Working in this industry, one quickly discovers that there is very little room for squeamishness.
Sure, we all have our own preferences, quirks and kinks when it comes to sex, but the bottom line is that we are in this business to assist our customers as best as we can — without judgment or prejudice.
My interactions with our customers become less about selling them something and more focused on teaching them that there’s nothing wrong with them, that having preferences and kinks and perhaps issues with performance is perfectly normal.
But that is the ideal, not necessarily the reality.
I’d like to tell you a little story.
A couple of months ago, a young couple came into the store to shop for some toys. Now, this couple had been in before, and I’ve always found them fun to wait on — they’re friendly, knowledgeable about what they are looking for and just overall the type of customers that make this job feel less like work and more like an interaction between friends.
So, on this day in question, I was really enjoying talking to them both, showing them what’s new and exciting in the store, talking about their kids and jobs – all very innocuous topics of conversation.
On previous shopping expeditions, the couple had purchased several bondage items, and expressed interest in buying more during this visit, so I was showing the young lady what we had in stock and discussing what each was used for while her husband browsed the toys on the other side of the store, trusting her to pick out what she wanted while he looked at some other products he was interested in purchasing.
And then it happened.
The young lady bounced up to her husband with an armful of bondage items, exuberant and talking a mile a minute, and he turned to her and told her to “settle down” in a low, serious voice. She immediately quieted, looked down, and replied “Yes, sir” and my stomach just knotted.
I squicked.
Hard.
Before this incident, I would have said that I have very few hang-ups when it comes to sex and sex acts. Whatever a person was into, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone or involve children or animals, I’m completely comfortable discussing. But something about the way this young woman instantly slipped into her role as her husband’s submissive made me feel physically cold, and more than a little sick to my stomach.
My kneejerk reaction to this was to ask them to refrain from acting out their dynamic in the store, a request that they easily agreed to, and even apologized to me for making me uncomfortable.
But I was mortified, and apologized to them; squicked or not, I had no business asking them to alter their dynamic, not when they weren’t doing anything wrong. In the time I’ve been working in this business, I’ve been aggressively hit on, asked inappropriate questions and have easily discussed the ins and outs of some hardcore kinks and fetishes, and have never blinked an eye. But a simple “Yes, sir” knocked me completely off balance.
There is a vast difference between the intellectual acceptance of another person’s proclivities and our emotional and psychological reaction to them in situ. We want to give our customers the best shopping experience that we can provide; yes, a big part of that is focused on the bottom line and profitability — happy customers are recurring customers — but we also want our customers to be comfortable, and feel able to talk freely to us. I can’t tell you how many times I have a customer start out saying “This is going to sound weird” or “This is going to sound like a stupid question, but…” and my job is to make them feel at ease.
It hurts my heart to hear someone think that they should be ashamed of their sexual desires, or wanting to try something new or be ashamed that they are experiencing ED issues. My interactions with our customers become less about selling them something and more focused on teaching them that there’s nothing wrong with them, that having preferences and kinks and perhaps issues with performance is perfectly normal. That’s what I love about my job, and I enjoy being able to see them relax and be able to talk freely about their wants and needs. Ideally, we want our stores to be seen as a resource to the community, not just for toys and the like, but for information and education as well. In order to achieve that, we need to leave our own prejudices at the door and offer our customers a space where they can freely discuss what it is that they are looking for — be it a simple vibrator, penis pumps and enhancements or something that caters to a kink or a fetish.
Just as we want to educate our customers, we need to educate ourselves, and if certain kinks and fetishes make us uncomfortable, we cannot show that to a customer, because some of them feel that what it is they’re into is unacceptable in some way. We have to be better than the rest of society — because all-too-often it is society’s fault that people are uncomfortable with their sexual wants — and if that means we have to talk about things that make us uncomfortable on a personal level, we find some way to push aside those feelings.
Now, I’m not saying that our own feelings don’t matter; we are all only human, and have a right to our own opinions and feelings. But while we are actively working and dealing with customers, we have to find a way to put those opinions and feelings aside. I have a tendency to intellectualize anything that makes me uncomfortable, and pick my feelings apart in order to figure out why I’m feeling that way – and once I can pinpoint a reason, I can let it go.
Being squicked by the incident I mentioned before was a knee-jerk response; voicing my discomfort was also not a conscious decision, but to this day, months later, it still bothers me. I still wince whenever I think about my reaction that night, and have given much thought as to why I responded as I did, in hopes that I can avoid a similar incident in the future. We as humans all carry some sort of baggage, have likes and dislikes and sometimes experience unconscious, visceral reactions to situations. It is our duty to our customers, however, to find a way to sublimate our discomfort, and either move past it, or hand off that customer to another staff member who is more comfortable discussing that customer’s needs.
RJ McCarthy is a freelance writer and editor who spends her days in an adult retail boutique on the East Coast educating her customers in all things sex-related. She comes from a long line of educators, and considers her store to be just another type of classroom, one in which she can promote healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Holding both a B.A. in English and a MFA in fiction, McCarthy has written articles for Sexual Health magazine and Impulse Novelties’ blog.
