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My Life
in Porn
What's the future of the porn store? A
former clerk returns to investigate.
By Brooke Thorsteinson
AS I PULL INTO THE TINY PARKING LOT at five to 10 in
the morning, I think: I don’t want anyone to see
me. Nestled in a strip mall along the Lougheed Highway
in Port Coquitlam, the place inspires a feeling of displacement.
The building that houses X-Citement Video is by a concrete
overpass, sandwiched between a discount carpet manufacturer
and a car rental business. A chicken processing plant
that stinks like an old refrigerator in the summertime
hums in the background. The face of this store is no
different from any other X-Citement Video: small and
dingy-looking, with the requisite purple neon logo and
STOP sign posted out front. You must be at least
18 years of age to enter.
I push open the mirrored door, confronting my reflection,
and step through the electronic security barrier. The
1,200-square-foot, black-walled room is jammed full
of products in every garish colour imaginable. One wall
is studded with small metal peg hangers sporting cheap,
boxed lingerie, red lace teddies, black pleather crotchless
undies and bright green man-thongs, dildos, penis pumps
and vibrators (ranging from the lipstick-sized variety
to the twirling, pulsing, double-ended funhouse toy).
Blow-up dolls get their own special shelf. In the centre
of the room a glass case holds lube, flavoured condoms,
edible body creams and powders, massage oils, nipple
clamps and cock rings. On the other wall, in neat rows,
are the DVDs and videos for sale. Near the back is the
shadowy doorway that leads, as I remember, to the downstairs
rental section. Six winters ago, I worked here. I’ve
tried to will the experience out of my mind, but every
time I drive past one of those XXX signs, the memories
hit me like stinging smacks to the forehead. How did
I end up in such a place? I’ve returned to try
to figure it out.
Perched behind the high counter—surrounded by
cream-coloured monitors showing every area from the
cash register to the basement—is Lynne, the fortysomething
store manager and only other non-inflatable body present.
Dressed in faded, skinny blue jeans and a black sweater,
she looks weirdly like my old manager, Connie, with
her long dyed-red, shaggy-rocker hair and talon-like
fingernails. Her amused, lined face says, “I’ve
seen it all.”
After small talk, I suggest we step out back for a smoke,
and Lynne finally warms to me. I ask how long she’s
worked at the store. “Four years,” she says,
“and I like it. It’s a relaxed, laid-back
atmosphere and I have total control over who rents and
who doesn’t.” She can ban customers if they’re
renting too much porn (though Lynne says she doesn’t),
or if they give her a bad vibe. It’s important
because the store encourages behaviour that wouldn’t
fly elsewhere. Men wear loose sweatpants, for a reason.
They flirt. Porn clerks need the power, and the permission,
to deny them.
Most customers I remember were innocuous middle-aged
men—the bulk of the rental business. Lynne says
that’s still the case: mostly older white men,
with a few women and couples thrown in. During her four
years at X-Citement Video, she says, sales have actually
increased, despite the ubiquity of Internet porn. She
rents out more than 900 videos a month. Worldwide, retail
sales of adult videos account for some $20 billion in
annual revenues, compared to the $2.5 billion brought
in by the world’s four-million-plus porn websites.
Clearly there’s still money to be made in these
dens of iniquity.
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When I was growing
up, porn was something you stole from someone's
Dad. I was six
when my cousin and I found a stack of
porn in my uncle's closet.
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Though not much today, it seems; our first customer,
a regular, doesn’t shuffle in until after 11 a.m.
He’s an older fellow Lynne has warned me about;
he repeatedly tells her she’s “very hot.”
Slim, barely five feet tall, he looks about 70, with
salt and pepper hair. He rents a video from the Older
Women category (featuring grandmotherly actresses).
As Lynne rings him through, I flinch at the odd intimacy
of the transaction: he hands over the case and we discover
what turns him on. (I’m strangely comforted that
he’s rented a movie featuring women his own age
and not teenage girls.) Lynne places the video in a
black plastic bag so that nobody else can see—though,
of course, only porn comes in a black plastic bag.
When I was growing up, porn was something you stole
from someone’s Dad. I was six when my cousin and
I found a stack of porn in my uncle’s closet.
I remember a photo of a woman wearing a black lace corset
in a swimming pool. She had short blonde hair and was
squeezing her breasts together. I liked it, but didn’t
know why.
Four years later, building a fort in the field behind
our house, I found a stash of dirty magazines composting
in the hot mash of weeds, buttercups and rotten field
berries. I knew from my Baptist mother that sex before
marriage was a hellacious sin; I had no idea it was
something people did for fun. Once I saw those raw,
forbidden images, I abandoned my fort to spend the next
two weeks immersed in porn.
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