America Unzipped (11 page)

This is silly. These scenarios are not true, at least not always. Many happy couples enjoy using sex toys, watching porn, and playing dress-up. And why should anyone feel shame if they aren't part of a happy couple? They shouldn't, of course. Everyone is entitled to a little blissful release. Buying a dildo or a love doll ought to be easier, not tougher. But I am unable to fully divorce this rational thought from decades of perception that a sex shop represents failure. Despite the nearly oppressive effort to pretend selling sex is exactly like selling Frisbees or decorator sinks or night repair antiwrinkle cream, and that the salve for whatever need is bringing customers into the store is to be found on these aisles, that we are performing a valuable public service, I think what has me spooked, so unexpectedly spooked, is participating however peripherally in someone else's embarrassment.

On the other hand, it could be I'm just making excuses for being a ninny. Either way, I don't feel like a “romance consultant.” So I am hunched over and wary, pretending to read a candle label as the day's first customer walks through the door.

She is a sturdy woman with brown hair and a confident ease. Her name, I am about to learn, is Jennifer and she is twenty-eight. Two others have come with her, a man and a woman. I gather they are married. The three of them wander around the store, smiling, mostly at the merchandise. They make a stop at the Love Bar, the long wall of vibrators and the equally long, clear display shelf on which demonstration models are placed like small vases on plastic platforms. Typically, you can't handle the vibrators in a sex store, but these days the big stores have them displayed and battery equipped so you know exactly what each one offers.

Jennifer requests in a firm, assertive voice that I join her at the Love Bar. She wants some help. I look up, manage a thin smile, and join the trio. The wife is holding a vibrator shaped like a penis straddled by a rabbit. Trista informed us in training that these are “personality” vibes. Some have dolphins, some butterflies, and some, like this lepus version of Strangelovian Slim Pickens, have rabbits.

“Is this the one from
Sex and the City
?” the wife asks me.

I know this! This is a question I can answer because Trista, bless her, talked about it. “A lot of women will come in and say, ‘I want the toy Charlotte had,'” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. It's huge. Everybody wants the
Sex and the City
vibrator.”

 

I
n the context of the Jimmy Choo shoes, the Fendi handbags, the Cosmopolitan-drenched lunches,
Sex and the City
turned sex toys from a feminist statement, or a cause for embarrassment, into aspirational objects.

Marty Tucker, founder of Topco Sales, one of the world's largest sex toy manufacturers, couldn't be happier about it. Back in 1969, Marty was working for McDonnell Douglas as a metallurgical engineer and dreaming of rocket science. “I wanted to be Marty von Braun,” he told me when I visited with him. But once America reached the moon, winning the space race declared by John F. Kennedy, the big increases in funding that characterized NASA's budgets through the 1960s began to slow. Marty realized that working for a contractor like McDonnell Douglas might mean improving on the last generation of rockets, but that there probably would not be any great leaps for a while. He was ambitious and eager and unwilling to wait. So Marty bought himself a small manufacturing company that made rubber creatures like snakes. Disney was an early customer.

In 1973, after he invested some money with a friend in the entertainment licensing business, he branched out to create rubber toys based on TV, movie, and comic-book characters. He also made a few dildos; the technology wasn't any different, really, and, he recalled, sex toys were “a good way to go to make money.”

A few manufacturers were already in the sex toy market. But when the VCR entered homes in the late 1970s, and brought porn with it, companies began making sex toys on an industrial scale. Marty Tucker's Topco Sales, now headquartered in a huge building near the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Chatsworth, California, was one early pioneer in this industrialization of sex. He created sex toys like a cock ring designed to prevent male premature ejaculation, and a latex-sheathed vibrator with soft foam inside to make it seem more like an actual penis instead of a hard plastic stick of dynamite.

Though he had not intended to become a sex toy titan, the business was impossible to resist. The profit margins were huge. You could import components (or the whole toy) from Asia, use unskilled labor here to assemble them, and for a few cents make a vibrator you could wholesale for $10 and sell at retail for $20.

Quality was irrelevant because customers would buy whatever they could get. “You just knocked them out however you could,” Marty told me. Most sex toys were junk. To avoid scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration and other governmental agencies like state antiobscenity squads, manufacturers couldn't say that a vibrating dildo was meant to give a woman an orgasm; they had to call it a “novelty,” meaning that it isn't really supposed to be used for anything. Wink, wink. Heck, down in the Bible Belt, Marty said, they used to call dildos and vibrators “cake toppers” and sell them as novelty cake decorations. So there was no higher authority to field consumer complaints—in the unlikely event somebody would fess up to needing a sex toy and actually make one—than the unshaven lout behind the dimly lit counter at Midnight Blue Adult Books.

By 1977 Marty Tucker was getting rich. Unbeknownst to him, one of the licensing deals he had bought into was for a comic-book character he had never heard of, the Incredible Hulk. CBS had just launched a TV series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno as the two versions of the title character, and Marty found himself selling thousands of rubbery Hulk dolls to stores like Kmart and increasing numbers of sex toys to mom-and-pop sex shops.

In the thirty years since, five companies (Topco, Doc Johnson, Nasstoys, Pipedream Products, and California Exotic Novelties), all American, have dominated the worldwide sex toy market, though this is beginning to change. All five are privately held, and accurate sales or profit figures are virtually impossible to obtain. Estimates of annual sales vary wildly, from about $1.5 billion to $5 billion. (One big five CEO, Nick Orlandino of Pipedream Products, an erstwhile maker of dope paraphernalia, said he expected $120 million worth of retail sales for his goods in 2006 and that the company's sales had been growing 40 to 60 percent per year until about 2004, when new entrepreneurs, inspired by
Sex and the City,
realized just how much money there was in orgasms and began glutting the market. “Growth is explosive. We were rated one of the fastest growing companies in L.A. County [by the
Los Angeles Business Journal
]. We were up there with Trader Joe's and the Cheesecake Factory, you know?”) Whatever the number is, suffice to say it's a lot of money and Topco is generally considered one of the two biggest, partly because it sells products to companies outside the sex industry. It makes a small piece for Microsoft's Xbox, for example.

Marty was sixty-seven years old when we met. He's short, slender, and fit looking, and on that day he dressed in a black rugby shirt and khaki pants. Glasses were one of the few concessions to his age, though he was a little discombobulated, having spent the day before flying back from China, where he has a home near Topco's Chinese manufacturing facility in Shenzhen. There he employs fifteen hundred people in a corporate campus of several buildings. (About five hundred people work in Chatsworth.)

Marty had the bearing of a man who enjoys life, and why not? He was married to a younger Chinese woman, and the sex business, he said, “is a really fun industry.” He was never embarrassed about it. When his daughter was five years old, a little boy asked what her father did. “My daddy makes souvenir weenies,” she answered.

“We never pushed it in their faces, but if a product was on the kitchen table we didn't try to hide it. I have a five-year-old nephew, Chris. We made an adorable product, a picture of a woman with cleavage for a computer mouse pad. It has two bumps in the shape of breasts and with our four-color printing they look like breasts. You rest your arm in her cleavage, right? Well, Chris puts his hand in there and smiles the biggest smile. It's instinct.”

Topco hasn't even had any legal troubles, he told me. The closest call in all these years wasn't about a sex toy. A woman's cat ate part of an Incredible Hulk figure and the cat died. She threatened to sue.

Still, Topco's chief chemist, the Technical Director of Drugs and Cosmetics, told me that the company is harassed by the federal government. “We have had over fifteen visits from them for plant conditions, manufacturing conditions. But I don't lose,” he said defiantly. “Not to the government. FDA, DEA, FBI, immigration—they all have a file on us.”

I asked him how a chemist comes to be the technical director of drugs and cosmetics for a sex toy maker and he said he was hired away from a contract pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturer that serviced big-name labels like Estée Lauder. Topco wanted a drug license because it manufactures sexual lubricants and products like penis desensitizers that have to be registered with the FDA, and it wanted to make a pubic hair shave lotion. If it was going to expand, it needed somebody familiar with good manufacturing practices in the cosmetics industry.

His parents thought his new job “was funny as hell.” And despite holding a divinity degree from the University of Northern Iowa, and having once considered becoming a Lutheran minister before going to graduate school, and still attending church regularly, he didn't regard working in the adult industry any different from working for any other contract lab. This job had some extra perks, too, like free sex toys and company orders to test out all the new products. “We have a lot of enthusiastic people here!” he said.

Topco takes pains to seem like any other industrial outfit, and maybe it is. Topco's holding company, Vast Resources, Inc., sounds like an oil driller or a gold-mining company. Basic Solutions, Inc., the mainstream side of the cosmetics and health products business, has goods on the shelves of major retailers all over the country. Sure, the chemist told me, they tried to keep a wall between Basic Solutions, maker of Nature's Dew feminine lubrication, and Topco, manufacturer of the Carmen Luvana Doggy Style Cyberskin Vibrating Pussy & Ass. But let's face it, that wall is more and more like a screen because “the adult field is really coming into its own.” Johnson & Johnson is in the adult industry now. It makes a warming “massage” lotion that's really a stimulating sex lube and is advertised on TV. Basic Solutions makes a private-label sex lube that's in the second-largest drugstore chain in the country. Women have created a great boom in the whole industry. They watched
Sex and the City
and they wanted products and not just the crummy junk. They want quality now. In the old days, he said, “the guy in the raincoat was buying it,” so quality was irrelevant, but no more.

The market is about high performance. Women demand “a longer ride with a sweeter slide, and we can give it to them.”

Thirty-six-year-old Justina Walford, the director of public relations for Topco, took me on a tour of the plant and offices. When I told her I suspected the hyperrealistic porn-star genitals sold in stores were just created out of some guy's imagination with the help of a computer design program, she laughed and walked me into a closet-sized room adjacent to the factory. A large massage table and equipment used to take molds sat on the floor. The wall was decorated with photographs of Aimee Sweet, one of Topco's endorsers, kneeling on the table with her butt in the air while several artists slathered a gooey compound on her rear and vulva. In another series, she is sitting on the table while the guys smooth the stuff over her breasts. These molds were used to re-create Aimee Sweet's assets, which were then used by thousands of men all over the world. I reckoned that if I were Aimee Sweet this would be a very heady thing.

In the factory, a few dozen workers, mostly Hispanic immigrants, mostly women, tore into boxes from China and removed one giant penis after another and dozens of leather “slappers” used for spanking. As they gossiped in Spanish, or listened to bouncy ranchera music playing through headphones attached to CD players, they cleaned each one, packaged it in individual plastic cases, and reboxed it for shipment to distributers.

The art department reflected the industry's realization that women increasingly control the sex toy business. Graphic designers working on computers were creating new package labeling for a line called Grrl Toyz, a play for the generation influenced by hip-hop, “riot grrl” rock, and female athletes. Previously, much of the packaging was supposed to appeal to men, with photographs of naked models, often with their legs spread wide, even if the toy, like a vibrator, was meant for women. Now the men and women in the art department were drawing cartoon women who were thin, attractive, and dressed as in-charge go-getters. The toys themselves were pink and blue and orange.

“We are trying to tone down the language, too,” Justina said. “Among younger people this is all totally normal. Hey, for my generation, a third date in a sex shop is not all that unusual.”

The next day I visited the Adult Novelty Expo trade show sponsored by the industry trade publication
Adult Video News
at the Sheraton Universal Hotel adjacent to the Universal Studios lot. There were 136 exhibitors selling everything from PVC bedsheets to audio CDs telling sexy bedtime stories. Hundreds of store buyers milled through the booths looking for new merchandise. Topco's display was movie studio worthy, an enormous operational retro soda fountain with a guy making sodas and malts and Topco CEO Scott Tucker, Marty's son, chatting up a rush of retailers. Most of the merchandise on display was gleeful, celebratory, with rite-of-passage names evoking big-girl bicycles and training bras. One popular toy was called My First Butt Plug.