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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Old Britannia puts prudish America to shame, with chic vibrator stores as ubiquitous as Gaps and sex-toy parties thrown by a royal granddaughter.
Mar 4, 2004 | Overcoming embarrassment is no small thing in England, a country that has always made avoiding it a national pastime. The West End's longest-running comedy, "No Sex Please, We're British," centers on the mortification of a bank clerk who finds himself mistakenly put on a pornographic mailing list. England has always been mocked by its continental neighbors for its prudery (America is considered so prudish, of course, that it merits only disdain), but perhaps for this reason the British also have a long and grand tradition of ribaldry. They are probably funnier about sex than anybody, precisely because they are so embarrassed.
Which is why any Brit attempting to transform a business stocking vibrators, strap-ons and anal beads into a cheery retail staple as commonplace as the Gap would do well to present it as good cheeky fun. And that's exactly what Ann Summers, a massive chain with more than a 100 bright, bustling stores across the U.K., seems to have done. Ann Summers sells 1 million vibrators a year, and has launched a real trend; Selfridges, the hottest department store in London, featured luxury-sex-brand Myla's vibrating toy the Bone (which retails for 199 pounds, or about $360) in its Oxford Street holiday window display, and Sam Roddick, daughter of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, recently opened Coco de Mer in Covent Garden to sell some more. And the U.K. edition of Good Housekeeping launched its science section last fall by subjecting vibrators to good old Good Housekeeping product testing.
"It was very much a zeitgeist thing," Lindsay Nicholson, Good Housekeeping's editor in chief, says. Nicholson pointed out that a sex survey early in 2002 revealed that 50 percent of the magazine's readers would happily use a vibrator. Ann Summers' cotton-candy-colored Rampant Rabbit -- so well loved by Charlotte on an infamous episode of "Sex and the City" -- was the most highly rated product. "Embarrassment," Nicholson said, "should not get in the way of good information."
That sort of thinking hasn't quite made the leap across the pond. I asked the editor of the American edition of Good Housekeeping, Ellen Levine, if she had ever considered doing product testing on vibrators for the magazine. "It would not be an appropriate topic for the U.S. Good Housekeeping audience, let's put it that way," she said diplomatically. She had not heard about the U.K.'s feature. She asked an assistant to get ahold of it for her. Is the readership for Good Housekeeping so different in the U.K. than in the U.S.? I asked. "A lot of things happen in the U.K.," she explained, "that could never happen here." So it would seem.
Ann Summers stores hum with fun as well as with battery-operated devices, and it's largely because CEO Jacqueline Gold, widely regarded as the founder of English women's current mechanical feast, removed men from overt participation in the equation. A sort of harmlessness bathes even the most graphic items Ann Summers offers, perhaps because women still aren't taken all that seriously as sexual subjects. (When I visited the Oxford Street Ann Summers store, for example, I actually found myself thinking that the Purple Penetrator -- a strap-on 6-inch dildo with a vibrating "bullet" to provide clitoral stimulation to the wearer -- was kind of cute.) Gold was also savvy enough to fill the front of every Ann Summers store with Victoria's Secret-type lingerie: naughty but nice. The message is clear: Seedy is men selling sex to other men, or women selling sex to men, but not women selling sex to other women. When that's the case -- even if Purple Penetrators are on the shelves -- sex is safe enough to sell right next to Nine West.
Walk into any Ann Summers store and it's obvious that it couldn't have happened here any other way. The difference between the ambience of an Ann Summers shop and the kind of sex shops you still find in London's SoHo (where sex shops of the pre-Disneyfied-Times-Square sort abound) is like the difference between Chippendale's, where beefy men in G-strings cavort around stage and pretend to eat-out velvet pillows while women hoot, giggle and clap, and strip clubs for men where, if there is hooting and clapping, there is no giggling, and horny concentration hangs thick in the air.
It is possible that Gold was especially prepared to grasp this stunningly profitable concept (Ann Summers did $250 million worth of business last year, and is projecting a 25 percent increase for 2003-'04, making Jacqueline Gold one of the U.K.'s highest-earning women), because not only did she grow up a multimillionaire's daughter, but her father became a multimillionaire by selling porn. In 1979 Gold chose to join the family business and soon Ann Summers, a two-store afterthought in her father's empire with a 90 percent male customer base, caught her eye. Gold knew, perhaps all too well, that the vast majority of British women would never be seen entering its doors, but she wanted them to. So she devised a brilliant strategy for paving their way: She recruited Ann Summers party planners and let women all over the country get to know the products and the brand in the privacy of their own homes.
Twenty years later the party-plan business is still going strong -- Ann Summers received a tremendous boost when it was made public that Zara Phillips, Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter, had hosted Ann Summers parties at her mother Princess Anne's home at Gatcombe Park. Gold estimates that 4,000 parties take place every week. But the mainstream success of the stores is even more striking, and that boom took longer to develop. In 1997, there were still only 12 franchises in the U.K.; since then 95 stores have been added, and expansion into Europe has begun. "There has been resistance from local government," Gold told me in an e-mail, "landlords, etc., but we have managed to overcome all of this, and now landlords are ringing us up desperate for us to open in their shopping centres, as we are a recognized brand!"
Clearly, despite all the credit Gold deserves for creating, as she puts it, "a safe and female-friendly environment on the high street where women can be adventurous and buy sexy lingerie and sex toys," larger cultural changes in the U.K. over the last five years have benefited her greatly by exponentially increasing women's comfort with what she's selling, and as a result their demand. What's different? The notion of vibrator as accessory, as opposed to vibrator as tool for orgasm (or is it orgasm as accessory?), came up in various forms in my investigation of vibrator zeitgeist. (Nicholson chose the adjective "glossy" to describe the image vibrators currently enjoy.) And none of the recent entrants to the vibrator market epitomizes this better than Myla, a newcomer in 2001.
