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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Using up too much too soon
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[07/24/99]

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[07/23/99]

Urge
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By Chris Colin
[07/23/99]

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A Taoist pimping astrologer offers
a seduction plan to make each sign
your helpless love slave. -

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By Virginia Vitzthum

July 27, 1999 | Marc Hayes made his first astrology-assisted conquest when he was 13. "I had a crush on Tracy O'Donnell, but she wouldn't pay me any attention. Then this friend of mine said, 'Find out her sign.' She was an Aquarius, and my friend told me to ignore her. It worked, and I've been obsessed with astrology ever since," Hayes recounts. "All through high school and college, I studied it, and guys would come to me to find out how to get girls into bed."

Though he now renounces such manipulation of women, he is comfortable selling their bodies. Hayes started Ananda Courtesans escort service in January, in part to study astrological trends among sex workers. He also reads charts and runs a zodiac-based dating service. Like a good drug dealer, Hayes doesn't dabble in his wares. "I have a Mars in Scorpio and that creates a lot of investigative curiosity about sex, but I don't have a sex life of my own. I've moved to a different planetary period since my Saturn return [four years ago]. Now I'm focused more on working and making money."

Virginia Vitzthum Virginia Vitzthum's column appears every other Tuesday in the Urge edition of Health & Body + Archives

I met the smooth-talking Pisces with the shaved head at a birthday party, where he told me he was a Taoist and only practiced tantric, non-orgasmic sex -- before telling me about his escort and astrology businesses. Tall and handsome in a black suit, his not-quite-clean shirt open at the collar, he looked more like a buppie bartender than your typical seed-withholding diviner/pimp. When I asked if I could interview him for my sex column, he scoffed, "Sex columnist? You? What do you know about sex? I bet you're just used to men coming, aren't you?" Confused but undaunted, I took his card and a bright pink flyer advertising "Massages, Escorts, Private Viewings, TwoBody shows, Dominatrix, Outside the Beltway, Roleplays, FireTrix, and Human Buffets." ("FireTrix," Hayes told me during our interview, refers to a Libra who pours butane down her arms and sets her arm hair on fire for the pleasure of her clientele.)

Each sign of the zodiac corresponds with a body part, and Hayes has discovered that most of the female prostitutes he's met were born under signs "concentrated in the lower half of the body, from Virgo [stomach] down to Capricorn [knees] or Aquarius [calves]." Within that group, the most heavily represented are Libras (butt) and Scorpios (sex organs). "Virgos and Capricorns crave security," Hayes explains. "They're in it for the money more than the Scorpios and Libras."

I asked Hayes to take me on a sexual tour through the zodiac, giving advice for would-be seducers and other tidbits he's picked up in his professional careers and as -- before his Saturn return -- a self-described "ho biscuit." One trick that works with women of every sign, he says, is to touch the associated body part (make it seem like an accident if it's a private part). "They like you, and they don't know why," Hayes marvels. "I would touch that part and they'd be calling me up, saying 'Marc, you're an asshole, but I like you for some reason.'"

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