When I heard a Hustler store had opened in Nashville's emerging gay district, I was intrigued. A girlfriend who had already ventured there said it was like going to The Gap, except with a Virtual Girl for sale, whose packaging included a miniaturized, sample vagina on display that customers could touch. The place was clean, brightly lit and staffed with young, attractive, helpful employees, she'd said. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" was blasting over the speakers.
I'd only been to an adult bookstore once, in college—the World's Largest here in Nashville—when a thrill-seeking girlfriend and I thought it would be fun for a laugh to go check out the freaks. Its questionable location, dank carpet and sweaty odor made us feel like we were slumming it. Funny, though, there weren't really any freaks. There were what seemed to be regulars, professionally dressed men thumbing unfazed through rows of magazines covered with gleaming images of ripe flesh contorted in every imaginable position. Eye contact among customers, if chanced at all, was furtive and fleeting. Sure, there were a few unsavory characters, the stereotypically dirty old men in trench coats, lured by the addictive pleasure of porn that could be eternally browsed without ever being purchased. The dark curtain covering the back room, we assumed, held the promise of lurid peep shows and raunchy sex films.
But this was 10 years ago, and in the decade since, pornography has gained considerable acceptance into the mainstream—in large part because of the increasing availability of sexually explicit material online, not to mention the wide variety of salacious programming on cable television. It seems everywhere you look, nice young girls have gone wild, and the news of yet another celebrity porn video rarely elicits more than an eye roll.
So I gathered a posse of young, thrill-seeking females to head out to the corner of Church and 14th, and there, against the backdrop of the Nashville skyline, was Hustler Hollywood in red neon, gleaming and bright as an automobile showroom. We pulled into the smallish parking lot and found the last available space next to a black convertible. We knew we had arrived—on the car's window was a sticker featuring two embracing animated women, an icy blue voluptuous vixen pinching the nipple of a sexy red she-devil.
Upon entering the pleasure emporium, we were immediately carded, something that hadn't happened when I visited the adult bookstore years earlier. Normally, all ages are welcome in the front section of the Hustler store, where gag gifts, lubricants, clothing and other novelty items are available. Only the big kids can peruse the sex toys, videos and magazines. In other words, anyone can purchase a pecker finder—a gag gift that includes a pair of tweezers and a small comb—but only those of voting age can buy a piggy-tailed butt plug. But tonight, porn stars Ashley Blue and Missy Monroe were on the premises, so it was strictly an adult affair.
Moving through the panoply of products for the sensualists among us, I was startled by the sheer variety of items. Everything from your basic KY Jelly to lubricants for the more sophisticated palate, like cinnamon schnapps-flavored Pussy Whip cream. There were vouchers for blowjobs for the busy couples who just don't have time to get around to oral sex. ("This voucher entitles you to one such service...in an elevator!") There's also a coffee bar, so you can sip a cappuccino while deliberating whether a diamond-crusted sparkly belt buckle that says "Slut" or "Naughty" better expresses your specific sexual statement. There were furry handcuffs, penis-shaped cupcake pans, thongs with sexually suggestive come-ons like "It ain't going to lick itself."
And all this while Pearl Jam, Modest Mouse and Weezer boomed from the overhead speakers, and young, enthusiastic staffers in black T-shirts bearing store manager (and Larry Flynt's brother) Jimmy Flynt's tagline "Relax, It's Just Sex" periodically checked on us to see if we had any questions. Ashley and Missy giggled sheepishly in the background.
But this was all just foreskin—conversational blue balls. We wanted to see the hard stuff. We moved past the feather boas—the demarcation line of entry into Babylonian excess. Pornography has always been about shedding light on what is enveloped in darkness, the glorification of every sexual angle. Its mission is simple: the single-minded exposure of the deepest truths about sex. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than a wall exclusively devoted to dildos and vibrators in every conceivable shape, color and size. Well, almost every size. Two thirtysomething women lamented that there didn't seem to be any tiny, vibrating balls that you could wear on your finger like a ring pop, like the ones they'd seen in Texas.
The best-selling vibrator/dildo is the Rabbit, according to a young, bookish sales associate with spiky hair and indie-rock glasses. It was popularized by an episode of Sex and the City, in which the Rabbit ensnares the prim Charlotte in its efficient grip, resulting in a weeklong addiction and many cancelled social engagements until the other women are forced to intervene. The associate explained the myriad possibilities for bliss that the $100 Rabbit guarantees, not to mention coordination to one's own bedroom color scheme. It was all so, well, antiseptic. A handful of couples, some young, some old, all with interlocked fingers, browsed the aisle eyeing various products with all the excitement of someone shopping for tableware.
All this frank discussion of sexual pleasure, complete with a feature film playing on a flat-screen TV in the background exploring sexual terrain in microscopic proximity, took all the fun out of the illicit allure of the dark mysteries of sex. I'd assumed I'd be embarrassed by such brazen displays of erotic images and steamily consensual acts, but I could have walked out of that store with a pair of silicone feet for the foot fetishist as dignified as though I'd purchased the latest Coldplay record from Tower.
Still, we opted not to test the sex swing, nor did we take the "Great American Challenge"—a frighteningly large dildo that dared would-be purchasers to attempt 14.5 inches of purple swollen love.
And then we saw it: the Virtual Girl. She is a full-length blond woman, mouth frozen in the permanent "o" of orgasm, with a removable vagina and anus for the guy on the go. She can be liberated from her plastic cage for a mere $699. In the left hand corner was a square cutout featuring a tiny sample vagina, beckoning "Touch Me." We couldn't resist. Neither, apparently, could everyone else who had been in the store, as upon closer examination, the squishy miniature was covered in a grimy, disgusting film. It felt like a spongy blob, and the general consensus was that it fell ridiculously short of reality and was something like fingering a Wacky Wall Walker. But pornography and its accessories aren't about reality; instead, they're about pure imagination, about getting in touch with our most primal identity. And in this sense, Hustler carries the torch of the eternal fires of desire, at least until 2 a.m.
