6. The Librarian Takes Down Her Hair – Awakening Erotic Personas

Part of you isn’t shy. Now it’s time to discover which part.

We’ll explore ways to do just that by looking at the idea of erotic roles and personas. Just like an actor, you can try on any role; if you’re a good actor, in or out of bed, you may find that you can play many erotic parts convincingly. When a role appeals to you very deeply, however, so deeply that it seems to be a part of you, you’ve probably discovered one of your erotic personas.

There is a difference between personas and roles. You put on a role, something like a costume which is based in personality rather than clothing. You can also think of a role as a character you assume. A persona, on the other hand, is part of who you are, and has more to do with feelings that well up from inside you. You might try on or adopt a role, but you discover a persona.

S/M – and Other – Roles

Taking on roles can be a fun, enriching part of sex and fantasy. Consider the world of S/M (sometimes also called BDSM), or erotic power exchange, which includes a lot of erotic role-playing. Even if you have no interest in this type of eroticism, S/M practitioners’ expertise in playing with roles and clear, precise communication can instruct and inspire. Here’s some basic information about S/M, in case you don’t know much about it.

When I talk about people who do S/M, I refer only to those who willingly engage in dominance and submission or play with intense sensation. Couples with an unacknowledged, nonconsensual dynamic of inequality, up to and including emotional or physical violence, are something else altogether. In some couples one partner is always dominant (or, perhaps more accurately, domineering) and the other is always submissive to the other’s wishes. For these couples, such behavior rarely stops at the bedroom door.

S/M, by contrast, is mutually agreed-upon and consensual; with few exceptions, S/M people do not think of or treat each other as unequal, no matter what their role preferences during erotic play. The world of S/M includes many sorts of erotic and fantasy behaviors, and a person may prefer some S/M activities while having no interest in others.

The main roles in S/M carry the terms “top” and “bottom.” In very simplified terms, the top is the “do-er” while the bottom is the “doee.” The kinds of activities each might prefer and engage in will vary radically, from restraint to spanking and beyond, but the breakdown of who does what will not change: the top takes responsibility for doing erotic, mutually-agreed-upon things to the bottom. The bottom lets the top do these things until both of them decide to stop. Within each of these basic roles, many other roles can be played and characters assumed: a bottom may enjoy feeling like a maidservant, a sex slave, a naughty schoolboy, or a trained dog; a top may wish to play a policeman, a sultana, lord of the manor, or a kidnapper. The kinds of characters each might assume are limited only by the players’ imaginations and how compatible the roles are with each other.

Besides deciding what you want to do in a scene, you need to decide in what role you want to do it. Will you be a top or a bottom? The negotiation doesn’t end there. Suppose I want to top and my partner wants to bottom. But my idea of being a top involves having my bottom lavish me with attention, call me “Goddess,” draw me a bubble bath, scrub my back and peel me grapes. My partner wants to be a naughty puppy who wears a rhinestone dog collar with his name on it while I swat him with a rolled-up newspaper. No compatible scene here! I may end up fuming in the bathtub that I had to draw while my “puppy” whines outside the bathroom door.

Roles often come in pairs: shy but eager virgin and roguish seducer, teacher and precocious student, stern sergeant and raw recruit, streetwise hooker and horny customer, strangers in the night, to name just a few. Notice that with many such pairs you could play S/M games if you wanted, though you could also have what some S/M people term “vanilla” sex – that is, genitally-involved, old-fashioned licking, sucking, fucking, and fondling (the term “vanilla” reminds us that there are many flavors of sex to choose from). The way you and your partner relate to each other during sex, though, may be very different if you take on roles, even if you proceed to do the same physical things you always do. The roles may affect your emotional experience, what you say, the way the sex feels, and your degree of arousal. You may even like certain kinds of sex, erotic talk, and fantasy in one role but not in another.

The individuals taking on these roles might also decide to change roles from time to time – people who enjoy playing as tops sometimes and bottoms at other times are called “switches.”

Even if you have no interest in S/M per se you can see that these roles might stretch to include what you do. If you ever take charge in sex and “run the fuck,” that’s topping. If you lie back and let your partner pleasure you any way s/he wants to, that’s bottoming (unless you told him or her to do it, in which case it’s also topping). However, when it’s time to get out of bed or get untied or stop saying “Yes, Mistress, whatever you wish, Mistress” – in short, when erotic playtime is over – you are probably no longer “a top” or “a bottom.” You put the role you assumed for play back into the toybox. You and your partner probably regard each other more or less as equals, not as dominant and submissive. A few people choose to maintain these roles all the time, but most find this quite difficult to do.

If you’ve been doing your reading to look for hot fantasies and favorite nasty words, you’ve probably come upon fantasy roles – not necessarily S/M ones – to which you respond erotically. These roles, if they “fit” you, can give you context for all kinds of erotic play, including exhibitionism and, especially, talking dirty. Sometimes words elude us until we’ve developed or discovered a character for whom they feel natural. If you respond with arousal to the role – if, for example, you find it really hot to pretend to be a virgin – you might find when in role that you instinctively know how to behave and what to say. Role-playing is sexual theater, and the role functions a bit like a script. Note that the role must have some sort of familiarity to you – you must have some sense of the kind of sexual personality or preference the role represents. If you’re familiar with Jungian psychology, you might say these characters are erotic archetypes.

Personas: Who Lives Inside You?

Let’s move now from thinking of roles to thinking of personas. If you respond erotically to a role, simply knowing when you assume it how you’re supposed to behave, there must be something in you that recognizes that character and resonates with it. I’m sure you can think of roles that have no attraction for you, and if you tried to play one of them in bed you’d feel disconnected and wooden. But you may be able to think of other roles that you can drop into just like that. If not, you are likely to discover them as you continue to explore your fantasies. Frequently our most powerful erotic roles develop first in our minds.

Within a role that feels very right, you may discern something that’s uniquely you. Part of you, let’s say, is a virgin. How do you express this? Are you fearful, or hot with excitement? Perhaps you have both feelings at once. The way you feel when you’re in touch with this virgin part of yourself may or may not resemble the feelings you had when you actually “lost your virginity” in real life (assuming you have). Your feelings may, instead, reflect the way you wish it had felt. If this virgin state feels erotic to you, you may call upon it during sex – or it may come over you unexpectedly, especially if you’re trying something new and you do feel virginal again. Your feelings will be your own; you will not feel like you’re playing a part.

The first day I went to work in the peep show I felt on edge with nerves and performance anxiety. Finally it dawned on me – I was a virgin that day. I’d certainly never had that kind of sex before. When I said, “Gee, Mister, I’ve never done anything like this,” I told the absolute truth! From then on I had a great time because I had given erotic shape to my feelings of excited, nervous, “I-don’t-know-what-to-do” – which are the feelings I always attribute to the virgin role, and this experience let me uncover a persona animated by just these feelings.

I also have a little girl persona which I experience as erotic. I am not remembering experiences I had as a child; I have no history of childhood sex play, either consensually or not. However, I do feel very young, and also very sexual, in ways that are curious and exploratory but also inexperienced. I do not believe for a minute that all or even some little girls feel this way; it is not a projection of my ideas about the sexual feelings of little girls. Rather, it is a complicated amalgam of the memories I retain of childhood emotional feelings, grafted onto my adult sexual self. When I feel like a little girl, I respond sexually to the same things I do when I feel like an adult – but the response itself feels different, because this persona has its own perspective.

Having a young or childlike persona is quite common; for some people this is erotic and for others not. You may have heard about the concept of “the inner child;” according to this theory, we retain within us the emotional essence of our childhood selves, even when we’re grown up. The erotic persona I’ve described is not my inner child, although I do remember feeling sexual curiosity when I was little. Many people never experience their childlike or youthful personas as sexual. While some, especially adults whose childhood or youth was affected by sexual experience they did not consent to, would not dream of having sex in this persona, others find this kind of play actually feels very healing. They may feel childlike, but they are no longer powerless children: hence they stay in control by doing only what they want and desire to do.

If you have a childlike inner self, it will tell you what it wants, likes, and fears. Listening to a persona is exactly like listening to your own feelings – your persona is a part of you, and its feelings are your feelings, even when those feelings differ somewhat from the ones you’re usually aware of. Personas can, in fact, once you become aware of them, assist you in having conscious access to a fuller range of your feelings.

What does this have to do with overcoming shyness? Everything. What happens when the reserved, prim librarian lets down her hair? Focusing on the erotic implications of our various personality facets, how can we access the sexy and bold parts of ourselves? It’s often easier to be sexually outgoing if you try on a role or, especially, tap into a persona. There’s something about finding an alternate side of yourself or a role that’s not “really” you that opens the door to new ways of expressing your sexuality. Starting wherever you are, you can use your new self to access and express sexual inspiration, even if you feel, “I couldn’t do that, I could never be that way.” Maybe you can’t – but you can assume a role or discover a persona who can.

Let’s see if I can clarify this by means of a couple of illustrations. Suppose I’m shy and rather passive in bed (like I used to be, in fact). But I fantasize about being a self-assured, even sexually controlling, dominatrix. I dream about men falling on their knees and begging me to tell them what I want. Maybe I even give voice to this dominatrix while I masturbate, whispering, “Lick my pussy, boy!” as I turn the vibrator onto high speed.

Now let’s say that I’m so inspired by this fantasy that when Hallowe’en comes around, I go to a shop that sells lingerie and fetishwear and buy myself over-the-knee, shiny black boots and a black leather corset. I put on severe makeup and a flowing black wig. My boyfriend likes me in the clothes, and playfully, I say, “On your knees!” Strangely enough, I’m only surprised for an instant when he complies! The role fits me because I’ve practiced it in my fantasies; I know what to do and what to say. My shyness is bypassed because it’s not really me.

But this experience awakens a formerly unknown part of me. After that fateful Hallowe’en, I am more talkative in bed; I speak up and say what I want more easily. The dominatrix has, in a way, taken root – or, more accurately, I finally uncovered her. (And of course I still put on the boots and corset from time to time!)

Some people might react less than well to the idea of personas, thinking that we contemporary Americans are less integrated and whole already than we want to be. The idea of discovering personas is not to “split your personality” – if that’s even possible to do voluntarily. Instead, it’s a way to take seriously the voices and perspectives of the inner selves that many of us deny in our search to be “normal,” acceptable, and like our peers: it’s a way of letting our full self out, one aspect at a time. As you’ll see below, this can lead to greater integration, not less.

When we set out to learn how to explore the up-til-now hidden facets of ourselves, it begins to click when we find a place to speak from – like doing improvisation, only deeper. Inspiration then bubbles up from a source we aren’t consciously aware of, making talk, showing off, or other sex play feel completely spontaneous. Not only is it exciting to feel this way, the spontaneity can also bypass shyness completely.

Meet Two Persona Professionals

Sybil Holiday and Bill Henkin present workshops and consult with individuals and couples about personas. Sybil also works as a dominatrix, where she gets to see her clients’ many erotic personas, and Bill works as a psychotherapist. I asked Bill and Sybil how a novice to the idea of personas might access them. How do you find those parts of yourself? Sybil had a shy, awkward adolescence, yet she began dancing in a striptease nightclub in the late ’60s. How did she do it?

“I could never have gotten up and danced onstage if I hadn’t pretended to be someone else. I was scared! But when I was a child I found that when I went onstage in school plays, the child I usually was – who was tall, fat, smart, dressed funny, and a wallflower – disappeared. I would lose myself in the role, and all the fear went away. I thought it might also be true when I danced. So I picked music and costumes that I found sexy but that I would be afraid to wear as my mousy, wallflower self.

“When I began dancing I took a different name. After a while my old name faded into the background and everybody started knowing me by my stage name. It really became me. I no longer had to set myself aside to create this other person. The new person took over my life! Because it was ten times more fun. Because the old me wasn’t really me. The person who was afraid wasn’t all of who I was. I wasn’t leaving me behind, I was just leaving the part that had been squashed by shyness. That allowed me to blossom.”

The shy part of us is a persona, too. Many people have probably experienced their shy selves as themselves – “the baseline personality,” as Bill puts it. “Part of me is still shy,” Sybil adds, “but that part has gotten smaller and smaller. Today my shy self plays a very small role in my life because I’ve fleshed out these other parts.”

Sybil’s story illustrates something basic about finding a persona. Even though she accessed her new self by “pretending to be someone else,” the dancer she discovered when she was in her twenties had a lot in common with the bright, adventurous child she was before she got “squashed” by shyness. It wasn’t really someone else at all – it just wasn’t her shy self.

If we go back far enough most of us will remember a child self braver and more exploratory than the self with which we went through puberty. We can make an end run around the shy one, even if it’s had the upper hand for years, by putting on an outfit, assuming a role and playing – give the adventurous kid a chance to grow up and enjoy being an adult. Some of us will leave our shy selves behind quicker than others. A few of us will have eroticized feeling shy and may feel resistant to letting shyness go. Most of us, though, even if we feel trapped within shyness, can find ways out.

You may have lots of personas, not all of them erotic – just as you can identify with several roles at once, some erotic and others that have nothing to do with sexuality. As Bill points out, “a persona is not something you create, it’s something you discover. You don’t have to go through a lot of machinations – you can just see who shows up in your erotic life.” Many of us already have distinct personas operating in our erotic lives, but we haven’t recognized or identified them yet. To identify a persona, look for a constellation of feelings, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, vocal tones, and body postures. Do you have particular moods that seem to change your personality obviously or subtly? “Notice what is different about a specific mood,” says Bill. “You can take any mood and flesh it out, listen to it, interact with it. You become aware of two different states at once, the one observing and the one being observed. That’s two different personas.”

“To access them,” says Sybil, “read porn, use costumes, think of any fantasy that turns you on. Look at the time in history of the fantasy or the role you like – whether Middle Ages or futuristic or something else. Get into it through music – all the senses and their response – even if it means using a script! If something sounds sexy, use it. Practice – read it in front of a mirror.”

Look In the Mirror

Facing a mirror and talking to your reflection as if it’s another person, one whose responses you’re not sure you can predict, is an excellent way to meet an alternate persona. “In mirror work I see the new me, and then there’s a point when it starts to deepen,” says Sybil. “Then I know I’ve touched on something that’s really me, not a role.”

Here’s an example of how this might work. Imagine me in front of a mirror getting to know my childlike persona. “How are you feeling right now?” I ask, and my voice changes a little, gets more lilting and little-girlish, as I respond, “I’m kind a scared.” “Why are you scared?” “Because everybody’s too busy to cuddle me and I’m lonely.” “Oh, sweetie! How old are you?” “I’m almost five.”

From there I could reassure this little girl that I’d help take care of her, ask her more about why she feels lonely, try to cheer her up by asking what she likes, or whatever. If I’ve been feeling vaguely lonely and unsupported in my life, this conversation with the little girl will give me valuable information about what’s going on in my below-the-surface emotions. Notice that I asked her age – get information about a new persona by quizzing it about its age, likes and dislikes, and anything else you want to know. Having this information fleshes the persona out.

Don’t forget to ask its name. Sometimes new personas won’t have actual names; the one you just met is called the Little Girl. The Little Girl persona carries the feelings of fright and sadness that are left over from my childhood, and I met her not in bed (thank goodness), but in therapy. If I hadn’t met, listened to the fears of, and reassured the Little Girl, I suspect I would never have met Carol Annie, the sexual side of my child persona.

How about an erotic example? I’m talking to myself in the mirror because I’ve been feeling a little uninspired about sex lately. “Well, it’s no wonder!” says the persona who’s popped up to talk to me. “You never do anything exciting.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “You always wait til late at night and you make love the same old way. You should leave the lights on! You should wear something sexy! What about coming home at lunchtime and doing it in the middle of the day for a change?” “Are you telling me you’re bored?” I ask this obviously frisky persona. “Yes! I want to dress sexy! I want to do something exciting!” What this persona is telling me

– in a voice that’s not quite my own – is obvious: I’ve let sex get a little humdrum. If this persona takes over in bed, she’ll no doubt liven things up a bit!

In Chapter Four I recommended you use mirror exercises that utilize dancing, dressing up, and masturbation to see yourself in a newly erotic way. This is different. Here you’re looking for one part of your personality in the mirror so you can get to know it – as if you can look into the mirror and see your persona reflected there. You can use the mirror to converse or get more information about your persona, as I illustrated above – in effect, to be two people. Of course, the earlier mirror exercises may also have exactly this result – behaving erotically in front of a mirror can call out a specifically erotic part of you, a persona which you can get to know as the repository of your sexual boldness. But this is more interactive than the earlier mirror exercises – it has more in common with talking to yourself, the way many of us engage in private solo conversations when we’re pondering something. In fact, you can use talking to yourself to recognize personas, too.

Sometimes the persona in the mirror will look different from the way you usually do, and not only because you may have dressed differently for the erotic exercises. You may see expressions you don’t recognize. You may see your face change subtly. It’s a new facet of yourself – a new persona.

One effective way to do mirror work with your newly-discovered erotic persona will also help you in your quest to learn to talk dirty: when addressing the persona in the mirror, talk about sex. Talk about the kind of sex the persona likes. Ask it questions. Tell it what you like. Spin out sexual fantasies, talking out loud. As you recognize different personas, notice how their sexual language and their desires may be different from your own – and from each other’s. Try not to feel shocked or judgmental – remember, the persona’s ideas about what’s erotic may be very different than yours. Your sex life can be enriched by your persona’s sexuality without your ever having to physically do any of your persona’s desired activities. In a way, some personas can be understood as an erotic fantasy, embodied in you – except more likely than a fantasy to have a mind of its own!

More Ways to Flesh Out Your Personas

Beyond naming them and getting an idea about their sexual desires and preferences, use visual cues to get to know your personas. Costume can be one of the easiest ways to meet them. Do you suspect you might have a slutty stripper within who won’t quite reveal herself when you wear jeans and sneakers? Get her some lingerie and makeup, for heaven’s sake! Do you harbor an S/M top who feels naked without a leather jacket? Is your inner virgin cheerleader just waiting for you to take off your work clothes and buy her some snow-white ankle socks? Dressing according to role, or dressing up your personas, doesn’t need to be expensive – you can do it at thrift stores, if you want – and it serves at least three important functions.

First, dressing in appropriate garb helps you visualize personas. Now when you look in the mirror you see a more fleshed-out alternate self; you find it easier to believe in yourself as sexy and bold if you look that way. Clothes don’t make the persona, but they can help one emerge.

Second, clothing associated with an erotic persona will very likely have some fetishistic appeal for you – wearing it will turn you on, even if no one else ever sees it.

Third, you give your persona a cue that you believe in it, and its erotic potential, if you let it present itself the way it sees itself. Because your persona is one facet of yourself, the message you send is essentially, “I trust my erotic self.”

Accessing personas or roles through props, including costume, has much in common with improvisational acting, and is another great way to draw on your subconscious strengths and leave your shy self behind. For practice (or a fun way to get into play), use the grab bag exercise discussed earlier, collecting a variety of props and then picking three. How will you incorporate these items into an erotic context that makes sense? What roles (or personas) will emerge to use them, and what will they choose to do? This exercise can remove your preconceived notions about sex, making you tap into a newly creative sexual realm.

No, you don’t need special outfits, props, and sex toys to explore erotic personas and roles – your biggest sex toy, after all, resides between your ears. You and your partner can whisper to each other when you’re making love and be anyone, anywhere, in the universe. But clothing serves our species as a powerful signal of identity and status, and changing your clothes is one of the quickest ways to alter your self-image.

Fantasy gives you access to the inner sexuality you may never have acknowledged, but only if you pay attention. If you’ve lived this long without listening to the perhaps alternate desires of your personas or your subconscious, you may have a difficult time accepting that parts of yourself want to do things you’ve never thought of yourself as desiring. Especially if you grew up believing that some kinds of desires are “wrong” while others are “right,” you may have packed any “wrong” desires that came up into a cupboard in your brain, closed the door, and never looked at or even acknowledged them. Now what?

It turns out when you finally get around to peeking into the cupboard that you have a persona in there, at least one alternate self with a very different fantasy life. It wants to have sex outdoors, or be on top, or explore bondage, or have sex with a partner you consider inappropriate, or leave the curtains open when you fuck. Are you going to let it take over your life?

“When you let a fantasy go, it’s almost always going to be more extreme than you really want to act out,” says Bill. “But extreme fantasies have value.” For one thing, they allow you to “unpack” your taboos. What you come up with may still be taboo for you in your sex life, but really looking at fantasies can give you lots more information about your deep sources of eroticism. They may even allow you to get to know yourself better (and hopefully accept yourself better) on all levels – not just sexually.

Allowing your fantasies to go where they will, staying conscious not just of turn-on but for information about yourself, is similar to dreamwork, where you remember, write down, and analyze your dreams. It makes little sense to think of “rejecting” our dreams – we accept them for what they are, usually, even if we find them unsettling. But it’s common for people to reject their fantasies. Accepting that these come from the depths of our psyche, like dreams, helps us accept the fantasies themselves, and then we can look at them, flesh them out, get more details.

You can even try writing a script of your fantasy. This lets you get into it deeply and look at it more closely, and it also gives you a record of it to look back on later. You can do the same by writing about it in a journal.

You may have personas whose desires seem to contradict each others’. You may have personas whose desires surprise you. You may have personas of different ages, sexual preferences, even different genders than your baseline self. As in Jungian psychological theory, we may discover an “inner male” self if we’re female or an “inner female” self if we’re male – Jungians would call them “animus” and “anima.” In fact, you may have more than one of these. Each persona contains something of yourself; the erotic ones hold the elements of your sexual potential. The more you allow them to come into your awareness, the richer your sexuality can become.

Your other-gender personas, if any, may not prefer the same gender you do. Either homosexual or heterosexual feelings (or both) can reside in a persona of either gender. For instance, if I were an exclusively heterosexual woman, I might have a male persona who desires women – so all the desire I feel for women is actually my male persona’s desire. Of course, I might also have a male persona who desires men; when I as a heterosexual woman have sex with a man, I feel like a heterosexual woman, but when my male persona has sex with a man, he feels like a gay male. A gay man might have a female persona, but only desire women when in that persona – so that, on top of being a gay man, he has a lesbian persona. If he has sex with a woman in this female persona, it won’t feel like heterosexual sex – even though he’s a man (physically) having sex with a woman. In his emotional body, his persona, he is a woman having sex with another woman.

And of course a person might have a number of personas which are different from one another yet always have the same gender and sexual orientation as the baseline persona.

Confused yet? Don’t be. As you explore person as, it’s only confusing if you try to superimpose your pre-existing notions about yourself and about sexuality on the perhaps new information and insights your personas provide.

You may find that you have a persona or two that you only get in touch with when you’re with a certain partner. Just as a specific partner can “call out” one persona or another, you may find another’s response inhibits you from letting out one or more inner selves. Ideally you’ll find your partner – and your partner’s own personas, if s/he’s in touch with them – are erotically compatible with yours.

Look for the overlap between what turns you on and what arouses your partner. Here you’ll find the most fertile, immediately accessible area for play. Remember, whether exploring roleplaying for the first time or introducing a newly-awakened erotic persona, your partner will be meeting someone slightly (or very) new and different from the you s/he already knows. Give yourselves time to get to know each other’s newly developed selves, just as you probably had to get to know each other when you first became lovers. There’s no need to rush this process – and don’t be surprised if the area of overlap grows larger as time passes.

When you and your partner explore personas, roles, and characters, verbally or through costume and other kinds of play, you will deepen your knowledge of each other and very possibly increase the levels of intimacy you can share. Even if only one of you instigated this exploration, both of you will have opportunities to take sexual pleasure and compatibility more seriously. And you can experiment, separately and together, with the erotic images that have meaning for both of you.

So don’t be surprised if your explorations with a willing partner take you further than you ever expected to go. On a related note, if your partner suggests a particular role or fantasy that you don’t think you’ll find interesting, wait till you’ve seen her or his erotic response to it before you completely write it off. That response might persuade you to open up to sexual enjoyment you’d never otherwise have experienced.

Self-Awareness, Growth, and Inspiration

Sybil offers another reason to look at your personas: “If all the parts of yourself align, each persona’s growth informs all the others’.” This is true of all personas, not just erotic ones, but the erotic ones are as good a place to start as any – maybe better, because your growth includes more possibility for sexual pleasure. If you manage as a shy, erotically retiring person to find that you can have sexual agency, possessing the emotional wherewithal to go for what you want, breaking through those barriers you thought you never could, it can inform your non-erotic sense of self, too, investing it with a whole new level of energy and confidence. I’ve seen this over and over when a person meets a new, outgoing partner, or in some other way has the opportunity to have new experiences and stretch their assumptions about him- or herself sexually.

That’s ample reason to follow your sexual fantasies and fascinations into erotic encounters with your personas, but beginning the process may still seem frightening. What if your response to the things I suggest you try is “Oh, but I just can’t”? A very common source of resistance comes from within: a line drawn in our minds between life as we experience it now and what we can conceive of as possible. It seems impossible to see what’s on the other side of the line and how to get there.

“If I can’t do something for emotional reasons, there may be something going on for me that has to do with fear or anger,” says Bill. “That means I might be able to learn to do that thing, but only if I address my fear or anger about whatever it is that underlies what I’m calling ‘can’t.’” Why would you want to learn to do something you’re afraid of? To get past the fear; because you feel stuck where you are now; to deal with buried sources of distress; because the new activity would be pleasurable; to change your self-image from someone who can’t to someone who can.

Naturally, Bill’s recommendation that we take responsibility for what we think we can do must be tempered with self-respect. It won’t help to beat ourselves up because we’re not there yet, wherever “there” is. Sybil elaborates: “Don’t push too hard. Take baby steps. One thing at a time. One costume, one fantasy at a time. If you feel you can’t, what is stopping you? Maybe you can find the back door to it. For me the two back doors to fantasy were phone sex and visualizing myself as another person. I learned I could get into a scene more easily if I left the room and came back as someone else, like stepping onto a stage. And the more you do anything, of course, the easier it gets.”

Porn star Nina Hartley echoes this. “My Nina persona is not a front over a hollow center. In the beginning, it was the idealized real me – I thought if I was completely together sexually and not scared, I would be kind, gracious, warm and giving. It was someone I wanted to be. It denoted confidence that I really wanted to obtain. In the beginning, before I was that kind of person, I had to act it.”

“It’s not necessary to go out looking for these personas,” says Jamie. “They’ll come to you. It’s really important for people who are just starting out – the fact that you want to discover them means that you probably can.” Blake adds, “You don’t have to develop this whole repertoire. You don’t have to find a whole bunch of inner selves. Because it’s so much about your own turn-on. Start there, and the characters will absolutely come.”

While I did almost no work connected to erotic personas while in therapy, the technique my therapist and I used, a variation of Gestalt, uncovered several personas. I would put my alternate self on a pillow and sit “facing” her, imagining her there in front of me, and talk to her. Every so often my therapist would have me switch places with my persona, giving that self a chance to talk back to me. You can do this in mirror work, too – or even talking to yourself.

What you learn in a therapeutic context about your inner selves’ relationship to fear, sadness, anger, hope, creativity, power, and everything else can also be applied to eroticism; and if your therapist is comfortable discussing sex, you may meet and work with these personas in your sessions.

Arnold, another of my childlike personas, is a seven-year-old nerd. He loves science – think of him as the kid who always won the prize at the science fair but never had any friends. I discovered Arnold many years ago on a trip to the woods with my girlfriend – a figurative as well as literal trip, for I was high on psychedelic mushrooms. All of a sudden, while my baseline self watched with amazement, Arnold popped up and began expounding about the trees and the puffball fungus that grew on the oak leaves. “This is an example of a symbiotic relationship!” he said proudly, while my girlfriend looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

I’m not going to recommend psychedelics as a means to access your personas, though if you use drugs now, you should know that the splits in consciousness they can facilitate make it more than likely you are not always “yourself” when high. Psychedelics have seen much use in many cultures for ritual and sacramental purposes, for just this reason: ingesting them alters our notion of the real and the possible.

Like the alterations alcohol and other depressants cause in our inhibitions, any personality state we can’t get to on our own leaves us vulnerable to dependence on the chemical we need to reach it. My friend Bayla tells me she used to act very exhibitionistic when she was drunk – when she stopped drinking, she found she couldn’t do it anymore. Her artificial means of getting comfortable was gone, and she had to start from scratch and learn to overcome her shyness on her own. That’s why I would like to encourage you to get comfortable with your sexuality without chemical assistance.

That said, though, I wouldn’t trade that mushroom trip for anything, because of Arnold. He emerged before any of my other personas – and he emerged at a time in my life when I felt rather uncomfortable with males. Because I couldn’t deny that I had had this experience of turning into a boy, I had to begin to make sense of the apparent fact that I had a little bit of maleness residing within me. Many other things urged on and contributed to this process, but the end result – a much higher level of comfort with men – owes a lot to Arnold. I suppose I can thank him for indirectly helping me get so comfortable with men that I could erotically interact with dozens of them a day at the peep show – ironic, because Arnold is one of my shyest personas! It just substantiates that the growth and insight of one persona can spill over into all your other personas, as well as your baseline self.

Arnold began as an asexual child persona, but he didn’t stay that way. He grew into sexuality when he met my lover, Robert. Arnold liked Robert from the start, because Robert knew a lot about science and would explain things to him. The fascinated Arnold hung on his every word. It reached the point where Robert could call Arnold out almost any time by starting to explain how something worked. Arnold developed an intense crush on Robert, seducing him by asking him to explain in minute detail how a guy gets a hard-on. I’m sure Robert doesn’t find Arnold the most erotically charged of all my personas, but for Arnold, Robert will always be the first.

Blake has a male persona, too – Matt. “He’s six-one, long blond hair, blue eyes, he’s kind of a cowboy, smokes cigarettes,” says Blake. “One day I was doing everything as Matt. I had on boots and jeans and my Levi jacket with white sheepskin on the inside. I got on the train and put my feet up on the opposite chair. I was wearing a dildo, so I had a bulge. This gay man sat down next to me. I was sitting there with my hat pulled down, and I did the whole bit, tipped the hat and looked at him. He’s sitting with his eyes riveted on the dildo in my crotch, talking to me, and I’m Matt – I realized just how grounded I am in Matt. ‘Cause I was right there with him. He said, ‘If I give you my phone number will you call me?’ I looked at him and said, ‘It depends on what you want me to call you.’ He was squirming in the seat! It was wonderful!”

Once you know one or two of your erotic personas, why not photograph them? For inspiration, look at the work Annie Sprinkle has done with alternate selves and photography. She takes very ordinary-looking people and, in her “Transformation Salon,” dresses them in wild, sexy garb, helps them pick a new name, and takes pictures of the new personality that emerges. Some of the before and after shots are astonishing, and if you have a shred of doubt left that everyone can enjoy exhibitionistic sexuality, Annie’s work should dispel it.

Look for the Transformation Salon shots in her autobiography Post Porn Modernist and her deck of pin-up playing cards. See her video “Sluts and Goddesses” for more of inimitable Annie’s work along these lines – helping women access the erotic power of both the Slut and the Goddess archetype. If she comes to your town, be sure to see her; she’s the perfect role model for every shy person who dreams of breaking out into exhibitionism. From ordinary Ellen Steinberg to ravishing porn star Annie Sprinkle to cutting-edge sexual healer and performance artist Anya, Annie serves as proof that setting out on the sexual path with a loving, open heart and a sense of adventure can take us a very long way.

So get out that Polaroid (if you can still get the film) and start documenting all your inner selves. Writing affirmations on the mirror is fine – “I am a radiant, outgoing, open soul who has no fear” – but a picture of one of your hot, erotic personas will be worth a thousand words. It will remind you that, even if you still seem shy on the surface, there is more to you than meets the eye – and underneath, close enough to touch, waits the embodiment of an erotic dream.