Sex Tips for Red-State Girls!

Ever since she qualified for a car award from her employer, Passion Parties, Linda Brewer has buzzed around the South in a silver Cadillac Escalade with a license plate that says ''Funlady.'' On the road, men often notice it and honk before passing, only to realize, with baffled amusement, that a woman of nearly 60 is at the wheel. ''Hey, girl,'' she shouted the first time we met, as she smiled and waved from the car window. ''Climb in.''

Passion Parties is a direct-sales organization based in Brisbane, Calif., that specializes in sex toys, and for the last seven years in a row, Brewer, a high-school dropout who lives in a dry county in the heart of the Bible Belt, has been the top seller in its sales force of 5,000. Roughly four times a week, she drives to the homes of friends and strangers, the Escalade stuffed to the rafters with edible lotions, sex manuals, erotic games, lingerie and, above all, ''power tools'': vibrators with 10 speeds and vibrators with 1; vibrators that hula-hoop and vibrators that glow; vibrators that run underwater and vibrators that run by remote control -- vibrators, in short, that do everything except sort your laundry and file your tax returns. Last year, she logged about 50,000 miles and sold nearly $140,000 worth of goods.

''This ought to be a younger crowd tonight,'' Brewer said, scanning road signs. Her speech is relaxed and pure Arkansas, a singsong of y'alls and endearments and missing g's. ''They have a much more open attitude. They're willin' to learn. They don't want to miss an orgasm they can have.''

Thirty minutes later, she pulled into the driveway of her hostess for the evening, a woman named Julia who lives about 10 miles northwest of Little Rock in Maumelle, a planned community. Julia, who asked that her last name not be used, greeted Brewer warmly and led her through her garage and into a spacious living area, where 20 or so women were milling about, drinking wine and plunging crackers into cheese balls and chips into trays of Tex-Mex. Almost all were married and had been since their early or mid-20's; most had children; and most went to church every Sunday, though that's not how they met: a core group plays Bunco, a dice game, once a month.

Brewer always starts her presentations with the more innocuous part of her inventory, like edible cream, before moving on to the more formidable bits of hardware. Because she is both unthreatening and fearless -- one minute she's talking about dollar shopping, the next she's describing which vibrators ''can stand the most abuse'' -- the evening quickly moved from a quaint session of show and tell to raucous chaos, culminating in a pile of electronic carnage on the living-room floor. But somewhere along the way, between one woman's inquiry about alternative uses of cervical tightening cream (could it also help with sagging jowls?) and a bravura demonstration by Brewer involving a pink silicone sleeve and a model penis, there came a moment of candor that resonated deeply among the women. It was when Brewer held up a small bottle of Pure Satisfaction, her No. 1 seller. ''Basically, ladies,'' she declared, ''this gets you in the mood when you're not in the mood. It creates that itch you cain't scratch.'' She invited a few volunteers to retreat to the bathroom and apply it to their genitals. One of them, a pretty blond 31-year-old mother of two, soon returned, her face flushed. She sat down.

''Sweetheart, you want to stand up and tell everyone how it feels?'' Brewer asked.

''Well, I'd rather not,'' she said, giggling. ''But I'll take a case.'' She looked at the price list sitting in front of her. It was a bit steep -- $39.50 for a 2.5-ounce bottle. ''I'll tell you what,'' she decided. ''I have been married for almost 11 years, so any little thing at this point helps.'' She looked down at the list again and nodded. ''I'm gonna buy as much as my Mother's Day allowance allows.''

Last November, passion parties surfaced rather unexpectedly in the news when one of its representatives, Joanne Webb, was arrested for selling two vibrators to undercover agents in Burleson, Tex. The reason, ostensibly, was her violation of an arcane state law forbidding the sale of any device used to stimulate the genitals. But the real reason, it soon became clear, had to do with Webb herself, who had stood a small town on its ear with her short skirts, flirtatious nature and unblushing sexuality. A brassy lawyer named BeAnn Sisemore came to her defense; today, Webb's trial is still unscheduled.

The Webb episode got plenty of press -- especially internationally, as one of those amusing parables of American hypocrisy and contradiction, in which the values of evangelism and the Playboy Channel were at war. But in truth, Passion Parties is one of the country's tamest, most pro-family peddlers of sexual paraphernalia. The company does a brisk business in the Bible Belt -- last year, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee ranked third, fourth and ninth, respectively, in sales -- precisely because it has positioned itself as an organization devoted to strengthening relationships, rather than to expanding the pleasure chest of the single girl. Its home page features a pleasant slide show of young heterosexual couples; its corporate tag line, scribbled on many products, is ''Where Every Day Is Valentine's Day.'' The Passion Parties training video, sent to all new representatives, begins with an endorsement from a board-certified sex therapist and licensed marriage, family and child counselor, and before the demonstration segment begins, one of the company's executive directors, a woman dressed in a bright indigo suit, declares: ''Now, ladies, if you did come tonight looking for any vulgarity or pornography, you're going to be very disappointed. I don't have it. But if you came here for a fun evening, plus some tips to keep the excitement in your relationship, plus the parts to work with, you are definitely in the right place.''

In this way, Brewer, a Baptist who had her first daughter at 18, is more or less typical of the Southern, rural segment of the Passion Parties sales force. Though she has certainly done her fair share of gatherings for lesbians and unmarried women, the running subtext of her presentations tends to be the challenge of marriage and family life. She jokes about how a man's doing dishes can be a form of foreplay; she acknowledges that sex, at times, can feel like a chore. The part of her presentation that invariably gets the most laughs is her advice about when to tell your husband you have overcharged on the credit card (it involves diverting him with a feather and a product called Fireworks), and her second-best seller, that pink silicone sleeve (known as Gigi), isn't even a toy for women, but for women to use on men. There are also myriad references to children: when she introduces the company's whipped cream, she warns women to store it where the kids can't get to it, and when she pitches the company's topical anesthetic -- used to delay ejaculation -- she also notes how good it is for soothing the gums of teething babies.

Before the company's current president, Patricia Davis, took over three and a half years ago, Passion Parties' image was a bit more risque. Its products were more explicitly named, and the company itself was called Coming Attractions, a double-entendre that Davis found distasteful. ''I didn't think that was good branding for us,'' she said the first time we spoke. ''It wasn't what we were about. I wanted women to know that we were really about relationships.''

For anyone who has been to a truck stop or seen the famous vibrator episode of ''Sex and the City,'' it may seem counterintuitive that sex toys are peddled as relationship aids in some parts of the country. In most urban areas, and certainly in the popular imagination, sex toys are associated with either pornography (which, while arguably a marital aid, is seldom marketed as such) or female self-determination in the bedroom. Many of the country's best-known sex shops -- like Eve's Garden or Good Vibrations -- were started by women themselves, during the 70's, when the women's movement was in full bloom. ''When we're promoting products, we have to remind our staff to include the couples-enhancing potential of our toys,'' said Anne Semans, marketing director for Toys in Babeland, another well-known, women-run store, ''because our customer base is so used to using sex toys for themselves.''

But as Rachel P. Maines notes in her meticulously researched ''Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction,'' sex toys have had an interesting commercial history in the United States, often finding their way into the marketplace under unusual guises. During the late 19th century, doctors used vibrators powered by foot pedal, steam and (eventually) electricity to treat their female patients for hysteria and other nervous disorders. Sears and other mail-order catalogs sold dozens of varieties under the heading ''Home Appliances''; advertisements claimed they boosted ''health, vigor and beauty.'' In the 60's and 70's, Maines says, some of the same women who sold makeup and kitchen goods in people's homes sometimes brought along sex toys and lingerie -- not in the name of health but of marriage -- hoping to spice up the medicine chests as well as the kitchen cabinets of their married customers.

To some extent, Passion Parties follows in this particular commercial tradition. Party-planned selling has long been popular in the South, and Brewer can rattle off tons of companies with local representatives (''Tahitian Noni Juice, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, Mary Kay, Avon, Southern Living at Home, PartyLite, Herbalife . . . ''); Amway, the most obvious example, doesn't even make her list of the Top 10. According to the Direct Selling Association, the South dominates the direct-sales market at 36 percent, compared with the next-largest region, the West, at 26. Passion Parties' main competitor, Pure Romance, also does a solid business in the South.

''There's a real affinity between the organization of community life in the South and direct selling,'' said Nicole Woolsey Biggart, author of ''Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America'' and dean of the school of management at the University of California at Davis. ''It's based on people coming together -- there's a blur between work and home, work and church. Life is more holistic.'' Biggart also noted that direct selling, because it happens in the home, is an unintimidating way for women to earn extra income, an idea that might suit more traditional parts of the country. ''The gender divisions,'' Biggart said, ''are very much intact.''

That may be so. But in their own way, Passion Parties and its competitors grew out of the women's movement too. They have given women without higher educations a shot at financial independence -- Brewer earns a six-figure income -- and they serve as a form of continuing sex ed for women who might have grown up in too stultifying an environment (or, indeed, the wrong generation) to learn about their bodies. As Davis, who was born in Memphis and grew up in Arkansas, explained, ''Many of these women don't have anywhere else to go to learn.'' Nor, she added, did many of her rural customers have any place to buy these products. ''They're in the back of a truck stop,'' she sighed. ''Would you go and ask a big, burly guy in the back of a truck stop where your G-spot is?''

On our second evening together, as we sat in a comfy double-wide mobile home in Alexander, population 600, it occurred to me that I had never once heard Brewer use the word ''masturbate'' when describing her wares. I asked why. The hostess, an earthy and attractive brunette named Tuttie Criswell, jumped in with an explanation before Brewer could respond. ''Linda would never say that,'' she said. ''She's so professional.''

Despite her obvious pluck, Brewer still carries with her the residual discomforts and taboos of a certain generation, and this identification with the embarrassment of her clients may in part explain what makes her so effective -- that, of course, and the fact that she is impossible not to like. Brewer says she feels comfortable with bawdy talk, and she has no trouble rubbing moisturizer onto the rear end of a 47-year-old woman in a Chippendale's tank top to show off how the product highlights her tattoo. (In fact, she did exactly this the following night.) But Brewer is also a bit like an actress: deferential, eager to please, even a bit shy once her presentations are over. She won't do parties for couples. (''I didn't like talking in front of guys,'' she explained. ''It's hard enough saying 'vagina' in front of you.'') She prefers not to say the word ''clitoris,'' but rather uses a euphemism: ''the little man in the boat.'' And she has seen only one episode of ''Sex and the City,'' which both thrilled and utterly scandalized her.

''It was the one where Samantha had a gray hair on her . . . pubic . . . ,'' she stammered later that night, as she sat in the local Cracker Barrel, trying to describe it. ''And she was trying to dye it, and she got herself all blistered. It was hilarious, but to talk about your very own private body parts on TV! I couldn't believe it!''

The waitress wandered over. Brewer slipped her a business card: ''Passion Parties by Linda.''

''What's this?''

''We sell fun stuff,'' Brewer said. ''Edible lotions and oils.''

The waitress grinned. ''Nowadays, I tell you, you don't need men.''

''Oh, yes, you do,'' Brewer said. ''To take out the garbage.''

Brewer was born, grew up and still lives in Sheridan, Ark., population 3,800, a town with more than 20 churches, at least 12 of them Baptist, one of them just yards from her home. The median value of a house is lower in Sheridan than the state average, and there seem to be more gas stations there than places to eat dinner, which Brewer pointed out the first time we met. ''What I can tell you about Sheridan,'' she said, ''is that there's nothing to do in Sheridan.''

Brewer eloped with her high-school sweetheart just days before her 16th birthday, never went back for her junior year and had all three of her daughters by 25. At 40, after nearly 25 years of marriage, she divorced her husband, an engineer for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad. (He died shortly after.) ''In 25 years, I might have had maybe two orgasms,'' she said. ''I didn't know better. Where do you get information like that in Sheridan, Ark.? You couldn't turn on the television and get it. There was no HBO. There was nothing. During my marriage, the Vietnam War was the big thing -- they were over there killing babies, and we were over here, trying to raise babies. And you know, that's basically how it was. I slept on the couch. Sex was nothing. I would just walk down the hall, wondering what I could do about it, and burst into tears.''

Roughly a year after her divorce, in a tiny bar about 25 miles from her home, she met Ernest Brewer, who dug water wells for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. For the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to experience sexual satisfaction. That same year, with two of her daughters, she attended a gathering sponsored by a local representative of Fun Parties, a forerunner of Passion Parties, and purchased $180 worth of products. The coincidence of those two events amounted to a huge sexual awakening and fueled, as she put it, ''a mission.'' She borrowed money from one of her sons-in-law to buy a starter selling kit for $1,600, determined to sell those products herself.

In those days, Fun Parties barely trained its sales force. So Brewer read, consulted with other saleswomen and listened to her clients. In large part, she decided, the objective was simply to get women talking.
''I can't tell you how many times I'll go into a party,'' Brewer said, ''and the women will be, like: 'Linda, tell us about our bodies. We just want to know.'''

Not all of Linda's clients crave an education, of course. That first evening in Maumelle, the women were young, college-educated professionals of some kind; for most, the evening was a girls' night out. And on our third night together, Brewer made a presentation in the new home of Wendy Emerson, a 33-year-old real-estate agent who was furious, simply furious, that her old home had been robbed, and that her cache of sex toys were among the stolen goods. ''They took the groceries from my freezer, a rifle, clothes I'd bought that were still in their bags, my jewelry,'' she marveled, as she arranged Triscuits around yet another cheese ball. ''But my toys?''

Yet frequently, Brewer said, she finds herself explaining the basics. ''So many women come to these parties thinking that women are born knowing how to have an orgasm,'' she said. ''You got to learn. I have vibrators where you can learn how to have all three -- with the Kegel muscles, the clitoris, the G-spot. I call that 'catching a cloud.' But your partner has to work with you and hit your hot spots -- you know? And that's what I'm all about. Opening lines of communication. Getting 'em talking.''

She paused. ''Of course, I also tell my ladies that there's a fourth kind of orgasm, too. The fake one.''

Criswell, for one, credits Brewer with a good deal of her sexual education. She was married at a young age; at least three women at her party had their first babies in their teens. ''I didn't know what the cl. . . . I didn't know what the man in the boat was,'' she said. ''I learned it from Linda.''

Did Criswell's mother discuss any of this growing up?

''I was raised Pentecostal. My mom didn't discuss anything.''

And girlfriends?

''My girlfriends talk, but the thing about it is, you don't get into details.''

As we left Criswell's home that night, Brewer heaved a wistful sigh. ''There are times I've really wanted to go back to school,'' she said. ''I hear people speak so eloquent, with all the big vocabulary words, and I feel so inadequate.'' She started the ignition. ''But the thing is,'' she said, ''I'll bet you I know as much as some guy who went to college for seven or eight years. About women and their sensuality, I mean. I might not have the tremendous vocabulary that they have, but I know, in my heart, that I have the same knowledge.''

On our third day together, Brewer took me to lunch at Brew Heaven, a cafe in downtown Sheridan, with her friend Helen Bounds. Curly-haired and apple-cheeked, Bounds is the local owner and manager of Curves, the fitness chain, and a charter member of the Red Hat Club, a group in which all women must, in Brewer's words, wear ''bodacious, audacious, looky-kooky hats.''

''Do you really think anyone around here has ever shunned you?'' she asked Brewer, as the two of them were tucking into sandwiches.

Brewer nodded and named a particular woman in town.

''Oh.'' Bounds paused, then waved her hand in dismissal. ''She's just that way.''

Brewer nodded. ''Well, I can think of another who turns her nose up at what I do.'' Bounds furrowed her brow, then nodded in recognition. ''Course,'' Brewer added, ''she has no problem coming to my house and picking up products for her boss.''

The two women burst into laughter.

To suggest that selling sex toys in the Bible Belt is a recipe for instant-pariah status would be a gross exaggeration. In all communities, no matter how small, no matter how conservative, there are people who strain against convention, and for the last 30 years, evangelicals themselves have extolled the virtues of a strong sexual bond, at least in the context of marriage. In 1976, Tim LaHaye, an author of the Left Behind series, published ''The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love'' with his wife, Beverly, and it has since sold 2.5 million copies; ''Intended for Pleasure,'' by Ed and Gaye Wheat, also made a splash when it made its debut in 1977. (The title also echoes something that Davis, Passion Parties' president, said to me: ''I don't know why everybody is so upset about sex when God put it there for us to enjoy.'') Perhaps the most memorable book of this genre was ''Total Woman,'' the 1973 landmark by Marabel Morgan, which famously recommended that women greet their husbands at the door in a snug casing of Saran Wrap.

Brewer does not exactly conceal her profession in Sheridan. A paper sign on the door of her home says ''Select Lingerie 40% Off'' in bold, red ink; walk inside, and you see that the entire front room has been converted into an outpost of erotic amusements. Two full shelves of edible lotions and lubricants line the walls -- Lickety Lube, Fireworks, Cremesicle -- and nine plastic chests of drawers, stocked with goodies ranging from vibrating bath loofahs to edible underwear, march along the perimeter of the room.

None of this means, however, that Brewer is entirely comfortable selling pulsing orbiters and Nubby G's in her hometown. Sheridan is a place reminiscent of a vanishing America in many ways; in the town square, you can still see stores like Scooter's General Mercantile (''Best Country Store in Town'') and Olga's Fabrics and Fashion (''Where Singer Sewing Products Are Sold''). Brewer spent 20 years here coaching girls' softball and eight years running an athletics store. Her father, a logger, owned one of the gas stations, and her mother still lives in a wood-paneled home just behind it. But until just two months ago, Brewer's mother thought her daughter sold only the products that were plainly visible in her office -- lotions and lingerie. And Brewer, who once had a perfect attendance record in Sunday school, who often evokes God in conversation and whose husband embraced the Baptist faith about a decade ago, hasn't once set foot in church since she began selling sex toys. In fact, on the day Ernest was baptized, she was doing one of her shows in Hot Springs.

''I don't need to go through the church doors every Sunday to know who my higher power is,'' Brewer said. ''If I go now. . . . '' She trailed off. ''I'll go to where these people, who don't want to speak to me, who don't approve of what I do, will feel obligated to speak to me.''

Is she sure about this? Have her peers said anything to her directly? ''It's not what they say,'' she said, hesitating. ''It's what they don't say. Or maybe it's just actions. You know. It's the basketball game, when I go with my granddaughter, and I think people are, like, singling me out. So I try to be low-key. I don't get where we can have situations where I've got to address how people feel about me.''

Brewer may feel some discomfort among her peers, but she has also made converts in town. One preacher sent her struggling couples for advice and products; one of Brewer's friends, Missy Kellebrew, estimates that nearly half the women in her Bible study group have attended a Passion Party. Brewer sees lots of schoolteachers, hairdressers and nurses from her area. And for the last three years, she has held Valentine's Day sales directly out of her home, advertising only through word-of-mouth, e-mail and The Sheridan Headlight, the local weekly. During one season of good weather, she did $22,000 worth of business in a 10-day period. Women came from as far off as Searcy and Lake Village, more than two hours away.

''One night, I did a party in Magnolia,'' Brewer said. ''And Magnolia's like a two, two-and-a-half-hour ride from here. I got there, and two people from Sheridan walked in! And I'm, like, 'What are you doing here?' And they're, like, 'Well, Linda, we never dreamed you'd be down here!''' She shook her head. ''They had driven that far to avoid me!''

There was a moral to that story, she said. ''One of the girls later called me and had a party or two,'' she said. ''If I can get them here that one time, and they can see it's not like they've heard it is. . . . ''

The job has also had untold consequences for Brewer. Fifteen years of modeling vibrators have made her relaxed and confident, a ham she probably would not have been. And before her direct-selling gig, Brewer had been out of state only three times -- once to Oklahoma and twice to Texas. She has since been to San Francisco and Las Vegas and Australia and the Caribbean and Mexico. Though her real goal is Chicago. ''I want to see Oprah so bad,'' she said. ''I just want to see her and touch her and tell her how much she did for the women of America with that show about the silent epidemic'' -- in which it was revealed that 43 percent of all American women experienced some sexual dysfunction, including difficulty achieving an orgasm.

After lunch, we went back to Brewer's house, which sits at the end of a wide, sunny street. Ernest, wearing a Cozumel T-shirt and a baseball cap that said ''World's Greatest Grandpa,'' greeted us at the front door, a green parrot on his shoulder. ''There's my hussy,'' he boomed. He proudly showed me where the drawers of vibrators were hidden, tucked behind a doorway so the grandchildren can't get to them, though the oldest ones know. ''We have a couple of vibrators under the bed too,'' he added. Brewer looked up, mortified, and shoved him. ''You've never met this girl in your life!'' she scolded.

He shrugged and caught her arms. ''Catch a cloud, baby,'' he told her. ''Catch a cloud.''

" I'm sorry if this message ruins your joy"

Don't worry about it. Since I obviously don't concur, how could it ruin anything?

" The Church teaches that it is a sin, the sin of Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins..."

They've been wrong about a lot of other things too. Besides, that's only an interpretation.

"Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.”

Inordinate? Please. It's supposed to be enjoyed. And how in the world can it be "disordered" when you do it correctly? Sorry, yours is an extreme, fundamentalist view. Most of us do not worry over such minutiae.

" The Christian faith has always celebrated human sexuality as another way of glorifying God; to reduce it to a pathetic exercise in mutual masturbation is to dishonor both ourselves and Him."

I do not live every second of my life to glorify God. And how do you know that what I do is "pathetic"? I've always been told I'm pretty damned good...

Seek help. Sex isn't that bad, really.

"The worst thing I've ever been invited to was one of those "memories" workshops where women waste time adding tacky flourishes and sayings to their family photo albums."

To each his own, I guess. I never did a scrapbook party, but always wanted to. I very much enjoy scrapbooking. When my daughter was getting married, one of her friends gave her a lingerie party. That was pretty cool, but I don't think I could see myself at a sex toy party. Oh the body lotions and that sort of thing is okay, but I guess I'm just a little old-fashioned about sex. I like my "toys" attached to a partner.

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