I submitted the first draft of my book! There’s still a ton of work to do, but I took a week off to recover—and I have to say, I didn’t really know what to do with myself without the book to shape my days.
One of the chapters I finished in the last month was one I’d been slightly dreading writing: the one about feminist sex-toy stores. My hesitation wasn’t because I doubted the topic’s importance or relevance—quite the opposite—but because I’m a wee bit prudish. (Even though I work from home and have absolutely no one looking over my shoulder, I was embarrassed every time I had to do research or fact-checking on a “pleasure products industry” website. You’d think there were rules about the minimum number of dildos that must be present in every ad—and they’re never the cute dolphin or corn cob ones.) In the end, though, it was one of my favorite chapters. I spoke with a bunch of people from Good Vibrations and Babeland, and they were uniformly delightful and helpful. Also, it’s a fascinating story, even though it takes a slightly depressing turn around 2017.
Yes, yes, I hear you muttering, but why am I telling you this now? Because of a funny coincidence I noticed in the course of my research.
Two women—one on each coast—opened the first feminist sex-toy stores in the mid-’70s. Dell Williams opened Eve’s Garden in Manhattan in 1974 (originally as a mail-order operation), and Joani Blank launched Good Vibrations in the Bay Area in 1977. What distinguished these stores from the existing “adult” emporia were a focus on sex education and high-quality products; a sex-positive, shame-free attitude; and a very different aesthetic. Instead of sleazy porn shops in “bad” neighborhoods, they opened appealing, cosy boutiques in cool downtown areas.
What I didn’t realize was that there was a (sort of) feminist sex-toy store in New York City before Eve’s Garden. Duane Colglazier and Bill Rifkin opened the Pleasure Chest at 10th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village in 1971. Just as Craig Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1967, two years before Stonewall and three years before Amazon, these gay men ran their business very much like the feminist stores that came after them.
The original Pleasure Chest was a tiny store—just 47 inches wide—so small, in fact, that they didn’t have room to display the product they were supposed to be selling: water beds. It was tiny, but the rent was cheap (just $75 per month—less even than the Oscar Wilde’s, just half a mile away, which was $115 per month), and it was in a gay neighborhood far from what was then the raunchy adult zone in Times Square. (Not that the Village in 1971 was the Village in 2023, as those rents suggest. There were lots of baths and bars and hustlers in the neighborhood.)
The Pleasure Chest quickly pivoted to sex toys, and while they developed a focus on BDSM items that wouldn’t have been welcome in the feminist sex-toy stores of the '70s, they otherwise had the same attitudes. They didn’t carry pornography. They didn’t stock junky “novelty” items. They didn’t black out the windows or hide the merchandise. They didn’t sell bogus ingestibles. And once they launched a catalog, it contained educational material as well as sexy images of their products in use.
In 1972, when a reporter from the New York Times visited the store for a piece called “Sex Boutique: Middle Ground Between Drugstore Approach and Smut Shop,” Rifkin told her “We treat our customers just as though they were walking into Gimbels to buy a table and chairs. We don’t pry. We just try to make them feel comfortable.”
When the Pleasure Chest launched a mail-order catalog, “The Pleasure Chest Compendium of Amorous & Prurient Erotica, Paraphernalia, et. al. or Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You,” it declared unambiguously: “The most important fact to know is that orgasms will not occur in the vagina or urethra unless the clitoris is participating. The clitoris is the key that unlocks female sexuality.” That's the gospel of Williams, Blank, and Betty Dodson!
It’s tricky to suggest that men got to the moon first—the moon in this case being, um, opening a sex-positive toy store! It shouldn’t need saying that it was easier for men to get loans and leases and all the other things that women struggled to obtain in the 1970s—here it’s worth remembering that women couldn’t get their own credit cards before 1974. (I should note, though, that while Colglazier and Rifkin had both worked finance jobs on Wall Street, Rodwell had no assets; he earned the money to open his bookshop by working two summers on Fire Island.) It’s just interesting to me that these stores existed avant la lettre because of some forward-thinking gay men.
Another interesting coincidence is that Rodwell and Colglazier both grew up in religions that had been founded (or, technically, co-founded) by women. Rodwell was raised as a Christian Scientist (in the book I note the similarities between Rodwell’s vision of a bookstore and the Christian Science Reading Room), and Colglazier’s family were Seventh-day Adventists.
The Pleasure Chest was a huge success—expanding to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.—but the founders both died of AIDS-related diseases in the 1980s, and the business barely survived them. As of 2017, when Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, which tells the Pleasure Chest story very well, was published, Colglazier’s nephew was still running the Village branch.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Lunch-time events in Edinburgh! That’s a cruel one, I know, but in my “week off,” we went to “A Play, a Pie, and a Pint” at the Traverse Theatre, and two days later we had a fabulous lunch at the Palmerston, a great restaurant near our apartment. The former offers all those things for £17.50 (or £12 for just the play), and I had mostly wanted to go for the experience rather than because I was drawn to the play. As it happened, though, the play we saw, “The Spark,” by Kathy McKean, was really quite good and depressingly timely. I’m looking forward to having the bandwidth to take advantage of the three P’s at the Traverse on a regular basis. (If you are a carnivore, I recommend the scotch pie!)
LISTEN TO ME: On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I offered some advice to a listener who was wondering if or when they should give up on their dream of earning a living as a freelance illustrator.
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