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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge
Colliding worlds
Matt is my intimate but knows nothing about me while Eileen the acquaintance knows everything.
By Tracy Quan
[11/01/99]

Urge: Naked World
Former sex slaves sue Japanese government
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[11/01/99]

Sexpert Opinion
Raising sexually healthy kids
Abstinence programs and ominous TV commercials are turning American children into nut cases.
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[10/30/99]

Eating Satan's footprints
What can the onion and garlic diet do for you? Ask, rather, what you can do for Macedonia.
By Susan McCarthy
[10/29/99]

Urge: Naked World
Porn-hungry Emirates purchase satellite dirty dishes
Citizens of the Arab republic have found a way to skirt strict censorship laws.
By Hank Hyena
[10/29/99]

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By Virginia Vitzthum

Nov. 2, 1999 | Divorce lowers resistance to many toxic behaviors, among them vengeance, greed, substance abuse and joyless promiscuity. Sometimes divorcées attempt to prove their attractiveness while they simultaneously try to get revenge against the gender of their ex. When Pam left her husband, she did all that -- and then took it a step further. "I was starting to get used to having one-night stands," she remembers. "And I thought, 'As non-emotional as this is, I should get paid.'"

For the year following her separation, Pam felt that she was owed something. In that time she made an odd transition -- greased by her sunny, solipsistic view of sex work -- from PTA meetings to turning tricks. "I don't think of it as bad; I think of it as titillating, erotic because it's sex for sex's sake," she declares. "I thought to myself, 'I'm sexy, I think I have something to offer.'"

Pam had married Ted, an aide to a Republican senator, when she was 25 and pregnant with their son. A daughter followed, and Pam, who worked part time, says, "Being a mother was the first thing I felt good at." Yet as the marriage ground into its eighth year, she and Ted fought more, and they stopped having sex "because I was always angry at him." Pam began spending all her free time with Linda and Dick, another couple with kids in the neighborhood. Soon Pam fell in love with Dick and they started an affair. A few months later, Pam left Ted and moved into a nearby apartment with an extra bedroom for the kids. She waited for Dick to leave Linda and join her; instead, he confessed the affair to Linda and then told Pam they should stop seeing one another.

Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives

Linda didn't keep her friend's betrayal a secret, and soon Pam was a pariah throughout their suburban neighborhood. On the weeks when Ted had the kids, Pam drank hard every night and began picking up men in nightclubs. There were no second dates. "I felt so bad about hurting everyone," Pam says. "I drank myself into a tizzy every night, and I spiraled lower and lower."

In the months after she moved into her small apartment, Dick remained her confidant. Even after they'd stopped having sex, he would still sneak phone calls to her. Talk of sex replaced sex: She told him about the pickups and her experimental fling with a lesbian in the neighborhood. With no adventures of his own to tell, Dick told Pam about his pimp friend, Itchy, and Pam asked for his phone number. Dick said, "I'm going to give it to you, but I really wish you wouldn't act on this." Pam says fondly, "It was fatherly-like. He said, 'Be careful, be safe.'"

Small and slightly built, Pam seems younger than 37. She pulls off teenager styles -- huge platform shoes, tiny backpacks and butterfly barrettes in her dyed-black hair. It's as if she's picking up where she left off as a single gal, trying to capture the freewheeling years she missed when she started having children. She speaks in flurries of nervous giggling and unfinished sentences. She apologizes compulsively for her appearance and her abilities but speaks of her affair and subsequent prostitution with a defiant thrust to her jaw.

Next page | Tutoring with Itchy