"Adult" book stores

nashvilleX3
Originally uploaded by ihaveabuginmyeye.

I confess, I've been in an adult book store. I was disappointed. They not one copy of War and Peace, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Pride and Prejudice, Silas Marner, or even Gone with the Wind. They did have some interesting titles though.

Seriously. "Adult Book Store" is a bad name for what these places are, I think. "Adult Books" conjures in my mind an image of a slightly cluttered, dusty bookshop full of heavy tomes with weighty titles. I don't know what a better euphemism would be, though. It still should be something innocuous sounding -- maybe something like "Porn Store" or "Filthy Book Palace". Would those be clear enough?

Tori and Jeff and I were at the lake one weekend and had passed the book place a few times on our way back and forth. Tori suggested that we might stop -- that it might be interesting. Now, I hate to pass judgement on an entire industry based on one experience, but this place was CREEPY. Perhaps "stores" in Memphis would be more up-scale and less trashy, but this place, outside of Paris, was plain skank. The decor wasn't all that horrible -- it had a crummy-video-store kind of feel which doesn't bother me since I'm from a small town with no chain video stores (all our video stores are crummy), but the clientèle just FREAKED me... Granted, we didn't look like the a million bucks (we'd been on the lake part of the day and had showered, but not "fixed ourselves up" to go out), but some of the folks hanging out in this establishment looked as if they'd climbed from under a rock somewhere.

Anyway, we wandered in, were warmly greeted by the proprietress, and proceeded to look around. I was particularly fascinated by the "Toy" section. Tori kept telling me not to touch anything -- but I couldn't help myself. There, sitting on a shelf available to the whole world (or at least the part of the world willing to stop at such a distinctive establishment), was the molded silicon replica of some woman's (a famous "star" of the adult film industry, no doubt) nether regions. I picked a safe place to poke my finger -- a thigh, I think -- and was amazed at the texture. Didn't feel like any woman I'd ever poked. I guess, if you're buying silicon woman parts, authenticity isn't that big of a thing -- after all, if you NEED silicon woman parts, you likely don't have a real woman with which to compare it.

We didn't buy anything. If they'd had a T-Shirt, I might have bought one... I was gonna ask about souvenir t-shirts of key-chains, but Tori wouldn't let me.

We smiled politely, thanked the lady for letting us look around, and leaped into the car leaving a cloud of dust and thrown gravel hoping that no one from home (especially the preacher) recognized our car.

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