The average sex shop is often tucked away, the interior screened from the outside, so it’s easy to jump to conclusions about What Goes On In There. That, combined with the fact that talking frankly about sex remains uncomfortable for many people, makes walking into the store and interacting with real people understandably intimidating.
But as @lilch0mp has shown in his popular TikTok videos, a sex shop is like any other store: a public place for adults to buy what they want. In his “sex shop captain’s logs,” Jack S, as the creator calls himself, reports on the week’s events as an employee at a sex shop in California. His videos include everything from the “dog of the week” (pets are welcome at the store) to the most annoying thing a customer did—which brings us to the subject at hand.
Jack says many of his customers do not know how to behave. “Some days it’s a ‘kicking out a masturbator day’ and some days it's just a lot of straight dudes opening boxes,” he tells GQ, describing some typical breaches of etiquette.
To help curious, well-meaning people feel comfortable in a sex shop—and discourage those who can feel too comfortable—GQ combed Reddit and sex shop reviews to find the most common questions people have about going to a sex shop, and asked Jack to share his honest answers.
The most common [issue] is probably opening boxes and touching the toys. It's a sanitary thing: Don't open boxes. Number two is probably acting inappropriately with the toys. Like if we're showing them testers and whatnot, they'll hold it to their crotch or hold it to their nipples. And it's like, it is a tester. You can test it. You cannot pleasure yourself with it. And the third is probably not asking for help. I'll watch a dude on the security cameras work himself into a tizzy looking at a wall full of a hundred pastel-colored, dick-shaped boxes. In a sex shop, the best thing you can do is ask for help from the employees.
What I would say to someone who's nervous to come into the store is do it anyway, but also being nervous isn't a bad thing. First thing, ask for help. Don't just go in there and kind of drown in all of the options. We're there to help you. And if you're too nervous, shop online if you need to, and stick with small businesses if you can.
I say go with a simple wand-style vibrator. It’s not going to have any crazy bells or whistles or form factor. It's just delivering good quality vibration. A lot of people with toys get kind of skittish, like, “Oh, that's gonna go in where? I'm unsure about the size or the material.” With a wand vibrator, male or female, gay or straight, whatever it is, you are just taking vibration, which is a pleasurable sensation, and you can just apply it wherever you want. If where you wanna apply it, during sex by yourself or with your partner, is your knee, you can do that. It's a very simple, very low-impact way of exploring both your own sexuality without having to get into a whole lot of like, “Oh, I need lube for this.”
The right amount of information generally is like, are you looking for an internal or external toy, are you looking for something that vibrates or doesn't vibrate? If you can keep it about the toys and not about the person, it helps people stay comfortable. So if you're asking for help and you're scared of giving too much information, you don't have to be like, “I feel this way when I masturbate” if you're not comfortable doing that. You can just keep it about the toys.
We do not secretly judge people based on what they're buying. I would say we probably don't even notice what most people are buying 'cause it's just what we sell. Obviously someone's gonna be buying it, and everyone masturbates. So there's no person and toy combination that doesn't make sense. There's no person buying a toy combination that I haven't seen.
We troubleshoot people's vapes over the phone and we troubleshoot their toys. We're like, “Did you find this button? Hold it down for this many seconds. Now click it down to this mode.” It's easier if you bring it in for us to troubleshoot it ourselves, you know, put on gloves, and then if we need to make an exchange if the toy's defective. If a sex shop has a phone line that's open for stuff and you aren't masturbating when you do it, you can ask questions.
A misconception is that they should like sex toys and be into it and free spirited. But in reality, those people, when they interview, are inappropriate. What you really need to work in a sex shop is a heightened sense of professionalism to treat selling these sex toys the same way you would treat selling a bike at a bike shop. Yes, you are saying “dildo” and “clitoris,” but you're not saying, like, “that goes in your pussy” and “that's to make you come harder.” What you really need is to be able to keep it at a level where you are helping the customer but not opening the door for other people who don't know how to act to be even more inappropriate. You want to set a precedent for respect and openness, but also a reserved sense of candor. You also need a thick skin. People are gonna say terrible, awful things to you. Like, can you imagine being on the bus and being like, I have to go walk up to that guy and tell him to stop masturbating? No, that's not a situation you really see yourself in before it's happening, but then it's happening.