As the great poet said, “The times, they are a-changin’.” When the Everything To Do With Sex Show first opened its doors 15 years ago, the current Ontario sex-ed curriculum was two years old, same-sex marriage was unthinkable, Internet porn downloaded at dial-up speed, and your then-very-hormonal correspondent spent a whole afternoon staring at a volume of tasteful nudes at David Mirvish Books on Art.
“When we first started the show, some of the biggest exhibitors were the porn companies,” says manager Mikey Singer as we walk inside the Enercare Centre, where the 16th annual exhibition took place over the past weekend. Now, according to Singer, cam services are king.
“Interactivity is the key,” he says. “Where before you would just sit there and watch a video, now, with something like a cam, you can totally interact with the person you’re watching.”
“That’s scary to me,” I say, and then wonder why I said that. My eyes drift to the Oasis Aqualounge booth, where topless women frolic in a ball pit. “There seems to be more talk these days about sex-positivity,” I offer.
He points to Carlyle Jansen, founder of the venerable women’s sex store Good For Her. “She actually just did a wonderful seminar on G-spots, and it amazes me how many years we’ve been doing the show, how few people know about their bodies. Because it’s not like you can go to school and learn about where your G-spot is in health class.”
“Yeah, people don’t like asking about that…” I say, pathetically substituting the word “people” for “I.”
We take a seat at a bench near the Kink Corner, where I see at least one middle-aged man in a leather-daddy outfit. “One of the things that’s changed is, people used to think we were a male-dominated show,” Singer says. “If you walk around and take a look at the crowd, most of the people here are couples, and then you’ll see a lot of groups of women.”
Truth in advertising: the Everything To Do With Sex Show has a little something for every (mostly hetero, mostly cis-gendered) taste, from neo-burlesque and erotic art to more practical concerns like condoms, vibrators and bedsheets. On the main stage, dancing beefcakes show their rock-hard pecs, and women from the audience compete to moan their best fake orgasms (with sometimes blood-curdling results). On the smaller stages, you’ll find seminars on tantra, oral sex, squirting, and kink. At the Love Shop booth, I come close to buying a “Pecker Voodoo Doll” (poke it in the shaft and give your enemy erectile dysfunction; poke it in the scrotum and give him crabs). Instead, I spend eight dollars on a “Taiwanese Cock Dog”—a penis-shaped hot dog on a stick. “Please share photos!” says the cook. I dutifully post one on Instagram.
I drop by Dr. Laura Betito’s presentation on sex after 50, and learn that the spirit is still willing even if the flesh is weak. “I do a lot of talks to seniors’ residences,” she says, “and that’s really interesting, because there you have one guy to, like, five to 10 women. And guess what? There’s a lot of action happening in these seniors’ residences—a LOT of action. I actually go in there and teach them how to have safe sex, because there’s also a lot of STDs.”
At the Good For Her booth, I ask Carlyle Jansen if she faces any common misconceptions. “We get, ‘What about Good For Him?’ There’s a real reaction, like, ‘Wait a second—why are you excluding men from this? My response to that is, we specialize in pleasure for women, and we think it’s good for their male partners to understand what they want.” She shows me some of the new vibrators and prostate massagers: “This is ‘The Womanizer’—now, the Germans are really bad at names, and they’re not so good at the aesthetics, but they make good-quality toys.”
Later, I strike up a conversation with Uncle D—a heavily tattooed man with a Grizzly Addams beard who calls himself “the Canadian Assman” (“The job didn’t exist, so I created it”). The Nova Scotia native is here recruiting “big-bootied” models for his site TouchYourToes.com, and recalls growing into tastes that mainstream porn rarely serviced.
“I would look for the adult videos on VHS,” says Uncle D. “You’d see this beautiful girl on the cover in a pair of disco jeans with an incredible bum, so I’m thinking, ‘This is great!’ But when you go to watch the movie, you’d never see that friggin’ seat!” Uncle D’s fetish photography is more about the sizzle (tight jeans, cat suits, underwear, etc.) than the steak, and his unabashed love of curvature has earned him fans around the world. He has also received the ultimate vindication: John “Buttman” Stagliano, the undisputed king of hinder-rotica and an inspiration to Uncle D, distributes some of his DVDs.
“What is it about the ass?” I ask.
“Some people are born boob guys—I’ve never really cared about boobs at all,” says Uncle D. “I like small boobs. I like my double-Ds in the ass-cheeks, to be honest. It just really accentuates that little waist with these nice, big, earthy curves—to me, that’s a woman. It accentuates that primal, instinctive, lustful side we all have as human beings.”
The big porn companies are absent this year, but the spectre of the industry looms large. With porn in transition, I ask Jemma Valentine—here recruiting with the Maxxx Models agency—where the money is for adult models.
“It depends on what a model wants to do,” she says. “I do much more hardcore scenes, working with different places and different companies. It all builds on each other—more people see a scene, and then they’ll sign up for my site. I produce as well and manage other models, so it’s a balance: it’s not like you have one job where you go do the same thing every day. Unless you’re just camming and that’s the way you want to do it.”
“It’s evolving,” adds model Rosie Cooper.
“Where’s it going?” I ask.
“Well, we’ll have to see. With all the new technologies coming out…”
“We had a really long conversation about virtual reality last night,” says Valentine.
Over at the booth for the website Cam4, I meet Loli Cam, a Quebec-based model, recruiter, and coach. “For me, it’s been such a release,” she says. “I was 265 pounds, and in my head, I was not pretty. I get on cam and I was seeing all those people looking at me, and I was amazed. I was like, ‘Wow, all those people looking at me, and they tip me?’ I got so much more confident in my body, and I have so much fun on cam.”
Loli is married, and on a TV monitor, I see her performing on cam with someone who may or may not be her husband. “I think when people try it, they can understand what I talk about. If you are BBW, if you are a super-small girl, if you are into a fetish, you will find some fans. A lot of people like it, who are there to tell you that you are beautiful, that you are amazing. I think this is the best thing: it’s the community.”
A lot has changed in the kink industry since 2002, when Shahrazad became a dominatrix. At the “Ask a Dominatrix” Q&A at the Kink Stage, she tells the audience, “My mentor, when she first started, the only way you could find her was in the back of some really obscure magazine that you had to go into some sort of really deep, dark store in the middle of a sleazy back alley to find. And now, with the wonderful advent of the Internet, everybody and their dog is offering fetish and domination services.”
That’s not the only way the Internet has shaken the industry: “What I find now that’s different is, we have the wonderful world of porn,” she says. “Now I have 19 and 20-year-olds knocking on my door and saying, ‘I’m into balloon fetish, and I want you to throw a cream pie in my face,’ and I just kinda look at them and go, ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ It used to be that clients were older because they had the time and the introspection to finally becoming accepting of what it is that they desired, and that took most of their life to come to that self-acceptance. Now we have people accessing our services a lot younger.”
This resonates with me, since I, like practically every millennial male of my acquaintance, received a certain amount of my sex education from porn. I’m ambivalent about this, because although porn has never been more accessible and culturally acceptable, the ugly and anti-woman elements of the industry have never been more visible. The Everything To Do With Sex Show is run very much in the spirit of openness and curiosity towards sexual diversity, but while our society has undeniably grown more sexually liberated, it has done so in parallel to growing anger, hostility, and misogyny in porn—consider the growing scourge of ‘revenge porn,’ or any ad on a mainstream porn site offering some variation ‘Teen Girls Punished.’ There’s no overt hostility or misogyny at the Everything To Do With Sex Show, where it appears that more than half of the event’s attendees are women, and nearly everyone looks like they’re getting laid. But I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the generation who grew up with online porn is leading GamerGate and other anti-female online movements.
But I’m not sure how to reconcile the sexual entitlement of porn’s darker side with the burgeoning camgirl market—a form of pornography whose appeal lies in the interactivity between performer and viewer. A generous interpretation might be that, in these unscripted, interactive settings, the viewer might more easily see the sex worker as an actual human being. A less generous interpretation would be that controlling another human like a video game in a private online room is a poor substitute for actual sex.
Instead of trying to grasp for a conclusion, I’ll leave you with this thought from cam-performer Nikki Knight: “I tell people, don’t be a body with a dildo, because it’s click-click and they can find anything they want. It’s more of an experience; you want to see what someone else is into, and you want to see them really, really enjoying it. It’s more interesting to watch someone else enjoy something that they’re into than it is to watch someone try to please everyone in the room. It’s much more about being an Internet personality.”
