America Unzipped (2 page)

Didn't know there was a punk-porn revolution? Never heard of
Art School Sluts
by auteur Eon McKai? It was one of the biggest-selling DVDs in the United States, though you'd never know it from the official entertainment industry listings. Hard-core productions like McKai's are making porn cool again among twenty-somethings—both men and women. Just how cool is reflected in the box office. The adult industry rakes in revenues of somewhere between $11 billion and $15 billion per year, on par with the “legitimate” film industry. We have arrived at the moment when a wannabe starlet and fashion icon like Paris Hilton finds her Q-ratings increased (becoming the Guess girl, being given her own TV series, starring in
House of Wax,
inspiring frequent media frenzies) after exposure in her own porn video.

Porn companies have gone public. They are traded on stock exchanges and covered by investment analysts, industry trade magazines, and the
Wall Street Journal.

Americans are doing far more than just playing Peeping Tom in the privacy of their own homes. Big-box adult stores are opening in small towns across the country. In Seymour, Indiana, for example, the quintessential midwestern town of about nineteen thousand people made famous by singer John Mellencamp, the Lion's Den sells dildos and platform shoes, X-rated DVDs, and enough lube to supply an Exxon station. Such stores are popping up in places like Chillicothe, Abilene, and Newton, Iowa.

Some of the stores' customers may take their new gear and head for places like Las Vegas, Miami, and Chicago, where hundreds of middle-class men and women strut around hotel swimming pools in thong bikini bottoms during swingers' conventions. They are part of “the lifestyle,” a booming phenomenon that has far outstripped 1970s wife swapping. Thousands of these couples now heed the old square-dance call to switch partners. Travel agencies, resorts, clothing companies, websites, dating services, and convention programmers take care of the details.

In Madison, Wisconsin, a “woman-centered” adult toy store called A Woman's Touch conducts regular classes, often using DVDs like
Bend over Boyfriend
as instructional aids to explain how to use a strap-on penis. Lou Paget, a Los Angeles–area woman who describes herself as “very Junior League,” conducts no-holds-barred sex seminars that are so successful, she recently moved into a new manse in Beverly Hills—and all because she tells women how to play with a man's rectum.

Dominatrices and their submissive slaves spank their way through fetish soirees in San Francisco, Phoenix, St. Louis, Tampa, Denver. Seminars (Introduction to Flogging, Advanced Pony Play) held in hotel conference centers are standing room only. In cities all over the United States, rubberists slip into latex dresses, pants, and head coverings so total they have to breathe through snorkels, all in excited anticipation of, say, receiving a stern lecture from a woman dressed as a rubberized schoolmarm.

Sexual experimentation has become so mainstream that middle-class women now routinely write out checks at Passion Parties, Tupperware-style gatherings for the vibrator curious. Passion Parties reports its income has grown by about 73 percent per year over each of the past five years—despite the bust on obscenity charges of a Passion Parties hostess in Burleson, Texas. (The charges were dropped.)

Wives and husbands are not only relying on professionally produced porn and toys manufactured by big companies to boost their sex lives: many have taken up new digital cameras to make porn of themselves. In a growing democratization of erotica, they are posting the images on websites, where they're available to everyone in the world with an Internet connection and the inclination. (One such site, Voyeurweb, claims to receive more than three million hits every day.) These fledgling Larry Flynts hope stimulated people will e-mail back, describing in great detail exactly how the experience of seeing a housewife naked in her kitchen in front of the open Wheaties box has sent them into masturbatory reverie.

Meanwhile, men and women are engaging in new forms of body modification, many inspired by porn. Products from Hair Care Down There help the pubically hair challenged achieve the porn-star look. Plastic surgeries for private parts have spread. One social researcher at UCLA has been studying the trend of “anal bleaching,” the use of lighteners to reduce the contrast between the anus and the surrounding skin, so anal sex enthusiasts have pretty rectums.

And yet, at the very same time, the political rise of conservative Christians, many of whom regard sex outside marriage, pornography, fetish, even lust and masturbation, to be sinful, has supposedly become an equally significant cultural phenomenon. Preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed sexual immorality—as they defined it—for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Legislators of all stripes now feel they must declare their fealty to sexually conservative “moral values.” Newt Gingrich knelt for absolution for his marital infidelity from preacher James Dobson on Dobson's radio show,
Focus on the Family.
Senator Barack Obama talked up his religious credentials. Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani faced questions about his gay friends and his multiple marriages during his presidential campaign.

United States attorney general Alberto Gonzales declared war on pornography, forming an “obscenity prosecution task force” to go after not just child porn but also porn featuring consenting adults marketed to other consenting adults. “The welfare of America's families and children demands” it, he said. Conservative Christian lobby organizations like Concerned Women for America harangued the offices of U.S. attorneys and the FBI, demanding they prosecute more porn cases. A failure to do so may have been an element in the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys by Gonzales in early 2007, a move that eventually led to his own forced resignation.

Religiously motivated activists lied to schoolchildren about human sexuality, contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to justify “abstinence-only” sex education. Conservative ministers pressured state legislatures and local prosecutors to shut down adult stores selling sex toys. Social conservatives resisted calls to vaccinate young girls against the human papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer, arguing that the vaccine would encourage promiscuity. Some states passed laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control while other states passed laws making such refusal a crime.

At first all this sounded to me like the culture wars, but from where I sat as the new writer of a sex column, it seemed lust had quietly won and just failed to declare victory. There were occasional hints of that victory, though. An estimated 50 percent of evangelical pastors have viewed online porn and more than 20 percent of born-again Christians report they have been “addicted” to porn. The conservative Republican mayor of Spokane, who was a vociferous opponent of gay rights, sought out young male lovers via the Internet. Preachers Ted Haggard (drugs and gay sex), Jim Bakker (booze and adulterous sex with a secretary), and Jimmy Swaggart (sex with hookers) all made headlines, but were thought to be merely high-profile exceptions.

Then one night I sat in a bar eating a pork chop and drinking a glass of scotch when a forty-year-old woman sat down next to me and we started to talk. She was a conservative Republican, she said, loved George W. Bush, and then, when I told her about my new job, she volunteered that “there's something just really great about sport fucking. You know, without any of the relationship bullshit.”

I reckoned that contrary to what we have been told, American sex, at least in practice, doesn't have a political ideology or even a religious one, though noisy combatants keep trying to impose both. The Left is as guilty of this as the Right. At sexology conventions you are likely to hear more debates over politics than sex, like “Conceptualizing Sexual Rights,” a seminar given at a conference I attended. It promised to “problematize polyamory as it is practiced in the United States by demonstrating how it cannot transform oppressive relationships and family structures without addressing racial and economic inequalities…[using] sociological and feminist theories of intersectionality and social justice to provide a critique of polyamory based on qualitative content analysis.” Holy cow! I was pretty sure “problematize” wasn't even a word. It seemed to me sex and the way people explored it followed its own logic and was influenced more strongly by something I had yet to define.

I also admitted to myself that my curiosity was not just professional. My own thoughts have always been complicated by being a product of Catholic schools, having a long career as an altar boy, and growing up in a small town in Ohio. I was even, for a short while, the president of the Fairfield County Teenage Republicans. As any other Catholic altar boy teenage Republican will tell you, we think about sex a lot.

Even so, I was a late bloomer, sexually speaking. I will spare you the details of my first time except to say it involved a coed neighbor, a commercial break during
Saturday Night Live,
and a mumbled apology from me about her couch.

My wilder imaginings have usually been more like Einstein's thought experiments. I've engaged in no Bloomsbury literary group spouse swapping, no visits to Bangkok bars where dancers shoot Ping-Pong balls out of their vaginas. I do not own a leather codpiece, and I've never been whipped, gagged, fucked by two women, or arrested for lewd conduct.

I suppose I am libertarian when it comes to consenting adults doing sexually whatever it is consenting adults want to do, but I have never truly been a part of all this letting go and I wonder how other people manage it. I feel both admiring and apprehensive about them. It's fair to say I have always been a little conflicted.

So now I wanted to know who these sexual explorers were; if the scene had really changed as much as I thought, and if so, why so many people were doing what they were doing; what influences were inspiring them; and most important, if they were finding any happiness by doing it.

Sexual explorers don't usually seek publicity, and I wasn't much interested in the loudest voices. So much was happening among the people who could be my neighbors that the only way I could think of to answer my questions, to see if I was correct in my theory, was to go where they were and ask them.

That's how I ended up in Las Vegas meeting the next teen anal queen and nervously looking forward to points east, west, north, and south.

CHAPTER
1

The Sex Mogul of Hillsborough, North Carolina

I E
XPLORE
P
HIL
H
ARVEY'S
E
MPIRE

Pleasure is so difficult to come by in this culture. I say fight for your right to enjoy your porn, your sexual fantasies, your masturbation and your orgasms.

—Betty Dodson, 2003

“
H
e may just have been trying to shock me, but out of the blue, over breakfast, he asked what I thought about threesomes,” Kathy Brummitt told me of a conversation she had with her fifteen-year-old son. Kathy is a forty-something brunette from central North Carolina with a short, sensible haircut, a little extra middle-aged weight, and a soft lilt to her voice. She resembles my Catholic-high-school Latin teacher, the one I used to torment by choosing to read aloud Roman narratives about bathhouse prostitutes and by displaying Roman good-luck drawings of erections.

So normally it would have been easy for me to picture Kathy dropping a spoon into her heart-healthy Cheerios, grabbing her minivan keys, and dragging her son to school to demand the principal explain just what kind of education the kid was receiving. But I was having a tough time imagining Kathy's kitchen, because just as she launched into the details of how she handled this ticklish mothering challenge, I became preoccupied with a pretty brunette sitting naked and open-legged in a love swing.

A scrawny middle-aged guy with thinning black hair had his hands on the two straps attaching the swing to the ceiling of a dreamlike darkened room. He was naked, too, and gently pushing the swing back and forth about six inches at a time as he watched his erection slide in and out of the brunette. She, meanwhile, was wearing a big, satisfied smile. Though the scene on the video monitor just over Kathy's shoulder was running without sound, it had the effect of turning Kathy's voice into so much white noise. I thought I heard her say, “So I asked him why he wanted to know,” but I couldn't be sure because—really—I was very impressed by the precision measurements that must have been involved in setting up the swing.

Think about it: What are the chances you could hang a swing from your ceiling while factoring in the critical height differential between a hard and a flaccid penis, the weight of the person in the swing, and a dozen other variables, without making multiple trips to Home Depot? How were those calculations made? Did they consult a carpenter? Was a laser device involved?

Meanwhile, Kathy was chattering away like a concerned PTA mom, seemingly oblivious to the video sex going on right behind her. “And it turned out that a friend of his wanted to have a threesome with my son's girlfriend and his girlfriend…”

I tried paying attention to Kathy, but now I couldn't help counting all the reasons why, and I mean never in a hundred million years, I could never have broached this subject with my mother.

“He really said this to you?” I asked, interrupting the story. “I mean, you two actually discussed threesomes?”

The guy on the video screen started moving the swing a little faster, bending his knees as if bearing down on a difficult task.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

Then he arched his neck and stood up straight as if struck by lightning. His butt cheeks clenched. Apparently the love swing worked.

“And so then I asked him, ‘Well, what do
you
think of threesomes?' I didn't want to appear shocked at all because I think he was testing me, though I do appreciate that he felt free to approach me with such a question, and he said, ‘It might be okay.'”

Most mothers would have become hysterical at this point in the conversation, but not Kathy Brummitt. Thinking about threesomes is part of her job. I didn't realize it at first, but Kathy was manning a convention exhibit booth for an outfit called the Sinclair Intimacy Institute, and as I soon learned, she was the director of production on the love swing video, and others, too, for Sinclair, based in the unlikely location of Hillsborough, North Carolina. In other words, it's her job to hire people to have sex, hire other people to film those people having sex, and make sure the whole production looks classy.

“So you make porn.”

Kathy smiled. No, she said, she doesn't consider this porn. She knows porn, and porn doesn't look or sound like this. This is education, erotic how-to, an exploration of fantasies and techniques that can forge a deeper bond between loving couples. The way she said all this made the love-swing video sound almost medicinal.

Besides, she argued, the movies she helps create are produced by Sinclair for its Better Sex series, those DVDs and tapes advertised in sports sections of newspapers all over the country, in women's magazines, even in highbrow publications like the
New York Times Book Review
and the
Atlantic
. The ads feature attractive people in each other's arms apparently in the beginnings of foreplay. They are who we would like to be, or at least who we wish our lovers would be. This kind of product, Kathy told me, is far removed from the pizza-delivery-boy-meets-horny-housewife world of porn.

The
Atlantic
!

To me, Kathy was one of the more interesting people at the sexology convention, which, as far as I was concerned, was mostly a bust. I had gone because I had my questions and thought perhaps I could get most of them answered in two or three days of Power-Point presentations. There were seminars and symposia and lectures from Women Going Topless on the Red Mile During the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Calgary, May–June, 2004, to Sex with Animals on the Caribbean Coast of Columbia (76 percent of adolescent boys do it, apparently, usually with a “she-ass”). But an awful lot of the dialogue was opinionated and political and not really about why so many of my readers wanted to know if it would be a good idea to have sex in a car for the entertainment of passing truckers.

One researcher's poster did address a question somebody had once asked me. My reader wanted to know about bukkake. I had never heard of bukkake, so I looked it up, promptly dismissed it as urban legend, and never answered. But as the poster explained, bukkake “is a Japanese term that refers to showering a receiver, male or female, with semen from one, several, or many men.” I had seen porn and so I had seen the facial “cum shot,” but according to the poster, bukkake was neither urban legend nor a pornography trope. It had “spread across the globe and…has gone from cult-like status to an accepted sexual practice.” There were now organized bukkake groups that “have generated several popular schools and techniques” of bukkake practice and that have brought bukkake into the sexual “mainstream.”

Though I was grateful for such bits of information, I preferred talking with Kathy because she was not a sexologist or a sexuality theorist. She was giving people what she said they wanted—more information on how to expand their sex lives in any number of ways, with any number of accessories. Still, I half expected her to be apologetic. Kathy just didn't fit the part of somebody who works in the sex industry. But she is proud, she said. Kathy believes that helping people find more and better sex is a noble purpose. She is a middle-class mom whose concern for others is expressed by making sex videos.

The DVDs seemed popular among the sex therapists, psychologists, and sociologists. Several stopped by as Kathy and I talked. They like the idea of visual aids, they said, because there is now so much curiosity out in the big world away from sexology conferences. People are asking questions they never asked before. Hearing answers from a therapist in an office about how to slide a butt plug into your ass or how to use your tongue on a woman's clitoris is a far less amusing experience than watching a well-made video with folks who look like more attractive versions of your neighbors.

“We're very successful,” Kathy said. “We sell to people all over the country. Big cities, small towns, Midwest, South, West, everywhere.”

When I asked her if it isn't difficult to find couples to perform for her, especially considering that the videos didn't seem to hire pros with porn-star names like Allysin Chaynes, she said no.

“It's not really hard at all.” Some are indeed porn-industry wannabes, “but most are just couples who like having sex in front of cameras.” Kathy had a way of making this sound like taking the dog for a walk. “And thank God for them. They help us promote better sexual health, better relationships.”

Kathy made her work seem practically altruistic, but she is not exactly employed by a sexier version of the Maryknoll Sisters. Sinclair is a division of PHE, Phil Harvey Enterprises, of Hillsborough, a porn and sex toy empire founded by, naturally, Phil Harvey.

Despite her insistence that she was exactly what I had thought her to be—a mom, a businesswoman, a churchgoer—despite the way she regarded her work as being as American as the Wal-Mart greeter, I had to ask how others living in the geographical heart of the nation's evangelical revival react to her job. Do they stop her in the produce aisle at Food Lion to inquire how the dildo scene worked out that day? Or do they hug their child close and dash over to canned soups?

“We've all had the ‘What do I tell my mother?' moment,” she replied, referring to how she and her coworkers explain their careers to friends and family in North Carolina. “But everyone accepts that this is a job I love and that we do a lot of good for people.”

“So how did you solve the threesome dilemma?” I asked. Her face lit up with the triumph of mothers everywhere who respond with, “If Jimmy jumped off the bridge, would you do it, too?”

“I just asked him, ‘Well, how would you feel if your girlfriend wanted to be with you and another boy?'

“He said, ‘Ewww! That'd be really gross. No way!' And so I said, ‘I think there's your answer,' and that ended his flirtation with threesomes.”

Yes, well, having once been a fifteen-year-old boy I was not quite as confident as Kathy that her kid's flirtation with threesomes was over for good. Actually, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for him. He is being robbed of one of the three ways kids have to persecute parents. Other than drugs or absurdly fast cars with questionable provenance, sex is supposed to be the great tool of teen tormentors. Most wouldn't even have to come close to suggesting a three-way to send Mom dashing for the Valium. At least that's the way it was when I was a kid. Of course, none of us had a mom who was the Harvey Weinstein of sex.

“You ought to come down and see us,” Kathy said cheerily as we parted. “We're just regular folks.”

 

W
hich is how I have come to be sitting in Kathy's office surrounded by sex videos and dildos and talking about Jesus Christ. “He is my Lord and Savior,” Kathy tells me. That is exactly the sort of statement that brought me here. Kathy seems to be a rich stew of apparent contradiction and the more I thought about traveling to PHE, the more I thought it might provide insight into what was going on around the country and who or what was making it happen.

PHE is the largest online and mail-order sex retailer in America, possibly the world, selling to over ten million customers. It comprises several divisions. The Sinclair Institute positions itself as the progressive, high-minded instructor in sexual happiness. Since 1994, it has sold over four million copies of its Better Sex videos. Its raunchy big sister, Adam and Eve, earns the bulk of the corporate income by selling sex toys, porn DVDs, and cheap lingerie. Adam Male markets to gay men. A video-on-demand arm sells streaming porn online. PHE also has a growing chain of retail store franchises. Adam and Eve Productions is a pornography powerhouse that finances and distributes over one hundred movies per year. Exactly how much money the entire company makes is impossible to know; it is privately held by Harvey and a few close associates. But sales in 2006 amounted to somewhere north of $109 million.

Sinclair is located apart from the rest of PHE in an office park of redbrick buildings vaguely resembling southern plantation architecture. Kathy drives to work, and most every morning she prays while she drives, giving thanks for a new day because it will present her with another opportunity to help people. She is descended from tobacco farmers who believed what they read in the Bible and they read that all people are equal before the eyes of God whether a body is white, black, or green. Everyone, they believed, is to be treated as you would wish them to treat you. Sometimes, during the days when Kathy was growing up, that created a little friction with neighbors who didn't always agree and that friction taught her that one did not always have to live by the prevailing thinking.

After college, Kathy became a buyer at Thalhimer's. For nearly a century, that venerable Virginia department store was an anchor to Richmond's downtown social and civic life. But then, like all other regional department stores, it succumbed to the merging giants of retail and the malling of America.

She wasn't looking to work in the adult industry; things just turned out that way. Kathy is a family person, the kind of woman who makes sweet potato pudding for Thanksgiving. (Long after I have left North Carolina, she will send me a recipe for chess pie, a heart attack on a plate worth dying for.) So she used to commute often from Virginia back home to North Carolina and when a girlfriend told her about a job opening at PHE, she saw it as a chance to come home for good.

Her story makes for a nice American homespun tale, but when I look around the room it is tough to reconcile the penises and porn and the “Jesus is my Lord and Savior” so I ask, “Uh, Kathy, you don't find all this a little strange?”

“Some people would find it strange, where I work, but I see no disconnect at all. Jesus may have lots of thoughts about how some people choose to use sex. But my personal mission fits nicely into Sinclair's vision of helping people.”