Sex and Sumo February 19, 2009

I’ve reached the point where I’d normally be walking out the door, brown paper bag in hand, nonchalant facial expression firmly in place. But today is different. I’m here to interview the manager. ‘Jill? She’s just in the bog love’, the shop assistant says without looking up from her handheld games console. I take the opportunity to survey my surroundings, Keane play on the stereo, creating an inappropriate soundtrack for the hardcore hole-pumping on the plasma screen above me. Technicolor sexual paraphernalia is abound as you’d expect:: edible stimulants, monolithic dildos, £150 dolls gagging to be taken home and shown who’s boss. DVDs, vibrators, a few Unidentified-Fucking-Objects that more readily resemble Joseph Merrick’s skull than items of sexual desire.

When she appears she takes my hand and shakes it roughly, leading me through the staff-only door at the rear of the shop. Lighting an illegal fag she pulls up a stool, and I push a mound of chocolate condoms aside to sit on the shelf opposite her, before asking how she got involved in the sex business. 

‘I worked as a bouncer, than as a security guard at the bus station’, she says, her gruff voice muffling my Dictaphone. ‘Not much ever kicked off there, just the usual stuff, chasing off kids, getting rid of homeless people, it got pretty boring really.’ Did you see this job as a way to liven things up then? ‘Not at first, I saw the job advertised and just thought it was Pound Stretcher or something, but I wasn’t shocked when I found out, not a lot shocks me I can tell you’.

My lack of surprise at this revelation makes her laugh and cough in equal measures, I probe her to elaborate. ‘You might think it’s weird, but it’s just a job for me, all this sex stuff. People can do what they want in the privacy of their own homes can’t they?’ To an extent perhaps, but do you feel a sense of stigma working here? ‘I try to keep it quiet, and I don’t acknowledge my customers on the street, if they say hello to me I’ll say hello back, but I’ve got other jobs and I wouldn’t want it to take over my whole life. In the day I work here but at nights I’m a bouncer and I don’t need any shit.’

 ‘You do get all sorts in here though…’ she says, I get a sense she’s dropping her guard a little and urge her to continue. ‘Me and Sally (still staring at the Nintendo DS) know a guy who comes in here a lot, and we reckon he’s a priest’.

A priest?

‘Yeah, well, you don’t just walk straight off the street into the shop. There’s two doors with a camera on the wall so we can see whose coming in. Anyway this guy is about sixty, respectable looking with beard and glasses. Every time he comes in he crosses his chest, thinking we can’t see.’ I’m unconvinced, she continues. ‘And once in the supermarket I heard someone call him Father, I swear it was him.’

‘There’s a politician that comes in here as well, but I don’t know his name… He’s got dark hair, about mid-forties I’d guess, clean-looking.’ Sensing incoming exposure I push for her to elucidate, what’s he look like? What party does he represent? What stuff is he into?  ‘I dunno much about politics, but he gets fetish stuff mainly, DVDs, handcuffs, masks, that kind of thing.’  

I sense that she only realizes the gossip-goldmine that surrounds her when prompted to reminisce, and I’m interested to know the extent to what she’ll tell me. What’s the weirdest thing anyone’s asked you for? ‘Crocodiles. One man came in and wanted anything to do with crocodiles. You name it, having sex with ‘em, toying with their bits, we told him where to go. We draw the line at anything with animals. But you’d be surprised at how often people come in asking for it.’

It’s unsurprising that Jill has become sexually desensitized. In an environment where sex is so overtly commoditized and pre-packaged, does it leave much room for real-life eroticism?  ‘No, I’m not interested in it anymore, its lost the appeal totally. I had a boyfriend, he worked at a sex shop up the road. But sex for us was no fun, just like being at work really.’

There are other personal implications too. Jill has two children, who have both been bullied and ignored as a result of their mum’s vocation. ‘We try to keep it our little secret, but some of the kids at school find out because their parents are customers here. Then they tell their kids to stay away from mine, as if we’re somehow worse than them.’ Not that this seems to bother her children: ‘my eldest daughter says she wants to have a sex shop as well. She looks up to her mum and wants to be like me.’

She says this with the same pride as a butcher nurturing his son to take over the family business, with sex rewired to become an essential product like any other. Paradoxically, the result is a life where sex means less to Jill than it probably does to most people. Her main interest is sumo wrestling, and this is the topic that she speaks most animatedly about. ‘I’m going to Estonia next year to compete in the world championships’, she says, ‘I’ve only been doing it for a year but already I’m Britain’s number one.’ So how did she get so good in such short space a time? ‘I just kept pushing them out of the ring’. Easy really.