Aaaaaahhh, Those Dirty Words Hit the Spot, but Not for Everybody

Used to be that when Bill Edelstein wanted to put his wife in the mood for an aerobic sexual romp, he’d get funny.

“If you can’t joke and laugh when you are naked, then when can you?” says Edelstein, an editor at Variety.

But was it good for her?

“I told him, ‘You have to stop joking around because it is breaking my mood,’ ” says his wife, Tracey Miller, the throaty-voiced sidekick to Jonathon Brandmeier on KLSX-FM (97.1). “I have never considered myself good at sex talk. Bill says he finds that a turnoff and embarrassing. So I am glad I don’t have to do that.”

But one person’s turnoff is another’s call of the wild. For some people, sex talk, the verbal equivalent of dirty dancing, is sexually irresistible.

“I guess it goes back to the idea of adolescence,” says a 43-year-old West Los Angeles marketing executive, who, like most people contacted on the subject, asked that his name not be used. He thinks it’s because, back then, sex was such a forbidden thing. “It was bad . . . you couldn’t say it and it was everything you couldn’t have . . . and now you can have it. My attitude is the dirtier the talk, the better. ‘Give it to me baby.’ ”

One 34-year-old woman, who is separated from her husband, says the excitement lies “in being a little bit nasty . . . that it is something a proper woman wouldn’t say in public.”

Which is not to say terms of endearment can’t be in the mix.

“It depends on the mood, but it usually starts off with ‘I love you, you look beautiful tonight,’ which is really a turn-on,” says a 28-year-old woman who has been married for six years and has two small children. “Sometimes the talk starts before the sex itself, like when we are out to dinner, I will tell him when I get home I want to do this or that to him. It makes sex fun. It gives some spice to the romance.”

However, if both parties aren’t in sync, disaster can ensue. To imply a desire, or to explicitly state one, is to allow oneself to become vulnerable. And a cold or negative reception can be devastating.

“Once, when we were coming home from a party, I said to my husband, ‘I can’t wait to get you home and rip your clothes off,’ ” says a 44-year-old business executive from San Diego.

“He said, ‘Ick!’ ” She thinks her verbal tease put unwelcome pressure on him to perform later.

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Another woman says she thinks her husband would enjoy explicit sex talk, but she feels “stupid” doing it.

“I haven’t been able to do it,” says the 46-year-old West Los Angeles woman. “It just seems that there are some things that would not be appropriate to say to someone that you share a bathroom with. But I know he would like it. He will say, ‘Tell me how it feels,’ and all I can manage is ‘Yeah.’ ”

That’s exactly the fear that holds people back from even attempting this sort of thing.

Sex talk, says Sandra Scantling, a Farmington, Conn., psychologist and sex therapist, unleashes a delicate brew of anxiety and tension that can either squash sexual arousal or rev it up.

“There is risk involved which can make sex edgy but it can’t be just any kind of sexy talk,” Scantling says. “You know, you probably aren’t going to get aroused by ‘I am approaching ejaculatory inevitability and I feel a certain contraction . . . that is sending signals to the glands of my . . .’ ”

Nauseous maybe, but aroused, no.