Nashville: Where sex doesn't sell

"Vibrators off," Nashville Scene - ah, those controversial sex toys! Read about how Surprise Parties has been unable to buy a billboard for its sex-toy parties, despite having cash in hand. But wait, you ask, isn't American full of girls going wild and female chauvinist pigs? Perhaps not so much. Sex, of a sort, sells, but only when it's convenient, pleasingly packaged, and the "right" kind of sex. Vibrators need not apply, at least in Tennessee.

Vibrators, it seems, are the sticky wicket in the sex-toy party circuit—in fact, Tennessee lawmakers recently tried to make their use illegal. Surprise Parties managers are sensitive to the subject, not wanting to be labeled in the same breath as sex-shop merchants. “In some people’s minds, that’s true,” says Donna Wittrig, a Surprise Parties vice president who has worked for the company 16 years. “But that’s not what it’s all about.”

What it’s all about, Wittrig says, is helping women to take a “Stand by Your Man” approach to romance. Everything Surprise Parties sells is designed to bring women, specifically married women, closer to the partner from whom they’ve drifted away, at least romantically. At a recent regional management meeting, Wittrig asked reps whether they knew women with children who’d never had an orgasm. Tragically, every woman in the room raised her hand, Wittrig says.

That in itself was bad enough, she goes on to say, but failed intimacy also has led to unintended consequences like faked orgasms, bad sex and broken marriages. “If you’re mercy faking, you’re lying to your partner,” Wittrig says. “No one should do that because you’re teaching bad technique. He’s thinking, ‘I should do that again’ because he thinks you responded to him. You don’t lie with your mouth and you don’t lie with your pelvis.”