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.”

DO SOME RESEARCH

The next day, I contacted the one woman whom I knew would have something to say about sex: Viviane Tang, of Viviane’s Sex Carnival.

“Read, read, read,” she wrote me in her e-mail response. “When I was getting back into the dating game after being married, I read up. I think people assume there’s a basic level of sexual knowledge—there’s not. I was encouraged by a 60-year-old reader who told me she learned how to roll a condom by reading my site.”

Tang suggested the minds at the forefront of sex: Violet Blue, Susie Bright, Cory Silverberg, and Ducky Doolittle. As well as the blogs Sugasm, Sexoteri’sc blog news, and Pleasurists.

She’s right. Before you can get what you want, you have to understand what it is that you want. Her comment that we tend to assume there is a basic knowledge of sex is dead on—the same is true for what we desire. I didn’t know the extent of what I wanted sexually, for example, until I read The Story of O for a second time—a second time!

SEXIFY YOUR SURROUNDINGS

“Create the right environment,” a male friend told me when I asked him for sex tips. “Candles, petals, run a bath.”

“Are you serious?” I asked him. “You have no idea how many movies I’ve seen where a house catches fire from the candles during a sexy scene. I can’t think of anything less brilliant—unless you’re minding the candle, say, using it for wax play. But petals and a bath? I don’t know. To each his own, I guess.”

That’s the key thing. There is no real way of knowing what will work for you in terms of creating a sexy environment. For me, a sexy environment is a cheap motel—the seedier, the better. Extra points if it’s in a really raunchy town.

But hey, that’s just me.

“For me, there is no better place than my own bed,” my friend Lisa told me when we met for coffee that day. “With everything that I need right where I can find it. I have a four poster that doubles as a sex playground with a few ropes and a set of handcuffs.”

“Furniture,” Tang had mentioned to me, is essential. “Try the Tantra Chair.”

The Tantra Chair is a multi-purpose piece of furniture designed to fit seamlessly into any décor. Its arc is designed to enable a variety of positions while providing a support system that enables control over the depth and angle of penetration during sex. And you can use it for yoga, too!

“That is SO epically hot!” my friend Atherton told me when I showed him the Tantra Chair.

“Of course, there is something to be said, too, for the sex that happens randomly in other parts of the house not intended at all for such couplings,” I replied. “Like the kitchen counter.”

“Or even outside the house,” Atherton remarked.

AU NATUREL

“We were leaving the club when she looked at me and then toward the beach,” my friend Brad told me one afternoon on the phone. “I knew what she was thinking. The beach was deserted. They have these little swan boats you can take out around the lagoon, right, so I untied one and we got in and started making our way out.”

Before Brad and I were good friends, we were lovers. That didn’t work out at all and for a long time, we didn’t speak a word to one another. I might even describe the situation as hostile. Eventually, however, we found our way back and remembered what it was that had attracted us in the first place: how much we had in common and how easy it was to talk.

“She starts going down on me,” he went on with his story. “And next thing you know, I’ve bent her over in this swan and I’m going at it, doggy style, right there in the middle of the lagoon.”

“Oh my god,” I replied. “I’m so jealous, I could just die. That sounds positively amazing.”

“But I didn’t just call to brag,” he said after he disclosed every delectable detail. “Afterward, I’m securing the boat again and, the worst thing ever! I mean, EVER: I stepped on a goddamn sea urchin! Can you believe it?”

Moral of the story: Be adventurous in where and how you have your sex. Follow hunches and explore unchartered territory. But keep potential dangers in mind and exercise caution. Or at least keep a properly stocked first aid kit in your car.

THE OTHER PLEASURE POINTS

“Anal sex, hands down,” my friend Callie declared at a New Year’s party some weeks ago. “Pick up Tristan Taormino’s The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and give anal sex a try.”

A rudimentary, completely unscientific survey of the women I know later showed many of them had either not experimented with anal sex or had tried it once and crossed it off.

“Did you know—my yoga instructor told me—the anus has a hundred times more sensory receptors than the vagina?”

“I had no idea,” I responded, lighting a cigarette and adding with a cheeky grin. “I’ve felt it, but didn’t realize it.”

Anal sex is a tricky beast, much like the initial taming of the g-spot. The key to learning to love it is relaxing the muscles.

“I was with a man once,” my friend Lisa told me when we had our coffee recently. “I was cockwhipped. He would message me at the weirdest hours and ask me to do the weirdest things.”

“Did you do them?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Last year, I had to go to New York and he wanted to see me. When I told him I couldn’t, he asked that…”

“What?”

She picked up her phone. “Let me find it.”

I sipped my coffee.

“Thank God for technology,” she said, pushing some buttons. “OK: ‘Upon your arrival, you have one week to hang yourself using a belt. First, you are to strip naked and insert a smooth object at least one centimeter in diameter into your ass. Use a door to hold you up, with the belt around your wrists. Hang from it thus without letting your shoulders or knees give way, for an hour, suffering the contractions of your muscles as you sway, not too much or too little, for an hour. Delight in the embodiment of my pain.’”

“Oh. My. God.” I said. “Where do you find these people?”

“Jealous?” she asked, laughing.

“I’m not sure if I’m jealous or terrified or both or just totally aroused,” I confessed. “Did you do it?”

“Are you crazy?” she asked. “Of course I did! And until then, I’d never really been into anal sex. So I bought—you’re going to laugh—blush brushes. They sell them in kits in all kinds of different sizes. So that afternoon, I started with some oil and the smallest brush and slowly worked my way up to a big one.”

“One centimeter.”

“A bit bigger,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Quite a bit.”

“Overachiever.”

FOUND OBJECTS

Lisa isn’t the only one who was using objects meant for other purposes to achieve her sexual ends. When I asked my editor at Black Heart Magazine, a web publication that pairs intellect and smut, her first piece of advice was to open my mind to the sexual possibility of everything.

“The Dollar Store is a wonderland for anyone with a dirty mind!” she told me.

“I didn’t realize the Dollar Store sold sex toys,” I commented. I’ve never been to one, I realized. What am I missing?

“Dollar Stores tend not to have sex toys, per se,” she explained, a little amazed I didn’t get it. “But dirty minds can definitely find paddles, rope, chains, nipple clamps to re-purpose.”

Interesting!

“What is the strangest non-sexual object you have turned into a toy?” I asked my friend Atherton immediately via IM.

“A 9mm Glock.”

I almost spit out my coffee. “Are you serious?”

“It was with Blaine, after a day at the range with my father and his,” he recounted. “They were down in my father’s study, drinking. Blaine disengaged the cartridge of one of our Glocks and fucked me with it.”

“I can’t think of anything that tops that,” I admitted. “Am I boring? I’ve had a variation of the Jackrabbit since I was a teenager. Maybe I’m just pampered and lazy.”

“YOU?” he asked, aghast. “YOU BORING? Dude, you’ve had your tits beat up. That’s at least on a par with fucking a Glock.”

MAP YOUR WANTS

While doing research for an article about oversharing sex, I happened upon the map of human sexuality by Franklin Veaux, a depiction of a landmass featuring a variety of human desires, from the common, to the downright freaky, as cities.

Looking over it, I wondered where I “lived” and “frequented” on that bizarre continent, so I called up Atherton and together, we spent the entire morning coloring in our maps. We tweeted so much about it, that many of our followers on Twitter asked for a blank copy for them to fill out themselves.

That whole day was spent discussing, quite openly, the things we desired in sex. It occurred to me to have my husband fill one out as well.

I sat him down that night and we went through the list. We kept going down the list. Dogging, tickling, speaking foreign languages, showering together, exercising, dancing, ass play, commercial sex, hentai, sex machines, prodommes, erotic asphyxiation, peep shows, multiple penetration, strippers, bukkake, talking dirty, anonymous hook-ups…

I looked at the finished product. We lived on different planets.

“Is it bad?” he asked.

“Kind of.” I showed him.

You can’t very well teach someone to love to beat you if that’s just not what they’re into. But as Viviane Tang told me, sex isn’t something we know all about at birth. It’s possible that some of the things we end up loving are things we never knew existed until we bumped into someone who liked them and helped us open our minds enough to give them a shot.

Graphing out what you and your partner want can be a bonding experience, as well as an interesting way of learning their inner workings, and maybe sparking some interest in terms of trying out new things neither of you had previously considered.

DON’T HAVE SEX

Lisa still can’t get enough of Mr. Smith, a guy she hooked up with randomly and with whom she spent a night talking dirty and making out.

“We didn’t have sex,” she recounted for the 18,000th time. “We just kissed. Like in high school. Remember that? Just kissing? I used to think women who talked about the perfect kiss were so boring. But no, there is a power in kissing. Something impossible to quantify. It can be one of the most erotic things.”

Victoria Zdrok, the resident love and sex columnist at Penthouse Magazine agrees.

“Kissing has numerous benefits,” she writes in 40 Steps to Great Sex, a recent piece at Penthouse. “From increasing saliva production, which improves your oral health, to turning on you and your partner.”

“I would never imagine that your contribution to my sex tips article would be to not have sex,” I said to Lisa.

“It’s like that game—did you ever play it? Where you held your hand over a lover’s naked body and see how long you could stand it without touching them?”

“Oh, yes!” I exclaimed. “God, I love that.”

“There is something in the denial of immediate satisfaction. They’re there and they want you, but you’re not going to indulge, not yet. It’s a part of the dance.”

“God, I wish we had time for that kind of stuff nowadays,” I said sadly.

PRIORITIZE

“Make sex a priority,” Zdrok writes in her 40 Steps to Great Sex. “Set a sex date, if necessary, because in our crazy-busy schedules, sex often gets put on a back burner.”

She’s right.

“Often we get so consumed with life, we leave sex out,” Tess told me over drinks the night we spent talking at the Standard. “We think we can just make that call at 3AM and get our fill, but it doesn’t work that way. Most of the time we have had a grueling workday and we know we’re going right back into the office the next morning. What kind of sex can you have like that?”

“My husband calls it ‘the lazy fuck,’” Sabrina said.

“Like in the Ars Amatoria?” I asked. “On the side, barely moving?”

“That’s in Ars Amatoria?” she laughed. “Damn you Ovid! I can’t stand the lazy fuck. I think it’s an assault on everything that is sensuality. It has to be the most boring, soul-crushing type of encounter.”

“It has its place,” I said, smiling to myself.

“Maybe if you’re at your in-laws for a family reunion, sharing a room with your sister-in-law and her husband and don’t want anyone to notice!” Sabrina yelled. “No! I hate the lazy fuck. I hate hate hate it! My husband wants to do nothing else. ‘I’m tired,’ he says. I’m like, ‘what? Do I need to schedule sex now?’ It’s annoying!”

“Maybe we do,” I said. “Maybe we need to schedule sex.”

“Ugh,” Tess sighed. “Who wants to schedule sex? Shouldn’t it just happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “But until we learn to give it the importance it deserves in the busy schedule of our lives, maybe we do need get in the habit of penciling it in and keeping our appointment.”

Sabrina took out a lip liner from her purse and pulled out her planner.

“SEX,” she wrote in giant letters across the lunch slot of the next day.

“There, see?” Sabrina asked. “I just made a commitment to have a nooner tomorrow.”

“The timeless question,” Tess said, laighing. “Food or sex?”

“Honey, this is the United States of America,” Sabrina said, her English accent stronger than usual. “We get to have both food and sex!”

LIVE IT, DON’T LIVE THROUGH IT

“Think of the last time food transported you,” Anthony Bourdain writes in his 2001 novel A Cook’s Tour. “Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips… steak frites when you were in Paris as a teenager with a Eurorail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of rumsteck (rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days… a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off… your grandmother’s lasagne… a first sip of stolen ice cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies… left over pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge… steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore… rice pudding from the Fort Dee Diner… bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun… dirty water hot dogs… a few beads of caviar licked off a nipple…”

A few beads of caviar licked off a nipple. What a simple, gorgeous celebration of touch and taste. The idea stopped me cold the first time I read it.

We stand at the edge of our senses, waiting for the sets of data to come in: hot or cold? Pleasure or pain? Nice or mean? Red or green? Too spicy? Too loud? Too big? Too slow! Hungry! Tired! When was the last time we stopped and touched something and focused on the brush against our fingertips? When was the last time we turned off the constant background noise of our iPods and pressed down on a piano key to hear the clarity of a single note? When was the last time we paused briefly before putting that snack in our mouths and committed ourselves to savoring the marriage of flavors in a bite?

When was the last time you had sex for the sake of your senses? No, think about this. I am not talking about orgasm. I am not even talking about pleasure in and of itself. I am talking about using every given sense receptor, focusing your energy on it and really, truly experiencing what that sense tells you, not just whether it feels good or not, harder, baby, harder, deeper, deeper, faster, faster, oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

No.

I mean: when was the time you lived your sensory data?

You don’t need to awaken your senses. They were never sleeping. You just have to pay attention. The next time you eat, let your taste buds overwhelm you, let your mouth feel the texture of what’s inside it. The next time you hear a song, let the notes carry you. The next time you kiss, let your mouth become your hands. The next time you have sex, let yourself become the skin throbbing inside you or wrapping around you.

Open up. Living through things isn’t the same as living those things.

Wow - I’ve logged into my facebook, twitter(s) -  side note: yeap, I got two, I am telling you, you gotta squat on the name properties. They will be valuable in the next year - MySpace and finally my blog. I’ve been quiet for a few month now. I’ve noticed that my page rank went up and my Alexa when up too. Guess you lose the link love when you stop updating.

Where have I been? That is the question I’ve been answering all day. Well, I have been busy. I take my own advice. I take breaks when I get burnt out or just get busy. So my humblest apologies to those that are upset or feel put off - but I am sure you understand that “space” you need when you just need to breathe.

So what you up to? What am I up to. Well, I am going to start writing again. I have some interesting things to say and will do my best to write weekly or at least every 10 days. If anyone is floating around AVN, you MIGHT see me.

So give me a few, and I get back to the lucious blogging, and only blogging. But know now, it’s gonna change. I’ve been writing for the great In My Bed Magazine and a few others and that content is coming. You will get the marketing morsels, but in limited quantity. But I promise what you get will be good.

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.