The world’s largest adult industry convention will be held this week in Las Vegas, which may seem like a weird bit of news to blurt out here on Exurb but I do it for two reasons. First, while the convention takes place in Las Vegas, the overwhelming number of businesses, performers, and even the sponsoring trade magazine — Adult Video News — are based in the Los Angeles suburbs, mainly in the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. Second, the sex business, like the middle class in the Los Angeles suburbs and the rest of the country, has been ravaged by the double punches of the recession and the digitalization of media.
The fact is, the sex entertainment industry is as bourgeois as Thermador appliances and public school angst. It is not about sex at all, really, it is about business. The names of the corporations are provocative: BoneTown, Evil Angel (lots of “angels” in adult company names lately) and Mr. S. Leather are three I just picked at random. But the pitches and purposes of the products can seem comically pedestrian.

Take, for example, Dapper Dicks. This is a line of designer clothing for a man’s true decision maker. The line includes Fireman Rick and Private Willy outfits.

Recall the sexy way some of the women rode that mechanical bull in “Urban Cowboy”? (Remember “Urban Cowboy”?) Well now Bucking Penis is marketing a giant rubber sex organ so that there’s no need to use that mechanical bull as metaphor. Coming to a bar near you.

Sex App Shop? Well, now there’s an app for that.

Natural Male Enhancement World plays on the insecurities of men the way that girl who advertises Go Daddy during Super Bowls plays on the insecurities of women. There’s no such thing as “natural male enhancement” but the adult industry, like, say, the banking industry, isn’t too particular about pigs and pokes.

Speaking of which, there’s French Lover TV, a “sex education” video series that promises to teach us shoddy Americans how to make love like, um, a French person. The company is based in Belgium.

My favorite, however, is a new appliance called the Blow Guard “designed by a dentist!” though the company doesn’t name the actual dentist except to say that he is “Dr. Joe” and “from Ohio.” He was inspired, says the company’s web site, by the sad tale of a female patient who sat in his dental chair and complained that when she pleasured her man orally, her false teeth moved. Oila! Genius responds to just such a spur and soon the world was blessed with the Blow Guard.

If these things sound a little like those products you see advertised on TV between the end of football games and the start of 60 Minutes, that’s the point. They may all be sex related, but they are really about hustling to sell you something just as that woman who makes cheese omelets in that hot air oven thing that looks like a popcorn popper wants to sell you one of those.

The industry is desperate to sell you because recession and the same digital revolution that threatens to undo newspapers and magazines (and has made everybody with a cell phone a potential pornographer) has driven out whatever naughty exclusivity used to exist in the adult business. Sex products and erotic entertainment are now commodities like coffee, hamburgers and real estate. Executives who once had to trade reputations for the license to print money in the adult industry now find themselves competing with every other commodity as just one more bit of discretionary flotsam in our economy.

Given that the adult industry is a major player in the Los Angeles region’s economy, that matters from a financial standpoint. Porn performers need dry cleaning and take out Mexican food, too, and if dentists from Ohio are entering the sex toy business, we may one day feel nostalgic for those days when Simi Valley seemed, well, just a little enticingly seamy.

Journalist Brian Alexander is the Sexploration columnist for MSNBC and the author of America Unzipped.

Alexander is the author of America Unzipped

I know I am getting older when people tell me exactly what “the kids” think and what the kids think is so different from what I think that what I think is that I am living in an exotic land that bears little resemblance to the one I knew.

Most recently this occurred while I was researching and reporting a story that is supposed to be part of a big MSNBC.com package to accompany a special report headed by Maria Shriver about women in America. (I am always suspicious of special reports about women in America because I think I am going to be hammered for having nerve enough to be a man. I wish somebody would do special reports on men in America.)

Anyway, it seems women are often making more than the men they love or sometimes acting as sole breadwinners either because the man has lost a job, or because the couple has made the choice to have him stay home with the kids and have her work. This is revolutionary, I agree, but it’s not really news to me since from the very beginning of my career I have worked for women. With two exceptions, women have literally been the boss of me, and I’ve never felt any less manly because of it.

My Sexploration column assignment this time was to suss out how this turnabout affects men sexually. Are the guys emasculated underperformers?

No. But some of the men I interviewed told me that they compensate for their lowly wage status by becoming bedroom studs. The woman is making most of the money, they figure, so they’d better put out. As one man said to me “You’ve got to take care of your business!”

Turns out that there is some empirical evidence that those of us who earn less than our lovers work extra harder to make sure they are happy in the sack. So while under earning men aren’t saying they are unhappy about female economic power, and say they love their wives and don’t feel less manly, it’s on their minds.

The younger the guy, though, the more natural he thinks this is. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I suppose it’s a good thing, but on the other, I picture a land full of Stepford husbands preparing breakfast in the morning, rushing off the gym to keep that six-pack, and then getting advice on what sex moves to make that night so their women won’t stray.

I am seeing, well, Laura Petrie in reverse. But here’s the thing: Aren’t we all — men and women — supposed to take care of our business regardless of who makes the money? Or is this just men ratcheting up their bedroom performance to where it should have been all along, the way women have tried to please men? I don’t know the answer to that, I’m just asking.

I also worry that the images of men we see in pop culture make us either overly muscled super heroes, oversexed slackers, or buffoonish suburban dads. I miss the all-around competent male. I miss Gregory Peck.

I do realize this role reversal thing, or whatever you wan to call it, is here to stay. But I also admit it makes me uncomfortable and that I can’t fully explain why without sounding like Mr. Retro Man. I am not my father but I am not 25 either.

Journalist Brian Alexander is MSNBC.com’s Sexploration columnist. He’s also the author of great book called America Unzipped.

I came across this bit of news yesterday: Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch industrial giant that brings you everything from TVs, to MRI machines, to light bulbs, has decided to bet big on sex toys.
The company estimates that the worldwide sex toy business amounts to about $97 buh-buh-billion per year, which means an awful lots of people out there, mostly women, are turning to vibrators.

The company entered the market a year ago in Britain, according to Reuters report, and things went so swimmingly that it has now launched an “entry level” model for worldwide distribution. I’m not sure what constitutes an “entry level” vibrator — some sort of training wheel apparatus? — but that begs the question what an advanced model might include. Yikes!

Anyway, the reports stated that the toys will cost from about $100 to $214 and be better constructed than your typical vinyl Chinese import known more for breaking down at inopportune moments than for accomplishing the task at, um, hand. They are distributed by companies, often based in the San Fernando or Simi Valleys with names like “California Exotic Novelties.”

As that name implies, sex toys were not taken seriously for many years but all that’s changed. Philips is about as mainstream as you can get and it is promoting its new line with a health message. A U.K.-based sex therapist and relationships counselor, Paula Hall, who helped Philips design the new vibrators, argues in a Reuters quote that sex toys can “actually reduce the chances of getting cancer, heart diseases and lowers blood pressure.”
(There is some research that shows having sex and orgasms may help with blood pressure and that orgasms may — repeat may — add to life expectancy but I’m not aware of any research that shows it reduces cancer and the other supposed benefits of sex are still iffy.)

Funny how they felt the need to make that sort of claim rather than just saying that vibrators feel good and can be fun. I mean, nobody says Philips TVs or MP3 players boost anti-oxidants.

But if a little non-sybaritic justification helps improve the acceptability of sex toys, and if Philips pushes its new products, you are about to see actual, honest-to-God vibrators in your Encino and Woodland Hills Rite Aids, Costcos, and Best Buys.

Go ahead and leave a comment…Will you be a Philips customer??  Are you already contributing to the sex toy industry?

Journalist Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped and MSNBC.com’s Sexploration columnist.

I have no desire to cause any trouble for anyone’s home life, but something’s bugging me after reporting my most recent MSNBC.com column. The column itself is a little complicated so I won’t bug you with its details, but it touches on something that’s troubled me before: how we pick our mates and the rather blatant prejudice with which we do it.

I’m not talking about race or religion. I’m talking about education. No kidding, it often seems that we stand a better chance of marrying a Jew if we are Catholic, or an African-American if we’re white, than we do if we have a law degree and the attractive person we’re eyeing went to plumbing trade school.

Interracial marriage is kind of hip and liberal. I mean, the tri (quad?) racial Tiger Woods and his Nordic wife are Ozzie and Harriet compared to any couple in a mixed marriage of high school diploma and PhD. Talk about segregation!

This helps explain why lawyers seem to mate with lawyers, creating more lawyers, or classics scholars breed children who go to Bard or Williams and write papers on Aeschylus.

Sure, a few years back, there was a spate of women, many of them writers, it seemed, who left New York or Los Angeles and their hectic media jobs and found love with cowboys in Montana, river rafting guides in Utah, or truck drivers on the open road. But these are glaring exceptions. (And if I recall correctly, shortly after the book or movie or New York Times article about the very satisfying sex to be had with hardworking men was produced, the relationships ended.)

Since I am man, I am going to find fault with women.

I know college and post-graduate educated women who decry male shallowness about looks — O.K., boobs and legs — who would never, not in one million years, seriously consider marrying a construction worker. One night stand, maybe. Marriage? Forget it. Sure, you like looking at the UPS guy in his shorts on hot summer days, but if you’re a professional, or highly educated, would you date him? Seriously?

When sociologists talk about people who marry those with less education, they use the phrase “marrying down.” Really. They say so-and-so “married down.” Ooh. Too bad. She married down.

There’s a wealth of statistics that show that since World War II we Americans simply do not marry down if we can help it. Before World War II, we were much more egalitarian. The fact that most women (most men, too) did not go to college before World War II may have had something to do with it.

But why did you marry (or why are you dating, sleeping with, flirting with, whatever) the man or woman you did? Was it really Kismet? Or was there some cold calculation that your education levels matched. I ask because sociologists also have a theory they call “exchange.” It says that love and marriage are a bartering of valuable stuff, not a magical moment built upon an old Bon Jovi CD and cheap vodka at a fraternity house. Education is a very big item of exchange. Looks are another. But education and future earning power often outrank looks. So if that man you are married to, sleeping with, dating, didn’t have as many years of education as you did, would you still have taken the leap? Might you have been happier with a sensitive van driver?

Just asking. Hey, nice legs by the way.

Check out Brian Alexander’s Sexploration column on MSNBC.com.

Alexander is also the author of America Unzipped.

This week’s Sex on the Brain lesson is about how our bodies can betray us. I don’t mean in that sad, breakdown way that leaves middle-aged people standing around holding gin and tonics and complaining about bad backs the way they used to complain about real estate prices. I mean it in the weird, losing-at-poker way that prevents us from keeping our feelings to ourselves.
Though I’ve been writing a sex column for some time now, I still learn new things all the time and now I have learned that yawning during the build-up to sex isn’t rare and it doesn’t mean you’re finding the action about as engrossing as a chess match between two fifth graders. It means you are getting excited. I learned this because I asked an expert on yawning. Yes, you read that right, an expert on yawning.

He’s a psychologist and he believes that we yawn as part of a transition from one state to another state. So we yawn at night when we’re settling down to sleep, but we also yawn in the morning when we are waking up. We also yawn when we are moving from a calm state to an excited state, and vice versa.

It turns out that when scientists test sexy stuff on mice — lucky mice — they look to see if the mice start stretching and yawning.

This little tidbit of nature could prove valuable the next time you find yourself yawning in your lover’s face just as he or she is performing their favorite foreplay move.

The other giveaway is the “sex flush.” A reader asked about the so-called “rosy glow” that good sex seems to leave on women’s faces. Is it a myth? she asked. Or could you say that sex is actually good for the skin?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The rosy glow is real (good news) but it’s the same thing as the glow you see after you’ve had a good workout. So you can’t really say that only sex gives you the glow.

But there is such a thing as the sex flush, which is more common among women than men. The sex flush, a sometimes intense flushing of the skin from the chest to the hips, and sometimes as far north as the neck, is proof positive that you are really, really, excited. So if you are one of those women who tries to act blasé so men don’t get too full of themselves, be aware that you could wear those goofy sunglasses and those baseball caps poker players wear on TV to hide their “tells” but the sex flush will still give you away every time.

For more on this important topic, visit Brian Alexander’s Sexploration column on MSNBC.com. Alexander is also the author of America Unzipped.