"Often, when a woman is about to ejaculate, you'll hear a particular sound as you work her G spot." BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THE MOST IMPRESSIVE PART of Tristan Taormino's New York City book party (held at Don Hill's, a hip Tribeca bar) celebrating the publication of her latest sex manual, Pucker Up: A Hands-On Guide to Ecstatic Sex (Regan Books), was not the booth in which women could have Claire Cavanah, the owner of Toys in Babeland, Manhattan's most forward-thinking sex shop, insert her experienced hand into their vagina and locate their G spot while an appreciative audience looked on. No, the most impressive aspect of the party, at least from a commercial perspective, was the table on which the author herself perched, clad in a drop-dead-gorgeous evening gown, to hawk her ever-expanding line of sex toys, books, and videos.

Her wares included not just autographed copies of Pucker Up, but also her sex-ed/porn videos, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex and the newly released (and raunchier) The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex, Part 2; "The Tristan" butt plug, available in black, blue, camo, green, pink, purple, or red; and even Pucker Up beverage cozies. "If you buy $50 worth of stuff, you get one," Tristan told me--referring, unfortunately, to the cozies rather than the pricier butt plugs.

Ms. Taormino and a coterie of other enterprising young women constitute a rather new and flourishing phenomenon: a sex-girl mafia. Among these women is Ducky DooLittle, the sexologist who was at the Pucker Up party manning her own booth devoted to introducing the public, or at least that portion of it on the guest list, to the joys of anal sex. "She is the anal-sex expert," Ducky acknowledges of Tristan, "but I know an awful lot."

Through a combination of chutzpah, creativity, civic duty, a passion for getting their pussies and asses licked--and doing the same for others, often in public--and most of all an unremitting capacity for hard work, these ladies are landing book deals, starring in their own sex-education videos (with decidedly greater emphasis on the sex than the education), embarking on sold-out lecture tours, lending their names to sex toys, and serving as all-purpose cultural icons. And they appear to be making a decent living doing so.

"I call myself a sexual field scientist," explains the alluring Ducky, who, at five feet tall and 150 pounds, isn't just redefining what it means to be a sex expert, but also a sex object. "When people ask me what makes me an expert in my field, I say, 'Do you want to learn about it from a guy who writes a book or [from] a woman who went out and fucked that thing?' " How can you argue with that?

"In college I couldn't have imagined this career," admits Tristan, who attended tony Wesleyan University in Connecticut. "It still wasn't possible. People say, 'When I grow up I want to be Lee Iacocca or Bill Gates.' There weren't a lot of people making a living off being a sex expert."

Ducky's career trajectory was even more unlikely than Tristan's. An orphan and high school dropout, Ducky moved to New York from Minnesota at 18 and supported herself dancing at peep shows and working as a machinist at a printing company. What set her apart from other hard-luck cases was her relentless drive, unwarranted optimism, and dirty mind. "I had an anonymous pen pal," she recalls. "We used to share erotic stories. I'd write part of the story, he'd write part of the story. To this day I don't know his name. That's how I started writing erotica."

Ducky showed some stories to her friends on the job, who encouraged her to publish them. She worked at a printing company, after all. "I started publishing zines, little erotic storybooks," she says. They featured large helpings of bondage and sadomasochism, which Ducky attributes to an overactive imagination, not personal experience. The zines sold so well across the country that she developed a cult following and was asked to give a reading at an East Village nightclub. "I was so shy, I was working the midnight shift so I wouldn't have to talk to people," she recalls. "I didn't realize it, but the place had sold out because of me. I got onstage and was insanely nervous. But they went nuts for me. That instant gratification was the beginning of my new self-esteem."

It would be inaccurate these days to call Ducky shy (she and her punk-rocker boyfriend are scheduled to appear soon in a women's magazine discussing the size and shape of his prick--"It's large and curved, which means he has the perfect G-spot penis," Ducky observes).

One of her most informative lectures, delivered in a white lab coat, involves animals and insects and what their sex lives can teach us about our own sexuality. "It decriminalizes human sexual behavior," Ducky explains. "So we like to sniff asses. Big deal!"

Ducky also performs comedy, sometime getting onstage in a sexy clown outfit and performing burlesque-style shows. As the aptly named Knockers The Klown (Ducky's are 36DDs), she can't stop herself from doing things like sitting on cakes and having the frosting work its way into her bodily crevices. It was a Knockers gig that brought her to the attention of the brain trust over at The Howard Stern Show a few years ago. "They wanted me to come over and spank Howard on the ass with a rubber chicken," Ducky says.

The Stern appearance jump-started Ducky's Website, DuckyDooLittle.com. "I'd do The Howard Stern Show and have 200,000 people visit my site," she says. "I sort of harnessed that energy." Rather than turn the site into an online ego trip, Ducky shrewdly asked visitors what they wanted and gave it to them, creating a money-making venture. "They wanted a Duckycam," she says. "They wanted message boards and polls and pie charts." The Duckycam is more The Truman Show than striptease. "You can watch me sleep at night, or looking for clothes after taking a shower. Sometimes dirty things happen, but it's more by accident. I'm much more pinup than porno.

"I get a lot of foot fetishists and panty fetishists," she says. "I've become known for being nonjudgmental. The majority of these kinds of fetishists are submissive men. They have a tendency to worship women, which I really like."

She also has many fans who are female. "I'd go on the road and do shows at comedy clubs, look out in the audience, and see that 50 percent of [the audience was] female," she says. "Women would come up and kiss my hand or kiss my feet and tell me that by being a sexy woman at 150 pounds and five feet, I was inspiring to them."

Ducky is currently negotiating her own sex-book contract. And while she refuses to divulge the work's contents, the word is that it involves not just the birds and bees but also snails, salamanders, and marsupials!

Perhaps the greatest difference between Tristan and Ducky (besides the fact that the former is tall and gay and the latter is short and primarily straight) is that while Ducky admits to being rather reverent when it comes to her own sex life, Tristan is an unrepentant exhibitionist. She's never met a camera she didn't like.

Neither Tristan nor Ducky feels herself in competition with the other. "There's such a need for sex education in America," Ducky says. "Tristan and I are good friends. We ping-pong off each other. If one of us gets a writing job and is not able to do it, we give it to the other one."

"I feel very strongly cooperative," Tristan says. "The main thing is, there's plenty to go around. When a new sex book comes out I'm not like, 'It's going to cut into my sales.' Most people want to buy multiple books on sex. I feel in coalition with other people like me."