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.”
Which 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.”
This is the Sinclair mantra. I am in Hillsborough for most of three days and over and over again I am told about how they help others. From executives and employees at both Adam and Eve and Sinclair, I hear the phrase permission giving.
“We are in the permission business,” Martin Smith, Sinclair’s director of e-commerce, tells me when we meet in a conference room with Sinclair’s president, Peggy Oettinger; Kathy; and wholesale director Susan Yaeger Montani. “The idea I brought to the Web was, ‘Let’s approach this like we are the Pottery Barn of this space. And it worked because there are certain touchstones people are comfortable with…Our customers are older, richer, smarter than the average bear, especially online.” What those people are looking for is an upgraded experience and better packaging, what Smith says is “a prettified version of adult, packaged in a way to give people permission to buy it.”
When Phil Harvey first bought the original Better Sex video concept in 1991, the company tiptoed around many sexual topics because he wanted the new division to appeal to an upmarket, skittish demographic who would not patronize Adam and Eve or an adult book store. So Harvey named it the Better Sex Institute. Soon, though, Kathy realized that Better Sex didn’t sound mainstream enough. Newspaper publishers, for example, rejected ads. So the name was changed to Chapel Hill Institute after the nearby college town, but then that sounded religious, like a Bible college. “Sinclair just sounded like a very dignified, clean, educational name to me,” Kathy says, “so I said, ‘Let’s try Sinclair. We do know a Sinclair, Lloyd Sinclair,’” a famous sex therapist. “I called him up and said, ‘Lloyd, would you be offended if we named our company Sinclair?’” She looks at me and says, “It could have easily been called the Alexander Institute.” That’s a double joke. Sinclair’s biggest competitor is the Alexander Institute in Sherman Oaks, California. As far as I know, it is not named after me.
Sinclair’s customers have a conflicted relationship with the sex industry. They want what it offers but don’t like the idea of wanting it and what that wanting might mean for their self-image. They are both lured and repulsed by the taboo.
I understand. I feel perfectly comfortable at Sinclair, with the idea of Sinclair, and with Kathy and the others because they inhabit, or at least appeal to, my own sexual territory. That land is a safe place from which one can see the adventure without having to live it.
The truth is, I have always felt cowardly in this way. The summer after my senior year in high school I worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool of a development of low-rent town-house apartments. People who lived there were newly divorced or had a boyfriend who’d been sent to prison or a spouse who’d died. The place was a living soap opera. One night, a few minutes after closing, two girls walked through the gate of the pool as I was cleaning up. They begged me to let them swim even though it was late, and when I said yes, they slipped out of bathrobes to show me how naked they were and how happy they were to be naked. They jumped into the pool, giggling.
“Come in, join us!” they shouted. I was a Catholic boy with an imagination. I knew I was being invited to a threesome.
“Quiet! I’ll get fired!” I said, without thinking, almost instinctively. Yet I wanted, more than anything on this planet, to jump in and have sex with both of them. So what if I got fired! The summer was almost over, I was off to college soon…But I couldn’t. I kept thinking of consequences. Why? To this day I am not sure, but it likely had something to with my belief, honed over years of Catholic education, and hundreds of hours serving Mass on my knees, that something bad always happened if you had too much fun. But I also think it had something to do with my being afraid of them—not literally, like I would come to harm, but afraid of being stuck, like I imagined they were stuck, going nowhere. In my young mind, vaginas equaled quicksand.
“Well, then, come back to our house. We’ve got beer.”
“Uh…”
This was all I said. “Uh.” I felt like a weenie then; I feel like one now.
I relish the idea of the taboo. Yet I have done much more thinking about it, more observing of it, than doing. Such detachment has allow
ed me to write about sex without being a sexual radical. This is another reason why I have come here and why I went to the sexology conference. If I just talk to all these people at this big company, I think, I will learn what I need to know. No muss, no fuss.
Sinclair is the shallow end of a swimming pool for those, like me, who are nervous about the deep end. When the first Better Sex videos sold in the 1990s, everyone at the company was pleased but quickly realized there was no “back end,” nothing else to sell. Suddenly, they had a lot of customers and no more product. So they gave them products, three thousand of them. Though the name may sound serious and clinical, and though it advertises to educated elites, Sinclair offers many of the same items as Adam and Eve. But they all come with the Sinclair imprimatur, a brand that comforts the uneasy. Once you buy your educational videos, see the toys used, get used to seeing naked people having sex, you can buy the toys and XXX features like Exxxstasy Island and Wicked Sex Party 7 from Sinclair.
“Sinclair videos give customers permission to buy the other items,” Smith says.
“You’re a gateway drug!” I say, laughing.
“You’re right,” Montani agrees. “Sinclair comes first, then people get softer features, then XXX, and then they are into bondage!” Montani is kidding a little, but not much. “That is the normal progression for the majority of our customers.”
Often Sinclair customers start out feeling afraid of their own desires or their performance or their bodies. Customers often ask the question I most often get: “Am I normal?” “That is why our business exists,” Kathy says. “People want to know if they are okay. Is it all right? Is there something wrong with this? Am I not doing something right?” In the Sinclair world, the answer is always “You’re fine. You have permission.”
Sometimes the Sinclair folks are surprised at what they are giving permission for. Ultimately, almost nothing is taboo. Mark Schoen, the PhD sexologist who directs the action on the videos, told me earlier that oral sex techniques were considered edgy when the division first started and that Sinclair told itself it would never make an anal sex how-to. The Better Sex Guide to Anal Pleasure was issued in 2005. Then came a “power play” video. Now, with Sinclair videos, you can learn how to shave your pubic hair, give erotic massages, use sex toys, have sex in “unusual places,” try out sadomasochism, indulge in “guilty pleasures.”
“My wife and I bought this video and it opened up a lot of doors,” one satisfied customer wrote. “She finally let me cum all over her face. Thanx [B]etter [S]ex video series!”
To me it sounds as if Sinclair might be manipulating demand, that perhaps people don’t really want anal sex, that they have just heard a lot about anal sex because Sinclair sold them videos with anal sex in it, thus piquing interest for a new product it could produce and sell. How else is a company like Sinclair going to grow except by giving people the idea that everybody else is having more fun?
But when I suggest this to Smith, he admits he and Sinclair often have no idea what the hell is going on in America’s sex culture. “My job is to constantly, with different indexes, figure out what people are doing on our website and what they are doing out in the world so I can take that and put it on our site.” Sinclair follows, it doesn’t lead, and Smith is often shocked by where his customers want to go.
“People are asking for more and more experimental stuff. That told me I have to let them ask questions,” and so he created a forum to help build Sinclair’s own online community. “I was very surprised at some of the questions I got. It’s incredible what people will ask you, like in your column. I get these long notes about what people are saying on the site and I am going, ‘Oh my God!’”
This goes to show you, Smith, a Vassar graduate, tells me in his best business-school jargon, that “anything will become a commodity if you give it enough time. What was a boundary yesterday is today’s commodity.”
Sinclair is trying to figure out the landscape just as I am. “It’s no longer Donna Reed out there,” Montani says. “People are talking about it. No more missionary position in the dark. And they all think the next guy is having better sex than me, so I had better figure it out.”
“Well, it’s Britney Spears and her private parts exposed!” Kathy speculates, sounding once again like a concerned mother.
“You gotta get technology in there somewhere, because it is technology that has brought it into every home,” Smith interjects with his own theory.
“Yeah,” Montani says. “It is, like, in your face whether you want it to be or not.”
“But you think you are absolutely mainstream?” I ask.
“Yessir!” Oettinger, a tall, thin woman about sixty, says quickly in her thick southern accent. “We are absolutely mainstream America. Our product line is progressing, but I do not know if it is because people are progressing or if we are driving the culture. I would say the culture is driving me.”
Starting about 11:00 a.m. the calls begin flooding into the Adam and Eve customer service desk, an all-day, everyday operation situated on the second floor of PHE’s modern three-story building in another office park not far from Sinclair. I sit with headphones on my head and listen to a twenty-four-year-old man order “Sistas” along with the Azz and Tits combo pack, which includes Booty Talk 45, Nice Azz/Tits, New X-Rated Sistas, and a free gift item, Black Poles and Dark Holes, all for just $19.95.
A man from Massachusetts buys Over 40 and Horny as Hell. A Michigan woman requests Eve’s Pearl Diver vibrator as a replacement for a defective Eve’s Pearl Diver vibrator she bought a couple of weeks ago. “This one toy doesn’t seem to like me,” she tells Mary, the operator. “And it is my favorite one, too! They quit after one use.”
A sixty-one-year-old Florida man selects several DVDs and a vibrator, and wants them quickly, please. But when Mary asks for his credit card number, he wants her to hold while he calls his wife on his cell phone. “What, honey?” Mary and I can hear him saying. “Yeah, Adam and Eve. Okay.” Then to us, “Four one seven…”
Often, Mary says, the husband orders without the wife’s knowing. The company then sends the catalog to the house, and the wife finds it and calls customer service. “They cuss us out, and say, ‘I go to church, God damn it!’”
As if on cue, a Muslim man calls. “Uh, could you please take my name off the mailing list? My wife doesn’t like me getting the catalog.”
A sixty-three-year-old man in Delaware orders Black Chunky Chicks 4, Hip-Hop Hooters, and Pure Pussy 4, adding a polite “please, ma’am.” Mary offers him a selection of a free gift—all customers who buy get something free—and she lists the offers like a tired waitress rattling off the domestic beers. “Okay, you can choose from Girl Gasms 2; Over 30 and Dirty; Tight and Fresh Part 3; and Sistas 21, with over two hours of mocha lesbian heaven and plenty of booty lickin’, or Booty Call, with over four solid hours of hot chocolate asses.” This guy goes for mass, choosing the four solid hours.
Mary, in case you are wondering, is black. She says she blushed the first few days she worked here, but doesn’t anymore.
A seventy-year-old man from a small town in Illinois chooses a Buckleroos DVD, a gay title, and a Senso Stroker masturbator. Oh, and how about Summer in the City? With the freebie Dick to Dick thrown in, he’s charged $79.35.
They just keep calling, one after another. A fifty-year-old man in Grosse Point, Michigan, buys Jenna Jameson porn. A fifty-six-year-old Colorado man buys $110 worth of porn and vibrators for himself and his wife. A twenty-seven-year-old woman who calls from Oklahoma wants the catalog so she can start ordering. An Ohio man wants a refund. A thirty-five-year-old man in Florida wants a masturbator sleeve. A sixty-five-year-old New York man calls in a DVD order for his wife: Pound Cakes, Pussy Worship, and Black and White Volume 2. A sixty-two-year-old California man orders a copy of the Sinclair Institute’s Sensual Exploration series and Great Sex Positions for $65.75 and requests it be sent Express Mail so it will arrive by the weekend.
Nobody cal
ls from New York City, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles. I have been wondering why, when I asked if I could listen in, managers eagerly agreed. Maybe this is why. I am listening to what media and politicians usually call “middle America” and listening to their voices demand what the sex industry is selling. If they are representative, then the mainstream really has shifted and the notion of community standards by which obscenity cases are supposed to be judged has shifted, too. Adam and Eve has an obvious interest in making this case.
Over the past decade, two famous obscenity trials—one in Ohio and one in Utah—demonstrated how far a community’s perception of itself varied from private reality. During the case in Cincinnati, the local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, investigated Hamilton County’s own community standards and found that Adam and Eve had sold twenty-six thousand X-rated videos to county residents in 2000. Adam and Eve had twenty-eight thousand different customers in the county. In January of 2001, 182,000 people living in the greater Cincinnati area visited an online porn site.
In 1996 two small video stores in Utah County, Utah, one of the most conservative counties in the United States and home to Brigham Young University, Mormonism’s version of Notre Dame, were raided by sheriff’s deputies after four thousand people signed a petition complaining that the stores were selling obscene materials.
Kay Bryson, the Utah County district attorney, called pornography one of the world’s “misery-creating features” and “worthless.” One of his assistants called porn “nothing more and nothing less than vile concoctions of scum, sleaze, and sludge.” Bryson was sure the confiscated video titles used to accuse the owner of the stores were in no way an accepted part of the community standards of Utah County. “I know essentially what people in Utah County are all about.”
At trial the defense attorney, a devout Mormon, revealed that Utah County residents ordered up nearly twenty thousand adult movies from one satellite TV provider, that the local Marriott sold about three thousand X-rated movies every year, and that the stores’ owner rented or sold adult videos to about four thousand customers, a number equal to the number of petition signers. After a hung jury, Bryson insisted on trying the case again. The second trial ended in a quick acquittal in 1999, but the owner was bankrupt by then. Bryson was subsequently voted out of office after it was revealed that during an ugly divorce from his wife, a state legislator, he had used county-owned spy equipment to install a camera in a condominium she owned and where she was meeting a man who Kay insinuated was a paramour.
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