Okay, so most of you know my background. Briefly, I started out as a shy consumer and now look at me! In 1993, I flew in the face of convention, leaving my high ranking position at Harvard University to sell rubber dicks to girls. I opened Grand Opening! in stodgy Boston and changed the face of sexuality retail in New England. We all have our own stories and I bet lots of you are thinking about how you wound up where you are now.

Now how and why, exactly, did we all wind up in this crazy business?  I always like entertaining the person sitting next to me on the plane when they ask “What do you do for work?” I always say “You’ll never guess” and, because of my Martha Stewart-ish looks, they want to start with the freakiest job they can think of and they usually say “You’re in the sex business.” When I respond in the affirmative, their jaw usually drops in the bag o’ peanuts and respond with “But you look so NORMAL!”

But that’s why it works so well.  During my wacky time in this biz, I’ve come out with the most absurd yet factual information about sex and sex toys, calm people down when they say “I can’t believe somebody would USE that!”, describe uses of commercially available sex toys to medical professionals (who often seem like they’ve never had sex themselves – I mean, if you need to go to a sex therapist, at least go to one who looks like they’re getting laid), prove to gynecologists that female ejaculation DOES exists (in a hotel room during a conference with a well-placed towel, thankyouverymuch) and most of all, speak from the heart and from experience.  I am not shy and like I always say, “I care what you think about but I don’t care what you think about me.”  Those words have carried me through other people’s discomfort about their own sexuality and their opinion of mine and have also had people come up to me and say “I wish I were you.”  Friends… I’m pretty easy, or it’s pretty easy… I keep forgetting which is more true.

One of the many hats I’ve worn in the sex toy biz is that of “Director of Brand Development” and corporate trainer for a now-defunct home party company. Now home party companies are pretty interesting to me. I mean, I seriously wonder how many of these women (predominantly) are getting into the sex toy home party/rep biz because they want to educate and change the world around them and how many of them are getting into it to make a quick buck. Raise your hands! The feeling I gathered as I toured the country training hundreds of reps for this company was that it was about 50/50 split even though the reps were often in agreement that every single time they had a party, someone would come up to them, spill their sexual souls about some aspect of their sex life, halfway hoping that the rep would have something valuable to say to them or offer them advice or products that could help them with their answer.

I’m going to elaborate on that topic in a future blog but the point I want to make is that no matter WHAT you do in this biz, always be on the lookout for that piece of sexual information that you didn’t know the moment you woke up this morning. There’s things in the media, on the internet (and we know, don’t believe EVERYTHING you read on the internet – except for my blog!), books, science, history, research… ask yourself questions, listen to what people ask you and if you don’t know the answer, find out. If you’re a retailer, home party rep, customer service staff, ANYTHING, find out the answer – you may even surprise yourself.

SEX: Always Learning, Always Teaching by Kim Airs originally appeared in XBIZ