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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Triumph of the cure
Lance Armstrong beat testicular cancer and then won the Tour de France. Was it a miracle or is he a poster boy for the power of modern medicine?
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[07/29/99]

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Our olfactory sense is highly developed and underused.
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Column
Sex secrets of the stars!
A Taoist pimp offers an astrological seduction plan to make every sign a helpless love slave.
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[07/27/99]

Using up too much too soon
Pushing the body to athletic extremes may be harmful to your health.
By Andrew Taber
[07/26/99]

Urge
Episode 5: Executive quickie
He's twice her age but she still knows how to make him feel young.
By Tracy Quan
[07/26/99]

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Arnie made me look at men differently. Before, clients were mere tools, a breed apart from boyfriends, and I didn't care if I saw them again. But now I discovered that you could care about seeing a john again -- because you simply hit it off or he did something to your body that nobody else did. For the same reasons that you might want to see your boyfriend. Uh-oh.

Everyone has to come from somewhere but with a past like this -- snubbing the first repeat customer I ever wanted -- I'd sometimes like to forget. I'm pretty open with Jasmine, but this is one story I keep to myself. Jasmine, who started hooking in her late 20s, has always had her eye on the bottom line. I'll bet she has the first nickel she ever made -- "taxing" the lemonade she sold as a child. Early financial behavior -- not sexual behavior -- is the key to what really makes a hooker tick. Jasmine has always had a criminal streak: She took her savings from baby-sitting to buy opera tickets and financed a precocious career as a ticket scalper when she was 14! With those savings, she began a small franchise as a marijuana dealer. Jasmine was inspired when a customer, a good-looking pimp called Rico, started boasting about his business. She paid him to introduce her to a madam.

Like Jasmine, I was a baby sitter, too. Regarded as the level-headed, mature type, I began baby-sitting at 11. I loved having money I could spend without my mother's permission. Unlike Jasmine, I spent every penny I earned -- and was already planning to be a hooker. Ever since I discovered an old copy of "The Happy Hooker" in our garage at age 10, I had been thinking: "When I grow up, I'll be a hooker."

I didn't feel any need to explain it. When my best friend told me, "You don't know what you're saying!" I shrugged: "Neither do you!"

I'd never heard of orgasms or had one. I knew I wanted sex to be my career but assumed that I wouldn't become a hooker until I could also vote: I'd never heard of an underage prostitute.

The opportunity to break in at the part-time level came sooner than I expected, when I was 13. I was not a passionate teenager -- I planned my defloration down to the last detail and read up on every method of birth control for an entire year before deciding I was ready. I read about the phases of the female orgasm and wondered when I would actually have one. There was no special guy to please or be seduced by but, oddly enough, the special guy -- Peter, a 19-year-old history major -- appeared as soon as I made up my mind to start fucking.

A few weeks after Peter became my first lover, I propositioned Professor Andrews, a longtime neighbor whose son was my little brother's classmate. Earlier that year, Professor Andrews had offered to initiate me sexually, but I said: "No, I'm not attracted to you." I didn't want Professor Andrews to be my first lover -- he was somebody's dad, for God's sake, middle-aged and rather portly. When he'd asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told him: "I think I'd like to be a hooker."

Next page | Can't wait to tell my boyfriend about my first trick