She did not need a college course like Anne’s because she really isn’t a citizen—or a captive of—her small town the way I was a citizen of mine and Anne and Kathy were citizens of theirs. Her small town isn’t nearly as small as it used to be, for one thing. It’s filling with anonymous-looking tracts occupied with anonymous people, salmon far out of their home waters. More important, she does not have to leave to go away. She can project her mind through seventy different channels of cable TV and sojourn in the digital realm via the Internet, becoming part of the global pop culture mind without the slightest sense of being displaced.
“We have always been twenty-five years behind the rest of the country,” Anne told me a few minutes ago, “but now we are catching up.”
I’m into my second vodka and orange juice slushie but still not feeling anything other than an urge to pee. Brooke has set up her presentation and gotten partway through the first half. Eight women are sitting roughly in a circle on a couch and some chairs in a tiny living room of a town house in Kearney, Missouri. They are listening to Brooke’s rat-a-tat-tat. I am now convinced that Brooke, who has been a very sweet guide and mentor, doesn’t actually hear what she says anymore, because if she did, there would be a terrible mental cost to giving this same talk three times per week.
The women here are cops, mostly, or employees of a local police department, and so, from nowhere, it occurs to somebody to say, “Hey, I wonder if this could be considered ‘conduct unbecoming an officer.’” After a few giggles, and jokes about conduct that might really be unbecoming an officer, another cop says, “You know, maybe it would be!”
Hmmm. On the one hand, we’re in a private house on our time, says a third. “Yeah, but on the other, this guy’s here.”
Being “this guy,” I feel I should put their minds at ease. I also don’t want to be kicked out into the middle of a development of town houses in Kearney, Missouri. “You know, you are not actually doing much of anything,” I say. “You’re shopping.”
True enough, they reply, but…supervisor…public image of the police…“Some of us work with kids in schools,” one says, “and you know how there is all this hysteria over kids and sex and porn.” Nobody is looking at porn, and Brooke doesn’t sell any porn, but some people out there might not get the distinction. “They think they are a perfect community and holier than thou,” one explains. But the kids, they hardly need protecting from information.
“Do you know what a ‘queef’ is?” one asks.
“No, what’s a ‘queef’?”
“A pussy fart. I learned that one a couple of months ago from a seventh-grader. He heard it on Howard Stern.”
Color me educated. The queef story reminds one of the cops about a recent incident.
“We had a disturbance call over a ‘dirty Sanchez’!” The cops all burst into laughter. “A guy…” She can’t finish the story.
Hahahha hahah ohmygod…hahaha.
“No, really?” another one asks. “A dirty Sanchez?”
Head nodding, gut grabbing.
Everyone is laughing except a woman who isn’t a cop.
“What’s a dirty Sanchez?” she asks.
This is too much. Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
I consider explaining a dirty Sanchez as a way to restore my credibility after proving I know less sex slang than a seventh-grader. But I’m not so sure I should be the one to tell her a dirty Sanchez is a smear of shit placed on the upper lip of a person receiving anal sex by a person performing anal sex. Actually, it’s mostly a jokey urban legend spread by the Internet, especially a wildly popular porn site called Bangbus on which a “bus driver” named Dirty Sanchez picks up women to have sex on the bus. Luckily another cop who has managed to stop laughing long enough explains it to her.
“Some guy,” says the woman who brought it up, “reached around and gave a dirty Sanchez to his girlfriend, and she hit him. He had heard about it and thought he’d try it! Started a big fight.”
Hahahahahahaha.
The Internet convinced the guy a dirty Sanchez was a hep sex move. “How stupid can you get?” Yeah, you’d be surprised at what goes down around here, some of the crazy-ass shit people do.
The police officers describe a town living publicly on one plane and privately on an entirely different one. They live the dichotomy themselves. Every one of them watches porn, almost always with their husband or boyfriend. Every one of them uses sex toys. None of them thinks they are especially liberal, either politically or morally, but they all experiment with sex.
“My doctor told me no more food products anymore! No more bananas!”
“That’s something I learned in tantric,” another says, referring to the way her lover massages between her toes.
When Brooke talks up the Tasty Tease gag inhibitor cream, another cop is dismissive. “Shoot, practice’ll teach ya you don’t have to gag!”
“I pulled one of those cock rings out, and he said, ‘Honey, I don’t think that’s gonna fit!’”
“If he were that big,” another says, referring to a large cock ring, “you’d never have to worry about flying solo!”
The department held a sexual harassment course recently, but the women here didn’t see the need for it. “Shoot, I already know how to sexually harass! Why do I have to take a class?” Hahahahahaha.
The woman who isn’t a cop tells me she’s actually very conservative. “It was two years before he saw me naked,” she tells me of her husband. “I was raised very strict Southern Baptist. No dancing, no cars, no kissing. I still prefer country over rock. My mother told me you get pregnant from French kissing. My father said ‘Honey, just do not do anything below the waist.’ That was my sex talk.”
Though she told her son during her much more inclusive sex talk with him that his father was the only man with whom she has ever had sex, that isn’t true. There was a fiancé when she was very young, so along with her husband, that makes two. The fiancé was a tender, considerate lover, but even so, “I wish I could say it was only one man.”
Unlike the other women in the room, she doesn’t consider herself especially experimental, though her husband has talked her into oral sex and they are working on anal now, and she has been enjoying it all, so it’s a good thing all this learning came during middle age. “If I had known in high school what I know now, I probably would have been a huge slut!”
She has never had a threesome, has seen porn but doesn’t really like it, and won’t go into an adult store—there’s one not far away snugged between a McDonald’s and a Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits place. She sends her husband. But she also says she doesn’t care if anybody else has threesomes, or is gay, or consumes porn, or does whatever else they want to as long as everybody else is a grown-up and agreeable and they aren’t pushing her to do it, too.
All these women say they are religious to varying degrees, go to church, are patriotic (the son of one cop is serving in Iraq), and take their jobs as police officers very seriously, despite all the kidding around. This is red state territory. Western Missouri is about as crimson as you can get. Could it be, I wonder, that the noise created by a few fundamentalist preachers, amplified by media, has created a convenient, if mythical, story line?
I don’t have any way to know if the women I am meeting at these sex toy parties share attitudes with a majority, or a tiny minority, though if their attitudes are shared by a minority, I don’t think it’s tiny. I do think, because every one of them has said so, that they are not vocal about their personal lives and what they see as a right to their own sexual habits. They like having access to porn and sex toys. They see nothing wrong with either. But they are not exactly signing petitions or marching, not because they feel in any way guilty or shameful, but because they think what they do is nobody’s business. They are content to allow the community to think one way about itself while behaving in another.
In 1962, when Pat Davis was seventeen years old and about to be married, her mother sat her down and said, “You
know, there will be things he will expect.” This was her sex education. When Pat told me this story at the Adult Novelty Expo, the day after my tour of Topco Sales, I was incredulous. I heard the same story from Joe Beam as he recounted the mother–daughter talks of women he has counseled. In fact, I’ve heard this story a few times over the years, usually told as a bit of apocrypha. But Pat insisted it was absolutely true. So let’s say it is and that it also happens to fit nicely into the explanation she gives for why her mission as president and CEO of Passion Parties is so vital to women everywhere. She’s not just selling sex toys, she argues; she is selling female sexual liberation and a slice of happy satisfaction.
Pat was born in Memphis, raised in Arkansas, and spent over thirty years living in Virginia and attending conservative Methodist churches. Many women she knew led constrained sexual lives. She has gotten rich trying to unconstrain them. If Passion Parties were a traditional business it would be about as big as PHE. All the representatives combined sell about $100 million worth of oils, lotions, and battery-operated love to retail customers every year and Pat has a couple of pretty nice houses—one near the ocean in Del Mar, California, and one in Las Vegas—to show for it.
When we met, Pat had just come from touring some of the displays on the show floor. There were a lot of new products to explore and she, with Joanne Harvey, her director of operations and finance, was trying to decide which new gewgaws, lotions, lubes, and devices ought to be added to the Passion Parties approved list. Manufacturers were happy to see them coming. Every Passion Consultant like Brooke, and there are hundreds of them all over the country and in Canada, was a miniature retail store. The entire network moved a lot of merchandise.
Pat portrays herself as an outsider to the sex industry. Unlike Marty Tucker, she coyly objects to being included in the same business category as, say, Wicked Pictures or Hustler. She prefers slogans like “We empower women from the bedroom to the bank.”
But this was not a mission she sought. Pat was a veteran in the world of multilevel marketing. Like Brooke, she started out selling to make a little extra money and along the way sold vitamins and cosmetics and health products. Then she formed her own consulting company to teach her successful techniques to others.
One day, a friend called and said a new company needed a little advice, but it was a different sort of company. Pat shrugged and said, “How different can it be? What kind of vitamin is it? What lotion or potion? Couldn’t be that different.”
Well, Pat met with the president “and then went into a meeting where they turned off the lights, and held up a purple thing, the newest, latest, vibrating, light-up thing. They were passing it around and saying, ‘Ooh, doesn’t it feel real?’ and I was like, ‘Alrighty then!’ I had never had one, never touched one, never used one.”
She consulted for the company for three years. “Finally, I caught what they were doing and realized it was more than a toy,” Pat recalled. While it may be true that Pat converted to the religion of female pleasure and empowerment, she had also been around the multilevel marketing game long enough to know a hot idea when she saw it, and by the time Sex and the City hit HBO, Pat realized how much the sexual conversation in America had changed. Suburban and small-town women were ready, if they could just get over the perceived ickyness of the products. “That is when I called Joanne”—with whom she had sold cosmetics at one time—“and said, ‘I think I have my hands on a gold mine, a diamond in the rough. They have a beautiful mission doing a lot of good things, but what can we do to market it so it would be acceptable to people?’” The key, she said, was to play down the ooh-la-la and play up the health, joy, and satisfaction to which Americans are entitled.
Pat bought the company, hired Joanne, declared herself a soldier in the cause of sex toys for women, and set about winning over the Heartland. In her hard-nosed business way, she was doing for small-town and suburban women what Joani Blank and her successors had done for urban women, but Pat was doing it on a massive nationwide scale and without a political agenda.
Though she prefers not to be considered part of the adult industry, she cannot escape the association. Banks have turned down Passion Parties business. Some shippers won’t handle the product. A payment processor abruptly announced it would no longer work the Passion Parties account after years without a peep. “One day I got an e-mail from their abuse department saying they do not deal in pornography,” Joanne told me. “I e-mailed them back and said neither do we!” One consultant used to hold meetings at a pizza place in Anaheim, California, but was booted out by the manager when he found out what the product was. “We don’t want your kind in here,” he said.
“She has a lovely family! They go to church!” Joanne said, and I am reminded of my customers at Fascinations who said, “And I’m a Republican!”
Consultants in the state of Alabama are offered two different kits, one with vibrators and dildos and one without in order to accommodate state law, though most seem to take the all-inclusive deal. Really, Pat kept telling me, Passion Parties is about the romance, not the sex. “Sixty percent of our product line is lotions and potions, only 40 percent needs batteries, and not all that is phallic.” Then she pointed out again how the business is a boon to female self-determination. Sherry Turner down in Bruce, Mississippi, near Tupelo, used to work in a textile plant trying to support herself and her kids. Then Sherry became a Passion Consultant hoping to supplement her income and within a few years she and her downline were moving over $5 million in merchandise every year.
Well, yes, but Bedazzle or Silky Sheets are not why women gather in living rooms. Without the vibes and dildos and how-to-have-sex books Passion Parties is just another network marketer selling moisturizer. With the batteries, you can buy stuff that will get you off. That is why the company is eleven times bigger than when Pat Davis took over, not because it sells scented creams.
Pat Davis is part of the adult industry, so much so her success has spawned imitators. Topco started a home party division of its own, as has Adam and Eve. Passion Parties already had its own competitors on the traditional multilevel marketing model, like a Cincinnati-based company called Pure Romance. Pure Romance got an endorsement from Jessica Simpson, a good Christian girl who said she was a virgin when she got married.
Before our last party together, the one where Brooke has promised I will finally get my chance to sell something, I take a day to drive around Shawnee and points west.
You have to squint a little to picture the Shawnee of just two decades ago. The old downtown has been made almost completely redundant by concrete traffic arteries lined with big-box chain stores, and the interstates. The First Baptist Church anchors the main street, Johnson Drive, and the Fine Arts movie theater, a Deco-inspired building that doesn’t show movies anymore, sits in the center. A few blocks to the north, the town fathers have re-created the pioneer village with a stable and cabins and general store. There are a few houses from the early 1900s on nearby streets. A side street off Johnson Drive is named for Chief Blue Jacket, a defeated Shawnee. You have to drive pretty slowly to catch all this, but nobody really wants you to drive slowly.
I pick U.S. 24, a secondary road that roughly parallels I-70, for the drive west. On the outskirts of Shawnee, I pass the National Agriculture Hall of Fame next door to the Kansas Speedway out in Bonner Springs. After that, the landscape opens up and the only radio station I can receive that doesn’t play country music features rock oldies, a category that depresses me because “oldies” refers to songs I listened to in high school.
Near the tiny town of Tonganoxie, I make a U-turn into the gravel and dirt parking lot of the Paradise Saloon Gentleman’s Club, a strip bar. There’s another car in the lot, but the place isn’t open yet.
Lawrence looks exactly how I imagined it would look, a small, brick college town, not exactly the center of a “red-light district.”
After I pass by Topeka, I find myself in the middle of farms growing soy and corn. In the distance, a
freight train runs straight through the corn, only the tops of its cars showing above the tassels. Clouds are building on the horizon.
I blame the scenery for why I failed to slow down when I entered the village of Rossville. I am looking at what there is, the neat aluminum-sided houses, the rusty spur of a railroad track, a big wooden building I take for a grange, when the red lights flash in my rearview mirror. Damn! I know better. State highways may say 50 or 55 mph, but as soon as you see anything that looks like human settlement, you slow down because even tiny towns need to resod the ball field and there’s no better way to finance the project than by snagging a stranger who doesn’t see the sign saying 25 MPH.
I pull over to the side of road, directly across from a general store, and reach into my pocket for my California license. The cop is going to love that license. He walks to my window and says what all cops say, and I say what all drivers say—didn’t see the sign, very sorry, boy, how stupid of me—and when he sees my license he asks me what I’m doing in Kansas.
I am tempted to say that I’m in Kansas to ask a bunch of women about sex and go to sex toy parties, but that probably won’t go over well.
“I’m a writer. I’m working in the area for a few days.”
“Oh yeah, whatcha writing about?”
“Well, actually, I am writing about women who go to these things called Passion Parties.”
“Sure. We got one of those women here.”
We chat about how nice I think Kansas is, which is true, by the way, and he lets me off with a warning and gives me directions to I-70. I pull into the general store’s dirt lot, back up, head the other direction, and immediately see the sign PASSION PARTIES BY BRIDGET.
Later I call Bridget Remer. Her grandfather owned the store in Rossville, she tells me. She was raised there and in the village just east on U.S. 24, Silver Lake. Now she teaches junior high in Topeka during the day and presents Passion Parties at night. She sells over $50,000 worth of merchandise per year. Not only is she not worried about the new state law, she says she’s had “clients” from the DA’s office, state senators, “some pretty high up clients if you know what I am saying, and no one has ever said, ‘Hey.’ But I do have a gal on my team, a consultant, who was a secretary for a lawyer. She shot me an e-mail after the indictments of the stores saying, ‘Fair warning. You might be the next one they are coming after.’ I was, like, ‘Well, bring it on.’”
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