It’s good to know that the Finns are so healthy that University Hospital has nothing more important to do than speculate on the menstrual irregularities of plastic dolls. - ”Barbie“
By December, I was finally beginning to hit my stride. Not only had I mostly settled into a routine that made writing and posting easier, I had also found the tone I wanted: while several of the columns for October and many of those for November read like my current work, I would say most of those for December do. Indeed, I sometimes refer back to some of these and say to myself, “Wow, is this one really that old?” There are a few relics which mark this as an early month, such as the gossipy narrative style of the two-part “Bits and Pieces” (an experimental type I used only a few more times after that); however, I am mostly pretty happy with the way most of these came out. That’s more than some others could say, however; three of these columns (“Courtesan Denial”, “For the Record” and “Criticism and Response”) are either partly or wholly responses to harsh criticisms of earlier columns, two by people who I am told still bad-mouth me at every available opportunity.
Even at this early stage, I could have done my news columns on a weekly basis rather than a monthly one, though it would be another year before I finally decided to do that; “December Updates” was supplemented not only by the aforementioned “Bits and Pieces”, but also by “Ho, Ho, Ho!” Three other columns (“O, Canada!”, “Liar, Liar” and “It’s a Start”) were based on news items, and many others were of the news/essay hybrid type which are so common on the blog nowadays: “Not So Different” (on sugar babies), “Ban the Super Bowl!” (comparing the “gypsy whores” myth to the old “abuse bowl” one), “Lack of Evidence” (the truly ridiculous things cops claim constitute “evidence of prostitution”), “The Swedish Pimpocracy” (Sweden, rape and Julian Assange),
and the two-part “The Slave-Whore Fantasy” (containing my first mention of Nicholas Kristof) all fall into this category. There were two columns which debunked prohibitionist lies: “Mecca” for the notion that decriminalization results in an increase in the number of whores, and “Bad Jobs” for the one that sex work is the worst, most degrading of jobs. The “Q & A” column was a regular feature by this point, the harlotography was “Madame de Pompadour”, and the fictional interlude was “Christmas Belle”.
The latter was only one of many holiday-related columns. Of course there were “Yule”, “Christmas Eve”, “Christmas”, “Boxing Day” and “New Year’s Eve” (which contains the amusing idea that I would start taking a couple of days off a week). But in addition to those, I wrote about the “Yuletide” season in general, told y’all what “Barbie” and “Saint Nicholas” have to do with whores, honored the old Roman festival of Larentalia with a discussion of “Whore Goddesses”, and explained why “The Red Umbrella” has become the symbol for sex worker rights in my very first column for December 17th. 
