QI’m a woman who wants to be spanked. But I’m overweight and self-conscious. Men who like to spank women like to spank petite women. Sometimes I’ll search kinky personal sites or other online forums and find someone who might want to spank me. But I get scared and I back out. Most recently, I’ve been talking to a trucker who stops at rest stops along his routes around the country and meets with/spanks women. He is patient and encouraging, and has references, and has directed me to boards with all this safety information, and insisted on getting to know each other via e-mail and phone conversations before we actually meet. This makes me trust him and feel better when I think about going to meet him.

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AI think meeting strange men in rest stops is a bad idea generally, SWAT, and meeting strange men in rest stops for a beating seems like a particularly bad idea. There are probably lots of decent and kind truckers out there, some of them kinky, and they have just as much right to pursue their sexual interests as anyone else. (I’m sure I’ll be hearing from them right after this column appears.) But you are not the right person for a kinky rest-stop hookup with a near-stranger.

This has nothing to do with your size, SWAT, and everything to do with your self-esteem issues and your isolation. I’m not saying this particular trucker is a crazed serial killer or an abuser. But serial killers and abusers seek out women who are isolated and have self-esteem issues, vulnerable women they can manipulate and exploit. Until you can approach someone with some confidence and with at least one confidant, you shouldn’t be making dates to see anyone.

If you love him, ODOR, be straight with him: if he wants to keep you in his life, he needs to loosen up, improve his diet, and see a doc and a dermatologist about the crotch stank.

ASure, NUT. There’s Tinsel, my friend Hank Stuever’s brilliant and hilarious new book about America’s Christmas present; or Every Man Dies Alone, a chilling 1947 novel by Hans Fallada about life under the Nazis (Fallada was a German novelist who barely survived the war and didn’t live to see his masterwork published). The bondage enthusiasts on your list will love the hemp rope for sale at twistedmonk.com; and for e-stim fans the ET302R, available at sextek.com, would make a perfect stocking stuffer.