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Sex toys, porno stars in Erotic Expo
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By Larry Fine
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sex tech, titillating toys and
porn stars featured in a seedy carnival of carnal
pleasures across the street from Madison Square Garden
on Saturday at New York's first Erotic Expo.
More than 50 exhibitors set up shop next to the Hotel
Pennsylvania to strut their stuff in a ragged, flea
market setting one flight up from the street and grab
a piece of what organizers say is a $40 billion
worldwide sex market.
Tera Patrick, Britney Rears and Tiffany Mynx were
among the popular porno queens posing for pictures
with fans in the two-day event that ended Saturday,
while product innovators flogged everything from
patented condoms to art object dildos, and an exercise
program devised to make a man's private parts bigger.
In sizing the sex industry market at $40 billion, the
organizers include topless clubs, exotic dancing, sex
toys, party goods, books and pornographic movies.
A crowd of mainly young- to middle-aged men shuffled
by the stations to ogle hard-core movie stars and sex
accessories.
Mynx, showing off her features in a scanty costume,
flexed her muscular derriere and encouraged a woman
who asked to pose for a picture with her to "go ahead,
grab it, squeeze it."
On the counter were copies of her films including
"Tales from the Crack," and "Weapons of Ass
Destruction."
Leon Kassman, who boasts having 12 sex product
patents, displayed his latest invention, the
hermaphrodite condom, designed to heighten sexual
pleasure of both partners after air is pumped or blown
into a thin prophylactic, filling ridges and adding
length and girth, and presumably mirth.
Kassman said new products are presented to a medical
school's industrial review board for approval.
ONE-HANDED APPLICATION
"In the last six years, I've arranged over 6,000
clinical trials for three products," he said,
referring also to a pair of products that allow
one-handed application of a condom.
Across from Kassman was The Bungee Sexperience, an
award-winning design that puts a sex partner in a
harness suspended by a bungee cord to "put the bounce
back in your sex life."
Miss Fyre, a big-busted spokesmodel for the bungee,
said it was fun seeing people walk up to a
demonstration and see their eyes light up with the
possibilities after watching a move she called, "the
corkscrew."
Another of the new products is called "Matters of
Size," an explicit DVD exercise program designed to
add inches to a penis.
The five-phase program demonstrates an elaborate
series of stretches, twists and rotations in
painstaking order, and how many "sets" of each drill
is required over the months to achieve the proper end.
One higher-end exhibitor was disappointed.
"This expo is very low end," complained Shiri Zinn, a
conceptual designer who offers a line of exquisite
glass and silver dildos with fox fur tail attached
that cost about $1,600 and are numbered like art
objects and mounted on silver stands.
"I believe that sexuality and fashion go hand in
hand," said Finn. "Women want style, women like
expensive materials. They don't want trash."
The majority of exhibits were dedicated to more
mundane products -- lines of hard-core porno movies,
special edition photo-books dedicated to porn stars
and adult party purveyors.
"Porn is getting more mainstream," said Tera Patrick,
one of the industry's most versatile players, a
hard-core actress who has become publisher of Genesis
Magazine.
Asked if that was changing the industry, she said. "It
enriches the business through more movies, DVDs,
pay-per-view on demand, the Internet.
"It means I make more money."
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