“What do we have to do out here in the country, especially in small towns, but hang around bonfires and drink Bud? If people can get together and learn a little about human sexuality in a safe environment, that’s good.”
“You know,” I say, “I keep hearing about all the fighting over sex, but it seems to me that people around here are pretty much live-and-let-live.”
“That’s a fair assessment,” she answers. “My mom played the organ in St. Stanislaus Catholic Church and I said to her, ‘Mom, I am doing this business,’ and she said, ‘Could you not sell baskets or something?’ I said, ‘No, Mom, this is what I need to do.’ My grandfather ran the store in Rossville, where you got stopped. I said to Grandpa, I said, ‘I am gonna start this business’ and he leaned forward—he was seventy-nine or eighty—and I said, ‘I am going to be selling adult toys.’ He smiled and said, ‘I owned a variety store in St. Mary’s [the next town west on U.S. 24], and people would drive all the way down from Topeka to look into my naughty box.’ That’s what he called it, his ‘naughty box.’ From then on I knew it was okay with Grandpa.”
She excused herself. It was getting toward evening, the light was fading, and the kids wanted to play some softball with her out in the yard.
That night, Brooke and I drive back into Missouri, far out into the countryside. The Escalade cruises down narrow asphalt roads as Brooke looks for the right house, but the houses are tough to see because they are spread so far apart, up long gravel driveways, set back in the trees. The hostess for tonight’s party, Tanya Willoughby, told Brooke to look for balloons tied to a mailbox, but we haven’t seen any yet and the landscape is more woods than houses now.
Finally, just about dusk, we see some balloons over a rise in the road. A small pickup truck parked in the front yard at the bottom of the gravel drive has a FOR SALE sign in the driver’s window. Brooke pulls in and we climb the hill toward the Willoughbys’ place, a small ranch-style house that may be a converted doublewide mobile home. I open the SUV’s door as two men approach. One is Matt, Tanya’s husband, wearing a baseball cap and a white T-shirt and holding a beer can in his hand.
Matt looks me up and down, shakes his head, and asks if I want a beer. He and his buddy are going somewhere—I don’t catch where—in the friend’s truck and maybe I’d rather come along than attend one of these “wiener parties”?
“I think you’re crazy,” he says when I say thanks but no thanks.
Brooke and I carry her bags into a small living room. Portraits of two of Tanya’s brothers, one in Marine Corps dress blues and one in National Guard combat fatigues, sit on a small bookcase. A copy of the Open Bible, a study Bible, sits on the coffee table in front of a couch along with a Bambi 2 DVD.
Most of the women who are coming are already here. They are gathered in the kitchen eating snacks, including a gooey butter cake so sweet it makes my teeth hurt. One woman is wearing an old sateen track suit. Another a one-shouldered black T-shirt with “Baby Girl” scripted across the chest. A third is wearing a green and yellow John Deere logo T-shirt that says, “Been there. Cut that.”
These women are skittish to the point of fright. Nobody tries to talk with me, though I make a point to say hello to a few of them. It’s as if I have a zone of contagion around me; as I move in any direction in the cramped kitchen / living room, women move away. I had expected this before but became lulled by the easy way other women have spoken to me about their lives. So now I’m surprised.
Brooke sets up as usual; then Tanya directs her to a small bedroom down a narrow hall. The “office” will go in here, on a card table. Tanya is pregnant. This will be the baby’s room and she and Matt have been working on it. A ladder rests against a wall, half-finished Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper border dangles loosely, a few cans of Similac sit at the bottom of an empty closet.
I am already regretting that Brooke picked this party to let me sell. I don’t sense much goodwill, and I seriously doubt any of the women will be interested in the Pyrex dildo Brooke has selected for me to present. It is one of her most expensive items. This is going to be a tough room.
Brooke is already perspiring heavily, and soon after she begins the spiel, she looks almost panicked. There is no boisterous conversation, no giggling, no shouted questions. She is a stand-up comic dying on stage. Finally I decide to interrupt.
“Excuse me, Brooke. Can I ask everybody if they are very uncomfortable with me in the room? Does anybody want to ask me any questions?”
“I have a thirteen-year-old stepson!” says a woman, who is herself about twenty-three.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I don’t want him knowing I’m here! What if his mother finds out?”
“What about the people at church?” asks another.
“Okay, what about the people at church?”
“They’ll know!”
“Do you think you are doing anything wrong?”
“No.”
Like the first party I attended, some of the people in the room are related to each other either by blood or marriage.
“You’ve got family here, right?” Heads nod. “So who are you hiding from?”
Well, it turns out they are hiding from “others” mostly, an ill-defined group they assume will be condemning. They see themselves as a vanguard and are not very comfortable in the role.
After some reassurance from me, Brooke starts again. Gradually, the room warms up. At the break, the women go into the bathroom one by one to rub Pure Satisfaction on their clitorises and the mood brightens more.
“Whoa! That stuff is comin’ home with me!” one says.
“I’m gonna use it when I have a toy between my legs,” says another.
“You ain’t put any on, have you, Brian?”
“No, uh…”
“Come on. Fair is fair. Come on. You get in there and put some on your dingle.”
Everyone thinks this is very funny.
So I go into the bathroom, lower my pants, put some Pure Satisfaction on my fingertip, and rub a little on my dingle. A tingly feeling like menthol makes me conscious of my dingle, but that’s about it. Maybe you have to own a clitoris.
As my dingle and I mingle during the break, the talk turns to the Internet. “Ricki and I are total MySpace whores!” one woman says, naming a co-hostess of the party. Ricki confirms that, yes, she is a MySpace whore, made so much easier now that high-speed access has come to the area. They spend hours on MySpace messaging each other and cruising to see what else, and who else, is online and what they are doing.
Somebody is getting married soon, and of course they have to plan a bachelorette party. But where to go for the big night out? Shaft, a gay nightclub in St. Joseph, emerges as the clear favorite. “I like it there. The gay guys know how to dance, they’re fun, and they don’t try to pick you up.”
During the second half of the party, as Brooke hauls out the dildos and vibrators, everyone is relaxed and open. “My husband drives me crazy with that thing!” one says when Brooke displays a long phallic vibrator. They play with the vibrators and laugh about the ways they can use them.
“And now Brian wants to show you a special item.”
I stand in the back of the room holding a nubby glass penis. I tell them I sold one of these to a woman in Arizona who liked hers so much she had to buy a new one as soon as she broke her old one. I talk about the nubs. I say it is worth the extra money. You can warm it up in hot water or cool it down in cold water. You can stick it in the dishwasher. I keep talking because every face is blank. I don’t know if it’s me, my maleness, or the pricey item, but nothing works. I smile weakly.
“Okay, and now Brooke has some more to show you.” I hand her the glass dingle and slink away to the back of the room.
A few minutes later, Brooke has finished. She retires to her “office” and one by one, women arrive, sit under the Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper, and pick out items.
Matt arrives home early, but Tanya quickly banishes hi
m before he crosses the threshold of the front door. The women are busy buying their own satisfaction. Why doesn’t he go downstairs and watch TV? “The remote’s down there,” she says, as if the remote control is tempting bait.
Meanwhile, I sit out on the front stoop with one of the older women. She’s been to a few of these parties, she tells me. Most of the women in her family have toys, which is wonderful because things used to be so buttoned up around here. Southern Baptists had such a grip on everyone’s lives, including hers, that nobody ever talked about sex and especially how to make sex feel good. Her own mother and father hardly seemed to show each other any affection. Despite all that, she wasn’t a virgin when she married at eighteen. Then one day, she realized nobody had to live their lives like that. Her husband, thank goodness, he was open and tender and loving. She just got lucky. They enjoy their experiments, the bondage, the anal, the girl-girl-boy, the boy-boy-girl…
“Wait. Whoa. Threesomes?” Massive bugs from the surrounding woods have started strafing the light by the door, so I wonder if I’ve heard her correctly.
“Oh yeah. Sure. Of course, I get competitive in everything, including sex, and so I got a little competitive then, too. I want to win, though I’m not sure what it was I was supposed to be winning. So I didn’t really care for it.” She’s glad she tried it, though. That’s how you survive thirty years of marriage. You try new things.
“I can’t imagine going through life unsatisfied,” she says. “I sure don’t want that for my kids.”
“So sex is very important to you?”
“Sex is important. Oh yeah. It is another way of being satisfied and happy. I cannot imagine not having sex.”
On the Adult Novelty Expo’s second day, I met up with Kim Airs, the woman who had been tutored at Good Vibrations and had gone on to create Grand Opening! Kim ushered me around, introducing me to various corporate executives, with an excited enthusiasm. “Oh wait, you gotta meet these people!” she’d say, and off we would run. After years of feeling radically at odds with the rest of America when it came to sex, Kim now felt the warm and fuzzy welcoming embrace of acceptance.
“Just look at Amazon.com,” she said. “You can buy sex toys on Amazon. How cool is that?”
But the biggest, most exciting growth, Kim told me, was at the high end. Cheap sex toys sold by the likes of Passion Parties were once all you could get, but now everyone in the know wants to go upscale. One northern California metallurgist was making vibrators out of titanium for $600 apiece. “Over here, though, you gotta meet these guys,” Kim said, as she and I half trotted to a booth. “These guys are getting sex toys into department stores!”
She was right. JimmyJane had crossed over. The products weren’t sold in most adult stores like Fascinations, and they weren’t sold by home party outfits. JimmyJane had succeeded in making sex toys into fashion accessories.
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 flye
r 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 DISCOVER THAT VIRTUAL SEX ISN’T ALWAYS VIRTUAL
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.
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