“A ‘kid-friendly’ sex shop, complete with baby changing facilities, has opened in New York to the outrage of local residents. Owners of the Babeland store in Brooklyn, New York, said the shop was designed to take the seediness out of the sex industry and allow busy working mothers to shop in their lunch hour. The shop, which sells ‘Sexy Moms’ lingerie, sex toys and bondage gear, has caused up roar in the family-friendly Park Slope district of the city. Local resident Anthony Vedetta said: ‘It’s completely unmoral, it’s unclassy. It shouldn’t be here.’ But the store’s owner Claire Cavanah said the store was designed tastefully with sober window displays and smartly dressed sales assistants. ‘If you walk into a mainstream sex store, you’ll probably be greeted with explicit imagery and a sort of artificial sexuality, like a woman with blonde hair with her head thrown back, something that’s meant to titillate in the moment,’ she said. Mrs Cavanah aims to make women feel empowered, not embarrassed about sex. She also plans to run workshops for new mothers and classes on having a ’sex-positive’ family.” — Telegraph (UK)

Here is a picture of the place. Here is its website.

Park Slope is a neighborhood where bohemians go when they’re tired of bohemianism but don’t want to become bourgeois. The leafy streets are lined with handsome turn-of-the-century brownstones. These have become quite expensive and thus the folks who inhabit Park Slope are less artists, musicians, or college kids than their financially successful counterparts — people who’ve actually made money as designers, photographers, and technologists. As a result the place has an arty but staid vibe. You’ll see cool moms walking down the street — and they may well be “two moms” who’ve adopted a baby from somewhere. If there’s any neighborhood in all of New York that’s ripe for a “kid-friendly” sex shop, it’s Park Slope.

It’s all well and good. But the thing that galls about such a place is that there is actually a lack of adult-friendly sex shops. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, he very successfully “cleaned up” Times Square and the other gloriously dirty parts of town. Basically that meant that the government zoned most sex shops and strip bars out of business. The remaining ones were exiled to neighborhoods so peripheral that hardly anybody bothers to venture out to them. It’s easier to download net porn than to hop on the subway.

It used to be that New York sex shops were wild and woolly. They pushed at the limits between stripping and prostitution. They were havens for drug dealers, petty criminals, and people you’d call characters. For that reason, they were quintessentially New York. It’s no wonder the Beat writers — William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and company — drew so much inspiration from the Times Square of the 1940s. It was an exciting place.

And it’s gone. The drug dealers have gone to jail, the strippers have become camgirls, the hookers have migrated from the streets to Craigslist, and the sex shops have become “kid friendly.” Ok, it’s a new world, you can’t stop the march of progress. But it’s a dispiriting state of affairs when there are no more sex shops that are sleaze-friendly, dirt-friendly, and maybe even a little dangerous.

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