S E V E N

Inflatables

At the same time that Duncan’s business was being tested, another former Seventh-day Adventist living in New York City was opening up a waterbed store with his friend. Tall and lanky with a wide smile, Duane Colglazier was just twenty-four years old. With his clean-shaven face and parted straight brown hair, he could have passed for a Bible salesman if it weren’t for the leather pants and stylish shoes that he was fond of wearing.³⁰⁹ It was 1971, and Colglazier and his thirty-year-old friend Bill Rifkin started small, literally. They sold only two products: waterbeds and mood lights. The Pleasure Chest on Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue was tiny—just forty-seven inches wide, sandwiched between two buildings. The space was basically a narrow alleyway that someone had put a roof over. If you wanted to sell waterbeds in New York City, you couldn’t have picked a worse location to do it. The store was so small that they couldn’t even fit a fully assembled waterbed within its walls. No matter. They were going to make this work. Even though the store was minuscule, there were two things about the location that made it a wise choice: The rent was cheap—only seventy-five dollars a month—and it was in the West Village, near the gay area of the city.

Still, Colglazier and Rifkin had a tough proposition: selling their customers on a product that they couldn’t see in store. It was difficult to entice customers to a store whose signature products were only available in a catalog. After a few months selling waterbeds, they decided to expand their stock to something that could actually fit within the store.

But what to sell alongside mattresses? Most mattress stores didn’t sell much else, maybe some pillows or sheets. Mattress stores were focused on the piece of furniture itself, not what went on between the people using it. As everyone knows, beds are for two things: sleeping and sex. Perhaps they could sell something sex-related?

The legend goes that it was Rifkin who had the idea to sell sex toys and suggested it to Colglazier. According to Rifkin, Colglazier had reservations about the new product line, but he eventually gave in, and soon there were sex toys hanging from pegboards on the wall.310

By placing sex toys in their waterbed store, Colglazier and Rifkin were upending the idea of where an adult store in New York could be located. Until this time, most of the sex-toy stores were sequestered near Forty-second Street, which was home to most of the commercial sex industry in New York City, including strip clubs, live sex shows, adult bookstores, and prostitution.³¹¹ Yet the Pleasure Chest was adjacent not to a strip club but to the upscale Italian restaurant Julius Lombardi, which Craig Claiborne had favorably reviewed in the New York Times.³¹²

If Rifkin’s version of the story is true, Colglazier was initially embarrassed to talk up sex toys with customers.³¹³ Colglazier had been brought up as a Seventh-day Adventist and stayed with the religion through much of college, much longer than Duncan had. He’d inherited the group’s fairly close-minded views toward sex, and he found them hard to shake. The group’s founding prophet, Ellen G. White, believed that masturbation was the cause of most of the ills in the world. White shared her antimasturbation beliefs in a book published in 1864 called An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental, and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. In the book, she argued that masturbation—or “the solitary vice,” as it was called at the time—would not only ruin life on Earth but also life in Heaven. She shared her visions of people who had become physically deformed from masturbation. The masturbators had ailments ranging from “misshapen heads” to dwarfism. Because masturbation was so common, she argued, most young people were doomed. But there was something people could do to stop masturbation: Eat bland foods and learn self-control.314 There is a great irony in that a person steeped in White’s religion became rich selling devices to aid in the very practice that its founder thought was destroying the world.

Colglazier grew up on a ranch in Holyoke, Colorado, in the 1960s, which was an awkward place to be a young man questioning his sexuality. After graduating high school, Colglazier moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to attend the Seventh-day Adventist Union College. After two years in Lincoln, he abandoned his studies and moved west to Los Angeles. It was 1964, and the city was teeming with possibilities. Colglazier arrived in Los Angeles ready for anything. He was twenty years old and finally able to come out as a gay man, at least to his friends. His family was still in the dark, although his mother suspected he was gay.³¹⁵

Colglazier’s first job was a brief one at the Los Angeles County Hospital. After that, he drove an ice-cream truck and sold frozen treats to kids throughout Los Angeles. It wasn’t a terribly ambitious business, but it was a good job for an energetic young man. Piloting an ice-cream truck suited Colglazier’s childlike, playful personality perfectly. As he drove, he’d pump music out of his truck, craning his neck to spot the kids chasing the truck. “I think that’s when he really picked up the power of retail,” Colglazier’s nephew, Brian Robinson, the current owner of Pleasure Chest, said in a 2016 interview. “When you’re driving around in those neighborhoods, and it’s a hot day and you’ve got what people are wanting, [you come to understand] the power of retail and demand and supply.” But Colglazier wasn’t happy in L.A. He missed the changing seasons he’d become accustomed to in Colorado. In Los Angeles, it was summer all year long. That was good for an ice-cream truck business, but it wasn’t a good fit for a Colorado boy.

After less than a year in L.A., he decided to move cross-country to New York City. Although there was still harassment and discrimination against gay people as there was everywhere at that time, New York was a fairly good place to be a gay man in the 1960s. Gay bars and saunas lined Christopher Street. Male hustlers cruised Times Square; the adult bookstores carried gay-male porn. New York was a city full of possibilities, and Colglazier was ready to work hard and make some money. He found his opportunity on Wall Street as a stockbroker, working for a firm called Dempsey-Tegeler. He quickly discovered that he was as good at selling stocks as he was at selling ice cream. He also met another financier, a gay man named Bill Rifkin, and they became lovers soon after they met. Their romantic relationship didn’t last very long, but they remained friends.316

Meanwhile, Colglazier was tiring of grinding out long hours as a stockbroker. He’d been at it for a few years, and it no longer held as strong an appeal. Besides, what was happening outside Wall Street was decidedly more interesting. It was 1969, and the sexual revolution and gay rights movement were just beginning. On June 27 of that year, the patrons of the gay bar the Stonewall Inn were commemorating the death of Judy Garland, which had occurred five days earlier, when suddenly police raided it. Raids were actually fairly common; usually the owners would be tipped off in advance, but this time the raid was coming from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and not the local police, so there was no warning. The feds were raiding the bar because it was mafia-run (which was common for marginally legal businesses), and they thought there was an illegal bootlegging scam. When they raided the establishment, instead of being greeted with “limp wrists” as The Village Voice wrote, they were greeted with beer bottles and bricks being thrown at their heads. It was the smashed beer bottle heard ’round the world: Finally gay men and women had stood up to the police harassment that they were constantly subjected to in bars and other public areas.³¹⁷ The Stonewall riots spurred the development of both the Gay Activist Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which had as its statement of purpose: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group . . . formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.”318

Colglazier didn’t join the movement. Instead, he decided to go back to school. This time he didn’t attend a religious college; he chose a secular one: New York University. But Colglazier didn’t just want to study business; he wanted to start his own. While he was still in school in 1971, Colglazier and Rifkin started the Pleasure Chest.

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In their stumble into selling sex toys, Rifkin and Colglazier actually did something revolutionary. They brought sex toys out of the dark, dingy pornography stores and sold them in a well-lit boutique environment. It was a far cry from the porn and sex stores in Times Square. “We treat our customers as if they are coming into Gimbels to buy a table and chairs,” said Rifkin in an interview, noting that they were the first adult store to “not black out the windows and hide merchandise.”³¹⁹ Pleasure Chest’s location legitimized the products within the store because customers didn’t have to feel ashamed to walk in. While other stores were ashamed to sell erotica, Rifkin and Colglazier (once he came around to it, which he finally did) were proud of selling sex toys because, to them, it was a political statement.

Colglazier and Rifkin distinguished themselves from the other adult bookstores at the time not just because they made the store more upscale but also because they educated themselves about the products they sold. This was an important step because, as the Malorruses’ Spanish fly drops and low-quality dildos attest, not all sex-toy producers were as assiduous as Marche. Colglazier and Rifkin educated their employees too. It seems now like a no-brainer, but no other sex-toy retailers were doing this at the time.

Even after they expanded their store’s stock to include sex toys, Colglazier and Rifkin continued to sell waterbeds, at least for several months, but the beds were by then positioned as sex accessories. The company was growing not just through their store but in catalogs, which allowed the sale of sex toys and waterbeds nationwide. They were definitely catering to a gay male audience. The Pleasure Chest’s first catalog, which was drawn and hand-lettered, was a work of art, full of drawings of naked, buff, mustachioed men using all manner of sex toys—classic gay iconography, à la Tom of Finland. Every item was accompanied by a drawing of a different man with a different story. The catalog featured “Alex” laying naked on a waterbed, his buttocks perfectly sculpted, a big smile on his face. The accompanying text informed readers that Alex “discovered that waterbeds are good for exercising as well as sleeping.”320 There was “Tony,” the “well-constructed Italian construction worker,” shown with an erection encased in a cock sheath, which the catalog said “come[s] in any desired length ($1.25/inch).” There was also “Al,” the locksmith, who “spends most of his day working with keyholes” and “is an ace with a dildo and really knows how to use that big black one ($12.00) he’s holding.” Rounding out the crew was Brad the telephone repairman, Ivan the Russian Cossack, and Gary the bad boy, among others. It’s worth noting that some of these men were presented in stereotypical ways, and that black male sexuality was fetishized in the form of the big black dildo, which was commonplace at the time.

Why didn’t Colglazier and Rifkin just put a picture or a drawing of the sex toys in the catalog and call it a day? Why sell sex toys using such complicated backstories? For starters, their catalog sent a message that masturbation was sexy and that using tools to masturbate was fairly normal. The characters in the catalogs humanized sex toys. The story format made sex toys seem like everyday objects used by men from all walks of life. Employing a narrative style allowed them to explain in great detail how the sex toys were used, which was helpful at a time when sex toys—especially those for gay men—weren’t commonplace. Not everybody would have known how to use the “B.D. Special Cock and Ball Ring” or what “Joy Jell” was. The catalog put everything in context.

Where the catalog was elaborate, the store was more subdued, although it was adorned with erotic art on the first floor. On their “toy chest floor”—which was only about four feet long—they housed their sex toys and sadomasochism, or S&M gear. As customers entered this space, they were greeted with a hand-written sign—probably inspired by Colglazier’s burgeoning attention to the law—assuring them that “All items sold on this floor sold as novelties only. They have not been approved by Good Housekeeping, Department of Agriculture or Board of Health.”321 Nipple clamps hung from the wall, next to realistic metal handcuffs, whips, and strap-on harnesses, all labeled with prices. One wall was strung with realistic-looking dildos: veiny and Caucasian flesh-colored. If the dildos hadn’t been so large, the display could have been mistaken for one in a medical museum, as the dildos looked like disembodied penises, unless you looked closely and saw the straps visible on some of them. Arrayed on shelves were leather cock rings adorned with studs on the outside or internal pinprick-like stimulators on the inside. Joining them were various types of erotic jewelry, including penis key chains, which made sense, given where Colglazier and Rifkin were getting their stock: Marche Manufacturing and United Sales (the Malorruses’ company), by way of Reuben Sturman’s distribution companies.³²²

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In the late 1960s, a few years before his company began supplying sex toys for the Pleasure Chest, Reuben Sturman had been looking to expand his porn and sex-toy empire in Cleveland. One day, the peep-show king entered his local Baskin Robbins for a generous scoop of one of their thirty-one flavors of ice creams. In the store was a teenager, Ron Braverman, who was looking for a way out of Cleveland.323 Sturman was a big shot in Cleveland. If there was anyone who a young Jewish aspiring businessman would have looked up to in Cleveland as a model for success, it was Sturman. A multimillionaire, Sturman dressed fashionably, smoked expensive cigars, and was always driving a Cadillac or Mercedes Benz. Braverman asked if Sturman could give him any work. Sturman said yes.

Braverman was twenty-four years younger than Sturman, and his only sales experience was in appliances (and not the sexual kind either), but his extended family—grandparents and uncles—were experienced salesmen. The fact that Braverman was Jewish didn’t hurt. Sturman hired Braverman, and Braverman’s life was about to drastically change. He just didn’t know it yet.

Sturman offered Braverman a job selling magazines in the New England area, and Braverman was relieved to get out of Cleveland. He happily moved to Boston, where he drove around his six-state territory with a stack of Sturman’s porn magazines in his trunk. “There were days I got pulled over,” Braverman told Los Angeles Magazine in 2012. “Sometimes the cops just wanted a few magazines. Sometimes I ended up using the attorney’s card.”³²⁴

In 1972, Sturman sent Braverman to Europe to grow the company’s burgeoning adult bookstore business in Amsterdam.³²⁵ What Braverman saw in Europe changed his idea of how a sex toy could be sold. “There was a completely different attitude to sex toys,” Ron Braverman says now. “They were in blister packs on the wall. They had descriptions on them about how to use them.”³²⁶ The biggest difference of all: The adult stores weren’t just full of men. Women and couples visited the stores and picked sex toys together. Braverman’s eyes were opened to new possibilities for selling sex toys—and the thought of bringing female consumers into adult stores.

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While Braverman was looking to get more women into adult bookstores, Farley Malorrus had the opposite idea. He thought there were enough profits from the dildo business; it was time for men to get their chance. By the 1970s, both United Sales and Marche Manufacturing were swimming in money, with around $5 million in revenue from their novelties and prosthetic devices.327 This should have been a good thing for the heir to the Malorrus fortune, but he wanted out. So in 1972, Farley broke off from his father and started his own company: Bosko’s Oso, which sold blow-up dolls “for all the lonely guys that weren’t getting laid” during the sexual revolution.³²⁸ In the era of waterbeds and inflatable furniture, no sex novelty was more emblematic of the 1970s than the blow-up doll.

Sex dolls date back much further than the 1970s. The idea can be traced as far back as the Pygmalion myth in which a king falls in love with an ivory statue of a woman that he has carved. He prays to the gods for it to come alive, and Aphrodite answers his prayer. The statue turns into an actual woman, and he has children with her. The idea of having sex with an inanimate woman is ancient, and sex dolls go back at least to the 17th century, the time when the Japanese began making variations on artificial vaginas: tortoise shells with velvet linings known as azumagata (“woman substitute”).³²⁹ By the 19th century, cloth sex dolls, known as dames de voyage, were carried aboard European ships so the sailors could have sex with them.³³⁰ In the 1960s, it was the Japanese again who were innovating with sex dolls, this time with the company Orient Industries’s blow-up dolls, nicknamed Antarctica 1 and Antarctica 2 because scientists took them to the Showa Station on the icy continent.³³¹ These dolls were flawed, however. They had the unfortunate tendency to pop.

Farley Malorrus didn’t make his own blow-up dolls. The Judy Inflatable Doll he sold was imported from Japan.³³² Constructed of vinyl, Judy was five feet two inches with the alluring figure measurements of 37"-23"-36". At least two different companies imported her to the United States before Farley began selling her. She was sold as a “loving companion” who could accompany men on rides in their convertible or recline on the couch, sipping martinis. Farley saw one major mistake: The doll didn’t have any orifices. So Farley strapped an artificial vagina on her (with a pubic hair option), which allowed him to double the asking price for the doll.333

Judy was somewhat of a TV star. Before Malorrus imported her, she had appeared on the Emmy-nominated comedy show Love, American Style in 1969, in an episode in which a man tries to make his neighbor jealous by pretending he has another date.³³⁴ But that was just the beginning of blow-up dolls in popular culture. They soon appeared in other TV shows, cartoons, and song lyrics.³³⁵ Their appearances in pop culture may be related to Americans’ uneasiness with the changing gender roles and sexual behavior that occurred during the sexual revolution. Blow-up dolls returned the new sexually autonomous woman to male control. A blow-up doll is always ready for sex, never talks about her rights, and always looks perky. They were the ultimate sex objects.

A few years after Farley started his company, the Police sang jokingly about the advantages of blow-up dolls in their 1978 song “Be My Girl–Sally,” which tells a story of a lonely man who “needed inspiration” but “didn’t want a wife.” His solution? A blow-up doll named Sally. Unlike a human wife, Sally is “loving, warm, inflatable, and a guarantee of joy.” She’s completely within a man’s control, like his little pet. “I sit her in the corner,” he sings. “And I sometimes stroke her hair.” That same year, Joan Rivers also referenced blow-up dolls in her directorial debut, Rabbit Test (1978). In the opening scene, Billy Crystal, in his film debut, is depicted from behind, sitting on a couch, seducing what appears to be a real woman, plying her with red wine, as he kisses her on the check. Midkiss, she pops, flies around the room, and lands in his lap. “You really know how to turn a guy off, Jackie,” he says. “A simple ‘no’ would have been sufficient.” Unlike in the Police song, this blow-up doll is not within a man’s control, and in fact is used to mock the man who is using her. It’s easy to tell which blow-up doll story was written by a woman.

Malorrus periodically tested out Judy to make sure the doll was sturdy enough. The best way to do that: research and development. Farley didn’t want to spend much money on R&D, so he enlisted a friend to test out Judy. “Every night he would come home drunk without a girl . . . and he would bang the doll,” Farley said. Then one night, when the man was having sex with Judy in his apartment on the twentieth floor of a St. Louis high-rise, he was interrupted by a loud pop followed by a hissing sound. Judy began slowly deflating underneath him. Drunk and angry, his friend began punching her. He threw her out the window into traffic on the major thoroughfare—to the horror of the drivers below who skidded to avoid what they believed was a real person.336

Farley continued to experiment with blow-up dolls. In 1974, he added a new doll to his line: the Barby, which had a built-in vagina—an improvement on Judy.³³⁷ He advertised Judy and Barby in alternative and underground newspapers in California: the Berkeley Barb and Los Angeles Free Press.³³⁸ Soon he added “a boy doll with a penis in it and an ass and an open mouth” to his line. Farley and other companies imported male dolls primarily for the gay markets but also for women, with vibrating penises and open mouths and anuses. Farley needed a place to sell these new dolls, and one of the places he turned to was a boutique called the Pleasure Chest.³³⁹

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Although by 1972 Colglazier and Rifkin of the Pleasure Chest had replaced their waterbeds entirely with toys like Malorruses’ blow-up dolls, they didn’t formally remarket their store as a sex-toy shop.340 They wanted to keep its boutique vibe. Preserving the upscale feeling was important not only strategically as a sales tactic but also because of the law. The same year that the Pleasure Chest opened in 1971, New York City Criminal Court judges found Al Goldstein’s sex magazine Screw obscene due in part to its dildo ads, which it said violated the penal code. Goldstein was forced to strip Screw of sex-toy ads, even though these were arguably the least offensive part of Screw, a magazine that delighted in detailing Linda Lovelace’s bestiality porn.³⁴¹ “The only thing I can think of to account for this, myself,” wrote Dean Latimer in The East Village Other, “is Betty Dodson’s illuminating suggestion that the more enlightened authorities don’t mind male-directed pornography, but still despise female directed pornography. Seeing an ad for a dildo . . . it perhaps occurs to the magistrate that this horrible thing might turn on women. Instinctively his mind rebels against this. Women aren’t supposed to get turned on.”³⁴²

The Pleasure Chest managed to avoid a run-in with the law, and their sex toys sold so well through both their store and their mail-order catalog that in 1972, they moved to a larger store on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Their new store was right in the heart of New York City’s gay mecca, yet it still attracted female customers. Colglazier’s reticence about sex toys had completely evaporated by this point. Times were changing. As Colglazier told the New York Times, “There were a lot of indications that sex had caught on in a respected and dignified manner. First there was nudity in the theater, and then abortion was legalized [in New York], and then just a few weeks ago New York had its first Erotic Film Festival.”³⁴³ Colglazier was aligning his store with high culture, putting the Pleasure Chest in the same category as Broadway shows and film. This was a smart move considering that the Pleasure Chest was trying to distinguish itself from the seedy porn stores.

But Colglazier and Rifkin faced a major challenge: They were selling gay-centric sex toys at a time when homosexuality was considered both a sickness and a crime. The American Psychological Association regarded homosexuality as a mental illness, and sodomy was illegal in most states. These laws were enforced too. In New York alone, more than one hundred men were arrested for sodomy during the 1960s.344 Even though this was post–sexual revolution and the gay rights movement had already begun, creating a sex-toy store targeted to gay men was incredibly risky. In fact, the sexual revolution was, in many ways, a revolution for heterosexuals. In the early 1960s, the revolution “celebrated the erotic, but tried to keep it within a heterosexual framework of long-term, monogamous relationships,” according to historians of sexuality John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman.³⁴⁵

Even within the sex-toy industry itself, heterosexuality dominated. Gay-centric sex-toy companies didn’t really exist at the time. The burgeoning sex-toy industry may have seemed to reflect sexual progress, but in fact it promoted the same ideals of heterosexual marriage and monogamy that many in the gay rights movement were trying to overturn. Even the most common euphemism for sex toys at the time—“marital aids”—seemed to indicate that gay men and women were excluded from the dildo revolution.³⁴⁶ Colglazier and Rifkin soon discovered this fact when they recognized that Marche’s dildos didn’t satisfy their gay customers.

“Fist fucking became popular in the gay community,” Colglazier said. “And the dildos that were made at the time were very small . . . they didn’t compare with a fist. We had a lot of requests for much larger dildos.” So Colglazier worked with a sculptor and Marche to design larger dildos, as well as dildos shaped like fists and hands.³⁴⁷ But given the antigay sentiment of the time, Marche Manufacturing didn’t indicate on their packaging that the dildos were for gay men.³⁴⁸ Yet the very fact that heterosexual men were collaborating with gay men to create gay sex toys in the 1970s was remarkable—and the collaboration worked out for both sides. By the late 1970s, the Pleasure Chest had purchased a half million dollars’ worth of dildos from Marche, and the sex-toy industry in general was growing at a rapid clip, about 28 percent per year, with sales around $100 million.349 ³⁵⁰

The Marches weren’t the only ones creating products targeted to the gay community: Farley and Fred Malorrus also began crafting products that appealed to gays and selling these products to the Pleasure Chest. Similar to the Marches’ toys, the Malorruses’ products promoted a heterosexual ideal on the package. They sold a lidocaine-based numbing gel called Anal Eaze for anal sex, but they sold it with a picture of female pornstar Seka’s posterior on the package, despite the fact that the predominant market for Anal Eaze was gay men.³⁵¹ Although Farley Malorrus said that “the gay people in this world . . . made the industry,” he had mixed views on the gay sex toys they sold. “My dad sure invented thousands of products that had to do with the rear end,” Farley Malorrus said. “I sold ’em, but I wasn’t a big advocate of it. . . . I don’t believe in sodomy. I’m a Christian.”³⁵²

Colglazier and Rifkin knew that selling products associated with sex, especially products associated with gay sex, was making a bold political statement. But the two entrepreneurs weren’t content to let their butt plugs and gay iconography speak for themselves. Starting with their second catalog, they boldly set out their philosophy in the front of their catalog. “The Pleasure Chest is a new concept,” they wrote, “reflecting the changing attitudes of our society towards sex.” Their catalogs mixed high and low culture. Interspersed among the dildos and vibrators were everything from quotes taken from The Oxford English Dictionary (a definition of love) to a concise history of sex toys, dating the devices back to cave drawings that “indicated that primeval man employed crude prosthetic devices.”³⁵³ Illustrations in the margins mimicked classical art, showing intertwined bodies engaged in cunnilingus, fellatio, and various other sexual acts.

It was not just gay sex that they were interested in legitimizing. They also advocated for women’s sexuality. “The most important fact to know is that orgasms will not occur in the vagina or urethra unless the clitoris is participating,” the catalog proclaimed. “The clitoris is the key that unlocks female sexuality.”354 This was heady stuff, reflective of Masters and Johnson’s work and the feminist movement’s advocacy of the clitoris most famously elucidated in Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Colglazier and Rifkin did not couch their discussion of women’s sexuality in overtly feminist terms, but the underlying philosophy was undoubtedly feminist. In a way, the first feminist sex-toy store was, in fact, not started by women; it was founded by gay men.

Lesbians and gays made up a big portion of the Pleasure Chest’s customers, but Colglazier and Rifkin estimated that more than half of their customers were straight. It wasn’t just its location or the fact that the store was more inviting than the Forty-second Street adult bookstores that attracted women to it, even though many of the products were directed toward gay men. It was also the fact that they didn’t sell pornography. The Pleasure Chest was one of the first adult stores to not sell porn alongside sex toys, which attracted women to the store. Women likely felt more comfortable shopping in a store run by gay men and full of gay male shoppers than they did at an adult bookstore full of straight men, many of whom who had come to masturbate in the peep-show booths. And these weren’t just young women shopping at the Pleasure Chest. Colglazier and Rifkin said they were surprised to have a sixty-something “grey-haired woman” enter the store, buy $145 worth of sex paraphernalia, and then “carr[y] it off [in a] ‘little knit shopping bag.’”³⁵⁵

Lesbian customers too were drawn to the Pleasure Chest. The store advertised in lesbian magazines, including Echo of Sappho, where they referred to the Pleasure Chest not as a sex emporium, but as a “Love boutique” that featured “Every thing for sex.”³⁵⁶ Among the lesbians who the Pleasure Chest attracted was a specific subculture: lesbian feminists who liked S&M.

This subculture was highly controversial within the feminist movement. Most feminists came down on the side of seeing S&M as a form of ritualized violence against women, even if it was only women who were participating. Stores that sold S&M gear were targeted by protesters demanding that the establishments stop carrying such goods.357 As a result, some women were hesitant to shop at the Pleasure Chest. For example, an actress who played a promiscuous carnival worker in Steve Martin’s movie The Jerk told the Los Angeles Times that even when she was auditioning for the part, which involved being “a motorcycle daredevil—a very S/M type,” she “was too afraid to go into the Pleasure Chest for leather and chains,” so she “shopped at a pet store instead.”³⁵⁸ The feminists who came out in favor of S&M were lambasted, called all manner of names, and accused of working for the CIA.

Gayle Rubin, who founded the lesbian S&M group Samois, spoke out against the feminist anti-S&M rhetoric. Samois argued that lesbian S&M practitioners were an “oppressed sexual minority” who “believe that S&M can and should be consistent with the principles of feminism.” Rubin argued that antiporn feminists unfairly used S&M porn for their cause. “The use of S&M imagery in antiporn discourse is inflammatory,” she wrote. “It implies that the way to make the world safe for women is to get rid of sadomasochism.”³⁵⁹ It wasn’t just antiporn feminists who were critical of S&M. For the most part, S&M was too controversial a practice to appeal to even left-wing radicals, even though sadism and masochism is as old as the Marquis de Sade. But it’s been misunderstood since that time too. Consensual violent-seeming or actual violent play seems just like violence to outsiders, but those within the community have developed a series of intricate codes, rules, and restrictions that actually make S&M as safe or safer (both physically and emotionally) than other sexual practices.

The Pleasure Chest was somewhat of an outlier in the range of sex stores because of its focus on S&M. “Most of us probably don’t consider instruments of torture sources of sexual pleasure,” intoned the narrator in a nasal voice in the 1972 documentary Pornography in New York as he stood outside the original Pleasure Chest location dressed in a suit and tie. “And you probably didn’t believe that sadomasochism existed or if does, certainly not outside medical journals. We questioned this and opened a veritable Pandora’s box called the Pleasure Chest.” In the documentary, Rifkin escorted the narrator around the store, showing him handcuffs, leather cock rings with pinprick-like interiors for stimulation, and penis key chains. While he was showcasing slave collars and all manner of handcuffs, Rifkin tried to distance himself from the S&M scene. “I don’t have to be a sadist or a masochist to sell restraints,” he said. “They don’t care if I am or not. If they want restraints, this is where they can get them. My sexual preferences don’t really influence theirs at all.”360

By the mid-1970s, the Pleasure Chest had added a second store on East Fiftieth Street and another on West Seventy-fourth Street. In spite of the government’s stance that obscenity was dangerous, the Pleasure Chest—with its stock of dildos and leather ball harnesses—was gaining more success and more visibility.³⁶¹