by Lynsey G
Especially within the adult entertainment industry, efforts to highlight actor consent in everything from gonzo scenes to kink films have become more prevalent. Although porn has been maligned for teaching young men that “women always want it,” the past few years have seen the industry taking pains to demonstrate otherwise. The fantasy aspect of pornography has been discussed in interviews, books, lectures, academic inquiries, panel discussions, and elsewhere as performers and consumers learn to tease apart the differences between what an edited porn scene shows an audience (what Seymore Butts described to me as “cut up and glorified and perfect”), versus the intense negotiations, heavy editing, and nitty-gritty reality of the performances. Many companies now shoot pre-and post-scene interviews to accompany sex scenes, featuring actors talking about what they’re about to do, negotiating sex acts with each other, and enjoying the afterglow.
I think that if Ron Jeremy tried to gnaw on my neck without my consent today, I’d have the fortitude to rebuke him. And I think that I’d have the support of many people in the room if I did.
But back then? I tried to laugh it off. After all, it was a funny story, even if I broke into a sweat when I told it.
CHAPTER 10
Vegas and the
Sex Toy Revelation
EXXXOTICA WENT SO WELL—my personal feelings about Ron Jeremy notwithstanding—that the WHACK! crew decided to go to Vegas for the Adult Entertainment Expo and the Adult Video News Awards. The porn industry’s time-honored annual gathering was held every January at the Sands Expo Center at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Sin City (though in recent years it has moved to the Hard Rock Casino, off the Strip) and 2010 seemed like the perfect time for WHACK! to make an appearance.
We talked the two lead actors from pornocracy, which we had continued to film on a shoestring budget, into paying for their flights in exchange for a free room in Vegas and a chance to hobnob with porn royalty on camera. The lead actress cashed in a long-standing offer from her grandmother for a free weekend stay at the Flamingo. We packed up our actors in an overcrowded taxi from Manhattan, shoved j. vegas’s six-foot-four frame into an economy seat, and crammed all five of us into a two-queen room that smelled of cigarettes from the seventies. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.
Our plan was simple: Use the two press passes we’d finagled for the expo on a rolling basis. We’d get two people in with the passes, then send one person back out with both passes, hand one off to another member of our crew, and sneak back in at a different entry point, until all five of us were wandering the show floor, looking for interviews to put in the magazine, porn stars to do cameo appearances for the show, and secluded corners quiet enough to film a few scripted scenes we’d planned for the trip. It was a racket, to be sure, but for a bunch of broke hopefuls squeaking by in New York, it was exhilarating. And, hey, nabbing the dubious title of skeeviest group at the porn expo? No small achievement.
The Adult Entertainment Expo was similar to Exxxotica in many ways—very loud, badly lit, and packed with every manner of perversion. But the booths were bigger, and there were considerably more of them. The premier producers had pulled out all the stops at their booths, with floor-to-ceiling banners sporting photos of their top stars and latest films. Early 2010 saw an upswing in big-budget adult film features, so there were themed booths and swag everywhere you looked. Porn parodies were on their way to the fore of the industry as well, so performers were wandering the show floor in costumes appropriate to their roles as pop culture icons. There were go-go dancers at every turn, a giant penis in the style of a mechanical bull, and even a few sex dolls modeled after porn stars hanging Mission Impossible–style from the ceiling. Several stages were set up throughout the hall, from which a parade of adult personalities drew crowds. Roving camera crews bumped into one another, camera equipment tangling. It was a veritable wall of sensory overload, making every pass through the show to find and interview a performer a complicated, tiring, and lengthy affair.
Our best bet was roaming the show floor without a clear target, then pouncing on unsuspecting porn talent at their signing booths. We quickly and happily discovered that with our press passes around our necks and cameras at the ready, we were rarely rebuked for cutting in front of signing lines. Taking full advantage of our credentials, we nabbed camera time with Andy San Dimas, Asa Akira, and Kaylani Lei, among others. I’d reviewed films starring most of my interviewees already, so I was able to ask pertinent and timely questions about recent performances. Most of the interviewees responded positively to my knowledge and were more than happy to talk. After two days of hitting the show hard, I felt pretty proud of myself. Well, proud and exhausted.
By the third day of our stay in Vegas, I was burned out on yapping with porn stars over the loud music, over-tired from late nights partying and long walks along the Strip, and completely over the convention. I left the show floor with our extra press pass in hand to go find Matthew. When we decided to take a previously untried door back in, we found ourselves in a smaller exhibition hall near the main show floor that I hadn’t realized was there. And it was filled with sex toys. I had unwittingly stumbled into the Adult Novelty Expo, an affiliated sub-expo to the one I was there for and a free bonus in a weekend where free bonuses were basically feeding and housing me.
As we moved through the show floor, ogling the vibrators and butt plugs and whips and gags and paddles, a light bulb went off in my noggin. Free bonuses. Adult novelties. Adult industry magazine … that I wrote reviews for. Free bonus adult novelties!
I marched right up to the first booth I saw and started talking. I told the guy behind the table about the industry magazine I was writing for and my own expertise at reviewing sex toys and by the way would he be interested in getting a free review from me, Miss Lagsalot?
There’s something about Vegas that can inspire even the least self-aggrandizing novices to become boldfaced braggadocios, and it had hit me. Little did I realize at the time that I was at the base of a swelling tidal wave of the adult industry’s shift in the new millennium.
ALTHOUGH ARCHEOLOGISTS HAD BEEN collecting “ice-age batons” from dig sites for years and delicately avoiding publicizing their intended uses, a 2005 dig in a cave near Ulm, Germany caused too much of a stir to keep prehistoric phalluses under wraps any longer. In the Hohle Fels Cave, an eight-inch-long, inch-wide siltstone “baton” in the shape of a penis—with carvings near the wider tip that made its primary use obvious—forced the scientists in charge to admit that they had found the world’s oldest confirmed dildo. The dildo (please excuse me while I gleefully overuse this term to counter all that “baton” nonsense) is estimated to be around twenty-eight thousand years old. That’s the Paleolithic era, folks. Pieced together from fourteen separate fragments found around the cave, the dildo appears to have been abandoned after it shattered—one hopes not during use. Its ground and polished veneer was enough to convince researchers that, while it may have also been used to knap flint, it was most definitely meant for insertion into body cavities. For fun. Like a dildo.
This Stone Age diddling device was made in the same time period as the Venus figures that proliferated in Europe in the Paleolithic period (one of the earliest examples of which was actually found in the same cave), but whereas those were mere visual turn-ons, this was meant to complete the job. Other similar “batons” from later periods have been found worldwide made from antler, bone, leather, ivory, camel dung (coated in resin, but still … ew), and wood, as well.
And the phallic novelty train didn’t stop in pre-recorded history—not by a long shot. In ancient Greece, dildos, called olisbos, were standard issue for wives whose husbands were away at war, to prevent female hysteria. The Greeks, you see, thought that women expelled sperm-like “seed” at orgasm, like men. This was likely a misinterpretation of the common thick, milky vaginal excretion (lovingly dubbed “cream” in modern parlance, and considered the only confirmed female ejaculation by the scientific community—none of t
hat “squirting” nonsense!) that often accompanies orgasm in women, and it was thought to comingle with male ejaculate at conception. In ancient Greece, the theory was that if women did not expel their seed regularly, it would turn toxic and lead to “hysteria,” a dreadful ailment that could result in all manner of symptoms. (A contradictory theory held that, if unused for too long, the uterus could wander throughout the body, perhaps in search of satisfaction, and cause blockages and disruptions. The word “hysteria,” as a result, has its roots in the Greek word for uterus.) “Treatment” for this condition could be self-administered with an olisbos, or by a doctor stimulating a woman’s pelvic region—usually by hand, but sometimes with water or other means—until she climaxed. This practice continued right up until the popularization of the vibrator in the late nineteenth century in Europe.
But naturally, Europe was not the only place given to an appreciation of phallic novelties: The dildo has a long and noble history in China, too, where great men were known to keep wives, mistresses, and virtual armies of concubines, all of whom were expected to stay faithful to the one man in charge. Left with a lot of free time between conjugal visits, these women were often gifted with dildos made of bronze and other precious materials to keep themselves company until the man of the house could pay his next visit. In India, ivory and gold were employed for ceremonial deflowering ceremonies in which a holy man would sometimes penetrate a virgin on her wedding night to avoid besmirching her new husband’s penis with hymen blood.
A charming story from the last years of the BC era tells that the forward-thinking Cleopatra filled a gourd with a swarm of bees, then shook it. The buzzing of the angry insects inside provided a pleasant sensation that the queen quite enjoyed on her nether regions, and thus the vibrator was born. Whether this story is true or not (and it’s very likely not), vibrations have long been known to titillate the sensitive organs between our legs. But it wasn’t until 1734 in France that a mechanical apparatus for buzzing one’s bits was invented—the Tremmoussoir was a handheld device that had to be wound up with a key, and which actually was quite a nice model. It never took off, however, and wasn’t replaced until Victorian times, when hysteria became a prevalent medical condition in England and America. Doctors’ hands were getting tired from delivering so many pelvic manipulations, so, in 1869, American doctor George Taylor patented the steam-powered “Manipulator,” which reportedly took up an entire room but nevertheless got the job done. In 1880, Dr. Joseph Granville of London developed a smaller electric vibrator, and the field of sex toy development took off at a gallop from there.
When I hit Vegas in 2010, I was witnessing a groundswell that has since become a tidal wave of sex toy innovation and popularity. With the advent of easy online browsing, research, and purchasing, sex toy customers were now able to discreetly purchase—without the black-plastic-bag walk of shame from the sex shop—any sex toy they wanted. From the adult industry’s perspective, consumer preferences were being illuminated by way of easily countable, trackable, and follow-up-able dollars being spent online. Sex toy customers, it became clear, wanted a variety of sex toys as diverse as their bodies and desires, and they wanted quality. And, now that buyers were at last able to contact manufacturers easily and privately via e-mail, discuss their purchases in online forums, review them, rate them, and demand more from them, something amazing happened: Consumers, especially women, became an active, vociferous, and lucrative demographic for the adult industry’s novelty division.
Of course, women have always been on the lookout for sex aids, as my first incredulous experience with “Boner Beach” had so graphically shown me, and as the unflagging popularity of the Magic Wand “personal massager” has proven since the early 1960s. And once the sex toy industry learned how to market its wares to women in more palatable ways, women responded.
First of all, the landslide of opinion favored better design. Jelly dongs and lifelike phalluses had their place, of course, but it turned out that most consumers preferred something a bit less obvious. Something they could take on vacation without fear of embarrassment should their luggage be searched. Something they could show to their lover. Something, well, pretty.
Ergonomics, too, are a big draw for modern sex toy consumers. Devices that don’t take a lot of explaining, are easy to use even in the throes of passion, and which won’t make your hand or other body parts cramp up mid-session are attractive to the average consumer. Toys that can hit the G-spot or P-spot (the prostate) without contortions, or which can be removed easily from a butt without fanfare, are big winners. There’s also a growing market of toys designed for disabled folks, sufferers of carpal tunnel syndrome, and people with larger bodies for whom some older designs were difficult—sexual pleasure for everyone! Hooray!
The democratization of 3D printing has vaulted the sex toy design field forward. Now that designs can be dreamed up and then made real in a short time by any company with a 3D printer, molds can be developed at low cost and new toys created in small or large batches faster than manufacturers a decade ago dreamed possible. Catering to even a small segment of the population that’s looking for exactly what they’re selling, small companies making everything from silicone dragon dongs to multi-sized ball gags on relatively miniscule scales are able to succeed because of the ease of manufacturing they can now command.
Today’s sex toy shopper is also looking for the finest materials. The days of the cheap plastic dildo are long gone, as is the reign of the carcinogenic, phthalate-ridden butt plug. (As an interesting side note, I recently learned from Sarah Forbes’s lovely memoir, Sex in the Museum, that the “adult novelty” title so often applied to sex toys came about because sex toy companies could “get away with selling … toxic items by simply attaching the word ‘novelty,’ implying that it shouldn’t actually be used.” Gross, right?) These days, the savvy consumer can find toys of medical-grade silicone, annealed glass, stainless steel, and other nonporous, nontoxic, body-safe substances. Many of these are on offer from manufacturers that take care to reveal as much about their production process as possible, some of whom go so far as to source their materials sustainably and power their production renewably.
And, of course, no matter how well a company has a specific customer pinned down ethics-wise, sex toy purchasers have bodies, desires, and sexual needs more diverse than anyone could expect. Variety is key to success in the sex toy industry, which means that as companies find their target demographic and work hard to supply it with what it needs, there is virtually always another demographic waiting for its turn. The diversity of human sexuality translates into an almost inexhaustible marketplace in which the only limit seems to be imagination. And as the means of production continue to democratize themselves with better technology and faster production, imaginations are running wild.
The latest development for many toys is a growing capacity for “smartness.” That is, many adult novelties are now programmable or tech-responsive. Some have memories of their own that can record and play back your favorite vibration patterns. Others can be linked to an app that tunes the device into music. A few can be controlled remotely, enabling couples in far-flung corners of the world to maintain long-distance relationships with very real sexual intimacy. And there’s an advancing arm of the industry specializing in pairing interactive webcam technology with sex toys that users on both ends can experience—some of which can be paired with virtual reality technology for a fully immersive experience. Every new advance in consumer electronics is up for grabs in the sex toy world, and sex-tech start-ups are taking off everywhere you look.
And then, of course, there are the porn tie-ins. Most sizable production companies now offer their own branded lines of sex toys, and porn stars sometimes have branded signature novelties under their name. Naturally, male porn stars like John Holmes and Lexington Steele have had their most famous body parts immortalized in rubber and silicone for years, but the big money in porn star genitalia reproduction these days has shifted to
the ladies. The Fleshlight company got its start in 1998 with a simple masturbation sleeve cased in an oversized container that posed as a flashlight. The brand, however, rose to a stratosphere of stardom rarely experienced in the jerk-off-sleeve biz by contracting female porn stars to have their mouths, vulvas, and anuses molded, then re-created in Fleshlight’s patented (phthalate-free!) secret material (using a proprietary molding goop that none of the models I’ve asked have been willing to divulge—I’ve heard a rumor that it employs seaweed or maybe algae, however). These Fleshlights are then made available for purchase by lusty fans worldwide. The Fleshlight Girls, as they’re called (and now the Fleshjack Boys), are basically a roster of porn’s hottest stars. Discerning fans can purchase their favorite model’s most delicious orifice and pair it with one of a wide variety of inner textures, making for a virtually endless set of masturbatory possibilities. The Fleshlight is far and away the most popular sex toy line ever marketed exclusively to people with penises, and its easy tie-in to pornography’s biggest names has made it an industry favorite. And, since the company is rumored to offer a fantastic royalty rate to models whose naughty bits are made into toys, everyone seems to win.
But the Fleshlight isn’t the only rodeo in town for fans looking for up-close-and-personal experiences with their favorite performers: The RealDoll takes the concept to a completely new level. While blow-up dolls with porn star faces are nothing new, RealDolls are fully articulated, life-sized, silicone recreations of human sex partners. In addition to its fully customizable line of standard sex dolls, the RealDoll’s manufacturer, Abyss Creations, has partnered with high-end porn producer Wicked Pictures to offer realistic recreations of its contracted models. That’s right: For a mere seven to ten thousand dollars, Asa Akira—or at least a startling facsimile thereof—can really, truly be yours.