A couple of different schools of thought emerged in this thread about training. One was that just about anybody could learn to be a decent PSO, if they had proper training. The other camp basically believe in survival of the fittest; throw your candidates into the deep end of this really scary, dank pond, they say, and see who resurfaces.

It sounds harsh, but I’m starting to appreciate the sink-or-swim approach. I mean, look at the skill set needed for PSO work: outgoing, talkative, mentally flexible, sexually open, unflappable. It’s not even a skill set, is it? It’s a personality profile, emerging from life experience in a way that is difficult to trace and impossible to replicate. Like morel mushrooms or edible acorns, they show up where they show up. You can’t grow them, you just appreciate them when you find them.

So actually, I don’t know how to raise a PSO. (That’s just as well; I don’t think there’s a lot of call for that parenting manual.) But the folks who would try to train people for the lines, their “training packets” are not helpful, either…. “Be yourself.” “Follow their lead.” “Keep ‘em talking.” How? HOW?? If the rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of conversation with strangers doesn’t come naturally to you already, it sure as shit isn’t going to suddenly happen when you’re talking about shoving a dirty dildo into someone’s mouth.

The truth is, every decent-to-good PSO needs those traits, but we all get there in different ways. Me? I got my go-get-’em chops and assertive voice from being raised in a big family, doing activism, living through a sequence of unlikely personal choices that blew the doors off my sexuality. Someone else might come to it after a lonely childhood, two marriages, and four years of telesales. There’s no pattern to it, no sequence of learnings that can be recorded and slipped into a training module.

So we stumble into the deep end, all of us newbies, and some of us, somehow, get our heads above water and breathe. It’s a messy way to recruit, but it might be the only way.

(sung to the tune of Big Rock Candy Mountains, which you can hear versions of all over, in O Brother, Where Art Thou, and also in kids’ radio programming sometimes)

Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the girls all shave their bushes and you eat out every night
Where the glory holes are open and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the testicle trees
Where the urine streams, where the dildo reams
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains all the cocks are hard all day
And the dogs are always willing and the boys all like to play
And every drawer is brimming with piles of lingerie.
Oh, I’m bound to come, gonna get me some
where the beds will shake and vibrators hum
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains you never change the sheets
And the little streams of pussy juice leave white spots on the seats.
The choirboys go commando and the priests don’t seem to mind.
There’s a lake of poo and other goo
If you step in that, I’ll lick your shoe
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

In the Big Cock Candy Mountains the floors are always clean
So if that horny mood should hit, you can drop and start your scene
The men are long and tall here, ev’ry girl a sex machine
I’m a-gonna to stay where you fuck all day
Where the cream and honey just flow that way
In the Big Cock Candy Mountains

(tip of the battered hat to Harry McClintock)