I was talking with some friends over the weekend and you know how sex seems to come up after you’ve had a few drinks. The question for the night was, is there a certain time, a certain place or after a certain activity that you want sex more than at other times?

We all looked at each other and we all waited to see who’d answer first and nobody did. The topic changed and we went on to some ordinary subject.

A while later one of the women said, “you know, I’ve been thinking about it and I think I’m horniest after reading an erotic story or bits of a book with an erotic scene in it. I can always put myself in the picture and it gets me going.”

That started everyone talking. It seems that there could be reliable triggers that work for some people. One woman said that when she was cooking and smelled the spice cumin, she would start thinking about sex. My friend Ret said it was her husband’s smell of “after shower and deodorant”, she couldn’t resist him. There was a group of 9 women and not one woman had the same trigger.

Do you have a trigger that you know will always get your motor going?

They weren’t kidding when they said diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

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!

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.

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.