Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (3 page)

You may choose to see this as evidence against my assertion that the scene was not a sexual one for me. I choose to see it as certi- fying proof of my capacity for fantasizing about clothed women who lingered in the periphery of my vision
at the exact instant
I ignored naked ones in the center of my vision.

The second slippage took place not at drawing group but in my room, with my friend Karl. We were fourteen. Karl and I usually drew superhero comics together, but this afternoon, deep into the porn drought of the 1970s, we drifted into trying to produce our own, doodling fantasy females without the veil of a cape or utility belt. At one point Karl reached an impasse in his attempt to do justice to the naked lady in his mind’s eye and let me analyze the problem. Yes, the nipples were too small, and placed too high, on the gargantuan breasts Karl had conjured. He’d also too much defaulted to the slim, squared-off frame of the supermen we’d been compulsively perfecting. “Do you mind?” I asked. Taking the drawing from Karl, I compacted and softened the torso and widened the hips, gave his fantasy volume and weight, splitting the difference between the unreal ratio and something more per- suasive. He’d handed me a teenage boy’s fantasy and I, a teenage boy, passed back a woman, even if one who’d need back surgery in the long run. Karl and I were both, I think, unnerved, and we never returned to this exact pursuit. Our next crack at DIY porn was retrograde and bawdy, a comic called
Super-Dick,
with images that were barely better than stick figures.

Confessing for the first time my authorship of
Super-Dick,
I’m flabbergasted, not at the dereliction of parental authority that would traipse nude women past the gaze of a boy still excited to sketch with ballpoint pen a hieroglyphic cock-and-balls in cape and boots and have it catapult into the obliging hairy face of a vil- lain named Pussy-Man, but at the Möbius strip of consciousness

that enabled that boy to walk around believing himself a single person instead of two or a hundred. If I’ve bet my life’s work on a suspicion that we live at least as much in our wishes and dreams, our constructions and projections, as we do in any real waking life, the existence of which we can demonstrate by rapping it with our knuckles, perhaps my non-utilization of the live nude models helped me place the bet. How could I ever be astonished to see how we human animals slide into the vicarious at the faintest in- vitation, leaving vast flaming puddings of the Real uneaten? I did. My last year at the High School of Music and Art a teacher booked a nude model for us to draw in an advanced drawing class, one consisting only of graduating seniors. By chance this was the last time I’d ever sketch from a nude model, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. By implication this was a privilege we seniors had earned after four years of art school: to be treated like adults. Still, there was plenty of nervous joking in the days be- fore, and, when the moment came, the doors and windows were kept carefully shaded against eyes other than those of us in the class. Needless to say, I felt blasé for several reasons, not least my own recent sexual initiation. I’d also begun to reformat myself as a future writer rather than an apprentice artist (at seventeen I’d already been an apprentice artist a long time), and everything to do with my final high school semester felt beneath my serious at-

tention.

Yet ironically, I’ll never forget the model that day. I remember her body when I’ve forgotten the others—had forgotten them, usually, by the time I’d begun spraying fixative on my last drawing of them, before they’d finished dressing. I remember her not be- cause she was either uncannily gorgeous or ugly, or because I experienced some disconcerting arousal, but for an eye-grabbing anatomical feature: the most protuberant clitoris I’d seen, or have

since. This wasn’t something I could have found language to ex- plain to my fellow students that day, if I wanted to (I didn’t). The model showed no discomfort with her body. She posed, beneath vile fluorescence, standing atop the wobbling, standard-issue New York City Department of Education tables I’d been around my whole life, the four legs of which never seemed capable of reaching the floor simultaneously, and we thirty-odd teenagers drew her, the whole of us sober, respectfully hushed, a trace bored if you were me, but anyhow living up to the teacher’s expectation. But I do remember thinking:
I know and they don’t.
(The boys, that would be who I meant.) I remember thinking:
They’ll think they’re all that way.

Can a Better Vibrator Inspire

an Age of Great American Sex?

Andy Isaacson

The offices of Jimmyjane are above a boarded-up dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission district. There used to be a sign on a now-un- marked side door, until employees grew weary of men showing up in a panic on Valentine’s Day thinking they could buy last- minute gifts there. (They can’t.) The only legacy that remains of the space’s original occupant, an underground lesbian club, is a large fireplace set into the back wall. Porcelain massage candles and ceramic stones, neatly displayed on sleek white shelves along- side the brightly colored vibrators that the company designs, give the space the serene air of a day spa.

Ethan Imboden, the company’s founder, is forty and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master’s in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited,

one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out—an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. “I think if you asked my mother she’d probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles,” he told me.

Imboden was seated next to a white conference table, re- viewing a marketing graphic that Jimmyjane was preparing to email customers before the summer season. Projected onto a wall was an image that promoted three of Jimmyjane’s vibrators, superimposed over postcards of iconic destinations—Paris, the Taj Mahal, a Mexican surf beach—with the title: “Meet Jim- myjane’s Mile High Club: The perfect traveling companions for your summer adventures.” The postcard for the Form 2, a vi- brator Imboden created with the industrial designer Yves Behar, was pictured alongside the Eiffel Tower with the note: “Bonjour! Thanks to my handy button lock I breezed through my flight without making noise or causing an international incident. See you soon, FORM 2.”

Jimmyjane’s conceit is to presuppose a world in which there is no hesitation around sex toys. Placing its products on familiar cultural ground has a normalizing effect, Imboden believes, and comparing a vibrator to a lifestyle accessory someone might pack into their carry-on luggage next to an iPad shifts people’s per- ceptions about where these objects fit into their lives. Jimmyjane products have been sold in places like C.O. Bigelow, the New York apothecary, Sephora, W Hotels, and even Drugstore.com. Insinuating beautifully designed and thoughtfully engineered sex toys into the mainstream consumer landscape could push Ameri- cans into more comfortable territory around sex in general. Jim- myjane hopes to achieve this without treading too firmly on mainstream sensibilities. “Not everyone sits in a conference room

and talks about vibrators, dildos, anal sex, clitorises—and we do,” Imboden explained. “It’s important for us to remain a part of the mainstream culture and sensitive to how normal people discuss or don’t discuss these subjects.”

Ten years ago, walking into the annual sex toy industry show for the first time, Imboden was startled by the objects he en- countered. He had developed DNA sequencers for government scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and more recently he had left a job designing consumer products—cell phones and electric toothbrushes—for companies like Motorola and Colgate, work he found dispiriting. “It was imminently clear to me that I was creating a huge amount of landfill,” Imboden told me. “I wanted no part of it.” He struck out on his own, and found himself approached by a potential client about designing a sex product.

The floor of the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo, held that year on the windowless ground level of the Sheraton in Uni- versal City, California, flaunted fated landfill of a different sort: a gaudy display of “severed anatomy, goofy animals, and penis- pump flashing-lights kind of stuff,” Imboden recalled. These tawdry novelties dominate the $1.3 billion-a-year American sex toy market. They are the output of a small but cliquish old boys’ network of companies you’ve probably never heard of, even if you have given business to them. One of these, Doc Johnson, was named as a mocking tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose justice department in the 1960s tried in vain to prosecute the late pornographer Reuben Sturman, the industry’s notorious founding father. Sturman invented the peep show booth, and built a formidable empire of adult bookstores that for decades constituted the shadowy domain where such products were sold, usually to men.

Imboden was inspired. “As soon as I saw past the fact that in front of me happened to be two penises fused together at the base, I realized that I was looking at the only category of consumer product that had yet to be touched by design,” Imboden said. “It’s as if the only food that had been available was in the candy aisle, like Dum Dums and Twizzlers, where it’s really just about a marketing concept and a quick rush and very little emphasis on nourishment and real enjoyment. The category had been isolated by the taboo that surrounded it. I figured, I can transcend that.”

At dinner parties in San Francisco, where he lives, Imboden found that mentioning sex toys unleashed conversations that ap- peared to have been only awaiting permission. “Suddenly I was at the nexus of everybody’s thoughts and aspirations of sexuality,” he said. “Suddenly it was okay for anyone to talk to me about it.” It occurred to Imboden that the people who buy sex toys are not some
other
group of people. They are among the half of all Americans who, according to a recent Indiana University study, report having used a vibrator. They are people, like those waiting outside Apple stores for the newest iPhone model, who typically surround themselves with brands that reinforce a self-concept. They spend money on quality products, and care about the safety of those products. Yet, for the very products they use most in- timately—arguably the ones whose quality and safety people should care most about—they were buying gimmicky items of questionable integrity. It’s just that people had never come to ex- pect or demand anything different—silenced by society’s “shame tax on sexuality,” as one sex toy retailer put it to me. And few alternatives existed.

Jean-Michel Valette, the chairman of Peet’s Coffee, who would later join Jimmyjane’s Board of Directors, told me: “I had thought the opportunities for really transforming significant

consumer categories had all been done. Starbucks had done it in coffee. Select Comfort had done it in beds. Boston Beers”—the makers of Samuel Adams—“had done it in beer. And here was one that was right under everyone’s nose.”

Jimmyjane’s success has inspired a growing class of design- conscious companies—including Minna, Nomi Tang and Je Joue—that are beginning to clean up an unscrupulous industry long cloaked by American discomfort around sex. LELO, a Swedish brand founded by industrial designers, creates upmarket products with names—Gigi, Ina, Nea—that sound like femi- nized IKEA furniture. (Try Gigi on the SVELVIK bed!) OhM- iBod, a line of vibrators created by a woman who once worked in Apple’s product marketing department, synchronize rhythmi- cally with iPods, iPads, iPhones and other smartphones.

I asked Imboden what qualified him to design a vibrator, a device primarily intended for female pleasure. Imboden said he considers himself “decidedly heterosexual,” but also “universally perceptive,” and he suspects that the formative childhood years he spent living with his mother and older sister, after his father died of cancer when he was two, may have nurtured within him a cer- tain empathy for the opposite sex. (His father had also been an en- gineer, also worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and ended up starting a dressmaking company called Foxy Lady.) “Ethan has an intellectual curiosity and an emotional maturity that doesn’t stop him from exploring something that a man ‘shouldn’t,’” said Lisa Berman, Jimmyjane’s C.E.O., who came from The Lim- ited and Guess and is among the company’s all-female executive team. “He is a real purist in the way he thinks, not just about engineering and design but the emotional connection that these products might assist in a relationship. He can do that better than anyone that I’ve met.”

Imboden enlisted his mother and sister to help him start the company. These made for some strange moments, as in the time when his mom complimented him on a well-written description of how a vibrator could be inserted safely for anal use, calling out from across the room, “Ethan, you handled the anus beauti- fully.” His friend Brian and other close friends invested initial seed money. Professional investors were intrigued but hesitant; here was a first-time entrepreneur, making a consumer product that was not, strictly speaking, technology (it being the Bay Area, this mattered)—and it was about sex. “They were scared of it,” Imboden said. (Banks still refuse their business, citing vague “morality clauses.”) Tim Draper, a prominent Silicon Valley ven- ture capitalist known for backing ventures like Skype and Hot- mail, thought differently. “He had a unique way of looking at the world, and a great sense for product design,” Draper wrote to me in an email. “He understood branding.”

Little Gold, Jimmyjane’s first vibrator, is a slender thing that could be mistaken for a cigar case. Imboden developed and pat- ented a replaceable motor that slides inside the twenty-four-carat gold-plated shell, which he engineered to vibrate in near silence. It is a portable, durable, and waterproof sex toy designed never to become landfill. For Imboden, it was merely a proof of concept. “It’s an immediate disruption of the associations that we have with sexual products,” he said.