BeatRoute Magazine Alberta print e-edition - November 2016

DESENSITIZING SEX
fresh psychology straight from the sugar shack
I
heard Karl Sandberg long before I ever saw him, a perfectly pitched string of notes from some obscure,
off-Broadway musical drawing me into the theatre where he was helping set up stage. I had been on assignment
writing a preview for the show for the Calgary Journal. He sounded like something straight out of a
Disney movie, and, as I soon saw for myself, he had the snappy suit and meticulously stylized hair to match. He
strolled around the stage with that sort of Stepford-level pleasantry common of guys that pay their taxes early
and help your grandma from the vehicle when the sidewalks are slippery. The kind of guy that, when you hear the
confident click of his would-be bowling-alley shoes, reminds you of ‘50s music and the flavour vanilla.
He seemed pleasant enough, sure — but almost boringly so.
To say the least, he was far from the sort of person I ever imagined turning my entire sexual worldview on its ass
and giving it a flogging.
“No, I’m not kidding you,” his distinctly jovial half-drawl insisted a few rows back as he conversed with crewmates.
“I have, right now, in my backpack, a Spider-Man dildo.”
…I may have spoke too soon.
As it turns out, Karl, 22, happens to be just as knowledgeable (if not more so) about sex toys as he is about harmonizing
chords and blocking out a scene. That’s because, much to my story-mongering delight, Karl is not just an
ex-arts major slash theatre enthusiast. Karl sells dicks for a living.
“Actually, dildos probably make up the lowest percentage of the products I actually sell,” he persists. But dildo
salesman has such a nice ring to it, even if it does carry with it a certain door-to-door quality. The title stands in
almost comical contrast to the man you would meet at the front counter of the Little Shop of Pleasures’ (LSOP)
two Calgary locations, were you to venture by. You have to understand, he simply doesn’t look the type.
Of course, to say there’s a “type” for this sort of work is highly reductive — even borderline offensive — but you
knew what I meant, didn’t you? And isn’t that exactly the point? The duality infuriated my imagination like an itch
I couldn’t scratch. He looked more like he should be selling made-to-order suit jackets and billion-dollar watches
than gallon drums of lube and themed masturbation sleeves. And yet…
story and photos by MIchaela Ritchie
INTERVIEW WITH THE DILDO SALESMAN
I said as much as I stepped into the Macleod Trail location of the sex toy chain, my first ever foray into such tumultuous
and tantalizing territory. It wasn’t meant as a snub, but more as a way to diffuse my palpable anxiety at
being suddenly surrounded by such a volume of as yet unidentifiable fuckable objects. The top 40 hits strategically
filling the shop’s white noise, while hilariously ironic, were simply not enough to anchor me back in my own reality.
“I get that a lot,” Karl chuckles. After a year of employment there, he was used to customers remarking on his
spiffy appearance upon their entry into what my super-celibate mind could only describe at the time as a kind of
Disneyland for grown-ups. “My first thought is always, ‘Well, who else are you going to buy a dildo from? Would
you prefer if I came in here in my ripped jeans and a T-shirt? ‘Cause I can do that if you like.’” His adamant professionalism
was startling, to say the least, in as much as it unsettled me more than the nearby display of Fleshlights
did. The comments on his appearance are second only in frequency to Karl’s personal favourite: “‘I bet you get a lot
of strange people in here, huh?’”
“Of course it’s not a question, it’s an assumption, but it’s posed as one because whoever’s asking it is looking for
validation,” Karl explains. “And the more I hear it, the more I realize that the people who come to our shop are all
people who consider themselves to be very normal, but also very isolated.”
The elder of the LSOP stores is a bit of a fucking rabbit hole — in every sense of the phrase. It is home to not
just whips, chains, and harnesses of all makes and models, but a rainbow wall of more than 100 kinds of lube (silicone,
water-based, flavoured, you name it), a bright and colourfully illuminated glass case full of weapons of mass
seduction (all of which are made entirely of surgical steel), and a half a dozen seemingly endless racks of lingerie
(spanning 10 different sizes, including one for the curviest ladies fondly labeled “queen size”), all overlooked by
a flamboyantly decorated butt-plug mascot about the size of a grown man’s torso standing watch at the front
counter. So I could forgive the folk whose off-kilter reactions to the place have given Sandberg and his coworkers
many a vivid tale to recount over the years. Hell, my own eyes became saucers the moment I stepped in the door.
How did Bill Hader put it on SNL? “Mark me down as scared and horny.”
Karl lives for it — that moment of unhinging. It’s the thing that breaks up workdays of otherwise stark retail
monotony. In a business where customers are reluctant to even leave their name at the shop to sign up for the
points reward system, their discomfort is a rare rift in the armour that Karl can reach them through.
“My favourite part of any interaction is when somebody tells me their name — even if it’s a fake one. It makes
me feel like the most trustworthy person in the city,” he says.
Unfortunately, the awkward exchanges Karl so often enjoys with his customers don’t always conclude in anyone’s
idea of a happy ending. Sometimes discomfort simply breeds insensitivity, people’s inability to feel comfortable
with their own sexuality not only hindering their own pleasure, but also shaming others.
“I have people come in and ask me all the time, ‘Wow, what kind of loser owns that?’” Karl says of the
types of people LSOP staff call ‘point-and-laughers.’ “And my only thought is, ‘Remember where you are. It
doesn’t make you cool to come in here, to this safe space, and point and laugh at things. If anything, it just
shows your ignorance.’”
But such ignorance is common, says Karl, given our society’s historic mental linkage between a certain comfort
with our own sexuality and an unspeakably horrific moral standing. Though Fifty Shades certainly got many a
soccer mom’s blood boiling again, and despite the fact that Calgary has the highest percentage of sex stores per
capita across North America (as Macleod Trail will tell you, we are a happy, horny city), our mainstream culture
continues to marginalize kink — even in the face of findings presented in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which
approximate that one in six people have a sexual fetish and, furthermore, over 50% of both men and women
fantasize both about being sexually dominated and dominating somebody else.
“Turns out, if you’re not tying up your wife, if you’re still doing it missionary style, you’re actually the kinky one,”
Christina Nelson all but cackles. “And yet…”
And yet, indeed.
Chris and Don, owners of the Little Shop of Pleasures... “Sex makes the world a better place.”
MIXING BUSINESS WITH PLEASURES
It was almost to spite the negative stereotypes and the shame they reinforced in her that Chris Nelson started
working at the Little Shop of Pleasures back in 1996. Having always possessed an intense curiosity regarding her
sexuality, despite the stern teachings of deeply religious relatives, Chris first started working for the previous shop
owners in an attempt to satisfy her sexploratory appetites with an employee discount. She hired Don Wilheim,
whom she had just begun dating at the time, simply as reliable backup in case one of her coworkers went MIA
before a shift. As a musician, Don says he took the part-time position solely for the tax benefit it gave him.
However, what first started as strictly business soon evolved into a labour of love for the couple, who
observed through working at the shop a real lack of quality products and sex education resources in the community
for the types of customers they interacted with (which, both surprisingly and not, are most frequently
mid-30s power suit women on their lunch break looking for a way to kill some stress after work). The previous
owners, says Chris, knew little about the psychology and practice of kink or BDSM, much less how to relay such
information to buyers.
“We got vampire gloves in one day,” Nelson remembers of her time managing the store under the previous
ownership, “which is a leather glove with little tacks poking through for gentle spanking. I came into work that day
to find my boss with a hammer, pounding all the tacks down! I said ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘Oh, this is
terrible craftsmanship, this is going to hurt somebody!’ But that’s what it was supposed to do!
“So when I heard they were selling the store [back in 2000], I think I knew what I wanted to do,” she says,
flashing a gentle glance over to her partner. “They needed us.” The pair looked to each other as they surely had a
thousand times throughout the last 20 years, and giggled — some inside joke shared between them that I was not
privy to, but that betrayed them in the moment more as the lovesick teenagers-at-heart they were, instead of the
orchestrators of a small-scale sex revolution.
“I was already leery about who would be taking over, right?” she shrugs, “I wanted the new owners to have
respect for what we do here.”
“We take this stuff very seriously,” continues Don, the severity of his tone more evocative of a funeral parlor
than a discussion on the down and dirty. “We’re not selling carburetors here — this is people’s sexuality we’re
talking about! This is people’s intimacy. We’ve got to know our stuff.”
It has been that commitment to professionalism, in everything from expertise to style of dress (and the staff
regularly compete to see who can best succeed in both, Don and Karl inform, stealing glances at each other’s
necktie du jour) that has motivated the Little Shop’s inner proceedings ever since the pair took over.
Sixteen years later, the sex toy industry has undergone a similar evolution. What once was a space dominated
by sleazy visual pornography centered solely on heterosexual male pleasure has since become one where risque
products are packaged in discreet, sleek boxes reminiscent of the Apple brand; where trans-identifying folks can
obtain appearance-altering tools with the utmost safety. A place where even a 91-year-old woman can buy a pair
of sexy stockings with her 75-year-old daughter (“We know what kind of store this is, young lady!” Chris recalls the
women snickering as they hunted down their spoils) — entirely free of judgment.
22 12 | NOVEMBER JANUARY 2015 2016 • • BEATROUTE ROOTS CITY