Sex Edition
In the stories that follow, and elsewhere on Pitch.com, it might seem as if we’ve got one thing on our mind.
It’s true — and we’re not ashamed of it!
Welcome to our Second-Annual Sex Edition. We think it’s a pretty nice package.
The Truth Behind Zoey
The fact that a dead girl turned out to be a porn star was a shocker. But the real truth was what it said about us.
By ALAN SCHERSTUHL
Here’s the victim in happier times. She’s spread across a beige bed in a beige room in what must be a beige apartment complex off a frontage road someplace. She wears a pink mesh top and black knee-highs but is otherwise exposed, with one leg scissored up and the other spread wide with gynecological bluntness. This is the point of the photo, of course, the only reason that it exists.
But that’s not what makes it arresting.
She’s grinning. She has slipped off her panties with a cheerful flourish, is waving them high above her head. The air blooms in them. There’s a blooming in her face, too, a look wholly unlike what we expect from women who make sex a performance or a business. She looks pleased and surprised, the way you might if you somehow managed to yank away a tablecloth without disturbing the place settings.
She looks the way any of us look when we’re naked and goofy with someone we trust. Except better, of course. She looks better.
If it were a painting, a Balthus or a Currin, it would fetch a fortune. If it were for sale online, as it was last fall, it would command $40 a month for access to it and other photos. But because the girl is Zoey Zane, it’s available more cheaply still. Although the Web has been purged of all official Zane photos, five minutes on Google will turn up this one, free and bastardized, with two lines of text added by some anonymous prick. First, about a quarter of the way up her long, slender arm: “Emily Sander, AKA Zoey Zane.”
Then, an inch below her shaved vagina: “We’ll Never Forget Her Contribution To Society!”
Like all of us, Emily Sander had secrets. Her biggest, perhaps, was that her real-girl appeal was rooted in genuine real-girlness. Kansas real-girlness, even. She was Olathe-born, and she lived in El Dorado, half an hour northeast of Wichita. She worked as a secretary at the local electric company while taking business courses at Butler Community College. She dreamed of Hollywood. One friend remembers her as having an affinity for Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz.
The world learned this late last Thanksgiving, not long after media outlets from the Associated Press to USA Today reported the disappearance of 18-year-old Sander. The case at first seemed ripe for yet another nationwide missing-white-woman freakout, the kind that reinforces middle-American prejudices. Here was a sweet, white college girl last seen in the company of a Mexican man, 24-year-old resident alien Israel Mireles. But dark details quickly gathered, tainting the template: a bloody hotel room, Mireles’ alleged flight to Mexico, and then, on November 28, a sensitively phrased headline on FoxNews.com: “Missing Student May Have Been Porn Star.”
A day later, ABC was less equivocal: “Body Found in Search for Teen Porn Star.”
Many of the pieces that followed expressed prim surprise at Sander’s “double life.” Typical was the glib disgust of Lynda Johnson, who contributes articles to an online newspaper called The National Ledger. Her piece, posted one day after the discovery of Sander’s body, opens with “She was Emily Sander by day and Zoey Zane by night…. The teen lived a double life and was willing to strip for anyone with an internet connection as Zoey Zane.”
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Many other writers employed Johnson’s facile day-night construction, cribbed from the tagline of 1984’s exploitation classic Angel: “Honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night.” In one sense, this was appropriate; the reporters and the filmmakers were selling the same titillation.
In reality, though, any such reaction is untrue in the most literal sense. Just check the photos of Sander and two other models on a sunny afternoon at the lake, beaming and preening as half-dressed Wizard of Oz characters. Sander wears a silvery miniskirt and pointed cap. She’s the Tin Man, and she’s grinning.
Sander’s death is shocking. But what isn’t is the fact that, in America Gone Wild, a “sweet, good kid” — as her grandfather described her to ABC — might take her clothes off for money and post her naked photos online. For half a century now, Hef’s Girls Next Door have been leaning nude on hay bales and stirring lemonade topless. Playboy bush is a perfect timeline of both the country’s increasing comfort with pornography and pornography’s corresponding discomfort with the natural. Before ’69, the magazine hid the bush entirely. When it appeared, it immediately began to thin, becoming less unruly every year — a patch, then a tuft, then a Velcro strip, then a sharp-lined eyebrow. And then, finally, to keep up with Penthouse and strippers and former Mouseketeer starlets, nothing at all.
The women changed elsewhere, too. Now they’re glazed over, poreless, their flesh like the caramel dripping in a candy-bar commercial. Breast implants are so common that a couple of times a year, Playboy publishes Natural Beauties as a sort of event: “real” as a fetish.
As the Girl Next Door goes, so — to an extent — goes the girl next door. Sander was shaved and tattooed, professionally tanned and pierced through the lip. But she still was “natural,” both in the categorical sense and in that real-girl essence that is the selling point of online amateurs. She looked real because that’s what she was: a real young woman trying — like so many of her peers — to look like a porn star.
The day-night writers prefer to think of Zoey Zane as someone separate from Emily Sander. But such real feeling pulses in that photograph of her grinning in that beige bedroom that it’s dishonest not to ask the hard questions. What if this is simply who she is? Who we are? At what point does pornography become documentary?
Zoey Zane is still online, of course. YouTube tributes compile her more modest shots. A friend has posted a celebration called “Emily Sander: Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” writing, “Her head may have been in the clouds, but her feet were on the ground. Even if they were dancing.”
This being the Internet, though, tributes are overwhelmed by anonymous nastiness. Check any message board where Sander is discussed, and you’ll find yourself staring hard into an ugly truth: Many users of porn despise the women who turn them on.
“The good news is, in her current state of decomposition, she has finally gotten rid of that god-awful tattoo.”
“One less prostitute. Yes, prostitute. Even, worse, prostitutes get a room and do it but these do it in front of millions.”
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“This dead little hottie is having her tight 18yo pussy spread all over the net! HOT :0.”
This last one is mostly inaccurate. Soon after the discovery of Sander’s body, something rare happened: The number of sex-related photos online lessened. Her site was wiped clean of her nude photos, as were dozens of sites linking to hers. The first three pages of Google hits for “Zoey Zane” all yielded remarkably similar results: an announcement of her death and police descriptions of Mireles. Two months later, with Mireles arrested and charged with murder, the Web is again chaotic. Call up zoeyzane.com, and you’re redirected to a site called “Live College Cam Girls.” Another URL bearing her name links to a spazzy porn site boiling over with spyware and pop-ups. Search for her, and you will find a slew of news reports as well as a couple of galleries, mostly labeled “SFW” and featuring her smiling sweetly in bras. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll get her, on that beige bed, beneath that insulting text: “We’ll Never Forget Her Contribution To Society!”
The same wiseass has a couple of other, sicker Photoshop pranks. One juxtaposes the head shot that ran with her missing-person report with another nude picture, arranged to illustrate a familiar duality. Over the first, he — because it could only be a he — has written, “Emily Sander.” Over the second, the nude shot: “Zoey Zane.”
From the Emily Sander picture comes a word balloon: “I got my ass raped to death!!!”
The message-board idiocy and the collagist’s sick jokes are to the legitimate press reports what South Park is to a libertarian stump speech: the same crap, just dirtier. With little else online about Sander, perhaps the real woman who is gone might be better served if the Web had not been purged of her alter ego.
Some claim that 30,000 people ponied up for her Web site. Surely a number of them saved their favorite photos. What if they posted them? What if Google picked up the links? What if the collagist’s cruel work sank back into the abyss, where it belongs?
What if, with the merely pornographic, we could wash away the obscene?
It’s Better with Three
If a UMKC researcher is right, bringing a third into your bedroom could make you healthier and happier.
By PETER RUGG
Chell knew she had at least one day to search for the boy she wanted before her husband would find out. She hit the road by 8 a.m. and left messages for Tank at the places she thought he would stay.
It was June 2007. Tank had been her houseguest and her family’s employee until two months earlier. Tank had been in one too many arguments with Chell’s husband, Spawn. Chell had last seen him at her daughter’s high school graduation ceremony. Looking at Tank, she could tell right away that he was back on meth.
Still, it wasn’t surprising to see that Tank had made the graduation. She had known him for six years, ever since her daughter met him. At age 13, Chell’s daughter went through a goth phase, and Tank, part of her new circle of friends, was like an older brother to her. When he needed a place to stay, Chell agreed to take him in. Chell and Spawn gave him a job in their home-construction business.
In his first week there, Tank overheard Chell and Spawn having rough sex. She saw him the next day and told him, “You know, he’s not beating me in there.” Tank didn’t need any further explanation. Talking over the next few months, Chell learned that Tank had a submissive streak and wanted to be on the receiving end of a beating himself someday.
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After she saw him at the graduation ceremony, Chell decided to bring Tank back herself. Her plan was to make him Spawn’s slave.
Chell and Spawn are in the BDSM community. They’re also polyamorous — Spawn carries on romantic relationships outside the marriage. (All three are members of a pansexual group, which is the origin of the pseudonyms Chell, Spawn and Tank.) Chell is Spawn’s slave; she had never invited a third party without her master’s approval.
Tank finally returned one of Chell’s phone calls that afternoon. “What do you want, and why did you call me?” he asked.
Chell told him, and he didn’t like it.
“Well, too bad, because I’m on my way, and you’re getting in the van,” Chell said. At 11 a.m. the 34-year-old petite redhead was at the boy’s door. She took him to a park two blocks away to talk.
Four hours later, Chell reached into her purse and withdrew a steel chain with a padlock hanging at the end. She wore a slim chain with a similar lock around her own neck. She’d bought them at Home Depot.
“I know you’ve always wanted one of these,” she said. “And I can get you one. But you have to earn it.”
Spawn came home that night. It didn’t take much for Chell to convince him to accept Tank as his new slave.
Tank moved back into the house. Spawn and Chell’s slave-master relationship, and their sex life, changed. Spawn could spend the night with one of them alone or with both. It took Tank six months to earn the collar.
Chell’s idea to bring a third person into her marital bedroom wasn’t just about fun. The trio has formed a powerful emotional bond — which is not unusual among polyamorous lovers. “There are things Spawn needs that I can’t give him sometimes,” Chell says. “I’m a small girl. I understand I can’t deal with his needs in every situation.”
There’s little research on how such relationships work. This is where Terri Conley comes in. A University of Missouri-Kansas City assistant professor of psychology, Conley has begun a yearlong study of about 300 people in polyamorous relationships. She’s preparing a questionnaire that will measure risk behavior, satisfaction, emotion and other psychological factors.
It’s easy to assume that polyamorous relationships are all about threesomes or bringing home a stranger for your lover to share. But Conley believes her research might show that people in polyamorous relationships are safer from STDs — and may know a secret about how to make relationships work.
Conley didn’t date in high school and found her friends’ attitudes toward sex confusing.
Conley wasn’t interested in having sex and didn’t discuss it with her parents. “I very much thought sex in high school was wrong,” she recalls, “and I was horrified to hear people in my high school were having it.”
She stayed a virgin until college, where she had nonexclusive relationships with a man and a woman. Her first real boyfriend, Josh Rabinowitz, became her husband. He also holds a position in UMKC’s psychology department.
They’re open to exploring a polyamorous relationship. But they just adopted a 2-year-old girl from Kazakhstan, and Conley says their lives are too crazy to think about getting involved with someone else. “Maybe down the road, that’ll be something we explore,” she says.
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Conley has taught a class on human sexuality since she came to UMKC in 2006. Her academic background is in gender and health stigmas and sexual risk practices. In a study she did while earning her doctorate at the University of California-Los Angeles, Conley had a team of men and women ask strangers to have sex. Most of the men said yes, and Conley concluded that the women’s assertiveness indicated to men that they would be good partners. The women her researchers approached typically thought that the men were socially inept and therefore not good bets for sexual experiences.
Conley became interested in polyamorous relationships in California when she saw a mathematical simulation showing it was safer to have sex with 100 partners and use a condom every time than to have sex once with a partner of unknown health status and not use one. She started wondering about the way monogamy was sold as an answer during the early days of the AIDS crisis.
“There was a surgeon general warning going around about how you should know your partner, but how well you know your partners doesn’t really have anything to do with whether they have an STD,” Conley says. “And people in a close relationship try to get rid of condoms as early as possible, and they’re actually leaving themselves wide-open for something to happen. So those things got me wondering to what extent monogamy really was a good approach to safer-sex issues.”
Conley compares the monogamy-only message to adults with abstinence-only sex education for teenagers. The two ideas, she says, cause people who can’t live in a monogamous relationship to suffer from guilt and a potentially dangerous habit of cheating. “If it’s not serving its health purpose, then we need to scrap the monogamy-only message.”
Conley saw that very little research had been done on polyamorous relationships and that most of what was available was years out of date. None of it seemed to focus on health factors.
So Conley, along with Amber Hinton, a graduate student in psychology, is preparing a detailed survey. She hopes the results will answer questions about whether it’s safer to be involved with more than one person. The survey will also question whether a relationship is invigorated when one member seeks outside companionship, and if having multiple relationship roles can actually make a person happier.
If polyamorous relationships do tend to include people who are as safe and happy sexually, it’ll open new questions about how we deal with complex emotions.
“I do feel somewhat outside of normal researchers,” Conley says. “My grad adviser said, ‘You don’t want to go on the job market as a sexuality researcher. The projects can require an enormous amount of work and patience. It has to be something you really just want to find out.'”
There’s the chance that reaction to her latest study could single her out in other ways, if it turns out that people might be healthier with more partners.
“I do sometimes worry what will happen if my hypothesis is supported,” she says. “Someone could take it badly, as some religious or moral argument. But it isn’t about saying something is moral. It’s about presenting the truth.”
If Conley can change the perception of polyamorous relationships, perhaps more people will come forward with their real names. But for the sake of privacy, let’s not call this couple by their real names. Louise was 19 and Owen was 22 when they got married. They were together eight years before Louise had an affair. They spent a year in counseling, during which Owen attempted to forgive her and Louise tried to work out feeling trapped in her marriage. Then they lived apart in a trial separation that lasted almost a year. Louise didn’t want to lose him, but she knew she didn’t want to be in a monogamous relationship.
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They moved in together again, and one night, as they undressed for bed, she told Owen that they needed to talk. “I love you, and I don’t want anything to happen to our marriage. And I know I want to stay with you. But I also know I’ll have a hard time staying faithful.” She suggested an open relationship.
Owen didn’t say anything at first. Finally, he said, “I think I’m going to need to be alone.” He put his clothes back on and left.
Louise lay in bed waiting for him, figuring it was the end of the marriage. Sometime after dawn, she woke to the sound of Owen coming home. She ran into the living room.
Owen looked at her. “OK,” he said, “let’s try it.”
First, they had to agree on rules. Neither was allowed to go on a date if the other did not have a date the same night at the same time. Each had veto power over the other’s choice of date. Each had to be home by midnight.
Based on what Conley has seen, this is a common arrangement for polyamorous relationships. Establishing ground rules is important to sustain the primary relationship, Conley says. She expects the answers to her survey will help better understand how rules govern polyamorous relationships. It’s one area — communication — where polyamorous couples might have monogamous couples beat, she says.
“Monogamy tends to have more general assumptions about what’s supposed to happen,” Conley says. “If you have to tell your partner what you want sexually, you burst the romantic bubble that they know exactly what you want. If you’re in a polyamorous relationship, you’re forced to deal with it.”
Whereas couples like Spawn and Chell might invite Tank into their bed, Louise and Owen have had predominately one-on-one sexual encounters, without the other around.
Louise was able to get a date almost immediately. There was a guy at the office she’d been flirting with for months who was in an open relationship with his girlfriend. Owen, meanwhile, decided to go to a swinger’s club.
They left the house at the same time. Louise was nervous about what her husband was about to do, and a little jealous.
Louise arrived at her date’s house wearing jeans. She didn’t expect to go out.
“We sat on his bed and talked about work and relationships, and I stopped feeling nervous after a while,” she said. “Then he reached over and kissed me.”
Louise and Owen were both home by midnight, honoring their agreement. She didn’t know what his reaction would be.
“So, did you have a good time?” Louise asked.
“Yeah. It was really different and really weird. Did you have a good time?”
“Yeah. Are you OK?”
“I am.”
That was it. Louise kept dating, and Owen stopped going to the swinger’s club. In the beginning, they asked each other every day whether there had been any second thoughts.
Now, 27 years into their polyamorous relationship, Louise and Owen have dropped most of the rules. They still have veto power, but only Louise has used it, and only on rare occasions. Owen now has a girlfriend, and Louise typically spends two nights a week visiting her current boyfriend, Jon, and a third night sleeping at Jon’s house. The tricky part is meeting people who understand their relationship. In case one of them isn’t around to assure the potential date that neither of them is a cheater, they’ve drawn up what they call “hunting licenses.”
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“I can just open up my wallet and say, ‘See? My wife’s cool with it,'” Owen says.
The relationship has become so successful that they have decided to start teaching other people. Louise gives talks on polyamorous relationships at wicca fairs. A year ago, they began offering a class through Communiversity. (They teach the class under the pseudonyms Louise and Shaggy Man.) They’ll start their third class in March. Most of the students are younger, and the classes are split about evenly between men and women. Last semester, Louise made a guest appearance in Conley’s classroom to talk about polyamorous relationships. “Condoms, condoms, condoms,” Louise said. “That’s what I tell everyone who asks about it.”
It isn’t something that will work for everyone. Louise’s boyfriend, Jon, had known the couple for years before starting a romantic relationship with Louise. He’d been married and in a monogamous relationship from his late 20s until his early 50s, when he attended one of Louise’s talks on polyamorous relationships at a wicca fair.
“I thought, here is an attractive woman who’s actually speaking intelligently about sex, and I realized that maybe I’d made the wrong choices and given up a lot for myself,” Jon says. He convinced his then-wife to try to make theirs a polyamorous relationship after undergoing counseling sessions, but she never accepted it. Now they’re divorcing.
When Jon, Louise and Owen are together at a coffee shop, the impression of who is with whom changes from moment to moment. For a time, Louise and Jon hold hands and laugh together. Then Jon leans back in his chair and Owen’s hand is on Louise’s leg. They look like any group of aging hippies, Jon with long white hair and beard, Owen in a T-shirt featuring a naked man and woman holding swords high, Louise between her partners.
“If there’s one misconception we always get, it’s that people think we’re swingers,” Louise says. “It’s not like that at all. I’m not putting anyone else’s lifestyle down, but this is about a lot more than sex. This is about sharing love.
“I’m not just going to jump in bed with anyone I meet. I want to go out and have the dates and get to know each other before I go to bed with someone. I’m old-fashioned. I like romance.”
Pulling the Switch
Bartending brothers give us their secrets to sexy drinks, bagging drunk hos and passing as each other. Yeah, it’s that kind of interview.
By JUSTIN KENDALL and BERRY ANDERSON
We here at The Pitch felt inspired by the gushing celebrity profiles in the likes of Esquire, Vogue or Vanity Fair. You know, the ones with all those questions that make a B-list celebrity sound as though he or she should get bigger billing than the Second Coming.
So, armed with questions that we ripped off from a few of those fawning interviews, we went over to the News Room, where we met up with bartending brothers Rhien and Matt Pounds. The 25-year-old twins, who look nearly identical, agreed to play along with our game. Here’s an excerpt.
The Pitch: You’re on a plane that’s going down. It has a full bar. What do you make?
Rhien: You’d probably go for the 151. Whatever you could slam before you hit the ground. Or just a beer.
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If you died and went to heaven, what drink would you serve God?
Matt: Sex on the Beach. Or a Redheaded Slut.
Rhien: Manhattan. It’s my favorite. Good for libidos. Is that good for God?
What inspires your libido?
Matt: Cleavage is nice.
Rhien: I like the girls that are really trying hard. That always inspires me to put her down. That’s a good one.
Like, really drunk ones?
Rhien: No, no. She is the one who has spent an hour and a half getting ready to go out, and then she made the mistake of walking into the Newsroom. It’s like, “You are in the wrong place, gal.” We always get the dirty art kids in here. They just wipe off the stink and pull on a pair of jeans, and they’re done, you know?
Matt: Those are good.
Rhien: Another good one is the drunk chick with no inhibitions.
Matt: Yeah, that’s a pretty big turn-on. The one downside to that, though, is that this is a 3 a.m. bar, and it’s really hard to get a drunk chick to stay until 4 o’clock. If I could change anything, I would change it to a 1:30 bar.
Rhien: I don’t think I’m a man of many morals, necessarily, but I don’t really wanna be that guy who drops a girl off and the next day, she’s like, “Who are you again?”
How often have you picked up in here?
Rhien: Well, I was doing pretty well there for a while, and then I met my girlfriend. I’ve been with her for a year and a half. But not as much as I’d like. My girlfriend hates it when I bring a chick home anymore. Sometimes I have to be like, “Sorry, honey, we’re fuckin’ her.” But sometimes she’s cool with it, or she’ll just sleep through it.
Matt: I’ve had some success.
Rhien: The first time for him was this girl that I’d been railin’ for a little while. She was in here, drunk, and I wasn’t here. So Matt went up to her, knowing that she thought he was me, and Matt said, “Do you want to come to my place and take a shower?”
Matt: She was all like, “I’m really hot.” So I said, “Do you want to come to my place and take a shower? Will that help?” I did feel really bad the next day, though.
So you guys pull the switch?
Rhien: Just that one time. He actually pulled the switch, though. I don’t actually do the switch.
Matt: But I think that if a girl said, “Hey, do you guys both want to come [home with me]?” we’d be in on it.
Being brothers, that doesn’t bother you?
Rhien: Why would it?
Matt: We were naked in the womb together.
What would you make a woman to put her in the mood?
Rhien: Some sort of alcoholic smoothie with, like, dark chocolate and asparagus.
Matt: And stir it with my wiener.
Rhien: No, that comes later. Maybe get the massage going, maybe breathe in her ear a little bit.
How do you tell when a woman is in the mood?
Matt: When she keeps looking down.
Rhien: When she looks sleepy.
What’s the greatest word in the English language?
Matt: Cunnilingus.
You wasted no time saying that.
Matt: For the longest time, I was like, “What the hell does that mean?” And then I found out, and I was like, “Oh, wow. I never expected that.”
Rhien: He just thought it meant great — like, “My coffee is so cunnilingus this morning.”
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KC’s Prophylactic Past
Back in the day, Kansas City was known as the home of Peacocks.
By CHARLES FERRUZZA
Veteran newscaster Walt Bodine remembers the popularity of Peacock-brand condoms back in the 1930s. Bodine was working at his father’s all-night drugstore at Linwood and Troost. “Men were a little sheepish about asking for rubbers early in the day,” he said. “But as the night went on, they lost their inhibitions. And since we were open 24 hours and surrounded by apartment hotels, the later it got, the more rubbers we sold.”
And it wouldn’t have been hard to restock the shelves. Kansas City, it seems, was once the headquarters for Peacock rubbers. It was a heady time for Prohibition-snubbing Kansas City — and for condoms.
But it wasn’t always that way. In 1000 B.C., Egyptian men employed tubes of fine linen to protect their peckers from infection or unwanted pregnancies. By the 19th century, a frisky farmer or a randy rancher could make his own condom with a sheep’s intestine, following this recipe (as quoted in Reay Tannahill’s Sex in History): “Soak it first in water, turn it on both sides, then repeat the operation in a weak ley (solution) of soda, which must be changed every four or five hours, for five or six successive times; then remove the mucous membrane with the nail; sulphur, wash in clean water, and then in soap and water; rinse, inflate and dry. Next cut it to the required length and attach a piece of ribbon to the open end.”
The convenience of prepackaged, easy-to-use condoms changed sex in America when the first commercially produced rubbers were introduced to consumers in 1855. These early prophylactics were expensive, though, and hard to find.
Interest in condoms exploded when soldiers returning from World War I brought sexually transmitted diseases back with them. By the 1930s, almost every U.S. drugstore sold inexpensive, thin, single-use rubbers.
Peacocks were made by the Dean Rubber Manufacturing Company in North Kansas City. The pocket-sized tins for Dean Rubber’s signature brands — Parisian, Peacock, Ultrex Platinum — are highly prized collectibles that still trade hands on eBay. Particularly popular are elaborate Peacock (“Redi-Wet, Hygienically Lubricated”) containers and giveaway items such as Peacock bill clips, key chains and tape measures.
“The Peacocks tins are among the prettiest condom tins ever made,” says George Goehring, one of the authors of Remember Your Rubbers: Collectible Condom Containers. “And Peacocks were being sold right up into the 1950s.”
In 1966, the Dean Rubber Manufacturing Company was prosecuted in U.S. District Court when a small percentage of rubbers from five shipments of condoms were found to contain holes, “thus failing to meet government specifications … by having a lower quality than professed through written expression and inherent meaning.”
It’s unclear what happened to Peacocks after that, but it’s not hard to figure that a reputation for leakage could kill a rubbermaker.
Bodine remembers headier times for Peacocks. His father once offered a sale on a box of condoms. “It was, like, 50 rubbers for a couple of bucks. A man came in one day and asked to buy a rubber, and I suggested our deal on a whole box of Peacocks. The guy glared at me and said, ‘Kid, I’m a man, not a machine.'”
An Erotic World
Rick Ryan has discovered YouTube and f gured out how to use it as his backstage pass at strip clubs.
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By NADIA PFLAUM
It’s just another father-daughter outing to the strip club.
Rick Ryan and his 21-year-old daughter, Ashly, loiter near the bar at Dreamgirls, an all-nude joint east of Lee’s Summit. The place would be completely unassuming but for the blinking marquee facing U.S. Route 50. Ryan is chatting with Kinky Kara, a bleach-blonde in a bra and panties. Kinky Kara tells Ryan that at his next stop, another strip club a mile away called Club Skin, he should look for a stripper called Spring.
“You know — Spring. My little blond, crazy friend,” Kinky Kara says, jogging Ryan’s memory.
Meanwhile, Ashly is hypnotized by a thick dancer writhing lazily on a tabletop.
“I could never dance nude,” Ashly whispers. “I dance topless in Dallas, but I could never do that. I gotta save something for myself.”
Similarly transfixed are two middle-aged guys sitting at the table, gazing up at the V shaved between the stripper’s legs, as if it’s going to tell them the meaning of life.
Ryan’s devotion to the adult entertainment industry spans five decades. Now, the 59-year-old veteran of adult newspapers has taken to new media. Armed with his daughter’s digital video camera, Ryan films his tours of Midwestern strip clubs and posts his reviews and interviews on YouTube.com. He calls his series “Rick Ryan’s World.” He does it for free. After years of writing about strip clubs and the swinger lifestyle for adult newspapers and simultaneously hitting up such establishments for advertising dollars, Ryan is using YouTube as his way of propping up the flagging adult industry. If the Internet and all its cheap porn are sucking money away from live adult entertainment, Ryan figures he can use the Internet to help draw patrons back to his beloved strip clubs.
“I’ve always been a big promoter,” Ryan explains. “I know how to promote. Most people don’t think of how to promote their businesses; a lot of them have no clue. I believe wholeheartedly in the adult industry because I’ve been around it all my life, you know. So I’m always trying to promote the best I can, if they allow me to.”
Club Skin is a boxy building with green siding at the end of a pockmarked dirt road by the highway. Its handwritten sign boasts: “No Cover Ever.” Spring is nowhere to be found, so Ryan interviews a leggy, disinterested woman named Destiny. Ashly holds the camera. Destiny wears a gauzy white blouse and a denim skirt so short, it could be a belt. Destiny has made a cardboard cue card for herself so she can explain the club’s membership policies.
The production of Ryan’s video is rough, and the dialogue is unscripted. Ryan insists that his interviews feel “natural.” During the filming, Ryan leans in close to Destiny’s ear and audibly whispers, “Speak up.”
Ryan’s puffy Dallas Cowboys coat dwarfs his lean frame. In February 2005, Ryan found a lump on his neck, and a biopsy showed it to be cancerous. Six weeks of radiation and three chemotherapy treatments later, he’s cancer-free and grateful that he’s still kickin’ — and that women are still strippin’.
Ryan has been a fan of love, free or otherwise, since the Summer of Love. He spent the ’60s in its epicenter, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, where he sold underground newspapers such as the Berkeley Barb and the Haight-Ashbury Tribune to tourists. He moved to Texas, and in 1974, he and a partner started what Ryan claims was the state’s first adult newspaper, the Texas Free Press. Ryan says he and his partner lost the Texas Free Press three months later when silent investors took ownership of the paper. “We were too young to know [how to fight the takeover],” Ryan says. The Texas Free Press stayed in print for another 20 years. Meanwhile, Ryan started the Texas Singles News in 1977. From the late 1970s through the late ’90s, he freelanced for two other adult newspapers in Dallas.
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In May 2000, Ryan moved to Kansas City to write and sell advertising for Night Shift, which bills itself as “The Midwest’s Largest Adult Publication.” It’s distributed free at strip clubs and truck stops from Oklahoma to Iowa.
The cancer slowed down his writing; he used to contribute articles about Kansas City’s swinger scene, among other topics. But since he discovered YouTube two years ago, Ryan has big plans. “I want to do videos with masseuses, with magazine models, anything in the adult field. Publicity is the name of the game.”
The Baby Bash and T-Pain song “Cyclone” suddenly blares from the speakers in the still-empty club. It’s only 8 p.m., and most patrons won’t start appearing until after 10.
“I love this one,” Ryan says, snapping his fingers and swaying with impressive rhythm. “You talk about a strip-club song, this is it.”
Ashly likes it, too. She starts gyrating in her jeans and Tupac T-shirt. “That’s where I get my craziness, right there,” she says, pointing fondly at her dad. Ryan and Ashly dance together, glowing under the black lights.
