Sex shops. Porn stores. Spunkeasys. Good-for-nothin’ smut peddlers. Whatever you want to call it, the adult retail industry has always had a certain stigma attached. It used to be that you would be deemed a dirty old pervert or a crack whore just for being seen entering one of these houses of ill-repute!
These days, the taboo surrounding sex stores and sex toys seems to have lifted a great deal, as people flock to adult stores globally to purchase the latest and greatest thing to acquaint their nether regions with.
A friend of mine works for Adultshop.com and has told me that the majority of the customers she deals with are professional (no, not THAT kind!) couples in their 20s-60s, happy to spend top dollar for the best and most innovative sex toys in the world. Brands like Lelo and We Vibe are designing rechargeable, medical-grade silicone toys that wouldn’t look out of place in an art gallery or a NASA lab. Gone are the days of the $10 jelly vibrator complete with yeast infection – unless you are a regular at Sexpo. Replacing those are the 10 year warranties, hefty price tags and artfully designed dildoes. Hand-blown glass dildoes and pretty little USB rechargeable lipstick bullets line the shelves alongside electric shock therapy kits, steel cock cages and ball gags. Selling everything from hens night novelties and girly lingerie to masturbation sleeves, dental speculums and steel floggers, sex stores now cater to the needs of the totally vanilla giggly girls to the dungeon-dwelling sadists. Thanks to shitty mummy porn such as 50 Shades of Grey, bored housewives are hammering on the doors of the kink-filled retailer in droves in order to satisfy their middle-class suburban urges.
Never had a sex toy before? Might be time to live a little and give your hand a rest.