America Unzipped (10 page)

“Does anybody actually buy these?” I ask.

“Oh, sure,” Trista says. “Not many people buy the violet wand because it's so expensive, but some do.” She opens a glass case and takes out a small brown handheld device resembling an electric screwdriver. A glass tube terminating in a pancaked disc juts from the wand's tip. Trista plugs the wand into an outlet, turns it on, and right away we hear a whirring sound. The glass tube glows neon purple. Trista holds it half an inch above her forearm and sparks fly from the glass tube to her skin. She demands we all try it, so we'll know what we're selling, and it feels like being hit with needles of static electricity.

I suspect the violet wand is here mainly for show, to burnish the store's credibility among the BDSM set. I have no way of knowing that before my walkabout through American sex is over, I'll be seeing much more of the violet wand.

When we leave the BDSM dungeon, Trista talks enthusiastically about the porn DVDs, or, as we are trained to call them, “the adult titles.”

“The new titles go here,” she says, resting her hand on a small display shelf at the end of a row of bins stuffed with thousands of them.

“Oh, that's awesome,” Jennifer says, laughing, when she spots one new title. “
The Da Vinci Load
!”

“Okay, over here are the BDSM DVDs. They generally do not have sex in them,” says Trista, who, I am about to learn, has a very restrictive definition of sex. “I did not know that, and then I rented one and was scared out of my mind…Over here, there's squirting. I never knew what squirting was until I started working here,” she says, referring to female ejaculation. “My boyfriend's favorite porn star is Teagan Presley. My favorite porn star is Cytherea because I'm really into squirting and she is, like, the squirting queen! I prefer gonzo and wall-to-wall” DVDs, she says, describing videos free of plots or characterization. “Oh, and I really like Belladonna,” she says, holding up a DVD titled
My Ass Is Haunted.
“These here are oral mainly. They don't have any sex either, or almost no sex, just oral. Foreplay.”

The magazine rack is peppered with titles I've never heard of:
Bizarre, Taboo, Tight, 18-Year-Old Hotties, Just 18, Leg World, Mature, D-Cup.
An entire comic book series revolves around mother–son, grandfather–granddaughter, brother–sister incest. I could spend days reading titles from the book section to learn how to do everything from bukkake to extreme bondage.

During our review of the love dolls, there is some serious discussion about a material called CyberSkin and one known as Futurotic, ultrarealistic, high-tech compounds that are meant to more closely duplicate the feel of real human flesh. Trista removes a CyberSkin product from its box and all five of us reach out to fondle and squeeze the molded ass of porn star Chasey Lain.

“Um,” one of the young women asks, “how do you, um, clean a doll?”

“Well,” Trista explains without hesitating, “a lot of guys do not ejaculate in the hole.”

Some of us aren't so sure. We feel the need for discussion. What strategies should we recommend to any man who says he will indeed be spilling his seed into the rubbery depths? Some of these dolls are pricey, and a guy is going to want more than one lovemaking session for his money. At least this is the general consensus of the class members. The doll will have to be cleaned. We have taken Trista's oath to customer service seriously and we want to provide a good answer to any man who asks.

“Swabs?” suggests Ashley.

“You could squirt it with a hose,” Kyle offers.

We pitch one suggestion after another until Trista finally says, “Like, okay, whatever,” a rhetorical trump card that silences the class. We move on.

The next section contains small missiles of rubber and silicone, most of which Trista describes with some variation of “and this thing goes in your butt.” She holds up a leather harness belt with a steel ring meant to be worn over the pubic bone and demonstrates how one of the large dildos fits through the ring to give the wearer a strap-on penis. “A lot of guys like it when their girlfriends wear 'em.” Trista explains. “They like it in the butt.”

In dongs and dildos, scores of outsized replicas of disconnected penises hang from hooks like hunting trophies. A few of these have porn-star endorsements, too, and when Jennifer sees one molded from a guy named Julian, she recognizes the name right away.

“Oh, he's hot.”

As we walk, Trista exhorts us to keep an eye on the gay and transgendered toys and magazines. Many straight men, or men pretending to be straight, are shy about their interest in homosexuality, to say nothing of being comfortable enough to walk up to a cash register manned by a fresh-faced young woman, so they steal these. Don't pressure anybody. Get a price range, talk about the qualities of each item, listen carefully. Try a compliment. Say, “Wow, I love those shoes. Where'd you get them?” Create a conversation so a customer will relax and realize there is nothing scary or odd or shameful about shopping here. It's all perfectly normal. Everybody does it. Just like a trip to Toys “R” Us.

I
n 1945, at the very end of World War II, Beate Uhse, a twenty-seven-year-old German woman trained as a pilot, fled Berlin in a Luftwaffe plane. She settled in allied occupied territory and the next year reinvented herself as a sex educator and entrepreneur. In 1962 she opened what is thought to be the world's first sex shop, the Institute for Marital Hygiene, a name chosen to deflect accusations of prurient appeal. Dildos, condoms, and educational literature were health aids, therapeutic for people who needed therapy.

The appearance of sex shops took longer in the United States and depended on a confluence of events within the overall sexual revolution. Most important, in 1965 the United States Supreme Court, in
Griswold v. Connecticut,
found that a Connecticut law forbidding the provision of contraceptive information, techniques, or treatment to married couples was unconstitutional. Griswold effectively overturned, at least for married people, the nearly one-hundred-year-old federal Comstock law, named for Anthony Comstock (who, coincidentally, was born in Connecticut), a Christian antiobscenity crusader who believed talk of contraception fomented lust.

The first sex shops were really “adult bookstores” selling skin magazines. Sometimes a headshop would stock cheap vibrators and dildos along with the blacklight posters, roach clips, and bongs. But slowly, court decisions and the growth in numbers and kinds of sex-related products gave potential shop owners both the right to open and the merchandise to sell. In 1970 what is thought to be the first porn movie (aside from stag films) released in the United States,
Mona
(about a virgin who apparently thinks oral sex doesn't count), made a brief appearance, followed by others, most notably porn's first big hit,
Deep Throat,
in 1973. American counterparts to Beate Uhse's store began peppering the landscape, often near new adult movie theaters. But the liberalizing court cases left one regulatory caveat: zoning. Cities were free to regulate stores by ghettoizing them into low-rent parts of towns. Sex shop owners responded by living down to the reputation. They played up sleaze and skipped any effort to appeal to customers with niceties like decor or service. Sex sold itself. What more did anybody need? All you had to do was throw up a few purple lights, paint the windows black, hang the goods from the wall, and charge three times what the stuff was worth.

Feminism changed the paradigm. In 1973, about the time the fundamentalist Christian community was trying to come to terms with the sexual revolution, Betty Dodson, who had earlier mounted exhibitions of erotic art, founded women's sexual consciousness-raising groups where attendees were invited to admire their own genitals. In 1974 she self-published a book called
Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self-Love.
That same year, Dodson acolyte Dell Williams opened a shop called Eve's Garden in New York.

In 1975 Joani Blank, a thirty-seven-year-old San Francisco activist and sex therapist, founded a publishing company, Down There Press, to publish a book she wrote called
The Playbook for Women About Sex.
The male version followed the next year, and in 1977 Blank opened a tiny retail store in the city's Mission District called Good Vibrations. The idea of the store was to give women an alternative to unsavory sex shops and to provide them with reliable information about sex and sexual pleasure. Sales gradually expanded and the store opened two more branches, another one in San Francisco and one across the bay in Berkeley.

Blank, who was more missionary and activist than businesswoman, wanted to spread the word that bright, clean sex shops with friendly, knowledgeable staff could fill an important need in the lives of women and, by extension, the men and other women—there has always been a strong lesbian component to the Good Vibrations story—who loved them. So she started an apprenticeship program for would-be store owners. Two women, Kim Airs from Boston and Claire Cavanah from Seattle, enrolled. Cavanah subsequently founded the Seattle version of Good Vibrations, Toys in Babeland (now, simply Babeland).

Kim Airs, a former administrative assistant and lab manager at Harvard University who once worked as a high-end escort at night and was an enthusiastic sexual experimenter, had long been frustrated that the only way she could obtain sex toys was by venturing into Boston's infamous Combat Zone. She wasn't ashamed of sex, wasn't embarrassed by sex, and didn't see why she had to take a risk to buy a sex toy. Upon leaving the Good Vibrations program, Kim tried to find space in Boston and in Cambridge for a store of her own, but rents were too high in safe areas, or landlords refused her because of the nature of the business. Finally, she found space in nearby Brookline and opened her own shop, Grand Opening! in 1993. She was thirty-five.

Now sex shops have gone completely mainstream. Phil Harvey's Adam and Eve outfit has been franchising stores all over the country, with about twenty-five stores so far. They look a lot like Fascinations—boxy and brightly lit. Larry Flynt's Hustler Hollywood stores have opened a dozen branches. Priscilla's, another big-box chain with dozens of stores, has spread beyond its Kansas City base to much of the rest of the Midwest and all the way to Las Vegas. When a few Penthouse Boutiques opened on the East Coast, complete with marble floors and chandeliers, some town fathers objected, but the less predictable reaction came from denizens of the old-style dank. They compared the new stores to Starbucks. All the character, they complained, was being washed out of sin. Sex was being homogenized.

 

P
eople do not feel much like buying penis-shaped drinking straws before lunch on a Wednesday. I started my first full shift half an hour ago and haven't had a customer yet, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed the trend continues. If the place gets busy, somebody might actually need help, and I'll be alone and unaided, adrift in an eleven-thousand-square-foot sea of sex. Here I am in my maroon polo shirt, my name tag hanging down my chest, looking the part. Yet I am practically hiding behind a row of phallic candles. The whole idea of a modern adult superstore is to seduce new consumers by presenting a friendly face and using words like
romance.
These big stores are repackaging sex, trying to sell it with a smile and a fine “Howdy-ho, neighbor!” Most of the products are exactly the same as those in the old, dark sex shops, even if there are more of them and more variety. But the lights are bright, the store is immaculately clean, and we romance consultants are peppy and bright-eyed in our uniforms. Well, everybody else is. I'm having trouble getting into the spirit and I'm not sure why. Moral guilt? No. I don't feel any moral guilt. I don't think I'm harming Mr. de Santiago's children.

Still, I'm uncomfortable and a little ashamed of being uncomfortable. To tell you the truth, I just don't want to have the conversations I am anticipating. Sex shops have always represented sad statements of failure to me. A man can't attract a woman, so he buys a love doll or three hours of other people fucking so he can stroke his way to some impoverished version of satisfaction like Garp's poor wrestling coach. “You wanker!” “You jerk-off!” That's how we used to insult each other. You weak, pathetic symbol of withered manhood—Lord Baden-Powell's nightmare vision of the chronic masturbator come to life. And a woman? Well, she hasn't got a man, so she buys an imitation of a man and hides it in her lingerie drawer for lonely nights after the Rocky Road is eaten and the sad movie has ended. “I think someone in this house should be having sex with something that doesn't require batteries,” the wayward daughter says to the defeated single mother in Ron Howard's movie
Parenthood.
Or she's got a lump of a man, a man she sees across the couch and secretly despises for his failures, and turns to her vibrator, bought under cover of night in a furtive dash into a sex shop, for escape.