St Lucy’s Ballet intensive

Lybrel no-period pill pack showing click-case dispenser

Prep for Summer ballet intensive: We are doing things a bit differently this year for St Lucy’s Summer Ballet intensive. In the past we have had a 15% dropout rate for the course and we are trying to lower that this year by more selective screening and dietary changes or supplements begun well ahead of arrival. Even with tougher screening there are far more applicants that we can possibly take even running two classes of twelve students each. The limiting factor is finding male ballet partners who are experienced, considerate lovers and free of STIs. We use a lot of the younger male escorts with dance backgrounds who have gone through the course in the last year. The quarantine after STI screening limits their income but that isn’t as much disincentive as you might think because there is a lot of sex with 17 y/o hardbody ballet girls to be had for the five weeks of the course. Most of the guys love it because it’s a way to stay in shape while almost on vacation because the inexperienced girls are blown away by the guy’s stamina, the intensity of the orgasms they give and suck up the guys tales of life in Vegas. It borders on hero worship and is a huge boost to a male’s ego!

The Vegas Ballet Experience: There are a lot of summer ballet intensives being offered, many by far better known schools than St Lucy’s. However, we like to think St Lucy’s provides a unique opportunity for the adventuresome ballet student who wants to experience what dancing in Vegas can be like while protected from some of the rougher edges of the real world, such as hard drugs and STIs. Students are nominated by their teachers from ballet schools all over the US, Canada and Europe. They must be at least 17 y/o by the time they arrive in Vegas for class, must have been taking pointe at least three days a week for the last five years and have their parent’s permission to be sexually active. We assume if the student is seeing a medical practitioner for birth control the parents are aware and consent to sexual activity, but require the signature of the mother or guardian to make sure there are no misunderstandings since Vegas is not Disneyland and accidents can happen.

Screening: Once a student is nominated the screening process begins. One of the common problems we are trying to address by screening is annoying side effects from hormonal contraceptives. Decreased libido, difficulty becoming aroused, vaginal dryness, breast tenderness and irregular bleeding can all be caused by birth control hormones. We have found that hormonal birth control causes a deficiency in vitamin B and additionally many women on hormones are also deficient in vitamins C and D so we start a candidate for a place in our ballet intensive on a special multivitamin at least two months before she arrives for her prep week.

We also want a candidate to have been on her hormonal method for at least six months. That’s because it can take that long for a woman’s body to get used to the hormones in her pills, especially breast swelling and tenderness and irregular bleeding from extended cycle pills. Imagine trying to partner with a man when your boobs are so sore that you can’t stand to wear a bra much less have a man hold and lift you where your breasts get jostled around and mashed in his embrace. Or in rehearsal or in performance and you start to bleed not just spotting, but heavily enough to soak thorough your tights or tutu! Believe me when I say that’s embarrassing, horribly distracting and it gets the costumer very upset as well since it’s nearly impossible to get blood out of a tutu, though it is possible to dye it to mask the stain.

Additionally we try to select otherwise qualified candidates who seem to thrive on birth control hormones, that is they have increased libido no irregular bleeding and are aroused easily while taking their pills correctly. There are some of those just as there are some women who can’t tolerate hormonal contraceptives of any kind. During prep week we administer an entrance exam that tests a students strength and stamina en pointe not only as a minimum entrance requirement, but also as a baseline for comparison for students we accept into the course to be compared with a final exam at the end of her five weeks of Vegas ballet training.

Pregnancy testing: The first thing we have a candidate do when she arrives is to test for pregnancy. If she tests positive she needs to make a choice as to how she wants to proceed. We do not allow pregnant women in the intensive, however there is time to terminate by means of a menstrual extraction and still participate in the course. We have only had that happen once and the student elected to have the ME and stay for the course. She did exceptionally well. Testing for pregnancy is done daily for the student’s safety as extremely intense sexual intercourse can cause a miscarriage and nausea during dive-sex can be fatal and dive-sex is part of the course. When detected a pregnancy can be terminated by ME and the student can continue the course while wearing a gas guard and on an antibiotic and 600 mg of ibuprofen every eight hours for a few days while her uterus recovers. Then after the course of antibiotics she can rely on her Reflexions or FemCap and spermicide for contraception while her hormonal protection is being reestablished. With students on hormonal contraceptives we have had one or two pregnancies terminated every summer for the last several years and no students have dropped out due to pregnancy related issues.

Hormonal birth control: St Lucy’s girls participating in the summer intensive have GyneFix IUDs implanted. For other students we won’t accept girls using Depo-Provera injections (given every 12 weeks) because we have found that women on Depo do not do well in the course and have weight and stamina issues. Neither will we take women if the are using NuvaRing because there is too great a risk of the ring slipping out and the student losing her hormonal protection or the ring interfering with the seal of the students gas guard. We ask students to bring their birth control pills with them and bring at least one extra pack in case something happens and the open pack is lost or becomes contaminated - think dropping it in the toilet. Most of the students seem to be using extended cycle (greater that 28 days w/o a period) pills like Lybrel or Seasonique With Lybrel once adjusted to the hormones a woman can go for a year w/o a period and on Seasonique she can go 84 days before taking the placebos to get her pill period. This year we have two French girls enrolled who are on Qlaira (a 28 day cycle pill) and they are experiencing amenorrhea (not having periods) when they take the inactive pills. Some amenorrhea is experienced by at least 15% of Qlaira users so these girls are thinking themselves fortunate. Though, with all the sexual axtivity they will be experencing if it were me I’d feel more confident getting my period on a regular basis. Of course with testing daily they will know as soon as possible if there has been a pill failure.

Pointe shoes: All major makers’ stock shoes can be purchased locally at the St Lucy’s school discount. If the student wears special make up (SMU) pointes we ask her to bring along at least eighteen pairs of pointe shoes for pointe and technique classes and performances because students typically go through three pairs a week and if she needs more the lead time for SMU shoes is too long for them to be any use for the course. Once the candidate passes the stamina test we fit her with both a FemCap and Reflexions flat spring diaphragm as gas guards for protection during dive sex and with Gaynor Minden pointes for pointe sex classes as Gaynors are far more comfortable and provide more support for sex en pointe than traditionally made shoes.

No satisfactory fellatio lip-gloss

Puckering up for makeup to apply more lip-gloss before a fellatio scene

Erotic dive girls and cosmetics: One of Taryn’s adult media companies is with us again videoing in the pit and I took Angie along to watch. She’s a good swimmer and qualified SCUBA diver with several hundred dives in the Med and Red Sea as well as German and French lakes. When we showed up in shorts and sports tops the producer asked if we wanted to be extras in a pool scene and Angie liked the idea so we changed into bikinis and splashed around on the surface with the actresses in a pool scene before they were encased in rubber for the main event. The men (who are from the current escort class and are union members) when they appeared wore hoods so they couldn’t be recognized. Angie said she thought the hoods gave the guys an evil look which is what the director was striving for the plot being girl divers surprised by a group of rubber fetish studs out to get their jollies by terrorizing chicks.

We got to talking to some of the actresses later about the skincare products they use and one of best is Jeff’s formulation of Dive-Gel which while silicone based won’t harm silicone barriers or toys which is a huge plus. It’s an industrial product and Jeff wants to keep sales manageable – for quality purposes - selling only to female sex-workers. It was unanimous among the dive-porn actresses we chatted with that there isn’t a good waterproof lip-gloss and they complained that videoing has to stop frequently to have lip-gloss reapplied by a makeup tech before close-ups because it gets all over the regulator mouthpieces and their partners shafts. When a girl is doing an underwater fellatio scene stopping the action to reapply lip-gloss breaks the mood and it takes much longer to get her partner to cum in her mouth. He doesn’t lose his erection - he’s taking a performance enhancer - she just needs to tease his little head longer with her tongue. It’s tricky enough giving head underwater as it requires taking a breath, removing the reg or twin-hose mouthpiece and fondling a rock hard penis with your tongue w/o swallowing water and doing that repeatedly until he spews. So the lip-gloss distraction is near the top of the most hated bits.

Having my Kate and Edith too: Angie is every straight man’s fantasy. She has C-cup breasts, long shapely legs, a wide pelvis, a beautiful smile, high cheek bones, brown eyes, waist length shiny brown hair and a tight deep vagina. She is also Bi which I found out while we were in the training pool where I was going over the basics of dive-sex prep with her. I mentioned I was going to have to take a break to pump my breasts and she asked how I came to be lactating. As I was telling her one thing lead to another and she said she would like to milk me. I was so pleased! We increased the inflation of our BC vests to get higher out of the water and I unbuckled mine so she could get to my nipples with her mouth while I hung in it with my arms while sitting in the snugged-up crotch strap. I spread my legs and she wrapped her legs around my thighs where I could insert two fingers in her vagina as she milked me. She sucked first my left and then my right nipple causing me to arch my back and moan in delight. Before I began lactating – a result of breast over-stimulation when I was a latex model one summer a few years ago – I had no idea how erotic breast feeding could be for a lactating woman. Now I understand why some women continue to breast feed their babies until the infants are two or three years old. It is a huge rush to feel the milk being sucked through my nipples, almost as good as sex in its way, and being milked gets me very aroused so I need penetrative sex afterward.

So there we were floating on the surface of the 20 ft deep training pool with her emptying my breasts and me caressing her G-spot with my fingers. I eased her along letting her drain me of milk before I finished fondling her to orgasm. Just before I took her to climax she nipped at my nipples with her teeth and as I tipped her over the edge she threw her head back and spewed a mouthful of milk in the air splattering us both as she screamed. After nearly two minutes in orgasm she was shuddering as her vaginal muscles spasmed contracting powerfully on my fingers. I could see she was about to faint so I stopped and she clung to me gasping for breath as she moaned and kissed me while basking in the afterglow. Our encounter was so intense I hope she hasn’t bonded with me as I don’t want to take her away from Taryn. I’ve watched then together for the last several says and there is a proper employee-employer relationship, but they do get along well together and since Taryn is Bi I think she and Angie should understand each other. Shortly after I left Angie Jacques was meeting me for dinner at the club. I explained how very needy I was and why so we stopped by the VIP lounge just long enough for him to take me from behind and satisfy both our cravings before we went down to dinner.

Pointe shoe quiz 05-24-2010

Who is the maker of these shoes?

Ok, I think you may find this quiz is a bit more difficult than the last one.

Taryn and Trinity College Cambridge

Great Court Trinity College Cambridge in the rain

Taryn will go to Cambridge: She has enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge and will start Michaelmas Term which begins October 1st. She will take premed courses with the intention of getting her MD and then becoming a psychiatrist, the better to understand the needs of the clients she serves with her porn empire. She had been taking subjects at UNLV and living in her suite at my place since Christmas while she was taking second year courses there. The tests to get in to TCC were pretty amazing to sit she said, but Tanaquil got her a tutor who prepped her for them for months and her acceptance letter came a week ago. Tanaquil also had some of her male and female friends who have received degrees from TCC put in a good word for her because the school is so small and there are a significant number of legacy acceptances. So a lot of what’s going for an ‘outsider’ is not the academics, everyone applying (even the legacy students) who is permitted to sit the exam has the grades, it’s who you know. And Tanaquil is friends with a great many of the British nobility and aristocracy through business and social contacts.

Trinity College: Trinity College was founded by Henry VIII in 1546 as part of the University of Cambridge. Since then Trinity has flourished and grown, and is now a home to around 600 undergraduates, 300 graduates, and over 160 Fellows so you can see that it’s a very small school, but Trinity is only one of the 31 Colleges making up Cambridge University. Three are for women Murray Edwards, Newnham and Lucy Cavendish and two admit only graduates (Clare Hall and Darwin). The remainder 26 house and teach all students enrolled in courses of study or research at the University.

Off Campus Hideaway: Tanaquil also aranged to lease an off campus residence for her a few miles north east of town (toward Ely) for entertaining and unwinding on weekends and holidays. It’s a 14 room 18th C stone and brick ‘cottage’ that had been built as a hunting lodge on 85 acres of high ground north of the A14 off the A10 (Cambridge Ely Road) owned by a member of the nobility. He hadn’t used it in years so it is requiring a lot of deferred maintenance – starting with a new roof - and renovation. We got it for a pound a year for 20 years if we paid for the renovations so we jumped at the chance since there were no restrictions on what changes we could make to the grounds and Taryn wants a deep pool for dive-sex. One of the beauties of the place is that it’s on high ground as a lot of the surrounding area is low with fens (flat, swampy land) where waterways abound. The pool will be enclosed with its own HV/AC and in addition to surface access to the pool house there will be a tunnel from the cellars for all weather access.

Access and personal security: There is a small regional airport, Marshall Airport Cambridge UK (IATA: CBG, ICAO: EGSC), just east of Cambridge with a 6,446 ft concrete runway. Limnaea, my G550, can land there and there is just enough room for it to take off. Marshall is about a 20 minute drive from the estate. There is also frequent rail service from Cambridge to London Kings Cross and Liverpool St stations that takes about 35 minutes each way. We have leased two Range Rovers for ground transportation. I keep saying ‘we’ because since Taryn is only 18 as her guardian I have to sign along with her until she reaches 21 though her major purchases are through the trust established for her education.

I thought Taryn’s personal security was going to be a problem but Tanaquil had that base covered as well, having found a gorgeous 25 y/o aristocratic black-sheep Brit-chick just out of the army who has a body guard license and was working as an up-market escort in Germany with Tanaquil’s clients who want British arm-candy. She has a plumy upper-class accent and Angelica (Angie) wants to go back to school so Tanaquil had her tutored and sit the exams and Angie was accepted as a legacy student (both her parents graduated from TCC) so no chits needed to be called in to get her accepted. Angie likes the idea of a steady 3 year job (perhaps longer if Taryn takes her MD at Trinity) with Taryn while she gets her degree and she came out to meet Taryn this week. The two of them seem to be hitting it off well together so far. As an upper-class teen Angie took ballet and was en pointe for several years but doesn’t have a thing for pointe. Taryn wants me to teach her dive-sex and I’m hoping to get her back en pointe again but that’s in the future. Angie already has a GyneFix implanted and I had her fitted with a 22 mm FemCap and a 70 mm Reflexions flat spring as gas guards for dive-sex. The Reflexions can be used effectively to at least a depth of 130 feet which is a plus in case she gets an opportunity to dive Adolph’s well while she is menstrual.

The Manor house: The locals are pleased to see the manor house being opened again as it will be a source of jobs. Work has already begun on repairing the chimneys and replacing the roof as well as reestablishing the gardens. The masons are working with the roofers to get the chimneys in shape before the new lead roof is put on around them. There are a few villagers in the neighboring village of Milton who worked at the manor when the noble owner had it open occasionally for bird hunting but no one remembers when the manor was at its best which was before WWII. Taryn wants to make it a showplace again with restoration of the gardens. The place is being leased furnished. The furnishings are good quality but are a bit shabby so we are having everything slip-covered to brighten the appearance. The house, Milton Park, is in a ten acre park at the center of a forest so there should be no problem with privacy. Tanaquil kiddingly called the estate ‘Pussi Park’ given that it will be used for intimate weekends and erotically themed parties and Taryn thought the name was so appropriate that in our conversations she has unofficially renamed it.

Even though we aren’t allowed to change the 19th C double and triple-hung windows that leak air the new HV/AC and new electrical wiring throughout that were installed a few years ago can easily heat and cool the place and will support modern communications and there is an aux generator for power failures that can be used for lighting if she decides to allow erotic video shoots there. There are working fireplaces in every room and getting them safely working is, as I mentioned, one of the first things we are doing as sex by a cozy fire is such a turn-on. Fortunately the owner had left the HV/AC on while the manor was unoccupied as the damp chill of the winters and the humidity from the fens in the summers would have caused rapid deterioration in the furnishings. We expect to move Taryn and her staff in to Pussi Park in August so she can get the house running the way she wants it before starting school.

A tea-bagging accident

A tea bagger wannabe; Estrogen, alcohol and the wrong anatomy

Tea bagging at Splash: One of the towel girls at Splash was helping a club member with his needs when there was a bizarre accident. The guy was into domination and one thing he enjoyed was to tea-bag his female partner. He had helped her into a zippered leather D-suit with hood – a catsuit with D-rings to restrain the wearer – and strapped her to a wide leather covered encounter table leaving only her arms free to pleasure him while he had his way with her. He had taken her twice vaginally and was tea bagging her while recycling to enter her anally when the accident occurred. The towel girl had a fellatio guard with her and asked if he wanted her to wear it and the client said no because he liked to feel his partner’s teeth on his testicles.

While he was positioned on the table squatting over her face – facing away from her - with his scrotum in her mouth she played with his testicles with her tongue. His stamina began to fade and he asked her to insert one of the medicated silicone butt plugs he had brought with him in his man bag and he handed her an individually wrapped pre-lubricated clear silicone butt plug. She said later that she didn’t really look at it closely and just stripped off the wrapper and had him lean forward as far as he could w/o coming out of her mouth. She spread his cheeks with one hand and pushed it in with the other. To prevent him slipping out of her mouth while she inserted his plug she had tightened her jaws on the soft folds of tissue of his scrotum and he had leaned forward enough that the skin was stretched tight and his little men were pushing against the backs of her front teeth. Her client asked her to make sure the plug was pushed in all the way so the sphincter notch would engage his anal sphincters and braced himself as she pushed it harder until she felt his sphincter pull the plug deeper as it gripped the notch. She gave it another push and felt a slight thump and didn’t think anything more about it.

Suddenly the client gasped and tried to stand up out of the squat and the frightened girl reflexively clamped her jaws tighter on his scrotum which was enough to throw him off balance and he fell off the table. Her head strapped to the table in the BDSM hood didn’t move nor did her jaws open. So when he fell off the table he castrated himself, though at that point it didn’t really matter. That’s because he had accidentally given her the wrong plug, one that had a syringe filled with very high grade cocaine and the last push on the head of the plug had emptied the syringe into his colon. Since he had snorted 2 lines of high quality snow just before they started their encounter he took a massive overdose and was dead shortly after he hit the floor. He also broke his neck when he landed on his head. The TG spit out his sack and screamed for help.

The accidents commercial aspect: If it hadn’t been for the coke they could have called 911 and reported the accident. The client, a single 33 y/o Canadian, had started his own import/export company selling erotic toys. He had been in town from Montreal attending a convention which had ended that day. Splash management made the best of the situation and had his things removed from his hotel room and checked him out electronically and he disappeared. He had used a credit card for services at Splash but the transaction isn’t processed until the client leaves. His charges were canceled so there is no record of him being at Splash and his rental was driven back to McCarran and parked in the long term lot.

The video of the encounter rather than being just another porn vid turned into a far more marketable product, a snuff video. Taryn has an agreement with Adolph to distribute videos taken at Splash and at The Well, his deep water training facility, so as soon as they clean up and master the video it should start distribution in Europe. The manipulation of his facial features to avoid recognition takes the most work and the TG’s features were hidden by the hood she wore so identity security is good. Members purchasing copies of the encounter will get the entire 48 minutes showing the TG being fucked vaginally and her being suited up in her leather D-suit as well as the Tea bagging portion and the insertion of the medicated butt plug and the fatal result. This should be a top selling snuff DVD.

A reader asked: “Are Jill-straps useful in female sports?” That question must have come from a man or perhaps a girl who has never played contact sports. A Jill-strap is a female pelvic protector, the female equivalent of a male’s athletic cup, and any woman who has had her clitoris mashed or twisted by getting a knee or foot in the groin knows the answer to that question is a resounding YES! Any girl curled into the fetal position crying and moaning in agony on a studio floor or a sports field after getting kicked in her unprotected crotch will never forget her pelvic protector again. That’s why it’s a bit chancy working with a new dance partner who may kick you if you are practicing w/o pelvic protection. That is one of the great things about a properly fitted Penetrator plug it provides maximum pelvic protection while being almost undetectable even when wearing a thong. A Penetrator is also fun to wear to a party if you aren’t into being finger fucked that night.

Pointe shoe quiz 05-19-2010

Who is the maker of this dancer’s shoes?

This pic shows a very distinctive maker’s logo

Backstage at ballet school

The grimy platforms of a student’s shoes

The bonding of pointes: I imagine men have something similar, perhaps military training that combines hard work, pain and the satisfaction of overcoming difficulty to do something well. For women, from the age of 10 or 12 when a girl gets her first pair of pointes until she hangs up her last pair of toe-shoes she is part of several hundred years of tradition of suffering for her career in the art of classical ballet. Her training starts much earlier of course with the strengthening of her feet, ankles legs and really her entire young body to provide the proper support and line when her bones harden enough to support her weight en pointe. A year or so before a girl is officially allowed to wear toe-shoes she is fitted with demi-pointes. Demi-pointes have blocked toe boxes but are shankless. The purpose of demi-pointe shoes is to accustom the student to the restrictive feel of the blocked toe box and to sewing and tying the ribbons on her shoes w/o giving her the support to stand en pointe that would have the potential to damage young bones. Of course in ballet boarding schools the girls are wearing a friend’s dead pointes around the dorm long before they are officially allowed en pointe in school approved and correctly fitted toe-shoes.

Over the years of a girls schooling and career in ballet hours and hours are spent sitting in groups on studio floors, stages and in dressing rooms sewing ribbons and elastics and darning platforms and gossiping about faculty, administrators, guest teachers and male partners as well as celebrity dancers who are guest artists. If it isn’t school or company politics its sex, who are making or breaking up with whom. A circle of dancers working on their pointes is an amazing source of gossip and rumor some of which may even be correct, but it spices up the boredom of waiting to dance and the time until we can be alone with men.

Platform traction: There are a number of ways to increase the grip of pointe shoe platforms on the surface to be performed on. One is to trim the satin off the platforms to allow the weave of the under-fabric to grip the floor. Another way to increase the grip on most floors is to moisten the platform. When doing that water from any source can be used; a fountain, the dancer’s personal hydrator (her water bottle) or saliva or even sweat. One of the ways to retain a boyfriend’s interest in a student’s pointes during her training is to give him a hand-job and then smear the semen on the platforms of her shoes. That can be a great bonding experience if she uses a dance partner’s ejaculate, but they do have to be practicing in private. A guy having his ejaculate used that way is a sign the girl thinks he’s wicked hot! And, there is the traditional method of stepping into a rosin box filled with powdered rosin, but that can be messy if wearing pointes around the house or while out partying.

Other methods of increasing traction if dancing on polished surfaces are: coating the platforms and soles with rubber cement or using poured rubber sole and toe caps which are sometimes called cabaret plates. On wooden studio floors and stages the surface is sprinkled with water before class, rehearsal or performance. To hold the backs of pointes on the heel, in addition to elastics, wetting the backs and tights with water or applying a bit of Elmer’s glue between a tights covered heel and the back will help keep the heel from slipping out.

The right and left of pointe shoes: Once they start breaking in new pointes most dancers mark a pair of pointes with an L and R to designate the left and right shoes since most pointe shoes do not come footed from the maker, so initially can be worn on either foot assuming the dancer’s feet are the same size, which is not always the case. The only asymmetrical pointe shoe (left & right) that I’ve worn is the Repetto Willis # 505 that has a full carbon fiber shank. It’s a personal preference as to whether to mark the shoes on the outer or inner sole and usually if the marking is on the outer sole it’s done unobtrusively with a blue or black ballpoint pen. Then there are young students who get carried away with a red felt-tip marker. Sigh! If a girl in my class is marking her shoes that way (it shows a gap in her training) I soon set her straight, but I rarely teach girls that young unless I’m teaching a special class at St Lucy’s and she is a transfer student in the class. Marking pointe shoes is covered in the classes on preparation and maintenance (taught when a girl gets her first pair of pointes) including sewing ribbons, platform preparation - which includes darning and crocheting - breaking in the shanks and boxes w/o destroying the shoes and with the new technology shoes (Bloch and Gaynor’s and Gamba among others) adjusting the arch of the shanks with a hair dryer and refrigerator.

Pointe shoes as weapons: I also teach basic self defense in pointe shoes as a last resort. The first thing is to try think ahead so you don’t get caught in a dangerous situation. If a girl finds herself in trouble she should try and get away w/o becoming physically involved. However, if the girl is wearing pointes shoes her running speed will be limited and when running in pointes it is easy to slip and fall so she will almost certainly be caught. So what I recommend is for girls taking pointe to practice kicking hitting with the platforms of their pointes. A well placed kick can disable an attacker, but accuracy is crucial because after the first kick the element of surprise is lost. So it’s important that a girl practice kicking to put he platform exactly where she wants it. Ballet training increases accurate placement of the feet so if she isn’t too shaken the chances of hitting what she aims for is pretty good. As a last resort it’s certainly worth a try.

Graduation pregnancies: It’s that time of year. In some high schools there are girls with low self-esteem, who think it’s cool to get pregnant by someone, usually, but not always, a steady BF. They think when preggers they can sweat the guy, scandalize their parents and get attention for themselves all with a single medical condition. The girl’s intention is almost always to terminate within 8 weeks so they can take Mifeprex, but young minds change and a very few carry to term and give the baby up for adoption. That way they can start college after a gap year and get on with their lives.

I’m pleased to say that while sexually active none of the students at St Lucy’s are interested in becoming preggers before completing their education, establishing a career and finding a life partner, not necessarily a husband, although, husbands come with a lot of important legal protections for wives who relinquish their careers to raise a family. Giving up a career in ballet (not just taking a year off to give birth) for 15 years to raise children effectively ends any chance of having a meaningful career as a dancer.

The male pill: In feminist publications there is a lot of angst about the lack of a male pill. I don’t understand what all the wailing and gnashing of teeth is about! Even if a male contraceptive pill was available today I wouldn’t trust men to take it. It might be ok in marriage or in a monogamous relationship, but any woman who is into multiple partners for recreational sex would be fooling herself if she trusted guys to take it correctly or at all. “Yeah sweetie, I’m on the pill. I’m shootn’ blanks hon!” Oh yeah! Right! You know that overall the pills that women take are only 92% effective, right? That’s because so many of us don’t take them correctly. And we are the ones who get pregnant! Go figure! For a guy who can just walk away from a birth control accident while his partner looses her bikini bod as his ‘gift’ grows in her belly there isn’t much motivation to use a hormonal contraceptive correctly, unless he’s really into her as much emotionally as he is physically and that’s a very stressful way for a girl to find out.

Natalia Makarova and La Bayadère

Mariinsky Ballet La Bayadère Alina Somova as Nikiya in Act 2 scene 5 ‘the Kingdom of the Shades’

The New York Times
Dance
May 10, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

The Eternal Godmother of ‘La Bayadère’

ONE by one, clad in diaphanous white, they enter to a flowing adagio musical phrase. One arm is stretched forward toward infinity, one leg stretched back to create a glorious arabesque line; then each ghostly figure arches backward, arms framing the head like a halo. The phrase is repeated over and over, the line of dancers winding across the stage in seemingly never-ending serpentine progression: a poetic image of eternity, of order, symmetry, harmony, of classical ballet itself.

This famous sequence is the opening of the Shades scene in “La Bayadère,” originally choreographed in 1877 by Marius Petipa for the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg. The ballet — a tale of a young Indian temple dancer, or bayadère, betrayed by her warrior lover and poisoned by her rival —was an immediate hit. Through various stagings and revisions, it remained a Russian repertory staple over the next century, as familiar to audiences and dancers as “Swan Lake” or “Giselle.”

When American Ballet Theater gets its Metropolitan Opera House season under way with “Bayadère” on Tuesday night, the audience might well feel the same way; the ballet (and a one-act version, “The Kingdom of the Shades”) is danced by so many major ballet companies that it has become part of the pantheon of 19th-century works that, for many, define an idea of classical dance.

In fact it has been just 30 years — almost to the day on Tuesday — that the full-length “Bayadère” was seen for the first time in the West. It was staged for Ballet Theater by Natalia Makarova, the great Russian ballerina who defected to the West in 1970. Like Rudolf Nureyev before her, she brought not just her inimitable dancing but also a heritage: a trove of knowledge of the classics that she had danced throughout her Kirov career.

Remarkably, since Ms. Makarova’s sole experience of staging was setting the “Shades” act for Ballet Theater in 1974, she mounted the elaborate production for Ballet Theater, where she was a principal dancer, almost single-handedly.

On the opening night she danced the main role of the bayadère Nikiya for the first time, with the British dancer Antony Dowell as Solor, the warrior who loves her but is compelled to marry the Rajah’s daughter Gamzatti.

“When I was dancing in Russia, I never prepared for this,” Ms. Makarova said this month after rehearsals at Ballet Theater’s studios near Union Square.

“But I had come to America, I was dancing all these modern works with Ballet Theater, and I looked at the company, at the people, that eclectic repertoire. At that time dancers didn’t know the differences in port de bras, épaulement, the right line, using the whole body in harmony. I had a desire to give to them what I know.”

Ms. Makarova, has lost none of her stringency about that heritage over 30 years of Bayadère rehearsals. (Her version is by far the most popular, with 14 productions worldwide, including the Royal Ballet, the Ballet de Santiago, the Australian Ballet and the Tokyo Ballet. But there are others, including Rudolf Nureyev’s lavish 1992 production for the Paris Opera Ballet and stagings by Vladimir Malakhov, Patrice Bart, Florence Clerc and Stanton Welch.)

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head during a rehearsal of the corps dancers, as they began a phrase for the umpteenth time. “Don’t like.” The pianist stopped abruptly, the dancers slumped, looking weary. Ms. Makarova walked over to the first row. “You are doing too much,” she said, imitating an overly lifted chin as she framed her head with circled arms. “It should be spiritual, not emotional.”

They tried the phrase again. “Better,” she said. “But not good yet.”

As the dancers filed out, she explained: “I don’t want to be too hard on them. They have just come back from a week’s break.”

Later Ms. Makarova, who at 69 still looks every inch the ballerina (and who casually lifted her leg above her shoulder while demonstrating in rehearsal), recalled how hard it had been to teach the dancers the nuances of the style she wanted. “We really started from the beginning,” she said. “How to hold a finger. It wasn’t a technical issue, but one of expressiveness. It was a revelation for them, the moment they got it. Of course there was a lot of emotion, because I demand a lot.”

Cynthia Harvey, who danced Gamzatti at the premiere, remembers Ms. Makarova as a tough, but inspiring coach.

“There were times when I wanted to burst into tears, but I understood that this was an education of a whole new kind,” she said, speaking from her home near Norwich, England. “How she used point work was a revelation to me, the way she rolled through her feet both up and down. How you carry your arms, where the head goes. It was a whole other level of refinement that isn’t even necessarily appreciated today.”

Ms. Makarova based her “Bayadère” on the original Petipa production, which included a final act that showed the gods’ destruction of the temple as Solor and Gamzatti are married. The 1941 version that she had danced at the Kirov, staged by Vladimir Ponomaryov and Vakhtang Chabukiani, had omitted this scene, as had all post-Petipa stagings.

“From my point of view there was not enough logic and conclusion without the final scene,” she said. “There is a crime, and there must be punishment, dramatically it must work that way.”

Her research on the ballet was hampered, she said, by cold war politics; she managed “with great difficulty” to acquire the Minkus score (later arranged by John Lanchberry) and found reviews of the original ballet in the Sergeyev Collection at Harvard, which gave her an idea of the atmosphere of the Petipa era.

Ms. Makarova was no purist, however. She pared away a number of dances, moved the Bronze Idol solo (a post-Petipa interpolation) to the last act, and choreographed a new solo for Gamzatti, and a new scene for Solor, just before he sees the vision of the Shades.

“Sometimes those old war horses need adjustment,” said Mr. Dowell, in New York to rehearse the company last month. “Natasha’s version really works because of its economy — the scene changes, the way it moves. She used what she knew, but she was able to let go of the past too.”

“La Bayadère” was a huge popular success at its May 18, 1980, premiere. “La Bayadère,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Post, "is the culmination of Ballet Theater’s 40 year-old history.”

Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times that it was “a superspectacle in the grandest of grand opera house traditions.” She didn’t mean this in an entirely positive way. “This “Bayadère” sets ballet back by 70 years,” Ms. Kisselgoff commented later in the review.

Critics have continued to feel the same mixture of love and annoyance with “Bayadère”: “No matter which production of this full-length ballet you see, at least 60 percent of it is trash,” Alastair Macaulay wrote in The Times in 2008. “Alternately entertaining and pompous, invariably spectacular, generally formulaic, musically trite and (the setting is India) an anthropologist’s nightmare.”

Audiences apparently don’t care. And Ms. Makarova offers a spirited argument for why not.

“The story is Shakespearean,” she said. “About eternal things: love, jealousy, betrayal, retribution, the choice between love and duty. As humans, we are always interested in this.”

the Millennium trilogy legacy

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

Time
May 24, 2010
By Lev Grossman

The Legacy of the Dragon Tattoo

On Nov. 9, 2004, Stieg Larsson arrived at the Stockholm offices of Expo, the antifascist magazine he founded. The elevator was broken, so he had to climb seven flights of stairs instead. When he reached the top he collapsed. He was having a massive heart attack. He died before he reached the hospital.

It was a sudden, shocking death — but not a completely surprising one. Larsson was only 50, but he was a 20-Marlboro-Lights-a-day smoker with a legendary junk-food habit, and his family had a history of heart problems. The truly surprising part is what happened next.

Larsson had spent most of his life documenting the activities of fascist groups in Sweden, but at the time of his death he'd also written three unpublished crime novels, now known as the Millennium trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. They went on to become best sellers, and then international best sellers, and then a global phenomenon that has generated a fortune in royalties.

But whose fortune? With Hornet's Nest set to be released in the U.S. on May 25, Larsson's legacy remains the focus of a protracted legal dispute between his family and his companion of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson. It's become a public soap opera in Sweden, with all the elements of a literary thriller: a star-crossed romance, a missing will, a house divided and a mysterious manuscript. It's the sort of story Larsson might have written — except for the ending, which is likely to be something out of Tolstoy, maybe, or Chekhov: sadder and less satisfying.

The Boy Who Died Too Soon

Larsson was born in 1954. His father and mother were shopworkers in Umea, a small city in northern Sweden. In 1972, when he was 18, Larsson went to a demonstration against the Vietnam War, where he met Gabrielsson, a fellow protester, also 18. Two years later they moved in together, and in 1977 they left Umea for Stockholm. Larsson signed on as a reporter with a news agency, and Gabrielsson began studying the history of architecture. They were still together 32 years later when he died.

But they never married. Larsson proposed in 1983, but shortly after their engagement he was hired as the Swedish correspondent for Searchlight, a British antiracist, antifascist magazine. From that point on he was forced to keep a low profile. Fascism is a live issue in Sweden, and fascist groups have been known to attack reporters who investigate them. But informational transparency is a point of national pride there too, and married couples must make their addresses public. To stay under the radar, the couple put off their wedding indefinitely.

His résumé notwithstanding, Larsson wasn't a humorless, steel-jawed crusader. By all accounts he was a man of large and joyful appetites who loved to drink and smoke and, above all, to talk. "He wasn't at all driven," says Graeme Atkinson, Searchlight's European editor, who knew Larsson for 20 years. "He was easygoing. His curiosity about things was just so immense."

In 2002, Larsson and Gabrielsson took a vacation on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. "Stieg had nothing to do," Gabrielsson told the Los Angeles Times in late 2009. "That's when he picked up a short story he had written about an old man selling flowers who gets murdered. And that became the first chapter of Millennium."

Over the next two years he wrote 2,000 pages, with Gabrielsson kibitzing and editing. Ultimately he hoped to run the series to 10 novels in all. A Swedish publisher offered him a three-book deal. Larsson delivered the manuscripts in a plastic shopping bag. Six months later, he was dead.

Life Imitates Art

The first hint of trouble arrived in early 2005, in the form of a big brown envelope from the Swedish government. It informed Gabrielsson that Larsson's entire estate, including half of their apartment and the rights to his books, had gone to Larsson's father Erland and younger brother Joakim. She had inherited nothing.

The government's position was simple. Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, and Sweden has no common-law marriage. Larsson had asked his publisher to help him draw up a will, but it was never executed. When Gabrielsson asked the Larssons for the rights to Stieg's novels, they declined — although they did offer her a share in them. Gabrielsson refused to discuss it: it was all or nothing. Standoff.

The irony here, or one of the ironies, is that embattled, disenfranchised women are Larsson's fictional specialty. His books have two heroes. One is Mikael Blomkvist, a Larssonesque journalist, middle-aged and unmarried, like Tintin grown up and gone to seed. The other hero, and the series' salvation, is Lisbeth Salander, a young computer genius whose abusive childhood has left her a misanthropic nihilist.

Larsson's writing has a slightly robotic affectlessness — conveyed in part by his, or his translator's, apparent lack of interest in contractions — but Salander burns through the Nordic languor with her electric rage, her incandescent cleverness, her principled refusal of all emotional ties and her determination to think the worst of everybody. Much of the pleasure of reading Larsson lies in getting righteously angry on Salander's behalf.

Joakim and Erland Larsson hasten to point out that Gabrielsson wasn't cut off completely, but under the circumstances their generosity doesn't play particularly sympathetically. "When Stieg died, he had a little bit of money" — about $20,000, says Joakim. "We gave Eva that money. If you take away the books, Eva got more money when Stieg died than if they were married."

It isn't much when you look at the outlandish scale of the books' success. They've sold 3.5 million copies in Sweden alone, all the more impressive when you consider that Sweden has only about 9 million people. They were the three top-selling novels in Germany last year. They've outsold Harry Potter in France. The first two have sold 4 million copies in the U.S. The Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the most successful release in Europe last year, and a Hollywood remake is in the works, with the role of Blomkvist reportedly offered to Brad Pitt. The Larssons say Stieg's estate is worth $15 million, although that is a very low estimate based on the many millions of books sold, not to mention the movie rights.

It's not all about money. Each side has accused the other of being incompetent in managing Larsson's legacy, and the extent of Gabrielsson's contributions to the books has also been debated. But the most hotly contested point is the nature of Larsson's relationship with his family. Gabrielsson's tale is that of a man all but estranged from his brother and father, who as soon as he was dead swooped down to loot the corpse. "I had no idea they had it in them to behave like this when money and power came along," Gabrielsson told the Daily Mail in January. "Stieg really disliked his father ... They blew the last 50 years and they still don't get it." But the Larssons tell a very different story. "I loved him very much," says Joakim. "He was a sort of hero for me. My father would speak to him once or twice a week on the phone."

Gabrielsson has little legal ammunition in this fight. Her only points of leverage are public opinion — a fan has set up a website, SupportEva.com to raise money for her — and Larsson's old laptop, which is still in her possession. On its hard drive are 200 pages of an unfinished fourth Millennium novel, which the Larssons, and most of the rest of the literate world, would love to get their hands on. In a bizarre negotiating gambit, the Larssons offered to trade her their half of the apartment for the manuscript. Gabrielsson declined. (See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)

The Larssons have made concessions. Two years ago they caved on the apartment, where Gabrielsson still lives, and last November they offered her $2.6 million to settle the matter once and for all. "I don't have a dispute with her," Joakim says. "She does with us. We want her to have a good life. If we can help her with that, then we will do it."

Gabrielsson declined again, but the conversation isn't over. "We've met a few times and discussed some issues," says Sara Pers-Krause, Gabrielsson's lawyer. "We will probably go on doing that as long as we think it's worthwhile."

Fans hungry for the missing Millennium novels have seized on the legal drama surrounding them as a substitute. But it's a poor one: if Larsson were writing the story, Gabrielsson would emerge from the fray in a satisfying blaze of vindication, re-enfranchised by some yet undreamt-of legal wrinkle or computer hackery. But the reality will probably be slower and messier, and it's unlikely to leave anybody completely satisfied. It's a strange afterlife for a man who never cared much about money. "If he saw his pictures around the world's airports and underground stations," says Atkinson, "he would have given his characteristic response: a rather wry and slightly mischievous smile." —Reported by Carla Power / London

Personal comment: I found the Millennium Trilogy an awesomely compelling read! I couldn’t wait for Hornet’s Nest to be published in the U.S. so I bought a copy from Amazon.UK before Christmas. I’m hoping to see the Swedish films of the stories. I’m not sure Hollywood will be able to capture the Scandinavian flavor of the books. Mikael Blomkvist is the male hero but the other hero, Lisbeth Salander, a near anorexic introverted computer genius and computer hacker is for me the character that makes the books come alive. As for the real world, I hope Larsson’s companion of 30+ years, Eva Gabrielsson, who helped him write the books gets her fair share of the profits from the books and films.

Hormonal birth control side effects

Different types of hormonal contraceptives

The New York Times

May 10, 2010
Risks: Birth Control Linked to Sexual Problems
By RONI CARYN RABIN

Young women who rely on hormonal birth control like the pill are at significantly higher risk for sexual dysfunction than those who use nonhormonal methods, a German study suggests.

The researchers, who questioned more than 1,000 students at six German medical schools, found that one-third of them experienced one or more forms of sexual problems associated with desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction or pain. The study appeared in the May 4 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Students who used hormonal contraception had the lowest overall sexual function scores, and they had lower scores on desire and arousal compared with those not using any birth control or those using nonhormonal methods.

The highest scores were among those using nonhormonal contraceptives. The lowest were among users of non-oral hormonal contraceptives like injected formulas or birth control patches.

An author of the paper, Dr. Alfred O. Mück, a professor of endocrinology at University Women’s Hospital of Tübingen in Germany, suggested that contraceptive hormones might reduce circulating levels of testosterone, which is needed to stimulate sexual desire and regulate genital blood flow.

But, he added, “The biological mechanisms remain unclear so far.”

Personal comment: Some of us who have used hormonal contraceptives already knew about the annoying side effects of hormonal birth control. Doctors, mostly males, will tell you that the side effects aren’t bad or that you can get used to them, but if you have once experienced an orgasm while cycling naturally and then go on the pill or other hormones the difference in the two experiences is startling. When I was on Ortho Tri-Cyclen the first year wasn’t too bad after getting used to the hormones while the breast soreness and the irregular bleeding went away. But after another year I had no libido, it was very difficult to become aroused and even when I felt as though I was aroused mentally my body wasn’t. I didn’t tent and was very dry. It was terrible! It took me a while longer to realize it was my pills that were suppressing my desire and arousal.

After coming off hormonal contraceptives it can take some women months or in a few cases years to recover from the side effects. Fortunately, after I stopped taking hormones my sex drive came roaring back and I began to cycle naturally again almost at once and I began to use an Oves cap as my primary protection and a diaphragm for flow control and contraception during menses. I’m fortunate to have very regular cycles and comfortable periods – I’m CD5 today – and enjoy the cycling of my female hormones, especially the days when I’m fertile or menstrual.

Anal nozzles, Lab-finals and Oxytocin

An aluminum anal nozzle

Anal irrigation nozzles and the prostate: Our clinic is offering ‘Colonic irrigation’, an enema, for medical purposes. In my Advanced Sexual Techniques class I teach Colonic irrigation as a BDSM technique which is of interest to women not only because some of us may enjoy getting an enema ourselves but because it is especially effective on males as it can massage the prostate. Nozzles are made of metal, aluminum or stainless steel, Pyrex glass, latex and silicone. The aluminum one shown in the image accompanying this entry can be heated, cooled and vibrated to massage the prostate as well as deliver recreational drugs and fluid to hydrate the user during prolonged sexual activity and/or while the user’s face is covered by a breathing mask.

I’m not sure how effective irrigation nozzles really are as it seems to depend on the needs of the user. So I think that there is a big psychological factor in their effectiveness. I say that because I have been with guys who are techie-freaks (really, really heavily into using equipment) who swear by having the right nozzle inserted while drilling me and guys for whom having a nozzle inserted didn’t seem to make much difference except to get them off faster when the vibi massaged their prostates. I think it helped the techies because I’m wicked tight and even wearing a cock ring and using performance enhancing pharmaceuticals the guys (there have been two of them) with a chilled nozzle inserted and forced hydration during a marathon session to increase their stamina almost didn’t finish. The other guys with inflatable plugs just used for hydration during long sessions so they could keep up their rhythm could keep me in orgasm most of the time. I smile just thinking about having a water cooled man plunging in and out of me.

I think anal plugs and nozzles are more of a guy thing, except for the few of us who enjoy the cleansing effect of enemas. However, they are especially useful for women escorts as an important part of encounter preparation if they know they are in for a long session or several encounters because a full bowel and bladder are things to be avoided during prolonged sexual activity.

Lab finals results for AST class: Paul, a good friend and returning reader asked if all the students in my Advances Sexual Techniques class passed their lab final, pointe sex in dead shoes. The short answer is yes. Of the 14 students who started class in the Fall five had dropped out for various reasons by the time finals were to be taken. Seven students wore Gaynors for finals and two wore Freed Classics. The Freed girls are masochists who enjoy the discomfort and can compartmentalize the pain and savor it while orgasmic, rather like me. One of the Gaynor girls sprained her ankle while orgasmic when she lost focus and strayed off her center - slaying over her platforms - and began to wobble. But she recovered well enough to clamp down mightily on her partner during an extremely intense orgasm and bring him to a quick finish filling her with semen. After he withdrew she turned and collapsed into his arms sobbing with relief and the joy of being finished with finals. I think she has the hots for him which could present a problem because as an escort he isn’t likely to want a stable relationship regardless of how she feels, but student crushes on lab partners are common so we will have to see what happens. I warn the girls about the bonding effect of Oxytocin which flows so freely in women during sex. That’s another life lesson taught by AST, that some hormones can make a woman bond with a man whether she intends to or not. How she handles her attraction to a man can determine how she will handle other challenges as she enters the adult world.

Pointe shoe quiz 05-08-10

Who is the maker of these shoes?

Lab-exams, dead pointes, Dry SCUBA

Sex in dead pointes

Pointe sex in dead shoes: Its finals time at St Lucy’s. One of the lab-exams in my Advanced Sexual Techniques course is having penetrative sex en pointe in dead shoes. The students are allowed to use any maker’s shoes as long as they no longer provide the necessary support and I am the one to make that determination. Each student submits the shoes she plans to wear for the lab-exam and I decide whether they are dead enough. Students are allowed to use old Gaynor Minden shoes but because the boxes and shanks are of polymer which doesn’t soften and rarely breaks they aren’t allowed to use ribbons or elastics on the shoes worn for the lab final.

The shoes in the image accompanying this entry were submitted for use during finals and were not allowed until the student cut the stitching and pulled the ribbons off the left shoe, there were none on the right. Then I bagged them with her name for return to her at test time. In order to help hold the shoes on the foot stirrup tights or unitards are allowed and of course if they are worn they have crotch zippers. This exam is important to determine if the student can successfully reach orgasm while staying en pointe in shoes that don’t provide necessary support. Toe taping and padding is permitted so it’s really about the strength of a woman’s ankles and feet and whether she can stay over her platforms to prevent coming out of her shoes while taking her partner’s thrusts from behind.

Reaching orgasm can be wicked hard for a women while she’s distracted by concentrating on not falling off pointe so I have been having my students practice. It’s not that a girl will intentionally have pointe-sex in unsuitable shoes, but every one of us could find ourselves in that situation occasionally if we don’t have a suitable pair of pointes with us when we are made an offer we can’t refuse. The student’s partner for the lab-exam is an experienced escort who has taken the student to orgasm before so he knows what a particular students vaginal contractions feel like when she orgasms so there is no possibility of her faking an O for the exam.

Another Dry-SCUBA/breathplay tragedy: I was called to the home of one of the Family cousins, a small ranch in the hills west of town. Their 17 y/o daughter died accidentally while on her bed wearing dry-scuba gear having solo-sex. It wasn’t suicide, there was no note and she was excited about being accepted at Princeton for the Fall term. And there is no indication it was murder. She was well liked and had a supportive boyfriend and she wasn’t preggers which her mom said wouldn’t have bothered her as the family is quite liberal as far as sexuality goes. The house was locked and the alarm system was on so no one got in or out. Her mom let me watch the video from the security cams. The cams showed no activity except in the master and her bedrooms where they recorded her relocating and setting up her mom’s Dry-SCUBA gear. The teen wasn’t using the air tank as a ‘bed-tank’ – an air tank fastened to the bed frame with a tank clamp to prevent the tank from moving or being tipped over.

She had moved her mom’s Dry-SCUBA gear – a steel HP 130 tank and an Ocean Reef Space Predator FFM - from the master bedroom to her own bedroom on a small two-wheel tank cart. The air tank in the master bedroom had been fastened to the bed using a Velcro tank-clamp and there were several wide Velcro straps unused and hanging on the tank cart that the daughter could have used to secure the tank to her own bed, but she didn’t. The security video showed her positioning the full 50 pound tank by the bed on thick carpet which provided an unstable base, putting on the Predator FFM, turning on the air, closing the masks surface air valve and lying back on a pile of pillows to watch herself in the mirrored ceiling as she lubed a large silicone rubber dildo with K-Y jelly, spread her labia and inserted the dildo with the vibi egg against her G-spot and turning it on.

There was about ten minutes of her playing with herself caressing her clitoris and adjusting her hips as the vibi caressed her G-spot while we listened to the demand valve on her mask hiss as she sucked gas and her muffled moans and mewing as she neared climax before we could see the sheen of sweat on her hard flat belly and lovely breasts with their erect nipples. Then her back arched and her hips were thrusting as she reached orgasm, she gasped screamed and her hand moved from her clit to the air hose on her mask and hit the hose with enough force to tip the unstable air tank over. The 50 lb tank jerked the short hose and mask on its way to the floor and you could see her head turn at an odd angle as her neck was wrenched when she was pulled by her mask toward the edge of the bed and the tank hit the floor. After her head was twisted by her mask there was no sound of the demand valve working. It was obvious that the falling tank had jerked her head hard enough to break her neck.

The only thing I could do was to sympathize with her parents they didn’t need my clean-up skills. I think they wanted my opinion about if they could have done anything to have prevented the accident. I didn’t point out that if the tank had been fastened to the bed or if the air hose had been lengthened (as it normally is) for dry-scuba sex there would have been no accident, but I did complement her mom on securing the tank to her own bed with a tank clamp and mentioned that she might want to lengthen the air hose to give herself more room to maneuver during an encounter. The funeral will be closed casket as the mask clamped on her face left such a deep impression that the cosmetician at the funeral home couldn’t get her to look natural.

Tank stands for dry-scuba: To minimize the likelihood of this sort of accident those of us in my circle who enjoy dry-scuba sex or breathe oxygen on the surface to speed outgassing nitrogen all have tank stands – Velcro straps attached to a vertically mounted three foot tall concave tank cradle on a wide flat steel base on rollers that lock when the tank stand is in position. When properly attached to the stand it is impossible to tip the tank over and the base of the stand is low enough to roll under a bed. In addition we lengthen the air hose on the FFM used for dry-scuba to at least 12 feet to give the wearer room to move around on the bed.

Bottom litter: I think I’ve mentioned this before but I’m amazed that the bottom of Adolph’s 200 ft deep training facility is littered with contraceptive barriers: All-Flex, Omniflex and Reflexions, FemCap and there was even an Oves and several NuvaRings; Diva menstrual cups; straps, weights and clamps used to fasten women to the well walls and a Scubapro 2nd stage reg. I think it’s normal for Adolph to remove a trainee’s upper reproductive tract protection once he fastens her to the wall if for no other reason than to increase her anxiety even if he has no plans to sexually penetrate her, but he rarely misses an opportunity to plant his seed in a young female under his control, and he has no concern about the possibility of his trainees having an embolism from dive-sex.

He took me to the bottom yesterday to show me the new drain grills that are supposed to prevent a diver from being sucked directly into the drain with such force that it tears her apart. I’d had those installed when the pit (my 68 ft deep pool) was built several years ago and I’d been after Adolph to have them installed when he built his training facility. Cost wasn’t a concern. I just think he wanted to watch a woman sucked into a drain and that may have happened several days ago because Ellen, his new Pool Attendant, disappeared suddenly and the pump company were there to replace a set of pump blades that got nicked and bent enough to vibrate badly when turned on. Of course it’s all circumstantial and supposition on my part because I haven’t seen the filter traps where remnants of her bones, regulator and mask might be. Ellen may have gone home to see her mom for Mother’s Day, or not. It’s not really my concern and I don’t plan on asking any questions.

Natazia/Qlaira approved by the FDA

Qlaira; estradiol valerate/dienogest tablets to be sold in the U.S as Natazia

U.S. FDA Approves Natazia(TM), a New Oral Contraceptive for the Prevention of Pregnancy
05.07.10, 08:06 AM EDT
PRNewswire

“WAYNE, N.J., May 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc. today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Natazia (TM) (estradiol valerate and estradiol valerate/dienogest) tablets for the prevention of pregnancy. Natazia has not been evaluated in women with a BMI of greater than 30 kg/m(2) [the equivalent of a 5’7” woman weighing 190 lbs]. Natazia is the first and only oral contraceptive that contains an estrogen called estradiol valerate and a progestin called dienogest. Estradiol valerate is a synthetic estrogen that is converted to estradiol in a woman's body. Natazia is expected to be available in the summer.

Until today, all marketed combination oral contraceptives (COCs) contained ethinyl estradiol. With the FDA approval of Natazia, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals becomes the first company [in the U.S.] to launch estradiol valerate together with the progestin, dienogest.

"Every woman's body reacts differently to hormones, so it is important that they have a choice in birth control options," said Anita Nelson, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, California. "Natazia may be a good option for women to consider when making a decision with their healthcare provider about which birth control option is right for them."

Women using COCs, including Natazia, should be strongly advised not to smoke. Smoking increases the risk of serious cardiovascular side effects from COC use. The risk increases with age and the number of cigarettes, especially in women over 35 years old.

Natazia is taken once a day. The dosing regimen consists of pills with varying doses of estradiol valerate, and estradiol valerate in combination with dienogest, for specific days of the 28-day cycle.” The text in brackets [ ] was added by me for clarification.

Personal comment: I think Natazia should be available from U.S. pharmacies some time in the 3rd quarter of this year. It comes at a good time for Bayer because Yasmin/Yaz is under pressure from lawsuits claiming injury from side effects caused by the progestin drospirenone. Qlaira became available in Europe in May of 2009. Women interested in the patient information leaflet for Natazia are (for now) being referred to the Qlaira PIL at Qlaira.

Pointe Shoe Quiz 05-04-10

Who is the maker of these shoes?

Readers questions & the butcher shop

The Mirena levonorgestrel releasing IUD

Recent questions from readers:

Mirena IUD: “Taking out a Mirena drops estrogen or progestin?” A Mirena continuously releases a tiny bit of the progestin levonorgestrel. So removing it will decrease the average level of progestin in a woman’s body. I hope the reader asking this question was a man. A woman should have known the answer. Well, perhaps she was a very young woman who had abstinence-only sex-ed classes.

An IUD that has perforated the uterus

The problem with an IUD that has a frame, the T-shaped plastic structure to which the vertical copper coil or progestin releasing polymer is attached, such as a ParaGard (that uses copper) or Mirena is that it can dislodge or perforate the uterus and migrate into the wearer’s abdominal cavity - as in the image above - where it is ineffective as birth control.

Pregnant Escorts: “Escort fucks her client bareback to get pregnant” I’m not entirely sure what the reader is asking here. Most of our escorts have GyneFix IUDs implanted so to a client she would appear to be unprotected as do the girls on hormonal contraceptives. We do that to provide the most natural experience possible. Though of course we will use any standard contraceptive method a client would like. If the reader is a man he could be concerned about the complications from a paternity suit or perhaps he is secretly fantasizing about impregnating a favorite escort. In reality, up-market working girls want to stay as far away as possible from becoming preggers by a client. Pregnancy means expense and time off w/o pay to take care of the problem.

However, we do have a premium ‘baby-dancing’ service where the escort is fertile and totally unprotected with the object that the man pushes his shaft deep into her vagina slippery with fertile cervical fluid and buried as deep as he can get pumps semen into his escort’s ripe cervix soft, open and waiting to accept his sperm. The client has to commit to financing the abortion or the cost of carrying the baby to term and the adoption process if he actually manages to impregnate her. That service is extremely expensive and as far as I know no man has been successful in getting his baby-dancing escort preggers.

Prince Albert Piercing: “Can my Prince Albert piercing block my sperm preventing me getting my wife pregnant.” That’s the sort of question a stallion should ask his urologist. However, our clinic’s experience with men who wear PAPs during unprotected sex is that they are virile and potent if the piercing has been done correctly so that the man is able to urinate a strong stream. There may be some leakage around the piercing site below the frenulum, but if the man has strong ejaculations that place his semen deep in his partner’s vagina he should be capable of easily impregnating an unprotected partner. There is a question about damage to sperm if the PAP is of copper. No one knows for certain but it’s thought that if copper is used copper ions might react like they do from a copper IUD in the uterus and harm the wearer’s sperm.

Dive-Gel intimate lubricant: “Does Dive-Gel help with anxiety?” Dive-gel is an intimate lubricant that is difficult to wash away with water so is ideal for use as a lubricant during penetrative sex underwater. It will not reduce anxiety unless the person is anxious about being properly lubed for sexual intercourse underwater.

Qlaira missed pills: I keep getting questions about missed pills while on the birth control pill Qlaira. These questions are usually from women in Europe because Qlaira isn’t available in the U.S. yet. The instructions for taking missed pills while on Qlaira are complicated so the best thing for a woman to do is to consult the patient information leaflet that comes with each pill-pack. An on-line copy is available here. The only thing that is straightforward is if you miss one of the two white (inactive) pills just throw it away. Also, if you need to use back-up the interval is nine continuous days.

Sex at 30 meters: A good friend and frequent reader asked: “What kind of difference have you felt between doing what you do at the bottom of the Pit and going at 100 feet/30 meters?”

It's not that much different except for the amount and type of gas needed and the length of decompression. The interesting thing is the comments of my friends who are all freaked by the fact that they are at the mid point of the well and there is another 100 feet of water below them if something goes wrong. Of course that’s why we all carry lift bags as back-up. If there is an equipment failure or the diver is sick the idea is to get to the surface and if something goes wrong with the weight dump and the buoyancy device a lift bag can get you to the surface, but there isn't much control and it's tricky - and often impossible - to stop for deco ascending on a lift bag.

The butcher shop; Lean teen: Beth went with me on her first cleanup w/o Taryn. The victim was an 18 y/o aspiring dancer and from what was left seemed to have had a lean hard body. They found her in the studio of a ballet school run by a rubber Domme where she trained in the evenings. She was new in town and interested in rubber encasement and was slaughtered in her latex catsuit. To me it looked as though she was butchered by someone newly into Gynophagia. Nearly all the time Gynophagia is only an extreme fantasy fetish. But on rare occasions there have been reports of women actually being roasted and eaten. Anya says Deiter was deep into Gynophagia and ate parts of several Bosnian ballet dancers in his fortress castle in Germany. Deiter was a nasty piece of work and I’m thinking that Adolph may have some of the same tendencies.

The reason I say her butcher may have been newly into Gynophagia is that the cuts where he severed her thighs from the hips sockets were jagged as were the cuts that severed the lower parts of her legs just above the knees. The killer appears to have used a scalpel to slit her rubber suit and for cutting through flesh and muscle and a cleaver to hack through the bone. Blood was splattered everywhere. Or perhaps he was just new at dissecting a living woman and excited because he didn’t open an artery and let her bleed out before he started cutting out the parts he wanted. We found her strapless FemCap in her mouth blocking her airway. The bruise on her neck indicated her killer cut off the blood to her brain by pressing on her carotid and then when she fainted stuffed her FemCap down her throat. Anya said that Dieter told her a deboned woman’s thigh roasted with crushed rosemary tastes just like pork loin from a suckling pig. From looking at her ribs and breasts there won’t be much fat on her thighs so I’m not sure she will cook up well if the thighs are to be basted in their own juices. I thought for sure he would have gutted her to take her liver and kidneys to boil for stock but the organs in her abdomen were untouched, she was just missing her thighs. I really hope this guy is passing through and doesn’t make a habit of hunting in Vegas.

I was pleased that Beth did so well. Of course the victim was fresh so there was just the scent of blood so no deterioration and the accompanying stench had started. She pitched right in and helped load the upper body and lower legs, the feet sill in Bloch pointe shoes, into the bodybag. The shoes were Beth’s size and style and since she has started pointe again I said she could have them as a souvenir since they were stock and didn’t have the victim’s name on them. They were Beth’s first ‘trophy’ which she intends to wear to class.

Abi, Cervical encasement, Multi-tasking and Dry SCUBA

Abi, Las Vegas Bay Lake Mead

Abi: Returning readers will remember Abigail (Abi) the 24 y/o German with auburn hair who was hired to teach an underwater bondage course at Splash and ended up as the resident Domme in charge of the Towel-Girls. She has a very high student accident rate in her classes and had another near fatality during a training session at Lake Mead when a towel-girl trainee had a buoyancy device failure at the end of her class. The students were starting their ascent when the girl punctured the bladder of her BCD on a jagged piece of metal on the wreck she was swimming around and couldn’t get off the bottom. She panicked and couldn’t drop her weights. They were using single AL 80 tanks with buoyancy characteristics of Full = -1.4lbs and Empty = 3.4lbs and the TG was wearing a 5 mm neoprene suit so she should have popped to the surface if she had dropped her weight belt. Abi had let the class stay down way past their safety margin so the chick with the torn BCD was nearly out of gas and Gigi who was in the group had to unbuckle her weights for her and buddy her to the surface. Abi looks almost angelic with a lovely face and gorgeous figure [see the image accompanying this entry] even when it isn’t being shown off encased in tight rubber. But I’m beginning to wonder if she isn’t a sociopath because of the number of ‘accidents’ and the fact that she seems not to care. A typical comment is, “well, perhaps she (the victim) will listen when I tell her what to do and practice beforehand next time”. Adolph does expect her to deliver some injured TGs that he can ‘mentor’ for his own purposes and the way she conducts her training is a very efficient way of doing that by sorting out the girls who aren’t paying attention which makes them ideal for Adolph’s needs.

Cervical encasement: As a tightly focused advertising campaign (to escorts and rubber encasement fetish groups) Gepettos spin on cervical barriers as ‘Cervical Encasement Suits’ seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but there is enough truth to it to make it fascinating to men and women who are deeply into rubber encasement but wouldn’t have used a diaphragm or cervical cap for birth control. However, the campaign has been so successful in portraying cervical barriers as ‘encasing the most feminine part of a woman’s body’ that there has been a rush to get fitted for a diaphragm and a FemCap. It’s recommended a woman have both so her cervix can be safely encased even during her menses with a FemCap (fitted by a Gyn) as her primary cervical encasement device. So in addition to the surge in cervical barriers used for gas guards for dive-sex cervical barriers are now must-have parts of a rubber-chick’s encasement costume.

The publicity is a highly polished up-market version of the fetish interest in ‘vaginal rubber’ that I mentioned in my entry for January 25, 2010, ‘Upper repro tract protection for rubber-chicks’, and is keyed to the must-have mentality that so many of the young rubber-chicks and stallions have. The luster dimmed appreciably on $3.000 ‘must-have’ handbags and that sort of thing in 2008 when the economy went into free fall, but cervical barriers never lost their niche market for professional girls who offer dive-sex as a specialty and so had a real need for protection as well as rubber-chicks and their Doms in the fetish community who wanted the feel of thrusting into a stretchy rubber membrane and a certain amount of cervical thrust buffering. But it’s the ‘all-rubber-all-the-time’ aspect of cervical protection that has caught fire in the imaginations of the target audience and has driven sales for the last several months. As I mentioned cervical barriers, however popular are a niche market product so market saturation should be coming in the next few months unless Madison Avenue can come up with a new hook to increase the size of the market.

Multi-tasking: I’ve written before [see my entry for April 4, 2010] about breathing pure oxygen to accelerate purging nitrogen from my body so I can dive more frequently or for longer intervals. And that’s what I’ve been doing today while I do pointe maintenance; trimming off loose threads, checking ribbons and elastics to see of they need re-sewing and re-hardening the blocks of my traditionally made Freed Classics. While I’m doing pointe maintenance I often straddle one of my Sybian machines and put it on slow to masturbate, but today I inserted a pleasure plug (a Penetrator with a vibi egg against my g-spot) and am masturbating with the most delicious tiny orgasms. I love being able to multi-task that way.

Dry SCUBA: For penetrative sex – with a man - while on pure oxygen I set a single HP 130 beside the bed and wear a FFM while I’m being drilled. That way I get to hear the hiss of gas being sucked through the demand valve and smell the rubber of the mask while I watch the long thick shaft of a superbly equipped stallion moving in and out of me. Figuring my SAC at 2.0 cuft (which is high) x 5 minutes = 10 cuft divided into the tank capacity 130 cuft = 13x5 = 65 minutes of gas at 1 ATA if I was in orgasm the entire time. There is no man alive who can perform continuously for an hour or more so I have plenty of gas before I have to worry about sucking the tank dry. Because I’m breathing 100% oxygen there is a danger of fire but all consumer electronics are kept out of the room except the ones in waterproof (airtight) cases so no spark can set off a flash fire. This way I can continue my vaginal training with my duty stallion while I’m out-gassing. The only way dry SCUBA could be harmful is if the woman is tied to the bed or disabled in some other way so she can’t get the mask off if she runs out of air.