A reader asked:

I know you have to do a lot of looking to find a sex worker who is conformable having anal sex with a client. Provided you use condoms the health risk is similar to regular intercourse so I wonder why so few sex workers are convertible providing that service. Is it physical comfort, personal likes/dislikes, or perhaps discomfort with the level of physical intimacy involved? What do you think?

I'm sure different working girls have different reasons for not offering anal sex as part of their repetoire. I don't because I very rarely have anal sex, ever, so it's one of those things for me that I can't just spontaneously do without a lot of, er, advance preparation. So for me it has nothing to do with the whole 'taboo' aspect of it, it's because it would be very physically uncomfortable for me to do it.
I hesitate to make any sweeping generalizations about why it's offered so rarely, because I am only sure of why it's not something that's on my menu.

On another note, I love HBO on Demand. I just finished watching one of their Late Night Specials called "Cathouse." It's a documentary about the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a brothel in Nevada. I found it fascinating. Most of the segments had to do with negotiating with the clients. How it worked is that the men would enter the place, and all the girls would come and line up and the man would choose one, and they'd go off to a private bedroom together to negotiate. The lady would sit the guy on the bed and basically hang all over him while she told him how much a 'party' would cost--and each negotiation was different. The ranges were from $500 for a porn star to masturbate for two brothers (they balked at the $3,000 she originally mentioned for a threesome including actual sex), to $1000 a mother paid to get her son laid for the first time, to $15,000 a man paid to spend time with 3 of the ladies at once. Once the negotiation was done, the madam would come in to collect the funds and then she'd leave and apparently the fun would begin. All of the women appeared to be absolutely delighted to work there. It certainly paints a much different picture than the other HBO hooker specials I've seen on streetwalkers.