While one person’s Don Juan is another person’s Frankenstein, surely there must be some sort of standard that we can all agree on? Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, reckons the definition is simple: “She is a woman who likes sex.”

Yet when I asked friends to define what they thought was sexy, I got such a bevy of mixed responses, you’d wonder how the heck a man’s magazine would ever get it right.

“It’s personality as much as appearance,” said one woman.

“It’s having a killer body and knowing how to carry it off well,” chirped said one of my male friends.

“It’s all in the attitude,” my husband says.

If those pages of the mens’ mags are to be believed, sexiness can be described by the four B’s: boobs, butts, bikinis and Brazilians.

The guys in the group say that’s not so at all. What’s sexy is a woman, regardless of looks, who feels sexy herself.

As for the women? Sex appeal runs the gamut of someone intelligent, someone who can make you smile, someone who thinks of you as human, (opposed to a sex object) and finally, I have one friend who said a man with good shoes was sexy because it meant he paid attention to detail. (She IS a bit of a list maker.)

When the the ex-Miss Universe was asked what she thought was sexy she said, “High-heeled shoes for women, casual jeans for men, and being natural, not too pushy and oozing confidence.”

I’m not sure about the high-heeled shoes but she’s absolutely right about being natural and confident!

You know…there’s something about you I like. I can’t put my finger on it…but there’s something about you that makes you attractive.

You’ve got charisma!

How do I know? — You’ve got charisma because you’re open to the world around you and ready to learn new things that the universe has to offer. And if there’s one characteristic you always find in charismatic people, it’s openness.

You might not know that you have it but I can sense it.

Charisma is easy to spot. You could probably name a dozen “charismatic” people you know in politics, the entertainment industry, or your personal life. But even though it’s easy to spot, charisma isn’t so easy to break down into its key components.

The “It” Factor

It’s not so easy to identify exactly what it is about a person that makes him or her charismatic. You know when someone’s got “it;” you just can’t quite define what “it” is.

Charisma is an attractiveness that goes beyond good looks
– an appeal that can’t be labelled
– captivating quality that isn’t the result of simple intellectual brilliance or a terrific sense of humor.

Most people see charisma as something elusive and unachievable—a kind of magical, mysterious magnetism that you’re either born with or not. Nothing could be further from the truth!

You can develop your own charisma.

Charisma is defined as “a certain presence.” When a charismatic person enters a room, their mere presence draws attention and their energy may radiate to enliven the entire gathering. They have self-confidence and the ability to pass that on to others.

It does take some work to improve your charisma.
(Don’t worry…the work is actually fun)

1. You’ll get far more respect than the average person.
2. People will be drawn to you without any effort on your part.
3. You’ll exude self-confidence.
4. You’ll seem powerful without being intimidating.
5. You’ll put people at ease and make them feel understood.
6. And you’ll be able to easily get what you want, because people will instinctively want to help you.

Everyone in your surroundings will be influenced by you. People will seem happier when they’re around you. They’ll feel better about themselves as they try to emulate you.

Honestly, your charisma makes you irresistible.

Charismatic when speaking
We tend to equate charisma with a type of sex appeal or charm, but you can find charismatic leaders who were pretty darn unattractive. Look at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, unarguably tremendously charismatic, but you wouldn’t choose him for a one-night-stand.

One ability of a charismatic person is eliciting images in the mind of a follower or acquaintance. Words that make it easy to “see” the message that someone is trying to get across.

Speak from within
You’re probably like most people; you don’t involve your body in your speaking. You take shallow breaths and when you speak, the resonance of your voice probably comes mainly out of your throat, neck and head. Practice deep breathing and let the sound come from deeper in your body.

Exercise: Open Up and Say Ahhhhh. Try breathing deeply and saying “ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhh” with each breath, letting the sound come out of a lower place in your body. Then try speaking. You’ll find that your voice is more resonant and easier to listen to. Practice every day and after a while your habit of breathing will change, and your vocal tone will change along with it.

Speak with enthusiasm
Many people who have been told that they lack charisma have usually gotten into the habit of never showing any real excitement or emotion about anything.

Charismatic, attractive people, on the other hand, are good at conveying their enthusiasm about things in their lives by the way that they speak. You can learn to do this by practicing speaking excitedly about things.

Again, it’s by practice. Choose a topic and practice speaking about that topic with enthusiasm. Really let yourself go, and get excited about it! It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about sex, a recipe for brownies, baseball, your business, or world politics. The subject doesn’t matter nearly as much as your ability to convey your excitement about it.

Charismatic people know what they want
Many people who come across as boring and un-focused were not rewarded during their formative years for speaking with certainly or decisiveness. As a result, they’ve come to believe that the best way to get along in life was to stay “under the radar,” and to never appear too committed to anything

That’s okay if you just want to “get along” and you don’t mind being completely devoid of charisma, plus all the benefits that charisma brings.

If you’d rather do more than just get along, if you’d like to really be charismatic in your personal and business life, it’s time to start experimenting with speaking with certainty.

Things to do

I was chatting with a guy in one of the chatrooms yesterday and he was telling me that he’d been at SexyAds for nearly 4 years and had never been what he’d call successful in dating women. I’m always up for a challenge like that, and I had seen him in the chatroom on quite a few occasions so I knew he was truthful when he said he’d been around for a while. I looked up his details and then ran a scan of the mail logs for his nick. Sure enough in 4 years he had never sent ONE initial email. He’d answered a few but he’d never sent one. So I asked why.

He told me he’d have to be a VIP member to send an email so he just waited around til someone wrote to him. So I asked why again? Was the cost of the membership so much that he couldn’t afford it and if so, how did he plan to entertain a woman if he found one. He said that he felt that all sites were ripoffs and that he stayed at SexyAds because all the people seemed real and he could talk to them for nothing.

I had to bite my fingers or say something I’d regret, so I said that if the people seemed real and he got so much for free, why wouldn’t he consider upgrading to move things from the computer to real life? He said maybe he should think about that but he always hoped that the women would find his ad and write to him – somehow that would make them more sincere. Women don’t peruse the profiles as much as men hope they do. They don’t have to because the hunter in a man gets there first.

I asked him how many times had he been to a bar or club and had had tons of women try to pick him up? How about at parties? He had to admit that it had never happened that way, that he’d always had to make the first move.

Then he said what I was waiting for, “Ok, Maureen, I get it.” He joined and wrote to about 30 women that interested him and he got 5 replies within 5 hours and just had to tell me. I did give him some tips on that first email but he did it all on his own.

The moral of the story is that regardless of women’s liberation and assertive women – the majority of women wait for a man to take that first step.

Why are more erotic stories read by women than men? It’s how we’re wired. We love to read stories and imagine ourselves playing a part. We fantasize while we’re reading and for most of us, it really gets our motors going.

There are heaps of stories written by men and they are quite graphic — more like a porn movie where it’s all slam bam and do it again. Women enjoy a story not a series of actions by the characters. I was approving one at SexyAds yesterday and there was no story to it. I deleted it. The guy wrote how he had sex this way and then flipped her over like a pancake and did it again and it was 500 words of the same thing over and over. Bleh..

Women aren’t like men who say they read Playboy just for the articles. Women read erotic stories for the words.

At the end of a really long day with work, kids, house chores, cooking, shopping – it’s sometimes difficult for a woman to get in the mood for lovemaking when all she wants to do is sleep. Some women read a story and they’re put into a different place emotionally and feel much sexier than they did before they started reading.

The husband of a good friend says he loves it when he sees Marnie reading “her stories” because he knows once she’s done he’s in for a good time. He said that she will often want to try something new that she’s read in one of her stories and he just loves that.
Marnie says she’s “lead a vanilla life for a long time and just wants to see what it’s all about.”

I think she’s on to something.

Emphatically yes you can flirt on the net. It’s done a bit differently than face-to-face but if you think about it, it’s not a whole lot different. In person you can rely on body language to help you out but what does your body language “say” without words? It’s showing another person that you just might be interested.

On the net you have the same capability as long as you think about what your goal is. You want to get someone’s attention to let them know that you think they’re hot or pretty or handsome and maybe they should consider getting to know you.

How do you flirt on the net?

You start with a compliment. If someone has a blog, you post a complimentary comment or a joke related to their post. If you’re on a dating site, make a comment about a photo. In both instances you’re showing that (1) you have looked at their blog or photo and (2) you’re interested enough to take the time to send them a note.

If your hook, the compliment, works, they’ll write back to say thanks and let you know that they’ve looked at your blog or ad or photo or profile. Now’s the time to set that hook and find out how compatible you might be. Send an email and give a little bit more information about yourself, what you enjoy doing and say something about what things in your life you would like to share with them. Before you know it, you’ll be dating.

Guys, sometimes this is where you flub it. You’ve sent the comment and receive a reply and when you set the hook you fall back into old patterns and write something sexy that should wait until AFTER the hook is set. Remember the old line where the woman wants to be treated like a lady in public and like a slut in private? You’re still public. She hasn’t invited you to speak privately yet so don’t mess it up.

I’ve seen men have a really nice woman’s attention and write back about how talented his tongue is and does she do anal. DELETE. All that effort up in smoke.

Ladies, you know that men are dying to get into your panties so make sure you give a guy the right signals. Don’t send him a picture of you naked or showing lots of cleavage and then be pissed off because he replied to the photo.

Flirting is a great way to get noticed. You can flirt with 50 people or more and reel them in one by one until you find one that’s a keeper.