I Prefer Muscovy Myself

But then I have always had champagne tastes on a tap water budget. Compared with the story in the WaPo (Howell hasn't whined and selected "facts" to represent her supposedly impartial ombudsman position) about the increase of male impotence on college campuses, young Chinese women seem to be serviced a little better by the opposite sex.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Boys flocking to be 'ducks' for China's bored housewives: "Xiao Yu, a prostitute in his twenties who sports a tight red T-shirt with aviators atop spiked hair, is agitated: 'I really can't talk. This is working time.' Xu Wen, his pimp, runs a tight ship, roaming the club, checking on his boys, ensuring that the women in the private rooms at the back are happy.

'Women pay,' he says, 'to buy a duck for a few hours of chatting, drinking and flirting. If they then want to rent a hotel room for the night, the price rises.' All the yazi in the nightclub earn as much as seven times the city's average wage.

'Many ducks who work here have problems at home; their parents might be divorced or they're poor,' says Xu. Many come from old Manchuria, where the men are tall but unemployment is high. 'I wouldn't say working as a duck is fun,' Xiao Yu says. 'I do it to pay my way through university. I'm a student at the Central Academy of Drama.'

Creating a boom in demand are tourists - moneyed thirty- or forty-somethings from Hong Kong or Taiwan who use mainland gigolos to spice up their holidays. 'When they [ducks] get to have sex with a beautiful girl, they are excited,' says Xu. 'But often it's old and unattractive women, which they find pretty disgusting.' Xiao Yu is more sanguine: 'It's not that bad. It's just a job.'

Once the preserve of bored housewives, Beijing's male prostitutes are increasingly sought after by younger women. Jenny, a 26-year-old, says she and her friends visit karaoke bars where they pay to drink, sing and play dice with attentive young men. She says: 'My friends have white-collar jobs, except for one who's a housewife. She's bored of sex with her husband, so she spends his money sleeping with yazi. It's very normal. It's not cheating, because it has nothing to do with love; I can easily separate sex and love. I just do it for the sex.'"

I wonder how the Heidi Fleiss brothel is coming? Guess I'll have to do something different for the upcoming big 50.

Less than two weeks to go, what shall I do? That doesn't cost me any money and I can be waited on hand and foot, because that is my fantasy.

Tags: impotence, duck, Beijing, Heidi Fleiss, brothels