There’s a visceral thrill that comes with selling a woman her first strap-on dildo.
She: a foxy brunette with dramatic bangs. He: a tall college-type, peering nervously over his girlfriend’s shoulder. She’s already wearing the leather gear-now we need to choose a dick. I turn a few examples over in my hands. This one has three levels of vibration, but this other one has that perky little arc. . . . So many possibilities.
As the boyfriend tries to look fascinated by something on the ceiling, the brunette and I narrow the options down to two. Five inches? How about six? I always try to up-sell.
Such is the joy of the Everything to do with Sex Show. A small gang of us from Little Sister’s staffed a booth at Canada Place for the four-day expo where fuckers of the world unite. I expected that-in the style of late night programming on Showcase-“sexual content” would translate to queer.
Straights, much like my parents, do not fuck. And if they do, it’s for practical reasons like having babies or distilling the boredom of their workaday lives-certainly nothing kinky goes down.
But no. The gay and lesbian turn-out at the Sex Show hovered lower even than the regularly ostracized leather and SM communities (who skittered in and out of their dungeon quadrant as gleefully as fat kids in a candy store).
As I rang up the silicone items and the leather, the lubes and the whips, the studded harnesses and vibrating butt-plugs, I began to realize something. Straight people are just as sick and twisted as we are. How did this happen? When did the straights become so queer? And, conversely, when did taking it up the ass lose its cachet?
Only two years ago, the Little Sister’s booth was a site of marked homophobia at the Sex show. Now, it’s a haven for boys who want their girls to bang them. Is this the work of Queer as Folk? No self-respecting gay person still watches the show, so maybe its audience is now a straight one, feverishly taking notes.
Certainly, we discovered, Sex and the City has had its effect on the dildo market. In a now-infamous episode, Charlotte (you can tell she’s the slut because they die her hair blonde) is laid up in bed with the flu. Consequently, she can’t get laid in any other way. Her friends (a gaggle of embarrassingly wealthy New York women who would make perfect dykes if it weren’t for their obsession with cock) buy her a dildo called “The Rabbit,” complete with twitching bunny ears for clit stimulation.
We at Little Sister’s fully endorse this kind of thing: dildos should be handed out to the sick and the lame as freely as cans of food are parcelled out to low-income families. We placed a sign over The Rabbit at our booth, which read: ‘As seen on Sex and the City.” Another sign promised “Charlotte loved it! You will too!”
And the straight women went ape-shit. The Rabbit out-sold every other dildo five to one. That’s what Sarah Jessica Parker and her primetime friends can do: they give people permission.
That’s what the Sex show did, too. A crowd of largely suburban straight folk suddenly felt like it wasn’t cool to make fun of the other 30 flavours at the ice cream shop.
That foxy brunette with the strap-on, after wisely selecting the larger of two dildos, dismissed her boyfriend’s whimper with a wave of a milky-white hand.
“If I don’t get to choose the size of your cock,” she told him, “then you don’t get to choose the size of mine.” The boyfriend shrugged then and gave me an orphan’s gaze.
“Can you help me choose a lube?” Yes, I could.
With pleasure.
If straight boys start taking it up the bum, maybe they’ll be less likely to sneer at me for doing the same. This is fantastic.
And then there was the half-drunk customer who hiccuped under the Little Sister’s banner and demanded to know where the cock rings were. “Gimme the best one,” he said. “I need the best.”
So I hand him the best-a veritable bear trap.
“Whaddoyou think I am?” he says, holding up the cock ring. “A fucking African American?”
With something like politeness, I demure, “It goes around your balls, too.”
“Oh.”
I imagine that being gay at a sex show is something like being Stephen Hawking at Science World. I even got to explain the exact location of the prostate gland to a professional escort. Just think: thousands of men will reap the benefits of my homo-wisdom. Even as you read these humble words, a john in some freshly made hotel bed is raising his eyebrows.
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