An introduction to pointe shoes

From the Grishko Homepage

An introduction to pointe shoes: A reader, Mark, asked: “you have given occasional hints, but would it be possible to write an intro to toeshoes for your less knowledgeable readers?”

Fortunately, one has already been written. The Pointe Book, revised edition 1989, has chapters on: The history of pointe dancing, The foot and the pointe shoe making process, The pointe shoe fitting process, preparing and caring for pointe shoes, Custom ordering pointe shoes and other chapters about pointe shoe makers, training methods, and pointe related injuries among other topics. The pointe shoe book is a good place to start for someone unfamiliar with pointe shoes as it will provide a basic understanding of the support a good pointe shoe must provide and the difficulties in making, fitting and wearing pointes.

What I try to do with my pointe shoe quizzes is to put up an image that has clues, things like: a sole pattern or vamp stitching that is unique to a model or style of particular maker or a logo of a maker whose shoes aren’t particularly well known. I’m fortunate to have several readers who are quite knowledgeable about pointe shoes and/or have good investigative skill and are adept at using the resources available on the Internet to come up with an answer. Two books that are full of information about pointe shoes are:

The Pointe Book (revised edition 1989) Janice Barringer and Sarah Schlesinger

Pointe Shoes Tips & Tricks 2007 (English edition 2008) Angela Reinhardt

Another book that anyone curious about the technical side of ballet might enjoy is: The Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet by Gail Grant.

Another source of information about specific maker’s pointes is their websites: Capezio, Bloch, Freed, Gaynor Minden and Grishko to name a few have details about their styles in on-line catalogues as do large dance supply houses that carry wide selections of makers pointes.

I hope this will give my non dancer readers interested in learning more about pointe shoes a place to start.

Pointe shoe quiz June 18, 2010

Who is the maker of these shoes?

Natalia Osipova – her back story

Bolshoi Principal Natalia Osipova

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Determined Ballerina, Propelled to the Top

THE Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova smiled brightly, theatrically, projecting outward as she danced the solo that Princess Aurora performs moments after arriving on stage in Act I of “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In a plain black leotard and a shabby practice tutu, Ms. Osipova was working before a single ballet mistress, Irina Kolpakova, in a rehearsal studio many floors under the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. There, on Saturday night, she will dance this role with American Ballet Theater, with which she is spending a second season as a guest artist.

Ms. Osipova was suffering from a throat sore enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment immediately after the rehearsal. Later she would cry, feeling ill and frustrated at her inability to perform the steps as she would like. And a week later she would be the victim of a mugging that would leave her bruised and shaken. But for the moment she was Aurora, shy and curious, looking tentatively at the four suitors with whom she will dance the Rose Adagio.

Ms. Osipova’s single-minded focus in rehearsal comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen her perform. Since she burst on to the international dance scene in show-stopping performances of Kitri in “Don Quixote,” during a 2007 Bolshoi tour to London, the sheer energy and intensity of her stage presence has been as remarkable as her improbable floating jump and astounding technical prowess.

“Resistance is futile; you adore her on sight,” Luke Jennings wrote in The Observer. “Let us not exaggerate, but six stars seem to be in order,” Clement Crisp began in The Financial Times, adding, “Not since Plisetskaya and Maximova have we seen so adorable a Kitri and never one so divinely destined to claim the role as her own.”

Ms. Osipova, just 24, is now in demand by major ballet companies all over the world, and in Moscow she is an acknowledged star with a devoted following. But that wasn’t always a predictable fate for her, said Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, who invited Ms. Osipova to join the Bolshoi during his tenure as the artistic director there.

“I watched the final exams at the Bolshoi school,” Mr. Ratmansky said, speaking on the phone from Jackson, Miss., where he was on the jury of the USA International Ballet Competition. “She got a lot of criticism from the examiners — not classical enough, no aesthetic, almost vulgar, just wrong,” he said. “But I felt you could see the physical talent and the openness, so I hired her.”

He gave her solo roles right from the outset. “There was a big division about her among the audience, and also among the dancers and coaches,” he said. “I don’t remember any dancer in my experience causing as much difference of opinion.”

Ms. Osipova’s extreme flexibility and steel-sprung jump — watching her hover in the air makes you realize how people felt when they saw Nijinsky — are quite possibly the legacy of her early training as a gymnast, which she began at 5 in Moscow, where she was born.

“I was very, very serious,” she said last week, speaking through a translator during an interview backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I saw myself at the Olympics. When I seriously injured my back at 8 or 9, and my teachers recommended I stop, this was a tragedy for me.”

Her parents took her to audition at the Bolshoi academy, hoping ballet would distract her. She was accepted but remained, she said, indifferent to dance for several years and wanted to return to gymnastics. Then she was given a solo to perform during a school show at the Bolshoi.

“Afterward the audience was applauding, and I understood that this is incredible,” she said. “In that moment I realized, yes, I want to dance.”

Offstage Ms. Osipova is wiry and feisty looking, with pale skin, wide-set eyes and jet-black tresses. (She dyes her light brown hair to correspond to her ballerina ideals: Margot Fonteyn, with whom she shares a birthday, May 18, and Diana Vishneva, also a Ballet Theater guest artist.) Onstage she is a theater animal for whom the presence and attention of the public is the oxygen that she needs to come fully alive.

It seems unsurprising that one of her heroes is the similarly avid Rudolf Nureyev, whose “Romeo and Juliet” with Fonteyn is, she said, the single performance she would most like to have seen. Ms. Osipova described Juliet as her “dream role”; next month, she will dance it with David Hallberg and Ballet Theater.

“I am a very emotional person, and those emotions have to go somewhere,” she said. “So I am always happy when I have a role where my feelings can come into play. Of course sometimes I scare people. They say, Natasha” — Ms. Osipova’s nickname — “you’re crazy. But I have to go out onstage and give everything I have.”

Mr. Hallberg, who has danced with Ms. Osipova at the Bolshoi as well as in New York, said their performances together had been among the greatest experiences of his career.

“She doesn’t care what people think,” he said. “She is so artistically involved in each role that she is continually questioning, validating every moment. She taught me to release a lot of my inhibitions, just through our physical communication.”

Ms. Osipova, who was invited to perform with Ballet Theater by its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, after he saw her on tape, said that she was extremely happy at the Bolshoi, where she was promoted to principal in May. But a ballerina in the 21st century, she added, has the opportunity to travel and experience the repertory and schooling of different companies.

The crime of different countries is an unpleasant extra; after the mugging, close to her rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she said she was simply relieved that only her face had been bruised. “It was so quick that I think I felt more shock the next day,” she said. “But now I am thinking only about my first performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

After just a few performances with Ballet Theater, it seems clear that Ms. Osipova’s technical gifts have raised the bar several notches higher for every other ballerina.

“If someone that talented comes out, it influences the dancers around her, and the younger ones,” Mr. Ratmansky said. “After her there was a wave of physical talent coming from the Bolshoi school. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Asked if he would like Ms. Osipova to join Ballet Theater’s roster of principal dancers, Mr. McKenzie said in an e-mail message that he “had that objective in mind.” Ms. Osipova said that while she would love to have a more permanent link to the company, her home was at the Bolshoi, where, she said, she felt she hadn’t yet fulfilled her potential. But she sounded touchingly girlish when talking of Ballet Theater.

“As little kids in school we were just thrilled looking at the stars of A.B.T.,” she said. “And now I’m walking next to them. It’s phenomenal.”

Natalia Osipova performs in “The Sleeping Beauty” on Saturday and “Romeo and Juliet” on July 10 with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, abt.org.

ellaOne closer to U.S availability

ellaOne (ulipristal acetate) another step closer

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By GARDINER HARRIS

Panel Recommends Approval of After-Sex Pill to Prevent Pregnancy

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A federal advisory panel voted unanimously Thursday that federal drug regulators should approve a medicine that could help prevent pregnancy if taken as late as five days after unprotected sex.

The pill, called ella, sprang from government labs and appears to be more effective than Plan B, a morning-after pill now available over the counter to women 18 and older that gradually loses efficacy after intercourse and can be taken at latest three days after sex. ella, by contrast, works just as well on the fifth day as the first after sex.

Ella blocks the effects of progesterone, a female hormone that spurs ovulation. It is a chemical relative to RU-486, the abortion pill, and some mystery remains over exactly how it works. That mystery spurred a fierce debate outside the committee over whether it should be considered an abortion drug, a debate that prompted the posting of several uniformed police officers around the meeting room.

The F.D.A. usually follows the advice of its advisory panels but not always.

The dispute is whether the drug works by delaying ovulation (as the pill’s manufacturer claims) or by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the uterus (as anti-abortion advocates say).

Dr. Jeffrey Bray, a pharmacologist at the Food and Drug Administration, said that ella may do both. And Dr. Scott Emerson, a committee member and professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington, said any drug that can prevent pregnancy if taken five days after unprotected sex must do more than simply delay ovulation.

Animal studies showed that ella had little effect on established pregnancies, suggesting it acts differently than RU-486. Dr. David Archer, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School who spoke on behalf of ella’s maker, said ella was not an abortion pill. “I just don’t think there is any element here that would allow me to say that this has an abortifacient activity,” Dr. Archer said.

ella is manufactured by HRA Pharma, a tiny French drug maker. If approved, the medicine would be available by prescription only. Born in the United States, ella was approved for sale in Europe last fall. During the meeting, anti-abortion and abortion rights advocates traded salvos. Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, called ella an unsafe abortion pill that men might slip to unsuspecting women.

“With ella, women will be enticed to buy a poorly tested abortion pill in the guise of a morning-after pill,” she said. Ms. Wright was followed to the microphone by Amy Allina, program director of the National Women’s Health Network, who said abortion questions were distractions intended to prevent “medically safe contraceptive options from becoming available.”

The committee spent the day in a cold discussion of the sobering realities that follow moments of passion, a discussion punctuated by the clacking of knitting needles from Dr. Paula Hilliard, a committee member and professor of gynecologic specialties at the Stanford University School of Medicine. It was a conversation mostly among women. Dr. Erin Gainer, HRA Pharma’s chief executive, is a young woman, and nine of the committee’s 11 members are women. Women’s health advocates say that the need for better contraceptive options is clear.

James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, who spoke on behalf of the company, said that more than one million women who do not want to get pregnant are estimated to have unprotected sex every night in the United States, and more than 25,000 become pregnant every year after being sexually assaulted. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended even though contraceptives are almost universally accepted by women.

Even though ella is somewhat more effective and can be taken later than Plan B, the new drug would, if approved, probably do little to solve this epidemic of unplanned pregnancies. Plan B has been available without a prescription since 2006 for women 18 and older, but abortion and unintended-pregnancy rates have remained largely unchanged.

Women who have unprotected sex have about one chance in 20 of becoming pregnant. Those who take Plan B within three days cut that risk to about one chance in 40, and if ella is approved, that risk would be cut further to about one chance in 50. ella is less effective in obese women, studies show.

Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, a committee member and dean of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, pressed the company and F.D.A. to make the drug available over the counter, as is Plan B. “Why would we not move to O.T.C. status?” she asked. Dr. Gainer said the medicine was too new to consider such a step.

ella was originally developed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The institute, now named after Eunice Kennedy Shriver, is part of the National Institutes of Health. It decided in 2002 during the avowedly anti-abortion Bush administration to finance a crucial study to assess the drug’s efficacy as an emergency contraceptive.

Joe Barton: Apology #2

Rep Joe Barton apology #2

Associated Press
Associated Press Writer Laurie Kellman
June 17, 2010 5:40 PM EDT

GOP lawmaker apologizes for apologizing to BP exec

WASHINGTON – Who's sorry now? Rep. Joe Barton, that's who.

The Texas Republican, the House's top recipient of oil industry campaign contributions since 1990, apologized Thursday for apologizing to the chief of the British company that befouled the Gulf of Mexico with a massive oil spill.

His double mea culpa plus a retraction, executed under pressure from fuming GOP leaders, succeeded in shifting attention from the tragedy, BP's many missteps and the stoic British oil chief at the witness table, to his own party's close connection to the oil industry.

The subject of Barton's ire was the $20 billion relief fund for victims of the spill sought by the White House and agreed to by BP.

"I apologize," Barton said to BP CEO Tony Hayward, who was sitting at a witness table for another of Congress' ritual floggings of wayward corporate heads.

"I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is — again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown," Barton said. "So I apologize."

Cue the outrage — from Republicans, who came close to stripping Barton of his post as chairman-in-waiting of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. GOP leaders summoned Barton to the Capitol and demanded he apologize in specific terms. The leaders threatened to launch a process to strip Barton of his seniority on the powerful panel, a particularly painful threat to any long-term lawmaker, according to two knowledgeable Republican officials who demanded anonymity so they could speak freely about private meetings.

But it was the notion of an American lawmaker apologizing to a foreign head of a corporation that had caused great hardships for millions of Gulf Coast residents that incited rare Republican-on-Republican rage. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., became the first in his party to demand that Barton be stripped of his seniority. During a House vote later in the day, other Republicans pressed their leaders for Barton's punishment — and at least two in the leadership were still considering that option, the officials said.

As Barton returned to the committee, the leaders issued their own statement:

"Congressman Barton's statements this morning were wrong."

Vice President Joe Biden weighed in — lightheartedly at first, red-faced by the end.
"I find it incredibly insensitive, incredibly out of touch," Biden told reporters. "There's no shakedown. It's insisting on responsible conduct and a responsible response to something they caused."

Democrats, eager to tie Republicans to the oil industry during this midterm election year, piled on.

"While people in the Gulf are suffering from the actions of BP, the Republicans in the Congress are apologizing to BP," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

By mid-afternoon, Barton was back on the dais with a statement that was something short
of what the leaders had demanded.

"I want the record to be absolutely clear that I think BP is responsible for this accident," he said. "If anything I said this morning has been misconstrued, in opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstruction."

Barton then issued, and House Republican leader John Boehner's office forwarded out a somewhat different written statement.

"I apologize for using the term 'shakedown' with regard to yesterday's actions at the White House this morning, and I retract my apology to BP," it began, and finished: "I regret the impact that my statement this morning implied that BP should not pay for the consequences of their decisions and actions in this incident."

Barton has received $100,470 in campaign donations from oil and gas interests since the beginning of 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Personal Comment: Do you have to be tone deaf in Texas to be elected to congress? No one could make this stuff up!

Joe Barton is ashamed, and he should be!

The face of big oil: Rep Joe Barton (R) Tx

Yahoo News
June 17, 2010
Brett Michael Dykes

Rep. Barton apologizes to BP for Obama 'shakedown'

Well, that was fast. Barely 10 minutes into Thursday's landmark congressional testimony — where BP CEO Tony Hayward and other leading company executives are revisiting the Gulf Coast oil spill before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the first controversial statement has entered the record.

And no, it didn't come from the gaffe-prone BP brass. Instead, GOP Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the ranking member on the House Energy Committee, made a decisive splash in his opening remarks (from which Republican leaders immediately began distancing themselves). A staunch conservative who has a long record of backing oil industry interests, Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the "shakedown" the Obama White House pulled on the company. (Barton has received more than $1.5 million in campaign donations from the oil industry, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan watchdog group.)

"I'm not speaking for anybody in the House of Representatives but myself," Barton explained, "but I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion shakedown."

Wrapping up, Barton said: "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."

As Sam Stein of the Huffington Post points out, this isn't the first time that Barton has shown conspicuous deference to the interests of offshore oil drillers in deepwater. At a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Air Quality in 2004, Barton announced that "Offshore drilling and productions platforms are so technologically advanced that one platform on the surface of the water can handle production from several different wells several miles apart, house a myriad of technologically advances computer systems, enable people to face and conquer the adversities of living in the middle of the ocean, and do so for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all without losing so much as losing a gum wrapper over the side of the platform. It is truly amazing."

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.

Personal Comment: Joe Barton is ashamed, and he should be, for his comments in support of BP! I wonder how his comments are going over with people living on the Gulf Coast? I wouldn’t want to be anyone on his staff trying to explain his remarks.

Big Pharma and female desire

Flibanserin – Female Viagra?

The New York Times
June 16, 2010
By DUFF WILSON

Push to Market Pill Stirs Debate on Sexual Desire

Ever since Viagra met blockbuster success in 1998, the drug industry has sought a similar pill for women.

Now, a German drug giant says it has stumbled upon such a pill and is trying to persuade the Food and Drug Administration that its drug can help restore a depressed female sex drive. The effort has set off a debate over what constitutes a normal range of sexual desire among women, with critics saying the company is trying to turn a low libido into a medical pathology.

On Wednesday, an F.D.A. staff report recommended against approving the drug, saying the maker, Boehringer Ingelheim, had not made its case and that the benefits of the daily pill did not outweigh its side effects, which included dizziness, nausea and fatigue.

That staff report came ahead of a meeting Friday by an F.D.A. advisory panel of experts who are to vote on whether to recommend that the agency approve the pill, which would be the first drug aimed specifically at a low sex drive in premenopausal women.

F.D.A. staff reports carry weight but do not always sway how advisory panels vote, and advisory votes do not always predict what the F.D.A. might finally decide.

Some analysts forecast that if the drug does reach the market, it could have annual sales in this country of $2 billion — or about equal to the current combined annual American sales of the men’s drugs Viagra, Levitra and Cialis.

In the last month, Boehringer has been trying to lay the consumer groundwork with a promotional campaign about women’s low libido, including a Web site, a Twitter feed, a Discovery Channel documentary and a publicity tour by Lisa Rinna, a soap opera star and former Playboy model, who describes herself as someone who has suffered from a disorder that Boehringer refers to as a form of “female sexual dysfunction.”

There is no dispute that some women have a depressed level of sexual desire that causes them anguish. Boehringer cites a condition — hypoactive sexual desire disorder — that is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a reference book for psychiatrists and insurers.

But many experts say that unlike sexual dysfunction in men — which has an obvious physical component — sexual problems in women are much harder to diagnose. And among doctors and researchers, there is serious medical debate over whether female sexual problems are treatable with drugs. Some doctors advocate psychotherapy or counseling, while others have prescribed hormonal drugs approved for other uses.

There is also debate over how widespread hypoactive sexual desire disorder actually is among women. The medical literature, including articles in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, indicate numbers above 10 percent, but such studies have been financed by drug companies.

Critics say Boehringer’s market campaign exaggerates the prevalence of the condition and could create anxiety among women, making them think they have a condition that requires medical treatment.

“This is really a classic case of disease branding,” said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s medical school who researches drug marketing and has studied the campaign. “The messages are aimed at medicalizing normal conditions, and also preying on the insecurity of both the clinician and the patient.”

Boehringer developed the drug, Flibanserin, as an antidepressant, but it failed to lift depression. The company says it learned serendipitously that the pill, taken daily for weeks, could restore female libido.

Dr. Peter J. Piliero, Boehringer’s director of medical affairs in the United States, says the lack of libido to the point of distress is a serious problem for some women.

“This is a real disease,” Dr. Piliero said in an interview. “There’s an unmet medical need among premenopausal women to have a treatment.”

Boehringer says the drug reduces the brain chemical serotonin, which can blunt sexual desire, and increases dopamine and norepinephrine, which improve desire, the company said. By acting on a woman’s brain, it takes a different approach from hormonal drugs or the action of Viagra for men, which increases blood flow.

Boehringer’s application for F.D.A. approval said that its two key 24-month studies, of 1,323 premenopausal women who said they suffered distress over lack of libido, had found small but statistically significant improvements. The women lived in the United States or Canada, were mostly married, well-educated and found to have the sexual desire disorder but were otherwise healthy.

In results reported last fall at a medical conference in Europe, the drug was found to increase self-reported “sexually satisfying events” to 4.5 a month on average. The reported events, which did not have to include orgasm, compared with 3.7 a month by women taking a placebo and 2.7 by those who did not take any pills.

The F.D.A. staff report on Wednesday, though, said that Boehringer’s data had not sufficiently demonstrated a second criterion the agency had set for approving such a drug — specifically, that women also report an increased level of sexual desire. The F.D.A. required daily self-reporting by the women in the studies; Boehringer said it had provided monthly reports.

Lara Crissey, a spokeswoman for Boehringer, declined to comment on the F.D.A. staff report.

Other drug companies that have sought a drug to elevate women’s sexual desire have included Pfizer, which spent several years trying to show that its drug Viagra could work for women as well as men. When Pfizer ended that research in 2004, it said in a news release that female sexual disorders resulted “from a broad range of medical and psychological conditions.”

Procter & Gamble sought F.D.A. approval for a skin patch to raise the testosterone levels of women who had had their uterus and ovaries removed, but it was rejected in 2004 because of possible links to breast cancer and cardiovascular disease. In 2006, though, European regulators, saying the testosterone patch appeared safe at low doses, approved that drug to treat depressed sexual desire in women whose uterus and ovaries had been surgically removed.

BioSante Pharmaceuticals, a company in Illinois, is in late-stage testing of another testosterone patch product which it hopes to submit to the F.D.A. next year. And Vivus, a drug development company, is testing a testosterone-based daily abdominal spray for women which it says has proved effective in early trials. And other research is focusing on the antidepressant buproprion, better known as Wellbutrin or Zyban.

Dr. Steven E. Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and a member of the 2004 F.D.A. panel that unanimously rejected the testosterone patch, said that the depressed desire disorder was a real medical condition, especially for middle-age or older women, with both physiological and psychological causes.

“I got a lot of hate mail after that vote,” Dr. Nissen recalled. “People wrote me and said, ‘You men have your Viagra, why are you denying us this?’ I said hey, I’m just trying to do the right thing. It needs to be scientifically sound.”

Dr. Nissen said he had not studied the Boehringer drug.

Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist and professor at New York University who has researched the topic of female sexual desire for more than a decade and plans to testify to the F.D.A. panel on Friday, said Boehringer had gone too far with its publicity effort.

“Women’s sex lives are often a struggle, a disappointment, an archipelago of regret,” she said. “Is there a small group of women who could benefit from medical intervention — probably.”

But she said that if the drug were approved, she worried that “the much larger group of women without any medical reason for their sexual distress will inevitably be misinformed and misled into thinking that there is a pill that can get them the sex life they read about, the one they think everyone else is having.”

Boehringer has also sponsored medical education classes for doctors and nurses about hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

In one course, released online in May, a quiz asked doctors to diagnose the condition of a 42-year-old working mother who takes care of three children and her own sick mother, and who had no desire for sex. (Her husband is mentioned only in passing.)

The correct answer? Schedule a follow-up visit to evaluate whether she has diagnosable hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

Personal comment: I can attest to the libido enhancing effect of dopamine, which I take to reduce my milk output to prevent my breasts increasing - from all the nipple stimulation from being frequent milked - to more than a 32B cup. We have been using Boehringer Ingelheim’s Flibanserin in our escort training classes. We got it through Adolph’s German connections and have established a clinical trial protocol so it’s legal to use it for ‘desire enhancement’ with our escort trainees. We don’t use it to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), all of our escort candidates have very healthy libidos, we use it to enhance their libidos further to offset anxiety about some of the more adventuresome sexual encounters they are involved in during training and it works wonderfully well for that.

Adolph is having Abigail (Abi) his new Pool-Assistant take it so she will show a bit more enthusiasm as a submissive (she's primarily Domme and isn’t really submissive in any real sense) for her encounters with him rather than trying to dominate him. He enjoyed the encounters with Elke where he was able to subdue and dominate her, but apparently Abi has an even stronger will (she is Prussian) and he needs an edge. Otherwise, he says, he is afraid he will kill her during a sexual encounter while trying to bend her to his will. It can take a few weeks for the drug to take effect – she has been on it for three weeks and there is another week to go before meaningful effects can be seen. Patience is not one of Adolph’s virtues and his temper when with her is getting worse by the day. Abi thinks its fun and is enjoying tormenting him.