Guest Post By AV Flox via BlogHER:

“Did you know that 71 percent of guys would rather have great sex occasionally than not-so-hot sex all the time?” Simone asked me, paging through the February issue of Cosmopolitan.

“Let me see that,” I said, reaching out and scanning the cover of the magazine. “I’m writing an article about how to improve our sex lives.”

Simone turned a page, “well, if anyone can write that, it’s you.”

“Actually…” I started, but I trailed off. The truth is that I need a guide more than anyone.

“I have a theory that the longer we’re exposed to a stimulus, the higher the tolerance, and the less able said stimulus is to engender the effect it once did,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

Simone looked at me for a moment, then smiled, “what?”

In preparation for this piece I did a little crowdsourcing on Twitter, asking over the course of several weeks what people thought was an essential component to good sex. The answer, seven times out of ten was: intimacy.

“Really?” I asked myself over and over as the direct messages and e-mails poured in. It just didn’t jive.

“When I think about dynamite sex, I don’t think about intimacy,” I told my friend Sugar during one of our late night discussions on the phone. “Am I stunted? Do you think about it?”

“Hell no,” she replied. “I just want to be thrown against a wall and devoured.”

BE DESIRED

Sugar and I are in line with Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and who has been studying sexology since the 1990s. Meana also disagrees intimacy is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

In a piece on the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, Meana emphasizes the role of being desired and the inherent narcissism in women’s sexuality, which she has gleaned from her laboratory and qualitative research, as well as her clinical work. Desire, she concludes, has “little to do with building better relationships,” or with fostering communication between partners.

“Female desire is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s,” Meana told Bergner. “Really, women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic.”

She is basically saying that women’s desire is dominated by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. That’s not to say women don’t want closeness and longevity—they do. But according to Meana, to imagine that these things are the catalysts of desire is incorrect.

“It’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire,” Meana said. For women, “being desired is the orgasm.”

“How do you make yourself desired?” I asked my friends the following night over drinks at The Standard Downtown.

“Can I tell you?” my friend Tess asked, leaning in. “I like to dress up like a hooker and walk by construction sites. Instant desire.”

“Ew!” Sabrina exclaimed, laughing. “Girl, you’re a freak.”

“What? You leave your windows open when you change in case your hot neighbor is home!”

“Mmm,” Sabrina said. “He’s so hot.”

“Does he watch you?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I like to dress myself in the sluttiest lingerie when no one is home,” I confessed. “There’s stuff I have that my husband has never even seen—not because he wouldn’t like it, but because it’s for me. I wear these things while I work. I love taking a client’s call in nothing but garters, a hat and stilettos.”

“Does desire require an audience?” Sabrina mused.

“You can be your own audience,” Tess said. “And if not, there’s always the internet.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Adult Marketing Takes To the Airwaves of BlogTalk Radio

Well, it’s been a bit of time since I have written kiddies; but we all know how that goes. Over the next few weeks, you are going to see the Adult Marketing blog get meatier and the marketing ideas flow. I encourage you to try the ideas and come back and dialogue with me about the tactics and strategies. To kick off the new focus, I will be dialoging with Gracie Passette on Interactive Adult Marketing Strategy on XXBN radio. I am all excited, Gracie (aka The Marketing Whore) and I have spent many hours on the phone the past few weeks discussing adult marketing strategy and why certain things like affiliate programs, pay sites, et al. no longer work as they used, what are some of the new solutions/alternatives for adult marketing and how social media is/isn’t relevant to adult content today. The show is gonna be good and chalked full of advice. So listen in! Don’t worry, there will 12 minutes dedicated to Sarah Palin too.

About XXBN

XXBN is a collection of progressive, subversive, sex positive, indie talk shows produced by sex workers, past and present.

Discussing topics relating to politics, culture, & society; sex work; sexuality; human, civil, & labor rights; feminist & gender issues; and media issues.

Along with interviews with sex workers & experts in scholarly pursuit of issues regarding human sexuality and the societies humans live in, XXBN provides interviews and interactions with authors, activists, artists, & entertainers in music, film/TV.

One of the most debated topics among sex workers is “Can you be a sex worker and have multiple identities? Is it ethical and right?”

My answer isn’t yes or no; I believe that having multiple identities is a sex worker’s personal choice. What’s right for one woman, is wrong for another. The better question to ask is “Why would a sex worker have/want multiple identities?” And furthermore, I think it’s important to ask, “How does a sex worker prevent them from conflicting with one another?”

As any well designed escort website, having multiple identities has to be a thought out and there has to be a reason to having more than one persona.

What are the Reasons Why Women Have Multiple Personas?

Usually, a woman who offers more than one service find that her services offered don’t mix well together went put on one website. If a she is a sensual massage provider, and she wants to offer escort services, she may have decided to create a new person with an entirely different website was the best way to differentiate massage and companion services. Why would this even be necessary? Most likely, she doesn’t want her massage clientèle to think that they could see her for companionship at her sensual services rates.

Another reason could be that she has personal issues with escorting and feels that in order to make the work worthwhile, she wants to command a much higher rate with multiple hour minimums. Thus, her regular incall sensual services aren’t compatible with her companion services, and multiple identities helps maintain the distinction between her businesses.

So then, if a provider has two different personas and websites, does she ever cross the personas?

The majority of women don’t mix their services. There are a few that choose to reveal their other identity with established, long-term clients. But once a woman begins to blur the lines between her personas with her clients, she will encounter boundary issues.

Scenarios When Multiple Personas Are Okay

• Multiple Hour Escort & Dominatrix
• Multiple Hour Escort & Sensual Services Provider
• Adult Entertainer (Pornstar/Actress) & Escort Persona

Scenarios Where Multiple Personas Aren’t Okay

• Several Escort personalities with various price ranges ($250, $400, $1000)
• Several Sensual personas
• Several Domme persona
• Any combination of personas that cause drama and fight with one another on forums
• When a woman is well-known her area and is easily identifiable.

How Does A Sex Worker Keep Personas Separate?

Well, that it’s in the marketing. If a woman offers sensual services in her home area, then she may want to focus her escort persona on seeing out of town and non-hobbyist men. The escort person will not and should not post/ advertise on message boards. She has to pay for premium advertising on a websites such as EROS or Cityvibe. Every website she has should have a completely different design, photos and marketing strategy. Another option is that her escort persona travels and she isn’t available as an escort in her local area.

If a woman offers BDSM/Fetish services and also has an escort persona, those two are also easy to distinguish because the advertising and marketing outlets are completely different.

How Does A Sex Worker Maintain Anonymity?

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the website of any persona should follow the model of any well-marketed, professionally designed escort website. It should have clean design, easy navigation, simple copy and have the proper search engine optimization. Why? Because it’s the first step in maintaining anonymity between personas!

• The design of website and tone of the writing should not match a woman’s main persona, it’s the first thing people look for when identifying/outing someone.
• A woman will also need different photos, even having them taken with different photographers is not out of the norm. Locations and lighting go a long way. Different photographs are another way to distinguish two personalities; each persona has their own lingerie and outfits. If a woman can pull off fake hair and wigs, that works amazingly well. If proper compartmentalization, discovery is minimal. It’s all in the marketing and presentation.
• A woman should have separate email addresses and contact information for each persona. It’s a pain in the butt cheese, but if a woman is going to go to all the work to have multiple sites, it’s one more step she has to incorporate into her business. It would be an insult to be outed by someone who was just able to Google a phone number.

How Are Women with Multiple Identities Outed?

The chances of this happening is very low if a woman keeps the identities compartmentalized well. But it’s not impossible. When a woman is outed, she usually is responsible for it. A woman fighting with her other persona in order to generate business on a board will find this strategy will only blow up in her face. Board owners & members pay attention to drama and guess what, they also log IP address and access points. The second most common way for a woman to be outed is by a hardcore hobbyists, these are not regular men who seek the services of sex workers, they live in the “hobby world” and have more reviews than most women on the board. In their free time, they crawl boards and look for Eros ad numbers/names. They then post the information.

What Does A Sex Worker Do When Multiple Identities Are Discovered?

When this happens and if it’s true, I believe a woman should OWN IT. She can say, “Yes, it is me, but you know what you see WHY I have two separate identities, there is no service overlap”. And therefore, no breach of “ethics”. If the proof isn’t conclusive, then a woman may choose to deny it. It only becomes a big deal if the provider makes it a big deal.

Is there anything else to consider in having multiple identities?

Yes, please keep in mind, that the more personas a woman has, the more time, effort and money she will have to invest in each. So plan accordingly. If it takes 16 hours ever three months to update ads, refresh website copy and add new photos, that time will double with each personality. At this point, some women have their webmasters help them maintain their sites by managing banner exchanges, reciprocal links, photo changes and even ghost writing blog entries. In an industry where time is money, it’s not a bad idea.

So the site has been up for a week. I have been working on it, as you can see from all the additions and nifty things. I had to stop for just a moment today and let it all sink in. Delving into the world of Sex Writing, Sex Blogging and Adult Marketing is not a light task.

Actually, it’s really fucking overwhelming.

There are absolutely fabulous writers and business women out there and I am so fortunate to have talked to some of them this week. So to all of you - THANK YOU for the links, blogroll, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook adds (sorry, I am drawing the line at Tumblr) and the encouragement, advice and referrals; I am looking forward to connecting with you more in cyberspace. I am excited to bring my insight and opinions in to the arena with such formidable women and men.