy.
 
These women spend most of their time complaining. It is too hot or too cold. The food is too spicy or too bland. The entertainment is lousy (which happens to be true but, on the other hand, it’s also free).  
 
These women wear ugly, elaborate swimsuits too small for their abundant, cellulite flesh. As a passionate woman myself, I suspect that if they ever knew real passion — the sort of passion that brings unendurable pleasure and, inevitably, le petit mort  — it was long ago and would be too embarrassing to repeat.

I think they should bare their breasts to the sun like me.

So their nipples harden with warmth and delight like mine.

That's what I think.


Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

It's worth reminding ourselves every so often that the Internet and Twitter and so-called citizen journalists haven't changed everything in our world.

In spite of its manifold and manifest problems, the United States still rules most of the globe. Its Middle-Aged-Middle-Class-White-Western-Male-thinking (if not all its skin) still stands astride the earth like a colossus — sword in one hand and the mainstream media clenched tight in the other. As if nothing has changed. Or can change. Ever.
 
Through television, radio, movies, newsmagazines, newspapers and the wire services (and now much of the Internet), the United States has a virtual monopoly of mainstream international information. It dominates the international media just as  — for now  —it still dominates the world.
 
For instance, America’s endless attacks on other countries (Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan to name only the most obvious and public in the past few years) are justified, time after, time by Western journalists who see them as the reasonable actions of “our side” against "the dark side."
 
It’s not surprising. American “official statements” and American reportage of those statements pour into the world’s newsrooms day after day, night after night, in an endless stream of doublespeak, bafflegab and misplaced patriotism.
 
There’s no getting away from it. You watch the Berlin Wall come down on American TV in Helsinki. You see a lone man stand bravely in front of the tanks of Tiananmen Square on American TV in Mauritius. You read about America’s invasion of Iraq in Time Magazine in Johannesburg. You hear about the English princeling's peculiar version of love-talk on American radio while on a beach in Jamaica. You hear the latest horror story from Pakistan through CNN or Fox (more entertainment than journalism) in Canada.
 
After years of this constant battering, journalists everywhere see the world — even their own world — though American eyes, American-think, American Middle-Aged-Middle-Class-White-Western-Male-culture. 

You can’t run.  And there’s nowhere left to hide.
 
Not even Canada.


Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)
 

My mother, who knows a thing or two about sex and men, is the most liberated person I know. She teaches me early on that women are as good and usually better than men. That most women are tougher, smarter, kinder, gentler and more generous than men.

We almost never hit people. We almost never kill people. And we certainly don’t rape people. Instead, we nurture, nourish and support people.

My mother even has an explanation for why women and men still don’t understand each other after all these centuries of sharing beds, offspring and lives.

It’s because women are so complicated — and men are so simple.

Women, she says, grow up in a complex, almost entirely female world of mothers and grandmothers and aunts and best-friends-for-life girlfriends who all understand that because we’re female we lack male upper-body strength. So, to compensate, we have to concentrate on forming complicated protective relationships which help us survive as we learn to manipulate the dangerous world around us.

Men, on the other hand, grow up in a simple, almost entirely male world in which fathers and grandfathers and uncles and buddies place far more value on physical force and sport and oneupmanship than on relationships. Something called backchecking is far more important than the scary something called love. In fact, men almost never discuss relationships with each other. Relationships are for sissies.

The result, says my mother, is that men don’t understand us women because, to merely survive and protect our wombs, we’ve had to become incredibly complex, complicated and manipulative.

And we women don’t understand men, she says, because we just can’t believe how incredibly simple they and their lives are. In fact, she claims, men are exactly what they appear to be. Nothing more. Nothing less. What you see is what you get. Men think relationships are what women have with each other in Sex And The City, in between bedding men.

In the end, says my mother, female survival all boils down to understanding male simplicity and taking advantage of it with the most powerful, complicated and manipulative combination of assets we women have  — the female mystique and pussy power.

My mother’s words made sense to me when I was young and they make even more sense to me now that I’m a grown woman.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

There's something quite heartening, even inspiring, about a bunch of rag-tag unemployed Somali fishermen playing Robin Hood And His Merry Men off the east coast of Africa.

It didn't happen without cause.

First, these fishermen had to watch impotently while the Americans and  Ethiopians destroyed their (working) government because it worshipped the wrong god.

Then, enormous foreign factory boats illegally scooped up most of their fish.

Finally - irony of ironies - other foreigners dumped nuclear waste on their beaches and in their waters, thus poisoning whatever was still crawling or swimming.

One has to ask, therefore, if it isn't entirely logical that these same unemployed fishermen then look around for other work so they can feed their families, and notice all those big, fat foreign ships cruising past their villages like ancient Spanish galleons piled high with the treasure of the first world? And setting up a toll system just like the fabled outlaws of Sherwood Forest, to hold some of those big, fat, foreign galleons until appropriate ransom is paid?

It's called stealing from the rich to give to the poor and has a fairly honourable provenance.

And isn't there a certain poetic justice in the Sheriff of Nottingham threatening and sniping and huffing and puffing because the outlaws of Somalia just aren't playing by his rules and he doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle such outrageous behaviour?


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

You’re a normal, mature, sophisticated horny male preparing for a week in the sun in the Caribbean and, of course, you’re after women. So you prepare — much as Alexander the Great successfully prepared to conquer the known world.

Let me be blunt — I don't have to prepare. I can get laid in the Caribbean or anywhere else any time I want. But unless you’re George Clooney or Brad Pitt, you can't. So you have to strategize. You’ve only got seven days and if the seven days are to be worth the price, they have to include getting laid.

I sympathize and understand perfectly. So here’s my advice (with apologies to any sisters who think I’m giving too much away.)

PREPARATION:
1.  Invest in medium bronzer and start applying it all over a few days before departure. The stuff won’t protect you from the sun but it will make you look a lot less pale and wan when you stride manfully onto that first beach that first morning. Students of getting laid are unanimous that pale and wan is not the look favoured by the better class of bikini.

2.  Buy a hard-cover Mongolian-language book, take its dust cover off and wrap it around your own book. This is so you can scowl, mutter “no spik Inglis” and concentrate on your book if the person sitting next to you on the plane or bus shows signs of wanting to be your new best friend forever. (If the person sitting next to you speaks Mongolian, of course, you have a problem.) This strategy should be abandoned immediately if the person sitting next to you turns out to be a beautiful woman, but I'm told this never happens in real life.

3. Buy some fashionable, reasonably expensive beach and bar wear, including a swim suit that isn't polyester tartan and doesn't droop down past your knees when wet.

4. Stock up on condoms and your favourite Cialis/Viagra/Levitra or whatever.

5. Check the resort out on the Internet to find out if there will be special evenings which need special clothing (bare as you dare night, whore and pimp night etc. etc.)

THE JOURNEY:
6.   Arrive at the airport with enough time to charm the ground hostess into assigning you "a seat-in-an-exit-row-as-far-forward-as-possible". You want an exit seat because you get considerably more leg room than any other passenger. (Of course, people on exit seats have to help other passengers escape “in the unlikely event of an emergency” but those who study these things say the chance of your actually having to help your fellow passengers escape from a burning or sinking plane is even more remote than your chance of finding a beautiful woman sitting next to you.) You want as far forward as possible because that gets you off the plane fast, leaving enough time to check in with the man under the umbrella in the parking lot before your bus leaves for the resort.

7.  There is at least one man in every parking lot in every Caribbean airport — except possibly in Cuba — who sells ice-cold beer and marijuana. At Montego Bay, Jamaica, he has a little metal cart with a Red Stripe umbrella on top and excellent ganja down below. Ganja will be vital bait in your pussy-hunt so by all means bargain but pay the man what he asks if you have to.

THE CAMPAIGN:
8. Once at the resort, bribe everyone in sight, particularly if it’s a no-tips sort of place. Bartenders, waiters, maids, dive masters, sailing instructors, tennis pros, entertainment managers etc. do their best work when stimulated by unexpected windfalls of US dollar and their best work could easily include introducing you to likely prey. Heavy tipping also gets you to the front of the line when ordering two banana daiquiris at the over-crowded bar after midnight. (This is no time for foolish patriotism — US dollars are the coin of the Caribbean realm.)

9. Stake out your hunting ground very, very carefully. Unless it’s an adult-only resort (about which more later) stay clear of the pool. The pool is where respectable families with children cluster because they believe their children are less likely to drown in the pool than the ocean. And the best bikinis don't hang out with respectable families with children. Don’t let the sight of some of the cellulite flesh on display put you off your hunt. Your average Caribbean all-inclusive resort (with the honourable exception of the Club Meds) is not peopled by noted beauties.

10. Avoid very young women even though they are legal prey and often look quite splendid in very small bikinis. You will have nothing in common with females, however enticing they look in very small bikinis, who say “like” and “you know” and “know what I mean” and “whatever” two or three times a sentence, a habit which can drive your average mature, sophisticated male right out of his banana. Leave them to the louts who wear their caps backwards, play beach volleyball at noon, believe it a mark of manhood to get hammered before the sun sets and vomit a lot.

11. Your best bikinis can usually be found sunning alone on the least crowded part of the beach. There are  two reasons for this female solitude. One is that she’s convinced herself that she’s only here to rest up, recuperate, recharge the batteries and get far away, if only for a week, from some man who so obviously doesn’t deserve her. Or, for that matter, away from all men who so obviously don’t deserve her. The other reason is that no woman ever born (except me*) is truly satisfied with her body. She’s certain that her breasts are too small or too droopy, her bottom too big, her thighs too fat or, just as likely, all the above. So she’s decided to nurse her glaringly obvious imperfections in virtuous isolation. You meantime, a mature, sophisticated male with no intention of remaining either virtuous or in isolation for a moment longer than absolutely necessary, will have no problem seeing her as a vision of unsurpassed loveliness, a veritable goddess unmatched in all of womanhood in all the world. Or, at least, suitable prey. It is, therefore, your job — indeed, your duty as a gentleman — to rescue her from her solitude and doubt.

So how do you rescue this shy maiden and be rewarded with appropriately grateful action? If I get enough responses, I’ll be happy to provide the answer.

*To tell the honest truth, I think my breasts are too big, out of proportion to my waist. But no-one else seems to care.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)

There's a scandal in New Zealand rugby league circles because players like to gangbang with groupies? How very quaint!

As I describe in my book, here in Canada partying with hockey players has long been a rite of passage for teenage girls.

The players roared into town in their team buses and groups of us girls hung out around their hotels looking eager until one of them asked if we’d like to party. We said yes, they said Ok, and smuggled us into one of their rooms.

The players called us Puck Bunnies when they were being polite and Dirty Girls, sometimes to our faces, when they weren't. Depended mostly on whether they were about to screw us or had already screwed us. That’s the level of respect they had.

Hockey players aren’t romantic. I remember one night three of us groupies slipped into their hotel through a back door and ended up in a room with nine guys. They gave us beers in plastic cups, pulled our clothes off, lined us up next to each other on the bed and screwed us. They wouldn't let us leave until just before curfew or the last guy couldn't get it up any more. Whichever came first. Didn't even ask our names.

Most hockey players are crude and uneducated, sort of slightly more sophisticated Don Cherrys.  I soon realized that apart from their hard bodies and fame — which gave us boasting rights with girlfriends — there was nothing to recommend them.

In fact, you haven’t lived until you wake up with half a dozen snoring hockey goons who don’t shower regularly and you look over at the night table and see six sets of false teeth grinning at you from water glasses.

Maybe this is what athletes really mean when they say they play as a team. Like Alexandre Dumas's truly sexy musketeers — one for all, all for one.

As I say, a rite of passage. It was exciting and dangerous and would have horrified our parents if they'd known. But we grew up and out of it without any harm and went on to hunt the individual rather than the team.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)