America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  No matter. With a little assist from Brooke, who provides a detail here and there, they fill in my story on their own, while I smile mutely and dab at the corners of my mouth with a napkin. The women do a very good job of guessing why I am standing in Julie Bunton’s dining area holding a plastic glass of wine and chewing on shrimp because they are media savvy and fully aware of their Heartland status. Reporters and writers have been running around the Heartland for a few years now, conducting anthropology. Mainly those efforts aimed to explain why Heartland folks (always “folks”) are so different from people in New York City or Los Angeles (never “folks”). So they infer I am here to find out what people in small towns think about sex and why women go to “sex parties” and if they’re hicks the way they think they are so often portrayed. When Brooke says, “He’s from California,” somebody back in the living room says, “We have sex here, too!” and then everybody laughs. Except for the hicks part—I don’t think they are hicks—they’ve got it basically correct and I haven’t had to say a thing. I pick up another shrimp.

  Brooke finishes setting up her little display, and I keep waiting for one of the women to voice some objection to my presence. It never comes. More women arrive and somebody says, “Hey, this guy is going to make us famous for sex toys!”

  Nobody is going to ask me to walk out.

  “Do you all know each other?” I finally ask.

  “Well, that’s my mom,” a young woman says, pointing to another woman, about forty, sitting in front of the fireplace hearth.

  “And that’s my mom,” says another, indicating a woman sitting in a recliner next to where I am standing on the threshold between the kitchen area and the living room. “My aunt’s over there.”

  “These here are my cousins.”

  “We’re sisters.”

  One woman turns out to be a grandmother to another woman in the room.

  “Are you really her mother?” I ask the woman sitting in the recliner.

  “I really am.”

  “You aren’t skittish about this?” I ask the mom.

  “Not at all. My daughters are more uncomfortable with me being here than I am with them being here.”

  A few more women arrive, and Brooke says, “Okay. We may as well get started.”

  She had warned me that she tends to bull her way through her sales pitches. She likes to pass around the sample products in order to start conversations and giggling, and the resulting noise can fill a room. That’s okay, she had told me, because people are having fun and when they have fun, they buy, but she has to keep going or else the party would last all night. By the time Brooke begins her presentation, standing in front of the display she has created, the volume is already high. But Brooke launches into a rapid-fire prologue about Passion Parties and how women can make extra money doing something that’s so much fun by joining her network. Then, like Trista at Fascinations, Brooke tells the women that selling Passion Parties products is as much public service as it is business—stronger marriages, healthier lives, greater intimacy, journey of self-discovery.

  She distributes long order forms with nearly 150 items listed in columns. Julie retrieves Dr. Seuss books from the kids’ room so the women can use them as lap desks when writing their orders for the Mini Tongue vibrator.

  “The first product I want to show you is our Luxurious Bath and Shower Gel with pheromones,” Brooke says, speaking over several conversations. Brooke always starts out with products like bath gels and salt scrubs, deferring the more explicit appurtenances for the second half of the show. She says this is a way to organize the pitch around the senses, starting with smell first, then taste, then touch, but really, it’s just a lot less intimidating for all concerned if you kick off with bath gel and perfume instead of the nine-inch-long Chocolate Thriller with the “lifelike veins.”

  Brooke pushes the irresistible attraction power of pheromones and quickly moves on to Bedazzle perfume, and then a body gel with glitter mixed right into the gel to accentuate cleavage, and finally a honey-flavored body powder “you can put in three places, and then tell your partner you put it in four and have fun as you keep him guessing.” Partner. Not husband or lover. Not everybody here is married or straight.

  Brooke’s script is carved deeply into her brain. Even as her eyes dart around the room to alight on this woman or that one, they aren’t really focused. She could be thinking about her newborn daughter, or why the navigation system in the Escalade went on the fritz, or how hot she feels even though the house isn’t really that hot. The spiel just keeps coming, hardly pausing even for a shouted question. After she talks about each product, she starts it circulating around the room and the women smell it or feel it or taste it and talk about it among themselves. Brooke knows that is where the real selling happens.

  Taste that strawberry massage lotion! Every woman dabs a little on an arm and dutifully tastes. “To really be great lovers we need to activate all five of our senses…this is Silky Sheets, you can spray it between the sheets to give them a silky feeling, smells great too and really dries up that wet spot…Okay, ladies, rub a little of the Fireworks warming gel on your arm, ready? Now rub, lick, blow. Rub, lick, blow. You can practically breathe your partner to orgasm with this…Tasty Tease comes in strawberry, piña colada, and mint, will also inhibit the gag reflex, here’s another gel, hot and tingly, also makes your lips fuller, called Nipple Nibblers, this is our number one product, Pure Satisfaction a clitoral gel to stimulate your clit and make it fat and juicy makes orgasms stronger, harder, longer and gives you lots more of them! Use it in the morning to get going for the day the price is just $39.50 and that’s less than $.05 per orgasm! I’m going to put this jar in the bathroom so during the break I want each of you to go in there and rub some on and feel just what this does for you.”

  Just before the end of Part I of her sales presentation, Brooke slows down and pulls out a rubbery tube and a long, phallic-shaped bottle of lubrication. “Now, ladies, this is Gigi.” She squirts a load of lube from the bottle into Gigi, and then slowly slides and twists Gigi up and down the bottle. “This is going to make your job a lot easier,” she says, sounding like a roving vacuum-cleaner salesman who has just tossed a handful of topsoil on the carpet.

  Pairs of interrogating eyes look at me, though I fail to notice, at first. I’m still standing on the threshold between dining area and living room, leaning up against a wall. I am entranced by Brooke’s technique, and absentmindedly rolling the word Gigi around in my head like Maurice Chevalier walking through a sunny Paris park. I think I might be smiling. Brooke gives Gigi one or two more slow, sliding twists around the bottle, then stops and looks at me, too.

  “When I took the porn class, it became the difference between what I was and what I am now,” Anne, one of the guests, tells me during a break in Brooke’s spiel. Anne is thirty-two, slightly older than some of the women—Julie Bunton is only twenty-five—and single, “which makes me an old maid around here.”

  By “porn class,” she means a course taught at the University of Kansas in Lawrence by a professor of social welfare named Dennis Dailey. Anne traces her sexual liberation from small-town thinking to the porn class. Actually, the course was on human sexuality in everyday life, but Dailey showed a few explicit educational films and photographs in the class so students knew exactly what was up with human sexuality in everyday life. Naturally, they dubbed it the porn class and kept it constantly oversubscribed. When a few state politicians heard about the class—which had been going on for years—they tried to shut it down, insisting the videos were antithetical to Kansas values, encouraged sexual deviancy, and contributed to the degradation of the conservative sexual morals of the American college student. In 2004 one used the contretemps over the porn class to create a campaign statement: “Some Kansas professors are using your tax money to turn their classrooms into red-light districts.” She won the election.

  What really peeved certain politicians, though, was not the nature of the ima
gery used in class but the thinking it might spur in the minds of kids, many of them from small towns. “Their minds are being formed, their morals are being formed,” fumed state senator Kay O’Connor to the Associated Press. “We don’t need this kind of information.”

  Anne is sitting on Julie Bunton’s couch, next to her younger sister, when she tells me about the porn class, and the deeper she gets into the story, the angrier she becomes. She took the course back in 1995 so she was not affected by the subsequent controversy, but she remembers how the course changed her life.

  “Being your sexual self in the Midwest, you are under scrutiny. Taking that class gave me a level of personal freedom.” Anne grew up Southern Baptist, in a family of Southern Baptists who meant it, and back when the Dailey thing was in the papers, she attended a barbecue with other family members. They railed against her old professor and his porn.

  “For the first time in my life I stood up to them and said, ‘That isn’t true, knock it off! He has a regimen in class. It is a class about learning about yourself. It’s not pornographic!’ They shut up after that. It was the first time I checked them.” She says “first time in my life I stood up to them” with pride, leaving little doubt that standing up to her relatives was a long time coming.

  Nobody ever talked about sex in her family. “Hell, no! No no no no no.” She and her sister like to joke that their parents had sex four times and they know that for sure because there are four kids to show for it. She still never talks about her own sex life within her family. “I’m a virgin, you know,” Anne says, winking. “Actually, I really was a virgin until I was twenty.”

  “No! Really?” her sister, sitting next to her on the couch, asks.

  “Yep.”

  Ever since the porn class, she has been sexually evolving. Don’t get the wrong idea about Anne, though. She chooses her words carefully, so I understand that this postcollege personal freedom she speaks of was mostly in her head, a way of thinking. She didn’t start her own double-penetration DVD collection or pick up random men in bars. She doesn’t like porn, not because she objects to it, but because she is just not interested in it. Rather, “I became willing to at least learn about sexuality. Sex ed in school was a joke. I don’t even remember anything about it; it was pointless and a waste of time.” Again, she wants me to know that willingness to learn doesn’t mean she’ll do everything she learns about, but she has been presented with a wider sexual menu than she imagined, and once in a while she’ll explore it.

  Masturbating, for example, “is a stress reliever.” Sometimes, with her work as a legal analyst for a major Kansas City law firm, “I have all the stress in the world. If you want a utilitarian excuse, that’s it.”

  I haven’t asked for a utilitarian excuse, or any excuse at all. Anne is talking to herself.

  Then she surprises me by telling me about another rebellious act in a region dominated by Baptists. Anne converted to Catholicism. Always the former altar boy, I can’t resist pointing out the sin of masturbation and premarital sex. “Well, I take birth control, too. Now that I am Catholic, I feel freer to express myself sexually than when I was Southern Baptist. I feel more freedom as a Catholic.”

  I am positive nobody has ever told me the Catholic Church sexually freed them.

  I must look surprised, because Anne says, “Yes, really. I know Catholics are all about procreative sex, and I am all about birth control and family planning and responsibility.” Anne decides on her own sexual course without reference to God’s law, neither the Baptist version nor the Catholic one. She works from her own compass. “What criteria do I use? There are no real criteria. I cannot answer that question. I know where my lines are.”

  “Based on morality? Some other foundation?”

  “It is based on my comfort zones, what I am comfortable with physically and emotionally. That is a difficult thing to put my finger on, though.”

  Anne pities women who haven’t taken her leap into a new way of looking at sex. “They do not allow themselves to get to that place. They would be unclean, not wholesome, and it’s not because they cannot, it’s because they won’t. Growing up in this area, it would be bad.”

  Brave talk, but Anne commutes to Kansas City, passing a Priscilla’s store every day. “I am curious, but I never would go in. I worry about social acceptability and how my reputation would be viewed.”

  I think Anne is related in some way to an older woman, Kathy Pierson. I could be wrong about this. I haven’t quite figured out who is related to whom and how, because there are cousins and sisters and mothers and an aunt sitting around here someplace, and there’s been a couple of divorces to complicate matters. But I do know Kathy, forty-four, is the mother of two of the women here and I gather a relative by marriage to some others, though exactly how she fits into what is becoming a crowded family tree is lost on me. Anyway, Kathy says she fully understands Anne’s journey because she has been making it herself.

  She married into a big, extended local family with deep roots in the area when she was just nineteen. She felt swallowed up. The Southern Baptist dogma was tough to take, too. “It was God’s way or no way, but I was sheltered and that’s all I knew.”

  She was reborn at thirty-four when she divorced. The world suddenly seemed so big. Here she was, supposedly a mature woman with two children of her own, yet still so naive. From now on, she vowed, the only boundaries she would obey would be her own. The first time she had sex with a man after her divorce, it was like the first time she had ever had sex. She’d experienced orgasms with her ex, mainly when he gave her oral sex, but they felt more like a mechanical reaction. She was too filled with anger to enjoy them. Better if he hadn’t touched her at all. The first time with somebody new, though, was like gliding off a tall building.

  With so much catching up to do, Kathy became a voracious student. She had a lot of male buddies in the U.S. Department of Agriculture office where she worked in Kansas City, and she would ask them all kinds of questions. After they told her men masturbate at least once a week, she went out on a date with a man and said, “So, is it true men masturbate at least once a week?” and he dropped his fork. Lately she has been trying to ease off the questions. Porn helps. She learns a lot from porn, though she doesn’t see much of it.

  Kathy also enjoys her vibrators. Masturbating with a vibrator “takes the edge off.” Once, her two daughters found one of Kathy’s vibrators. “They got mad at me and said, ‘You’re just a sex freak!’” Now they are sitting across the room, scanning Brooke’s list of goods.

  What Kathy really wants is a relationship. She doesn’t have many dates despite being tall and attractive with a strong jaw and light-colored hair. Honestly, she often feels lonely. She cries into her pillow at night, but there’s no use in whining because she’s got two daughters to send through college, and at the moment that mission is more important than men or sex.

  Kathy is forty-four, Anne thirty-two. Younger women at Julie’s party tell me an entirely different story, as if an asteroid had hit the earth soon after Anne went to college and changed everything. They don’t say anything about rebellion; they are matter-of-fact.

  Melissa married at seventeen. She’s twenty-eight now, making her only four years younger than Anne. She is also a churchgoing Southern Baptist who enjoys watching porn with her husband and shopping at Priscilla’s over in Blue Springs. Tonight she’s got her eye on one of the cock rings Brooke has brought, the one with a little sleeve to accommodate a bullet vibrator. Her husband can push his scrotum and penis through that thing so the vibrator bullet hits her clitoris just right when she’s on top. She likes that.

  Another woman, a local teacher, also in her twenties, shops at Priscilla’s, too, but not the one in Blue Springs. She and her husband drive over to Lee’s Summit to reduce the chances she’ll run into one of her students’ parents, though, come to think of it, how could they complain? “What are they doing there? That’s the way I look at it.” She and her husband like to experim
ent with sex and porn. Some things work, some don’t. Lately they’ve been taking “baby steps” with anal sex because after five years, you know, things start to repeat and you need to keep ’em fresh.

  “Times have changed,” she says. “I’m not sure why. Things are just more openly discussed, more freely accepted. I think it is a shift in our thinking, the whole society.”

  I find Kathy Pierson’s eighteen-year-old daughter coming down Julie Bunton’s stairs, so I wheedle her to sit with me on the landing. She is very pretty, thin, with the best of Kathy’s features. We talk a little about what it’s like to come to one of these things with your mom, whom you once accused of being a sex freak, and she admits that it can be a little strange. But without any prodding from me, she recalls the day her mother looked at her and said, “You’re having sex!” and her daughter responded, “How did you know?” and Kathy said, “I can tell from the look on your face.” The great thing about her mom, though, is that she didn’t panic.

  “She is liberal that way. We can talk about it. Like, she knows my best friend, and her mom has no idea she’s having sex and my friend hates that because she can’t talk to her mom and so she talks to me and my mom.”

  She’s religious, she says, a Baptist, so I ask if she ever feels guilty about having sex with her boyfriend. She looks surprised, as if she has never thought about guilt, as if by asking the question I have revealed myself to be hopeless. Don’t I get it?

  “Get what?”

  “The Internet.”

  You don’t learn about sex from school. Maybe a little from an older sister, and certainly nothing from church. No, dude, it’s the Internet. When she has questions about sex, she just goes online and it’s all there. Her church may be the place to learn about matters of the spirit or God, and her school may be the place to learn about geometry and the Entente Cordiale, but the Internet is a more reliable and honest sex academy than her church or her school, and it is a place where people don’t go to hell for having sex. It has killed sex guilt. “I bet I am more educated even than some women in their thirties. Things are way different now.”