In Book 1 I outline several methods of dealing with your period while working. I hadn’t tried them all when I wrote that section. Since then, I have. I’ve been off birth control pills for the past year and my periods have resumed their normal, very-heavy tendencies. Besides not working on my heavy days, I’ve tried some different methods. I have to. As always, being on my period guarantees lots of appointment-requests. I still haven’t figured out why that happens.

Obviously this post is for those who aren’t taking birth control that completely stops menstruation.

Instead Cups

I still love my Instead Cups. The offer the best options. For light days, they’re perfect on their own. On heavy days I still put something absorbent inside the cup before inserting them. A low-to-medium absorbency tampon can work, or a small, natural sea sponge. It’s very important to remember you’re using backup and make sure you remove it when you remove the cup. Leaving it inside will cause an infection.

If you’re having sex with someone well-endowed, they could cause the cup to leak, with or without the absorbent materials inside. Not much you can do about that. Know your body, know your clients and try to work around your period if you and/or your clients really don’t want leakage. I discuss using the cups a bit more in Book 1.

Natural Sea Sponges

The have been used as tampons for a very long time. You can buy pre-sized ones online. Or you can try to find reasonably-sized and priced sponges in a store, usually a “healthy” or “green” store or the makeup section of a many other stores. Depending on where you live, it might just be easier to purchase them online.

These are very good instructions for cleaning your sponge. After washing my hands, I rinsed the sea sponge with very warm water, cleaned with dish soap, rinsed and rinsed, soaked it overnight in pure white vinegar, rinsed some more and then microwaved it on a clean plate for 3-4 minutes. It needed to be almost bone-dry but not burning!

Advice from experience: do not microwave dry sponges. They will burn up, turn black and stink very badly. I killed my favorite sponge this way.

If you aren’t going to use your sea sponge right away, put in in a clean sealed container. A plastic baggie or glass jar works. When you’re ready to use it, wash your hands, rinse the sponge thoroughly and microwave on a clean plate again. That first cleaning to make sure you’re killing any leftover bacteria from the sea. This cleaning might seem obsessive to you, but I don’t think anything you put inside your body can be too clean.

Even if you plan on using it with an Instead Cup, it’s a good idea to sew a thread or piece of plastic dental tape (a type of floss) through the middle of it while it’s still dry. Make sure your needle is sterilized with alcohol and just make a simple loop. It’s good if it’s a big loop. Knot the end well and cut any excess. Now you have something your fingers can grab if it goes a bit beyond your reach.

To use, first rinse it under warm/body temperature tap water until it swells and is completely soft again. Squeeze out the excess water. It should still be soft and fluffy. Fold it up so it resembles a tampon, maybe put some KY Jelly on the end to make it easier, and gently push it in. It’s like putting in a tampon with your fingers, but I find sea sponges to be much softer and gentler.

The sea sponge is rather absorbent, but if you have sex with just a sea sponge, expect it to get shoved quite far back in your vaginal canal. This makes retrieving it hard to do by yourself because your hand will be bent at a bad angle. If you can find your loop of string and get it wrapped around your finger, you can push down on it and pull out. More effort than a tampon requires but the same concept. Or do what a friend of mine does — “squat and grunt.” It really does work.

I find that sea sponges can get very slippery with blood and are often hard to grasp with your fingers canted at that angle. A trusted friend/partner who doesn’t mind fishing it out for you can make life easier.

Once removed, cut your thread out and throw the thread away because it will harbor bacteria. Rinse the sponge well under cold, cold water until it’s clean. Vinegar-soak, then microwave again, putting it back in its container until next time. If you need to reuse immediately, I highly recommend going through the whole microwave/threading process again. Cold water alone will not kill any germs, nor do you want to give yourself Toxic Shock Syndrome.

Soft Tampons

I’ve been wanting to try these for years. Europe has a couple of brands. I’m not sure why the US doesn’t carry any. Soft tampons are basically an artificial sponge, a lot like the contraceptive sponge from several years ago. Some of these sponges have a built-in loop to grab, others have a built-in finger-hole.

They’re simliar to sea sponges, minus all the maintenance. I recently bought and used my first soft tampons and love them.

The Beppy Wet tampon comes pre-moistened with sterile saline solution (the liquid that contact lens wearers store their lenses in). If you buy dry sponges you have to get them wet with water. I think it’s easier to just buy the wet ones. They’re a little rough and not as soft as a sea sponge but they still glide in easier than a tampon. They’re quite large – you fold them up, add a dab of KY Jelly to the end and push in. Done.

Because of their slightly rough surface, they’re easier for your fingers to grab when you’re ready to remove. The finger-hole helps a lot too. They don’t become as slippery as sea sponges either. Because of their size and springiness, it’s hard for them to get stuck so far in you that you can’t feel them and wiggle them down with your fingers. The only downside to their texture is that squatting and grunting doesn’t work very well because they’re not as slippery as sea sponges – they grip your vaginal walls better.

They don’t absorb blood so much as block your cervix and prevent blood from coming out. Flat, round, latex makeup sponges have the same effect. So when you remove a soft tampon, expect some amount of mess. Not as much as an Instead Cup, but more than an absorbent sea sponge.

Toss in the garbage and do whatever else you need to do.

FYI, they aren’t “green.”

Decisions

It’s your body and you know how it works best. I can’t make any choices for you, nor do I want to. Please experiment safely. During your period your cervix is open and bacteria can easily enter your uterus (which is a sterile environment), potentially causing a life-threatening infection. Don’t be casual about what you do to your body.

If you discover a new method that works well, tell me! Post it on your blog and I’ll add a link here. Women always want to know how to have sex on their periods, not just escorts.

The article discussed condom usage and herpes (which condoms don’t always protect against). It did not discuss what the writer defined as an STD. For example, many health-care professionals consider bacterial vaginosis to be an STD because only sexually active women get it. However, it’s not a strictly a disease but an imbalance in your vagina brought on by sexual activity.

The article’s statistic is alarming. I looked online to try and find confirmation of it and could not, yet the various articles I did find were not much more encouraging. In general, it seems that if you indulge in sexually-risky activity, your chances of contracting an STD are better than your chances of winning a hand in a Vegas casino.

The best way not to become a statistic is to reduce your risks as much as possible – strict condom usage, no intravenous-drug use, minimal number of sexual partners, no other body-fluid swapping. If you decide to go without condoms for all sexual activities, your likely odds are stated above. Always using condoms for sexual activity lowers your risks significantly. (This article did not specify if regular condom usage would alter the reported statistic, but I’m guessing it would.)

I’m not trying to gloom and doom you. Not at all. Sex is risky. Until it isn’t, the best way to reduce risk is by proper and consistent condom usage. It’s a simple concept that easily improves everyone’s overall quality of life and reduces worry.

There are many women who’ve worked in the adult industry and have never had an STD. Condoms work.

*I prefer the term infection because not everything that is sexually-transmitted is strictly a disease, but this article used the term “disease.”

The most direct way of becoming infected with HPV is through unprotected sex; in this case, unprotected oral sex is the problem. A Time article summarizes the findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The men and women study participants¹ completed a survey about their sexual history and those with six or more oral sex partners were 32 times more likely to have throat cancer. The other two top risk factors, smoking and alcohol, don’t increase the risk factor by more than three.

The risk of unprotected oral sex is increasing. The number of people in their 30s and 40s with throat cancer has noticeably risen over the past decade, according to a doctor interviewed in the Time article.

This is brand-new research and needs further study, but I have little doubt that the original findings are correct. Although a lot of reaction is focusing on HPV’s effect on men, women are at as much risk as men. Infection is infection and unprotected oral sex is similarly risky whether a man or woman is giving it.

Although there is speculation that the new HPV vaccine could prevent throat cancer (which kills about 3,000 people a year), it has not been tested. Although the HPV vaccine and the throat cancer study patients share one strain of HPV, this is no guarantee. Further study must be done.

Of course, one very reliable way of preventing HPV infection is the use of condoms for oral, vaginal and anal sex. Researchers in this study quickly concluded that infrequent condom use was one of the sexual risk factors.

Further Reading

You can Google to your heart’s content.
Cancer Consultants
247Gay.com
NYPost

¹ 100 with throat cancer, 200 without

It is safely being used in Europe and in clinical trials is as safe as regular birth control pills. But its FDA approval has been postponed, although the company is positive it will get approved within the next year.

Read more in-depth info about the pill. And here’s an older, but more user-friendly article about the pill’s FDA trials.

If you want to suspend your periods, for whatever reason, talk to your gynecologist. According to Allure October 2006 (p. 208), The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reports that 53% of female ob-gyns use birth control pills to skip their own periods.

For more information about skipping periods, you can visit noperiod.com and thewelltimedperiod blog.

My version of the game is simple and an excellent mental exercise. If you think safer sex guidelines are too inhibiting, try this:

Mentally picture all of your clients and the escorts they’ve seen in a room with you. A random person puts a piece of gum in their mouth, chews it for a few seconds, then hands it the next person. Do you think your clients would be eager to share that piece of gum with each other? After it’s been around the room, would you put it in your mouth and chew it?

If this grosses you out, then safer sex is for you. I cover a lot of guidelines in Book 1: The Foundation and have more references listed in the Resources.

If this doesn’t bother you; recognize that this exercise, when done in a classroom, scared school administrators so badly they wanted to test the participating teenagers for various STDs, mono and other diseases. Just from a piece of gum. It wasn’t like the kids were asked to give uncovered blowjobs, swallow, or have unprotected sex.