by Неизвестный
Imboden sees Jimmyjane as playing into that discussion around sex and well-being, not only as a peddler of “marital aids”—terminology still used by the handful of online sex-toy retailers catering to religious Christians—but as a trusted provocateur. Guests looking for condoms at W Hotels will find Jimmyjane’s Pocket Pleasure Set in their room’s minibar, a slim package containing condoms, a mini-vibrator, a feather tickler, and the “love decoder”—a piece of paper folded like an Origami fortune-teller that engages players in titillating acts through a game of chance. “Everybody wants to try these new boundaries but they need a catalyst to make this happen,” Imboden told me. “We are granting them permission by transferring the responsibility to us.”
One day, I flew to Los Angeles with Imboden for a routine trip he was taking to different retailers that carry Jimmyjane. We started at Hustler Hollywood, an upmarket sex emporium on a corner of the Sunset Strip, with a glass façade, bright lights and polished floors. Hard-core pornography was displayed just feet from an in-store coffee bar, arguably two things that should occupy different spaces, but the suggestion is to get over it. Presenting erotica stigma-free in the manner of a Barnes & Noble triggers the disorienting feel of a dark nightclub suddenly flooded with fluorescent ceiling lights, where everyone can see what you’ve been doing in the corner. But a fishbowl is precisely the metaphor of transparency Larry Flynt had in mind, and amidst this forthright statement of normalized sexuality (store motto: “Relax…it’s just sex”), Jimmyjane is at home.
“With most other consumer products, like a pair of jeans, you have to convince people why they need it,” Cory Silverberg, a certified sex educator and author who writes the “Sexuality Guide” for About.com, had told me. “With sex toys people come in already interested, and what you are doing is removing the obstacles. A lot of it is permission giving—saying that sex toys don’t make you kinky, or that your boyfriend or girlfriend isn’t good enough.”
Imboden told me that Jimmyjane was the first to present sex toys in white packaging, and that retailers, accustomed to the candy-colored aesthetic, told him customers would never go for it. Several packages made by the company’s competitors now have a cleaner, white look. Imboden picked one of them off a rack, and pointed out the words bullet-pointed on the package: body-safe materials, phthalate-free, waterproof. “You never used to see that,” he said. European laws have driven much of the industry’s attention to materials safety, but whether it is to be believed is something different. Sander Gardos, who founded MyPleasure.com, an online retailer of sex toys, had told me, “You cannot trust what’s on the box—it has nothing to do with what’s actually in there,” recalling a manufacturer at a trade show in Shanghai who stood before a display of two boxes that contained the same product—one was labeled “100% TPR” (thermoplastic rubber), the other “100% silicone”—and then admitted both were made with PVC. “We have visited the Chinese factories that make all the toys that say ‘Made in Japan,’” Gardos said. “There are tremendous quality-control issues in this industry because it is completely unregulated.”
A stand-alone glass case carried what the salesman distinguished as the “sex devices”—superior quality, more nicely designed and higher priced products “that don’t crap out,” as he put it. Jimmyjane’s products occupied two shelves. The case also displayed products by LELO and Minna. On another shelf was OhMiBod’s Freestyle vibrator, which pulsates to music from an mp3 player. It bore a striking resemblance to the Form 6, down to its solid plum color and narrow metallic band.
Nearby, in West Hollywood, we stopped in at Coco de Mer, a luxury erotic boutique with outlets in London and Manhattan. With Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, who is an investor in the store, Imboden designed a custom version of the Little Chroma in black, with Stewart’s lyrics etched into the aluminum and a leather cord threaded through the cap, along with a custom guitar pick. We then met Robin Coe-Hutshing at Studio BeautyMix, her store inside Fred Segal, in Santa Monica (which has since changed ownership). A wall behind the custom fragrance counter displayed Jimmyjane’s vibrators, white porcelain massage stones (for which it won an International Design Excellence Award), and scented massage oil candles, which were the first candles of any kind to be formulated with a melting point matching body temperature, an innovation that makes them an effective emollient when poured onto the skin. In an environment of soaps, perfumes and skin cream, Jimmyjane’s bright color palette and white boxes fit as seamlessly as they had in a room of maid outfits and butt plugs. If Hustler Hollywood and Studio BeautyMix might represent almost dichotomous approaches to sex—the excitement of sexual fantasy versus the everyday made sexy—Jimmyjane works in both worlds by remaining agnostic.
We finished our tour in Venice, at A+R, the design store that Rose Apodaca, the former Women’s Wear Daily editor, opened with her husband Andy Griffith. The store displays a compendium of home accessories from designers around the world. The Form 2 sits on a shelf behind glass in a wall display next to the Braun travel alarm clock by Dieter Rams, and is sometimes mistaken by customers, according to Apodaca, for a Japanese anime toy. In the adjacent case, beside colored glass vases in the shape of honey bears, are the Form 6 and Little Chroma. “We wanted to include these products in our mix because we wanted it to seem like a perfectly normal part of one’s lifestyle,” Apodaca told me. “Just like they’d have a great wine carafe or a filtered water bottle.” When Sasha Baron Cohen walked into the store the week before I visited and learned what that Little Chroma was, he proceeded to browse the store picking up random objects and asking, “Does this vibrate?”
Victoria’s Secret, a $5 billion retailer ubiquitous today in American shopping malls, was founded in San Francisco in the 1970s by a Stanford Business School graduate who felt embarrassed buying lingerie for his wife in a department store, and set out to create a more inviting atmosphere for men. Soon, picking up a vibrator in a shopping mall, or a store that sells home accessories, cosmetics or lattes may seem rather conventional. It nearly is already. One of the faster growing categories in terms of sales at Walgreen’s, the nation’s biggest drugstore chain, is sexual wellness. Walgreens has been selling a vibrating ring—a gateway sex toy—made by Trojan, since 2006, except in the seven U.S. states where it is illegal to do so; Target and Wal-Mart sell them as well. Amazon.com currently carries just under eighty thousand sexual wellness products. Sales of “sexual enhancement devices” in mass food and drug retailers (excluding Wal-Mart) increased by 20 percent for the year that ended April 15, according to Symphony IRI Group, a Chicago-based market-research firm. Yearly sales of sexual products through home-party direct sales, like Pleasure Parties, are more than $400 million. “Vibrators are already mainstream,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s former vice president for marketing, who estimates the market for vibrators in the United States to be $1 billion—more than twice that of condoms.
Trojan, along with Durex and Lifestyle, are among the large companies now developing vibrators that a place like Walgreen’s might start to feel okay about selling under florescent lights. Trojan has introduced the sixty-dollar Vibrating Twister—the condom maker’s third vibrator model. For a trial, Philips Electronics launched a line of “intimate massagers” under their Relationship Care category. “These big multinational companies are realizing there is a ton money to be made,” says Cory Silverberg. “They will change things more significantly than the political feminist sex stores and some of the more interesting manufacturers like Jimmyjane.” Mainstream manufacturers and retailers are couching these products as being good for sexual health—that it’s not just about getting turned on, or being kinky, but about being healthy, like exercising and eating well. “That’s not exactly a change in our comfort with sex,” says Silverberg—it still will be some time before sex toy ads become as acceptable as Viagra commercials—“it’s a marketing ploy, but it will give people permission to try something they want to try anyway.”
Johnson & Johnson’s KY relaunched its
own brand with what it’s calling “intimacy enhancing products for couples,” including a topical female arousal gel “scientifically proven to enhance a woman’s intimate satisfaction.” “I look at it as the final frontier of the women’s movement,” says Dr. Laura Berman, a prominent TV sex and relationships therapist who incited a vibrator buying frenzy after appearing on “Oprah” with various devices. “Women now feel more entitled and free to explore their own sexual responses.”
As sex toys become just another personal electronic device, our expectations of them and how they are used are bound to change. Imboden has been considering this scenario for years already, quietly developing technologies that he says will “fundamentally alter the way that we interact with these products.” Imagine wearable sensors—embedded in clothing, or a bracelet—that operate according to heart rate, blood pressure and skin response. Imagine devices that communicate via a personal area network, connecting sexual partners in ways they don’t even realize.
One afternoon at Jimmyjane’s offices, Imboden told me that he believed the companies that will succeed in making sex toys are those that are forthright, trusted and accountable, like an intimate partner. He paused, then added—“and give great orgasms”—just before it became an afterthought.
Sex by Numbers
Rachel Swan
Jessica, John and Kate (not their real names) sat together at Cafe Van Kleef recently, looking more like three longtime friends than three people involved in a love triangle—or, as they’d put it, a love polygonal. Jessica had an arm casually draped around John, who leaned against her contentedly. The two of them met on OKCupid about three years ago, started an email correspondence, and hooked up, for the first time, at a friend’s Christmas party—John says they spent most of it making out in the bathroom. They started seeing each other “in a fling capacity,” he says, and fell in love against their better interests. John clearly remembers the day it struck him: “We were outside a Virgin Megastore in New York,” he recalled, “next to two guys who were laying asphalt. I suddenly turned to her and I was like, ‘Hey, I love you.’ And she started crying.”
About a year into their relationship, Kate entered the picture. She and John had actually known each other for a long time, and John said they’d always had a lot of chemistry. Both were warm and loquacious, identified as “queer,” and saw themselves as part of the Bay Area’s sexual underground. They’d actually met at a drag show. One day, Kate showed up at a music event that John had produced in Oakland’s Mosswood Park. (By day, he works as a freelance lighting designer for rock shows.) Kate marched straight up to Jessica. “Full disclosure,” she said. “I’m only here to get in your boyfriend’s pants.”
Weirdly enough, it worked. It turns out Jessica is one of the few people in the world who would take kindly to someone trying to steal her man. Because she doesn’t think of it as stealing; it’s more like sharing. A good boyfriend shouldn’t be squandered on one person, right? At this point, Kate and John have been sleeping together for a full year. They use condoms. John and Jessica are still “primary” partners. Jessica, in the meantime, started seeing three other guys. It’s not about getting even, she says; it’s about sharing the love. She and Kate are best friends. And Kate has a fiancé of her own.
Confused yet? Jessica explains it this way: “So here’s a conventional relationship,” she said. “You meet someone, you date, after six months, you use the L word.” She paused and glanced over at Kate, who nodded approvingly. “Then you wait for him to ask you to marry him. Then you have a baby.”
That isn’t what she ever wanted. In fact, since reading Dossie Easton’s polyamory primer, The Ethical Slut, in college, Jessica decided that she wanted to impose a cooperative, communal model on her own romantic life, without being a total freak. Although her current relationship with John is her first real foray into polyamory, Jessica said it’s something she always wanted. She’s certainly not inured to jealousy—no one is, she argues—but she’s found ways to sublimate it. And she feels that the returns are well worth the sacrifice, adding that she’ll probably never go back to old one-on-one style partnership. “I like being a slut,” she insisted.
And Jessica’s not alone. Over the past decade, polyamory has gone from being a fringe trend to a bona fide scene to a relationship model that’s widespread enough to almost be socially acceptable. The scene has its own canon, which includes texts like The Ethical Slut and Christopher Ryan’s Sex at Dawn (coauthored with his wife, Cacilda Jetha). Plus it’s got celebrities like alt-weekly sex columnist Dan Savage, who coined the word monogamish and turned open relationships into a cause célèbre. He’s currently shooting a late-night advice show for MTV. Some would even argue that the proliferation of social networks and dating sites—namely, Facebook and OKCupid—has turned us into a more open culture. The Bay Area in particular, with its long history of free love, its vast network of Burning Man enthusiasts, and its overall progressive ethos, is a natural hotbed for the alternative sex scene. It’s a place where avid polyamorists can bring just about anyone into their fold.
Sort of. It turns out that, no matter how successful they’ve been at negotiating relationships, many polyamorists still have one foot in the closet. And in a world where monogamy is not only well entrenched but vital to the workings of a property-based society, their scene may always remain marginal.
That realization has caused many “ethical sluts” to treat open relationships not only as a lifestyle but as a social cause.
Christopher Ryan has spent most of the last ten years combating what he calls “the standard narrative”: that man’s nature is to always be concerned about paternity. He started writing Sex at Dawn about eleven years ago as a PhD dissertation. At that time, Ryan was studying psychology at Saybrook University and working at a San Francisco nonprofit called Women in Community Service. “It was all women, except for me and one other guy,” Ryan said, “and they were all lesbian-feminist Berkeley types.”
Ryan was in the midst of reading Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, which uses evolutionary psychology to figure out whether men are congenital cheaters. Ryan had a major hard-on for the book. He’d recap Wright’s theories for anyone who would listen, including the women at his nonprofit—who mostly dismissed them. “They said, ‘That sounds really Victorian and phal-locentric,’” Ryan recalled. He didn’t take their criticisms as insult. Rather, he decided to go back and explore some of Wright’s original research.
And that led him to the bonobos. Ryan contends that if you want to challenge the standard narrative of human sexuality, you can’t just start at the beginning of civilization—you have to go all the way back to our primate ancestors. He explained it thus to a crowd of roughly a dozen acolytes at San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture: “If your dog shits on your bed, and you want to know why, you’re not going to study birds. You’re going to look at wolves, and foxes, and coyotes.” Similarly, if your girlfriend sleeps around, and you want to know why, take a look at the female bonobos at the San Diego Zoo. As Ryan’s friend Carol Queen pointed out, you’ll see a lot of parents at the zoo covering their children’s eyes: bonobos love to hump.
There’s really no way to answer an essential question about human evolution without resorting to conjecture, so Ryan and his coauthor (and wife) Jetha tried to have some humility about it. They also tried to incorporate data from as many disciplines as possible—primatology, archaeology, nutritional biology, psychology, contemporary sexuality, pornography, you name it. They drew some interesting conclusions: first and foremost, that monogamy really began with the advent of agriculture. That’s when we became concerned about ownership and possession. That’s when men decided that the only way to uphold a property-based society was to control women’s bodies. In Ryan’s estimation, it didn’t take that long—evolutionarily speaking—for us to invent the phrase “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
But there’s more. Ryan and Jetha also discovered some interesting and
oft-maligned facets of female sexuality that were borne out in bonobo research. Namely, that women are raving perverts, that they’re way more “bisexual” than men, and that they make a lot more noise during sex. Even more importantly: we’re all perverts. Or, as Ryan would put it, we’re “promiscuous” beings—promiscuous not in the sense of prurience, but in the sense of wanting to mix, being fiercely egalitarian and wanting to have sex with as many different people as possible.
We’ve been taught to think in terms of competition and scarcity, Ryan says, meaning that we’re told if we don’t ensnare one partner within a certain time frame, our chance at reproduction will run out. He contends that this line of thinking is culturally imposed, and that in reality, we’re not thinking about procreation every time we have sex—we’re doing it for pleasure. “Think about the number of times you’ve had sex,” Ryan said to the audience at Center for Sex and Culture. He paused, allowing us to mentally calculate. “Now divide that by the number of kids you have.” A few people chortled, though some hid their faces uncomfortably. Point taken.
Ryan isn’t particularly doctrinal—he purposefully left the pedagogical, thumb-sucking, “Where to go from here” chapter out of Sex at Dawn. But his book, which quickly landed on the New York Times bestseller list, has become a de facto bible in the polyamory community. John and Jessica both invoke his theories when trying to define their relationship. “Monogamy automatically assumes all these rules,” Jessica said. That’s why, when you desire someone besides your one life partner, it’s called “cheating.”