America Unzipped (19 page)

The company was started by an industrial designer named Ethan Imboden. As company legend has it, Imboden attended a dinner party with chic friends in San Francisco who moaned about tacky vibrators. They were so pedestrian and inelegant. Sure, maybe it was cool to have a rabbit vibe during the
Sex and the City
era, but now somebody ought to bring some real sophistication to sex with a stylish, quality product. Just as Pat Davis realized a new market was ripe for exploiting, Imboden realized a market represented by his friends was ripe for upgrading. Since he had done design work for clients like Herman Miller, Nike, and Motorola, he knew this was a market he could supply.

Shannon McClenaghan, the president of JimmyJane, handed me the signature product. At first I thought it was a tube for a nice Cuban panatela. It was plated in gold, and the motor was removable, so when you sent your bags through X-ray for that trip to Heathrow, security wouldn't ask you any embarrassing questions about a hollow tube. It costs $350. Other models were made of stainless steel or platinum plate ($460).

To be sure JimmyJane's vibrators got to the right people, Imboden attracted a team from far outside the sex industry. They were mostly people whose radar had been finely tuned to find the next big cultural thing, and sex, they knew, was it. Shannon was a San Francisco attorney who had worked on consumer projects for Apple and Home Depot. The VP of sales had worked for Barney's, the chichi New York department store. Another came from the Whitney Museum.

The line launched in 2005 and the design world, the self-consciously hip, peed themselves with excitement. Editorial features ran in
W, Elle, Nylon, Esquire, GQ, Arena, Marie Claire.
The vibes were included in the schwag bags for attendees at the Golden Globe movie and TV awards show. Kate Moss was seen buying the gold version in New York. In no time, you could buy JimmyJane vibrators at ultracool temples of consumerism like Fred Segal in Beverly Hills, the gift shop of the Delano Hotel in Miami, Harvey Nichols in London. Sonia Rykiel in Paris and Henri Bendel in New York snapped them up, too. JimmyJane vibrators were immortalized in sculpture at Miami ArtBasel, the international modern art week for the jet set. Chrome Hearts, the jewelry and accessories brand made famous by the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, and Karl Lagerfeld, offered JimmyJane vibrators at their pricey stores. JimmyJane even attracted Silicon Valley venture capital. They didn't want it advertised, but Tim Draper, the founder and managing partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, funder of Hotmail, Baidu, and Skype, and Phil Schlein, a VC who spent eleven years as the president and CEO of Macy's California, became JimmyJane backers. JimmyJane succeeded in adding glamour gloss to masturbation, the ultimate lowbrow pursuit.

Walking around the Adult Novelty Expo with Kim, I began to believe the lock the big-five makers once had on the adult industry was being quickly eroded. It wasn't just the JimmyJane people—there were dozens of agile, small-time sex entrepreneurs creating any number of products from sex furniture to Web-based dildos made to be operated remotely by somebody at the other end of a computer. The big five had thrived in the days when America was undercover about sex, but if committed Southern Baptists were shopping for Tasty Tease, those days were gone. People weren't shy anymore. You no longer needed a mafia connection to move a product into a town, you needed an Internet connection. Phil Harvey was right about the adult industry being just another part of corporate America, and the fate of individual companies would now be driven by the same rules that govern Starbucks and Microsoft and Delta Airlines.

As I exited the expo, I passed the Nasstoys novelties booth. Nasstoys is one of the old big-five makers, but I hadn't visited the display, so I paused briefly to see if I had missed anything. I hadn't. Its products looked like all the other mass manufacturers' stuff. (In an incestuous circle, some of the companies make products for the others so the real difference between them is often just packaging.) As I turned to leave, I heard a British accent say, “Can I help you with anything?”

The voice belonged to a woman with startlingly blond hair. Her breasts projected from her chest like huge sea buoys and her tight, white minidress was woefully inadequate to the job of containing them. Her lips were puffy as overstuffed kielbasas. She stood at about my eye level, but then I looked at her feet—it took me a moment to work my way down there—and I saw she was wearing clear, plastic platform shoes of such altitude I guessed her true height to be five feet. Once I recovered from taking all this in, I realized she was wearing heavy makeup. Underneath it, she was about forty.

“I'm Taylor Wane,” she said. Taylor Wane is a porn icon, the inspiration for millions of men to take penis in hand. Since 1989, not long after porn first went mainstream with a VCR in every home, she has made over 350 videos. She has her own production company now and a deal with Nasstoys for a signature line. Among other toys, she was at the expo to introduce the Taylor Wane Assturbator Starter Kit (available in lavender or red). “Would you like an autograph?”

“Sure,” I said, to be polite. Honest.

Taylor walked around from inside the booth and stood in front of me, making her already imposing persona impossible to ignore. Thinking I was a retailer, she handed a flyer to me. “Nasstoys makes You
MONEY
with the
TOP SELLING TAYLOR WANE COLLECTION
,” it said. I made some small talk about working in an adult store, and as we chatted, and I looked at the lines around her eyes and the outrageously inflated lips, I felt as if I were encountering an endangered species.

CHAPTER
5

You're a Naughty Daddy

I D
ISCOVER
T
HAT
V
IRTUAL
S
EX
I
SN'T
A
LWAYS
V
IRTUAL

To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion.

—Pierre Baudrillard, 1990

I
am stunned by her openness. She lacks any trace of self-consciousness. He, on the other hand, is a little on edge but wants to be brave because she is, and he wants to keep up to please her.

I sit with Susan and Michael in Susan's kitchen, as she talks about her sexual life and her adventures and misadventures with men—and sometimes with women and sometimes with both at the same time. I have come to watch them take some pictures of themselves, possibly having sex. We've left that a little vague. But I want to talk to them first, and the longer I am here and the more we talk, the longer I want to keep on talking. I am in no hurry to go upstairs. We are on the clock because Susan's son will come home at a certain time, so we don't have all day, but I keep stalling. I sense something going on between Susan and Michael that is not nearly as casual as they have made it out to be.

Before we jump ahead to Susan's bedroom, though, I should explain how I ended up in a Maryland kitchen with the prospect of watching two people have sex.

It started during a conversation with Kim Airs, who has become a helpful Virgil on my tour. I asked her what I have asked others, why there was so much sexual conversation when America was supposed to be a Puritan place rediscovering its religiously restricted carnal outlook.

It's not just the conversation, she said; it's the doing. As my own correspondents indicated, many people were not just watching porn and buying vibrators by the millions. They wanted action.

“One word sums it up,” she said. “
Internet.
”

“Yes, yes. I know,” I said a little impatiently. Everyone from the folks at Phil Harvey's place to the women in Missouri have said the Internet has replaced school and family and church as sources of information about sex. I rolled my eyes.

I have a prejudice against the Internet. I am sick of hearing how “the Internet has changed everything.” I know it's true, but I hate hearing about it from smug know-it-alls in chino pants, the BlackBerrys hanging from their belts turning them into wan gunslingers. I have long thought the rise of the Internet was a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by stock options. To my mind, the Internet as we know it was created by hippies who failed to make utopia in Haight-Ashbury or back-to-the-land communes and thought they could finally carve it out of virtual worlds made possible by digital technology, worlds conveniently free of all the human nature—sex, drugs, self-interest, money, emotions—that mucked up the Haight and the entire hippie-anarchist enterprise. But just as they did before, they turned into prophets for profit, cashing in on promises of a technological nirvana of free information, democracy, and liberty for all.

What nobody seems to be saying out loud is that the Internet has created a new tyranny of technology. What? You don't have a cable router hooked to a 2-gig RAM Vista machine with an Nvidia graphics card and 120-meg hard drive? You read a newspaper? On paper? Oh, man! Refuse to buy an airline ticket online? Pay more. No need to read
Huckleberry Finn.
Kids should learn “computer skills.”

Of course it has changed the world, but for every truth that gets out that would not have otherwise been heard, there seems to be a hundred lies. Worse, it has made the world an oyster for Islamic Nazis, hucksters, identity thieves, Lonelygirl 15, and political bloggers who produce nothing original but demand—and receive—obeisance from a political class terrified of what the “blogosphere” might say. The Internet is a black hole into which time is poured.

But I knew Kim was correct. Of course she was correct. The free flow of information on the Internet, not to mention all the porn floating around on it, has probably done more to change sex since the appearance of
Playboy.
Personally I wasn't sure if this was good or bad. Exploding myths was good, I guessed, but I wasn't sure how I felt about the rest. So I asked Kim what she thought.

“Okay, where do I start? The sex act. The sharing of personal information, photos, the anonymity, IMing,” by which Kim meant instant messaging. “You can see movies, pictures of naked people, everybody does that now.”

By “everybody,” Kim meant people who are not pros and not making a living having sex, people who take pictures or videos of themselves and broadcast them to the world. Kim knows because she used to run her own homemade porn film festival to which people from many walks of life submitted videos of themselves in flagrante in a declaration of independence from big-time porn. Nobody got paid, nobody expected a career in the skin trade. It was just the idea that everybody can be a porn star now, she said, thanks to tiny digital video cameras and computers, and the very freedom to do it has led many to take up the challenge.

“The accessibility of sex has changed immensely. I think we are taking action because it is so much easier now. You can go on Craig's List and get laid in half an hour. We are having more sex in all its forms, and that choice is supported a bit more. I mean, go to AdultFriendFinder and you can find anything.”

I wasn't sure whether or not to be disturbed or buoyed by the idea that my every sexual desire could be satisfied by going online. On one hand, maybe it could be freeing. On the other, I still worried about the question I asked Candida Royalle and Susan Montani back in North Carolina. “What happens if nothing's taboo?”

So I went to the website of AdultFriendFinder, based in Silicon Valley, the most popular commercial adult dating site (in a realm in which
dating
means “sex”) on the Internet. An estimated twenty-four million people from all over the world have registered their profiles with the site and every day tens of thousands join them, sending tiny signal flares into the Web sky. Other members who like what they see can flag the profile, effectively sending their own signal flare in return.

Filling out a profile of myself proved tricky. Since I wanted to attract some responses, I had to make it sound interesting. But I also wanted to be honest and so I could not promise anybody an actual meeting for sex. Besides, I'm more the “meet cute” type. But eventually, I wrote:

I'm a writer interested in communicating with people who have a variety of sexual interests. Absolutely sincere.

This was completely true, if deliberately vague. In the space for describing who I was seeking, I typed:

I'm looking for those who wish to share experiences honestly.

Which was also true, though the sharing I had in mind may not have been the sharing a responder might have in mind.

A week later, my first e-mail arrived from AdultFriendFinder, a compilation of all those who had seen my profile and wanted to meet, at least virtually. The first one read: “Young, affectionate couple committed to each other and our relationship. Looking to expand our sexual experiences, fulfill fantasies as well as meet like-minded people and make new friendships.” They included a picture of themselves sitting on a couch.

They were pretty tame compared with others that followed. “I have always been that ‘good girl next door,'” a woman, who said she was thirty-three, and who sent a picture of her thong underwear–clad butt thrust into the air, wrote. “Now it is time for me to be as bad as I wanna be…no more ‘good girl.'” In the same batch, another woman, who claimed to be twenty-one, was shown shoving a dildo into her rectum.

 

W
ho are these people inhabiting the Web? Who is the woman standing naked in high heels against the kitchen counter, an open box of Wheaties in the background? Who is the man, hands on his hips posing like Superman at the beach, his pale ass gleaming in the sun? Who is the woman sitting spread-eagled in her Barcalounger with the vacuum cleaner plugged into the wall socket, standing ready to clean the living room, which, by the looks of it, could use some work?

In some photos there are needlepoint cushions depicting quaint farmhouses plumped on the couch, and family photos sitting on the piano, or prescription bottles on the bedside table, but the people are always naked or nearly naked and reaching out to the wide Web world.

“I hope you remember me but if you don't, my name is Kitty and I am a 50+ mother of a college student. My first contri [contribution] appeared on April 4th and you all left such wonderful comments. So I decided to submit again. This time I will show you what I like to do right before bedtime.” And there is Kitty, reading, or pretending to read, a book, first with a nightie on and then with it off, and then kneeling with her ass to the camera, her breasts dangling.

“Hi Folks…! We are a mature couple living in the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida area. We really hope you guys enjoy our Las Vegas contri. Positive comments are app [appreciated].” And there she is, Mrs. South Florida Sunshine, lying on a hotel room bed, her breasts flopped over her red top, staring out the window over the roof of a Ross discount store, toward the Circus Circus in the background.

They are twenty and sixty and thirty-five. Often they are pregnant. “Preg-O Wife!”

“I had my boyfriend take these pictures,” one writes on Voyeur web.com, explaining her series of shots. “I am very shy and can't believe I am actually doing this. Hopefully people will like these.”

“This is my hot 26 year old wife,” says a newly married man. “She looks hot no matter what she has or doesn't have on, but there is something about a wet t-shirt clinging to her gorgeous breasts. If there is enough positive responses we will post more with the wet clothes all off. Please enjoy, I know I did when I took the pictures and enjoyed even more when I got to put the camera down.”

“Hi guys, me again,” writes a mature woman with short blond hair posing topless, in panty hose. “You gave me so many hot, flattering comments last time I decided to try again. I thought I was too old for this and had lost my sex appeal when I hit fifty, but here I am eight years later showing my tits for you guys, and hoping you will jack off while you look at me. That is so hot…! I've never been gang-banged but I always wanted to try it. I'm married and have two kids, both of whom are grown up and have kids of their own, so that makes me a granny! Oh my goodness…! Thanks so much.”

Like other commercial websites that post amateur submissions, this one has a section that, for a fee, includes X-rated images and videos of some of these same people having sex. Democracy has come to the Internet, but not in the way its most ardent promoters advertised. Just as happened with the introduction of Polaroid film, which required no developing from an outside provider, from the Internet's earliest days, people realized they could be as raunchy as they ever imagined being without creating a scandal, because on the Internet, you can be anonymous if you choose.

Of course, sometimes word gets out, as happened in Snyder, Oklahoma, when the police chief's wife was discovered posing nude in front of an American flag on a website. He eventually quit after citizens demanded a police chief who shared their moral values. “People in this country do what she does on a daily basis,” he told the Associated Press. He was right about that.

In fact, the commercial websites are just a part of the new exhibitionism. Influenced by porn, seeking to validate their own sexual allure, and hungry for experimentation, many thousands of people have declared themselves freelance erotic icons whose only payoff is their own sexual satisfaction. They populate photo-sharing sites like Flickr or private group sites hosted by Yahoo!. They give themselves names like “Slutmom.”

“Very sexy pics, very sexy woman, thanks for sharing. We are an early 40ish married committed couple. We have also posted our pics, and we share unblocked pics and vids with other couples? Interested?”

“Just what we both love! U got us both so hot & horny! Great tits and with a perfect pussy! We're also in 50s, married, discreet, looking for good friends. Let's trade pix, talk, then? Love, Sue & Bob.”

The porn world has realized that amateur eroticism, less packaged and seemingly more sincere, holds an appeal that the old-style skin flicks do not. Your neighbors could be doing it right now! Sexy Mrs. Dannemeyer down the street might actually be as hot as you imagined! This is the basis for Girls Gone Wild, those videos sold on late-night TV and the Internet, the ones featuring coeds lifting their shirts and dropping their skirts after three Long Island Iced Teas. It has made so much money for the creator, Joe Francis, he is starting a chain of Hooters-like restaurants. A whole new genre of “reality” porn, inspired by the initiative taken by Internet exhibitionists and by TV shows like
American Idol
where Americans routinely subject themselves to what used to be considered shame but now guarantees you a spot on a talk show if you are abused enough, has flooded the adult industry, so much so that sales of traditional, professionally produced porn movies have slumped dramatically, down over 30 percent in 2006.

Bang Bus is the most successful. Dirty Sanchez roams the streets looking for girls and couples willing to fuck in a van for cash (the performers actually apply in advance and sign contracts and releases before being “discovered” on the street). On the Bang Bus website, Dirty Sanchez provides accounts, blog-style, of each encounter.

German girls are hot. This girls body was smoking. Her ass was sweet and her tits where luscious. From the moment I saw that girl I new she was the one. We picked her up in front of a art museum of all places. I love artsie girls. They give the best head. In my experience they're really wild in the sack too. All this shit was running through my mind as I tried to figure out what to say to this girl…She was all up on Blumkin five minutes into it. I started talking to Al-B and I turned around and the two of them were making out. Shout out to Blumkin, that nigga moves fast. Shout out to Hialeah. Shot out to my mom. O.K., enough shot outs. Anyway, Back to the hot German chick…