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Zivity, the adult social networking site that made history last week as the first such site to receive notoriously conservative Silicon Valley funding, is the brainchild of Cyan Banister, 30, a tech executive unafraid of wielding the power of female sexuality in concert with Web 2.0 tools to create a 21st century pin-up girl that you chat with.

The site will feature pin-up and erotica photography of nude and clothed female models who come from diverse backgrounds. Some of the Zivity Sweethearts, as they are called, have modeling experience but many do not.

And the draw for everyday women -- teachers, lawyers, bartenders, tech execs --  to disrobe for the masses?

"They love expressing themselves and Zivity is a great place and a positive place to do it," Banister said. (As part of her informal research, Banister posted an informal poll on Facebook which asked 1,000 women if they'd ever taken nude pictures of themselves and posted them to the Internet. Ten percent said they had.)

The site will publicly launch near Valentine's Day. The event will be a culmination of strategy that was hammered out over the past year. Banister is a former senior manager at IronPort, the email security company that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million this year. She is Zivity's chief strategy officer.  

"Everything about our site when we launch needs to be just right," she said. "It is really important to us from a marking and branding perspective that we nail that."

Zivity announced a $1 million first round of funding from private investors last week. A few of the San Francisco start-up's investors will likely come forward within a month or so, Banister said.

But is Silicon Valley truly ready to embrace sex?

"I think our timing couldn't be better," she said. "If we had done this five years ago we would have failed."

Thanks to the publicity, the number of VCs at Zivity's table has increased. Banister called it "pretty incredible" that partners at VC firms are considering investing in a site with nude content.

"Maybe America is ready for it," she said. "The line is constantly moving, we are becoming more accepting and more tolerant of the expression of sexuality."

For the record, Banister is neither denying or confirming rumors that Zivity is funded by PayPal executives. The site is not solely funded by her husband and Zivity co-founder Scott Banister, (who co-founded IronPort in 2000) as some have guessed, but has at least 10 investors. The company will likely close a bridge round in the next two months and is currently strategizing to have a Series B in place by January.

Banister tossed the idea of Zivity around for about a decade. Her first inspiration was the website nerve.com, an online sex magazine that is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. She found she wanted more information about the hot people in the photos. Who were they? What was their profession? What if you could not just look, but connect with the people in the photos? Enter in Web 2.0, social networking and user generated content and Zivity was born.

Besides its Silicon Valley investors and founding team, what makes Zivity most interesting is its revenue sharing model that rewards those that provide the content and its determination to be a social networking site centered on skin that is not pornographic.

First, unlike many start-ups that are funded without a clear plan to monetization, Zivity has a clear revenue stream.

For $10 a month, subscribers will have access to the site's nude content and have the opportunity to vote for and leave comments for the women featured in the photos. Each subscriber receives 5 votes a month, with each vote worth a dollar. The model and photographer split 80 cents, with the model receiving 60 cents. Subscribers can purchase more votes for a $1 each.  

Photographers that become elite Zivity photographers may negotiate their split with the models.

By compensating the models and photographers, Zivity hopes to attract and keep top talent, ensuring the quality of the site. The company plans to invest in the top photographers and models by giving them supporting photo shoots among other perks.

"I started noticing this trend with member generated content that people are a little upset, that they put all this effort to make this site incredibly successful and didn't receive a dime," Banister said.

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