Disney World for adults
Not everyone at this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo was selling porn.
But most were selling sex.
Here, a few of the sex-related trends I spotted on the convention floor.
Doubling down on sin
At the XXX Vaporizers booth, Joshua Berkowitz, 32, was going all in on vice. At Princeton, he studied organic chemistry. Now, this Miami, Florida-based entrepreneur had united two of America’s favorite past-times: smoking and porn.
On a video playing behind his head, a brunette porn star wandered sexily around in lingerie while smoking a XXX Vaporizer e-cigarette. The product line included XXX-brand electronic cigarettes, a menu of “eliquids,” and a calendar starring the XXX Vapor Girls posing and vaping.
Ecigarettes are controversial already, he noted. “This just takes it one more step into the sphere of adult.”
Disney World for adults
“It’s not a sex hotel,” Jay Holly, the director of sales and marketing for Eros Resort & Spa in Orland, Florida, informed me testily. “It’s a clothing-optional facility near Disney.”
Behind him, foam core boards balanced on easels displayed artistic renderings of a planned 200-room, gated, private, members-only hotel and spa for those who come to Orlando in search of more adult activities than those found at Disney World. One labeled “TYPICAL SUITE VIEW” included two nude women making out on a bed.
“Is it a nudist colony?” I asked.
“It is not a nudist colony at all,” Holly asserted, clearly annoyed.
See these actual rules from nudist colonies.
Every guy thinks he can be a porn star, most guys aren’t porn stars
The tall blond guy who could be mistaken for an Abercrombie & Fitch model were he not wearing a Captain America suit was there, he said, “to pick up porn stars.”
I asked him if he’d gotten any porn stars’ phone numbers. Eight, he claimed.
“Do you want to be a porn star?” I inquired.
“No,” he sniffed, waiting in a long line to talk to a porn star at a booth around the corner. “I have a real job.”
The Chinese are coming
In the far less crowded adult novelties room, it was impossible not to notice the growing number of adult toy manufacturers who had flown in from China.
Amidst stalls hawking bedazzled merkins billed as “body art for your body parts,” eco-friendly personal lubricants, and bottles upon bottles of male enhancement pills, I found the Wenzhou Fullze Trading Company.
According to one of the men behind a table scattered with adult products, sex toys are “big business in China now.” In modern-day China, a more open-minded generation and the free market have boosted sales of adult novelty products.
“We come here to find our North American partner,” one smiled benevolently.
Real women are Real Dolls
One of the most eye-catching displays was a series of bulging plastic cases containing life-size RealDoll versions of Wicked Pictures contract performers Samantha Saint, Jessica Drake, Stormy Daniels, and Kaylani Lei.
Thirty feet away, Matt McMullen, who’s been manufacturing “the world’s finest love dolls,” as they’re known, since the late nineties, admired his artwork. Nearby, the real world doppelgangers of the dolls on display signed autographs for fans.
“For a girl, that’s like a dream come true, to have a doll of themselves,” he considered. A regular, basic model RealDoll sells for $5,499, but the clones he’s made in a licensing deal with Wicked, one of adult’s biggest production companies, sell for $6,499.