Reviews! Fan Mail! Gifts! My clients and readers are awesome!

Well, this past week has been pretty surprising. Let’s review, shall we?

First off, I got an email from a woman whose partner had sent her the link to my blog. The subject line reads: “Add me to the fan club!” (I ain’t too proud to admit that flattery will get you everywhere.) Turns out she’s something of a kindred spirit–not only does she have the same fond memories of being absolutely perplexed by the advice in Cosmopolitan Magazine when she was a teen, but she also shares my passion for Bellocq’s photographs of the Storyville prostitutes.

And who doesn’t love positive feedback?

Speaking of which, I got another type of positive feedback this week, this time in the form of a very flattering review on TER (The Erotic Review) from a client who was an absolute pleasure to meet with.

And then, I realized that I hadn’t even noticed a positive review I received on ECCIE a few weeks back.

And! A client bought me a gift off of my Amazon Wishlist! He got me a year’s subscription to The New Yorker!! It was perfect timing, too, because my subscription was just about to run out. It’s my favorite magazine, and I don’t know how I’d ever convince myself to work out if I didn’t have it to read at the gym. Anyway, he scheduled an appointment and I met with him, and it turns out he’s just as awesome as his taste in gifts :)

Full Disclosure: My Thoughts on Reviews

I don’t have many reviews at all, but I like it that way. While I do allow reviews (I address this briefly on my FAQ page), I don’t want a ton of explicit descriptions of my time with clients floating around the internet. For one thing, I feel like it’s disrespectful to me, and it cheapens our time together (it’s called “intimacy” for a reason, lol). Why should a bunch of men I’ve never met get to be titillated by the time I spent with you, that you paid for? Also–and this is purely from the standpoint of a writer–I believe that, ultimately, these review sites are more predatory than helpful. What it really amounts to is that clients are basically writing porn for the sites, for free, and then the sites turn around and charge other clients to read it. So you’re supplying the content for a site that is selling it, and you don’t even get a share of the profit. Yeah yeah yeah, I understand that everyone profits by getting access to the reviews, but still. If they were really there only for review purposes, they wouldn’t demand in-depth, detailed, explicit play-by-play descriptions of dates. They’d simply require a yes/no recommendation and a short explanation, and leave it up to the reviewer to decide how much to include. That being said, I stand by what I say on my FAQ page: if you’d like to write a brief, tasteful review of our time together, please feel free ;)