Special issue article: Sex, consumption and the city
Urban Studies
2017, Vol. 54(3) 582–599
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0042098016659615
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Sex and the city: Branding, gender
and the commodification of sex
consumption in contemporary
retailing
Louise Crewe
University of Nottingham, UK
Amber Martin
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
This paper explores the changing spatiality of the sex retail industry in England and Wales, from
highly regulated male-orientated sex shops, pushed to the legislative margins of the city and social
respectability, towards the emergence of unregulated female-orientated ‘erotic boutiques’ located
visibly in city centres. This is achieved through an exploration of the oppositional binaries of perceptions
of sex shops as dark, dirty, male-orientated, and ‘seedy’ and erotic boutiques as light,
female-orientated and stylish, showing how such discourses are embedded in the physical space,
design and marketing of the stores and the products sold within them. More specifically, the paper
analyses how female-orientated sex stores utilise light, colour and design to create an ‘upscaling’
of sexual consumerism and reflects on what the emergence of up-scale female spaces for sexual
consumption in the central city might mean in terms of theorisations of the intersectionality
between agency, power, gender and class. The paper thus considers how the shifting packaging
and presentation of sex-product consumption in the contemporary city alters both its acceptability
and visibility.
Keywords
brands, city, consumption, gender, retailing, sex shop, space
Received April 2015; accepted June 2016
Introduction
One of the most interesting developments in
the recent study of sexuality has been an
increasing focus on its spatial dimensions. In
this paper we address the spatial, social and
gendered contours of sex shops. This is
Corresponding author:
Louise Crewe, School of Geography, University of
Nottingham, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park,
Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
Email: louise.crewe@nottingham.ac.uk
significant as part of a broader project to
theorise both the emotional and the corporeal
dimensions of the consuming body, and
its classed and gendered composition. The
paper highlights the importance of place,
commodification, social class and regulation
as key determinants in shaping the commercialisation
and normalisation of contemporary
sex-product retailing. We explore how
sex premises and products have become key
spaces and places that contribute to and constitute
the contemporary city. Specifically,
the paper maps out the ways in which there
has been a dramatic and highly visible feminisation
of the adult retail sector which has
a very specific geography and a particular
set of branding, marketing, sales and retail
design techniques. This paper explores the
complexities and contradictions that lie at
the heart of how, why and where feminised
spaces of (im)morality are constituted and
reproduced. Crucially, the paper explores
the role of agency in the commodification
and marketisation of female sex shopping.
The participation of female consumers in
contemporary urban sex shopping is a subject
of pronounced theoretical contestation.
For some, the new generation of city centre
female-focused sex shops are simply the latest
stage in a long-standing process of the
neoliberal colonisation of all aspects of public
and private life, a means of creating new
markets for hungry, unsatiated female consumers
ready for their next shopping fix.
From this standpoint, the pornification of
contemporary culture is leading to ‘a form
of hyper-sexism that entails an increase in
physical, sexual, mental, economic and emotional
cruelty towards women’ (Tankard
Reist and Bray, 2011: xiv). Women are, in
this interpretation, little more than consuming
subjects dancing to the tune of the market.
Such interpretations of female sexual
consumption sees the proliferation and normalisation
of sex stores as the ‘epitome of
heteronormative capitalism and patriarchy,
an industry dominated by men who produce
sexually explicit material firstly, for their
own benefit; next, to satisfy the insatiable
sexual (and perverted) desires of other heterosexual
men and, finally, to reinforce the
secondary position of women by reducing
them to commodified sex objects’ (Maginn
and Steinmetz, 2004: 3). Other readings are
entirely possible, however. A range of work
is beginning to challenge this approach that
casts pornography as a ‘monolithic medium’
and argues, rather, that the new breed of
female-friendly sex retailers is testament to
the new agentive capacities enjoyed by
women in the post-feminist era. Might not
the new, highly visible generation of femalefocused
sex shops be indicative of the liberatory
and celebratory social and economic
position that (some) women now enjoy?
There is an emergent body of work that
attests to the new freedoms and powers that
consuming women now enjoy in the contemporary
city as a result of the normalisation
and democratisation of desire (McNair,
2002: 166). Evans et al. (2010: 216) argue
that this physical emergence of erotic retailing
from the 1990s was mirrored by changing
perceptions of female sexuality which
was increasingly being seen as active, agentive,
assertive and autoerotic and was
framed through discourses of ‘post-feminism
and hedonistic rights of pleasure’. The
changing geography of the erotic store, its
increasing visibility and the materialisation
of the female sex store in urban centres has
in and of itself helped to make the consumption
of sex more acceptable. Focusing on the
commodification of female sex products in
the contemporary city, the paper thus
explores how the gendered branding and
presentation of sex-product retailing alters
both its acceptability and visibility in the
city. The paper focuses on one particular
space, the female sex-product retail store, in
order to explore how the contemporary city
acts as a key site for the representation and
Crewe and Martin 583
sale of new forms of gendered sexual consumption.
The commodification of sex products
reveals both the changing gendered
nature of sex shops and their increasing visibility
in ways that are variously interpreted
as empowering or emasculating. The changing
nature of sex shops represents a perfect
illustration of broader trends towards the
idealisation, commercialisation and normalisation
of sexual consumption. The shifts in
the visibility and invisibility of gendered
spaces for selling sex products reveal important
new – and difficult – intersections
between design and desire, profitability and
pleasure, class and consumption, agency and
oppression, bodies and space. It is to a critical
interrogation of this problem that the
paper now turns.
The shifting spatiality of the sex
store
The shop itself is a classy establishment - no
darkly-lit, sleazy side alley building. (Customer
review, Ann Summers1
)
The spatial contours of sex retailing and consumption
are deeply woven into the physical,
economic, social and cultural fabric of the
city. The presence of sex-related establishments
in public spaces has long been a source
of anxiety and fear, but providing they were
secreted away in liminal, marginalised ‘hidden’
spaces, their potentially ‘polluting’
impacts could be quietly ignored. Sex shops
have traditionally been perceived as masculinised
consumption spaces, frequented at the
margins of both the city and the clock. The
landscape of sex-product retailing in England
has, however, shifted dramatically in recent
years (Martin, 2014). Its early origins are situated
in 1950s Soho with the emergence of
specialist ‘book shops’, housing books of a
mildly erotic nature, acting as a cover for the
pornographic images and poor quality film
held in the secreted stores’ back rooms
(Manchester, 1986). In the late 1970s a chain
of sex stores emerged named ‘Private Shops’,
which were synonymous with the contemporary
associations of sex shops characterised
by concealed shop fronts, minimal shop
de´ cor and an orientation towards the heterosexual
male consumer (Kent and Brown,
2006). The characteristics and localities of
such stores developed through the introduction
of government legislation in 1982, which
remains a regulatory medium through which
to control the number of sex shops in
England and Wales. The legislation requires
stores to obtain a ‘Sex Establishment’ license
from their local authority if they wish to sell
R18 videos or DVDs (Coulmont and
Hubbard, 2010; Goudie, 1986; Hubbard,
2012; Manchester, 1986) and/or over a ‘significant
degree’ of ‘sex articles’ (1982 Act,
Schedule 4.1)2
(both of which are vaguely
and indeterminately defined by the legislation).
This licensing geographically restricts
stores to marginalised locations in towns and
cities and requires shop contents to be concealed
from the street outside. The clustering
of adult entertainment premises has thus been
deliberately prevented by a range of regulatory
mechanisms such as zoning laws in the
USA that aimed to curb the creation of ‘vice
districts’ (Hubbard et al., 2009: 88). In
England and Wales, local authorities have
been able to remove such businesses from
particular cities ‘simply on the basis that they
were ‘‘out of place’’’ (Hubbard and Colosi,
2013: 67). In what amounted to a form of
‘spatial governmentality’ (Hubbard et al.,
2013: 126), sex premises are pushed to the
hidden interstices of the city, away from more
valued commercial and residential land, and
far from the innocent eyes of the general public
(particularly women and children, the
upholders of ‘family values’) for fear that
they may be tainted or polluted by noxious
activities in unwanted places. Typical examples
of regulated sex shops include the chain
584 Urban Studies 54(3)
stores ‘Private Shops’ (owned by David Gold
and subject to much controversy), ‘Harmony’
and ‘Simply Pleasure’.
In recent decades, arguably as part of the
process of urban gentrification (Hubbard
et al., 2008), there has been a shift towards
more design-led, heavily branded and stylised
sex consumption formats that are
deemed sufficiently ‘up-market’ as to be the
acceptable face of the sex shop sector. Sex
retailing has become big business and new
gendered commodities and markets are
being created in the heart of our urban centres.
The geographical placing of female sex
shops is particularly significant and reveals a
markedly different spatiality to that of traditional
male sex shops. Positioned in central
areas of towns and cities such ‘erotic boutiques’
do not require any form of licence in
order to sell lingerie, sex toys and sometimes
soft-core pornography to largely (or exclusively)
female customers. Examples of erotic
boutiques include the well-known British
chain store Ann Summers that began in 1970
and can arguably be seen as a key player – a
forerunner – in the mainstreaming of female
adult retailing (Kent and Brown, 2006).
There are now almost 150 stores throughout
the UK and Ireland, and a number of independent
retailers have also entered the market
in the last two decades. In addition, in
the last decade there has also been an emergence
of up-scale erotic boutiques, such as
Agent Provocateur, Coco de Mer and Myla,
keen to promote their ‘designer’ credentials
through the sale of fashion-conscious,
design-led lingerie and sex toys and by presenting
themselves as bespoke retail spaces
catering to a sexually sophisticated female
clientele. Coco de Mer, for example, is situated
in a prime retail site in Covent Garden,
London. Founded in 2001 by Samantha
Roddick, the daughter of the Body Shop
founder Anita Roddick, the store evokes a
sense of grandiose, decadent luxury through
the sale of designer lingerie and sex toys in
an impeccably designed store with its ‘dark
red walls and nineteenth century props’
(Kent, 2005: 32) giving an air of wealth, luxury
and seductiveness. There has thus been a
profound re-shaping and re-scaling of the
geographical landscape of the retail sex trade
in recent decades. Sex businesses have shifted
from back alleys and ‘municipal districts of
ill-repute’ (Liepe-Levinson, 2002: 22) to the
heart of the city’s consumer landscape
(Hubbard, 2012: 155).
The growth and lack of regulation of upmarket
retail spaces is raising important
questions about gender, space, consumption
and the body in the contemporary city.
Alongside urban centrality, this new genre of
sex retailers are exclusive, up-scale operations
with particular customer profiles in
mind. As we go on to demonstrate, the placing
of sex stores reveals a great deal about
the intersectionality between space, gender
and class in the contemporary city. There is
a highly distinctive locational geography at
play that is reflected in the geography of the
store locations: high-end designer erotic boutiques,
such as Agent Provocateur and Myla,
are predominantly located in affluent retail
hubs such as Knightsbridge and Mayfair in
London and in flagship department stores
including Selfridges and Harrods. The location
of these stores in up-scale, prime retail
locations directly contrasts with the locations
of licensed sex shops which are legislatively
pushed to the margins of the city,
further demonstrating how it is the packaging
and presentation of sex that enables or
disables its visibility in urban space. Female
sex consumption has not simply become
more acceptable: the spatial strategies and
physical materialisation of the up-market sex
shop has made it so.
Methodological approach
The research on which this paper is based
includes interviews with four company
Crewe and Martin 585
directors and 14 shop workers, observational
research conducted in 43 sex shops
and erotic boutiques in England and a content
analysis of 354 online customer reviews
(in which the reviews were coded into a
frame, a series of major themes and refined
layers of subthemes or categories using
NVivo). In addition, a combination of content
and semiotic analysis was used to analyse
7116 products. Each product was
individually collated into an excel database
in which the product type, name, colour,
cost and material were recorded. This
enabled an understanding of quantities and
specificities of the products for sales, alongside
considerations of visual representations
of sex products, here used as ‘visual texts’
(Pink, 2007: 21).
Taken together the range of methods
shed light on the ‘upscaling’ of the sex retail
industry, on the significance of the sensory
retail environment and on the hypercommodification
of sexualisation of female
consumption. These themes are explored in
detail throughout the remainder of the
paper, and reveal that the relatively recent
emergence of the feminised retail store
within the contemporary city is raising a
series of highly pertinent questions about
the intersectionality between class, gender
and space. The analysis underscores the tensionful
nature of the commodification of
female sex and questions the degree to which
the developments underway represent a
post-feminist celebration of freedom, choice
and agency for women, or whether the
developments discussed represent little more
than the latest capitalist technique to commodify,
marketise and monetise ‘every last
drop’ of human life (Thrift, 2006).
Into the light: The affective
properties of luminosity
Inside, its[sic] has the same comfortable & welcoming
atmosphere, bathed in pink light from
the beautiful persex[sic]-lit displays. (Customer
review, Erotic boutique, Sh!)3
Never been to a sex shop before. Always
thought of them as dark and sleazy establishments
with perverts at the counters. (Customer
review, Sex shop, Simply Pleasure)4
Light is a recurrent motif in urban architecture
and design. An understanding of the
relationship between light, store design and
the consumption experience is an important
yet neglected element within contemporary
retail geography. Light and luminosity are
key strategies that shape social encounters,
the in-store experience and consumer perceptions
of space. Light, as Bille and Sørenson
argue so elegantly, is a key means of ‘exercising
social intimacy and inclusion, of shaping
moral spaces . while working as a metaphor
as well as a material agent in these
social negotiations’ (2007: 263). Light is
symbolic, it affects our experience of being
in space and can be actively configured and
orchestrated to alter our relations between
people, spaces and objects: ‘Without light,
form and space have little meaning to most
of us’ (Davey, 2004: 47). As the following
discussion reveals, light affects retail space in
very profound ways, both perceptual and
material. It transforms consumers’ readings
of retail space, the ways they perform in
these spaces and the meanings they ascribe
to contemporary urban space. Store lighting
is actively used to shape, promote and project
notions of morality and danger, seduction
and safety. It conceals and reveals, is
atmospheric and affective, powerful and persuasive.
The ways in which light is experienced
and its affective properties lie in part
in its mode and materiality (bright, dim, artificial,
subdued) (Bille and Sørenson, 2007:
274). Reflections, shadows, glare, luminosity
– all work in different ways to produce consumption
lightscapes the mould the affective
properties of objects and the spaces in which
they are displayed. Both light and colour
586 Urban Studies 54(3)
alter the world and the way in which we
relate to it, endowing certain commodities
with aura, throwing others into sharp relief,
and masking, camouflaging or disguising
others (Young, 2006).
In the specific instance of sex-product
retailing, darkness and light are used as
visual cues that signal mood, texture, spatial
transition and the perception of security and
safety. Lighting and its absence are used to
create atmosphere, ambience and intimacy.
It both reveals and conceals and is affective
and manipulative: ‘The materiality of light
has the ability to alter human experiences of
space and to define sensations of intimacy
and exclusion’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007:
274). Darkness is associated with night time,
danger, excitement, immorality, sexual delinquency
(Baldwin, 2004; Hobbs et al., 2000;
Otter, 2008; Painter, 1996); ‘the private’ and
‘the impossible to discipline’ (Barker, 1998:
184). In contrast, daylight is associated with
reason, morality and control (Barker, 1998:
184). Light is symbolised by the colour white
(Barker, 1998: 184) – it is luminous, shining,
representative of all that is simple, clean,
pure and innocent (Gaimster, 2011: 65). The
customer review excerpts emphasise the
complex interpretations afforded to light,
and how it is used as a key spatial signifier.
Traditional sex shops are associated with the
darkness, no doubt resulting in part from
their legally imposed concealed entrances
and windows which prevent natural daylight
from entering the store. This renders the
stores hidden, concealed and secreted from
the street outside which gives the sex shop an
illusionary quality of darkness. However, in
order to compensate for the lack of naturally
occurring daylight, the interiors of sex shops
are typically lit with strong artificial lighting
(usually in the form of fluorescent strip
lights), which creates an unnatural and painfully
bright retail space. The dislocation here
between the dark invisibility of the exterior
and the glaring brightness of the interior is a
perfect illustration of the spatial tactics at
work in retail design. The view from the
street is of a dark, impenetrable and forbidden
space. The contrast between this and the
glaring strip-lit interior is stark and resonant.
The connotations of darkness attributed to
the concealed exteriors of licensed sex shops,
can also result in sex shops being seen as
‘dirty spaces’ (Tyler, 2011) that need to be
hidden away. Positioning sex shops as dark,
dirty spaces in turn generates perceptions that
they have the capacity to pollute, contaminate
or seep and leak into their surrounding
area (Hubbard, 2012), thus explaining their
alleged need for strict regulation.
In contrast with sex shops, erotic boutiques
are free from the regulatory requirements
of sex establishment licensing that
requires concealment. Erotic boutiques are
permitted to have transparent glass shop
fronts that allow natural daylight in and render
them spaces of cleanliness and purity, as
opposed to spaces of darkness and dirtiness.
The natural light permitted in stores also
overcomes the need for harsh artificial lighting.
Instead, recessed lighting, uplighters
and chandeliers are used to emphasise the
fashion-orientated and design-led nature of
the retail environment. In addition, and in a
very different way to the darkened exterior
of traditional sex shops, designer erotic boutiques
such as Coco de Mer and Agent
Provocateur actively play with the seductive
association of darkness through the use of
dark colour schemes. Here we see colour,
light, shade and shadow being used in very
different ways and for very different purposes.
In traditional sex shops the darkened
exterior store fronts stand in stark contrast
to the glaring luminosity of the strip-lit interior;
in feminised erotic boutiques soft tones,
subtle shading and natural light are actively
used in the creation of stylised, seductive,
up-scale and design-led retail environments.
Light in this context, we argue, is an illuminator
or signifier of social class. Lighting
Crewe and Martin 587
enables us to see how particular social classifications
are linked to technologies, particular
aesthetic assemblages and design
interventions, and yet many of these
assumptions – enshrined in discourses on
crime, deviance and immorality, are left
unspoken and therefore unchallenged
(Entwistle et al., 2013). In the case of gendered
sex retailers, light plays a crucial role
in signifying and classifying urban space.
Dark, impenetrable traditional sex shops are
contained at the margins of the city, liminal,
marginalised and difficult to recognise or
read. Feminised erotic boutiques, in contrast,
are permitted to occupy prime retail
spaces – visible to all, gaily illuminated with
soft pink de´ cor and natural light. Light, we
argue, plays a fundamental role in contemporary
urban life, ‘as infrastructure, as technology,
as medium, as ambiance, as facxade
or, quite literally, as a particular kind of
material, or stuff, that we do, make and
shape through our everyday practices.
Lighting is deeply social and has always had
symbolic associations. Lighting is never simply
a matter of visibility’ (Isenstadt et al.,
2014).
You can have any colour as long as
it’s black (or pink): The
chromatography of feminised
retail space
This is the most female-friendly place to buy
toys in London, especially if you’re shy, windows
covered in pink film, staff all women,
customers mostly women and there’s a pink
beaded curtain up at the door! (Customer
review, Sh!)5
The manipulation and configuration of light
within different sex stores and erotic boutiques
is paralleled by the use of colour to
represent and reinforce particular stereotypical
notions of masculinity and femininity as
part of the broader process of concealment
of certain spaces and the re-branding and
upscaling of others. The colour of garments,
toys, store design and buildings produces
emotional effects and responses. We feel and
see colour through our skin and colour is
another key means through which social
constructions of gender and sexuality are
inscribed onto space. Colour is a key tactic
employed by sex-product retailers to exploit
gendered stereotypes in order to enhance
profitability and tap new markets. This section
of the paper draws attention to how
gendered stereotypes are represented in the
space of the shops and the products they
sell. Observational research confirmed that
traditional sex shops are indeed overwhelmingly
masculinised spaces; produced for
men, staffed predominantly by men and frequented
largely by men. The physical space
of the store also reflects their masculine
orientation with the majority of shop fronts
being blue. The colour blue is associated
with both ‘sexual innuendo (blue jokes)’
(Gaimster, 2011: 66) and ‘pale blues are
associated in the West with baby boys’
(Gaimster, 2011: 66). However, as discussed
above, the masculinity associated with traditional
sex shops is perceived as a particular
form of ‘dangerous’ masculinity, one which
is abject, dirty or perverted and must be concealed
from view.
We explore how colour is used in a variety
of ways in feminised sex retailers (store
design, product design, lingerie, furnishings
and visual merchandising) to signal particular
sets of associations concerning social constructions
of gender, and reveal how the
deployment of colour can also be a deeply
classed affair. Most striking is the use of the
colour pink within the design and decor of
the mid-range erotic boutiques in order to
produce an affective sensory experience of
being cocooned in a female-friendly ‘safespace’.
For example, the feminised erotic
boutique Sh! in Hoxton, London, has light
588 Urban Studies 54(3)
pink walls, frosted glass windows with heart
shapes inscribed into them and white fairy
lights lining the walls. The high-street chain
Ann Summers has pink carpets, floor tiles,
walls and display units. The extensive use of
the colour pink, alongside shiny surfaces,
sparkling lights, floral patterns and heart
shapes, are key motifs in the creation of
stereotypically gendered children’s spaces
such as Barbie or Disney fantasy lands or
the highly stereotypically gendered ‘girls’
sections of toy shops. This illustrates how
the use of the colour pink is not only used to
construct a stereotypical version of traditional
femininity but also an infantilised version
of this which has a double-effect: it both
de-eroticises the space in question whilst at
the same time hinting at an intertwining of
sex, childhood and commodification. Sexproduct
consumption thus becomes symbolically
and spatially interwoven with broader
social and cultural debates surrounding the
premature sexualisation of young girls in
popular culture and commerce (Carey, 2011;
Coy, 2009).
The more up-scale, design-led female erotic
boutiques use colour in a rather different
way. Again it is used as a symbolic motif or
marker, but black is the colour of choice in a
majority of these stores. The colour black is
used throughout the downstairs display area
of She Said (Brighton), including the wallpaper,
decorative upholstery and soft furnishings.
Agent Provocateur also uses the colour
black in the decoration schemes of a number
of its stores including the use of black chandeliers
and heavy pieces of black furniture
for the storage and display of lingerie. The
colour black is commonly associated with
sex, seduction and the erotic (McCulloch,
2010) and is used in the erotic boutique to
add a more sophisticated and sexualised
edge to the consumption space. The female
sex shop is thus a variegated and stratified
concept – far from being a homogenous
retail format we see the ways in which space
and class are interwoven in both the location
and the design, de´ cor and product ranges of
stores. At the middle reaches of the market
in stores such as Ann Summers, pink is the
dominant motif – the socially constructed
colour of femininity – unthreatening and
playful. As we move to the more up-scale
erotic boutiques the semiotics change, the
marketing message becomes something altogether
more unattainable: the stores are elegant,
opulent, design-led and undeniably
classed and exclusionary. These are spaces
for wealthy women. The use of the dominant
colour black has long been associated with
elegance, glamour, sophistication, style,
mystery, wealth and power (Fields, 2006;
Gaimster, 2011; McCulloch, 2010) with the
‘little black dress’ seen as the ‘epitome of
sophistication’ (McCulloch, 2010: 24) and
‘black tie’ as the dress code for formal evening
events and social occasions. The colour
black therefore lends the gentrified erotic
boutique an air of sophistication and glamour
and contributes to the up-market
branding strategies of shop space. It also
reveals how the simple binary between the
assumed darkness of traditional male sex
shops and the openness, lightness and
brightness of erotic boutiques is actively
challenged and broken down in the space of
the erotic boutique: whilst black is typically
perceived as the colour of darkness, the
night and danger, it is here re-appropriated
to signify and symbolise sexual sophistication.
Here we see how colour is deployed in
very different ways and for very different
effects, effects that are both gendered and
classed.
The use of colour as a symbolic marker is
also reflected in the sex toys sold in erotic
boutiques, which are predominantly either
black or pink/purple and are styled in
ambiguous shapes such as the rabbit which
has a range of conflicting symbolic associations.
Rabbits are evocative of both childish
innocence (the lucky white rabbit, the
Crewe and Martin 589
innocent symbolism of a child’s soft toy)
and of fecundity, fertility, lust, promiscuity
and naughty sophistication in the case of the
Playboy Bunny icon. Rabbits are traditionally
associated with sexual rigour and promiscuity
(for example the unstoppable
‘Duracell bunny’). The use of the rabbit
shape in this toy nods to its ability to provide
constant sexual pleasure and has subsequently
become an iconic symbol of female
masturbatory empowerment (Attwood,
2005).
The colours and styles of lingerie sold in
sex shops and erotic boutiques also construct
a specific version of erotic femininity.
Of an analysis of 1565 lingerie items sold in
eight case study stores, black was found to
be the dominant colour of lingerie, making
up 69% of the total lingerie in sex shops and
47% in erotic boutiques (see Figure 1).
Black lingerie has been theorised as eroticised
and sexualised (Fields, 2006; Lurie,
1981) and as a sign of ‘female sexual sophistication’
(Fields, 2006: 611), elegance and
glamour (McCulloch, 2010). It is therefore
classically associated with both sex and
sophistication. It also has a stronger set of
associations relating to sexual power, experience,
authority and dominance which, when
enrolled as a key motif and marker in female
sex shops, alludes to notions of female
empowerment. Black is the dominant colour
of PVC and leather ‘bondage’ or ‘dominatrix’
outfits and lingerie items, again signalling
the potential for female consumers to
buy their way to sexual freedom and control.
For example, a black, BDSM style bra
sold at Coco de Mer is described as having
‘a distinct dominatrix feel with a structured
style and linear lines reminiscent of rope’.6
Pink is also evident within the product
offerings of feminised erotic boutiques, with
38% of the 2119 sex toys analysed across
eight stores being either pink or purple.
However, as with the discussion about store
design and theming above, pink lingerie is
more typically found in the mainstream,
mid-market chain store outlets such as Ann
Summers. This distinction is an important
and deeply classed affair. The push-up pink
bras on sale at Ann Summers promise a
‘33larger cleavage’ at an affordable price
point of £15 and appeal to conventional heteronormative
constructions of busty, laceclad
women who enjoy dressing up for ‘their
men’. The Ann Summers lingerie advertisements
and shop windows display a particular
version of femininity that is resonant of
top-shelf pornography, or page 3 spreads in
tabloid newspapers; cheeky, sexy, affordable
Figure 1. Proportion of different colours of lingerie items in sex shops and erotic boutiques.
590 Urban Studies 54(3)
and heavily made-up women. In marked
contrast, the opulent black and gold interiors
of up-scale erotic boutiques, such as
Coco de Mer and Agent Provocateur, reveal
a very different version of contemporary
woman. Gone are the shapely breasts,
curves, commercialised and heteronormatively
made-up dolls on display at Ann
Summers. In the designer retail store we are
shown editorially styled, small breasted,
slim, faceless women. Whether submissive or
domineering is indeterminate; that these
women are knowledgeable, adventurous,
sexually adept and in control is clear, and
with price points upwards of £100 for a bra,
these women also have the financial means
to buy into this erotic vision of sexual
competence.
Taken together, the use of colour as a
symbolic marker in sex-product retail
spaces and products suggests that it is not
necessarily sex itself that ignites anxiety
and controversy when positioned publicly
and visibly in the public space of the city,
but rather it is the extent to which sex
space is gendered, designed and stylised
that may determine its acceptability. Soft
lighting, feminine pink styling and window
displays that are more akin to fashion
stores than sex establishments appear to
generate far less controversy than traditional
sex shops that are located on the
fringes of the city, are painted black or
blue, are dark and have masked-out windows
and closed doors. These spaces are
difficult to read, they generate fear and
anxiety about what might lie within.
Designing desire: Branding,
fashion and new forms of classed
commodification
It’s like entering the Versace of sex shops.
(Customer review, Coco de Mer)
Beyond the powerful symbolic motifs of
darkness and light, pink and black discussed
above, branding and design are increasingly
foregrounded in the up-market design-led
space of the erotic boutique. In contrast to
traditional sex shops, the spaces of erotic
boutiques are heavily stylised retail environments
whose ‘look, feel, product and image
embodies a conscious attempt to mimic
aspects of non-sexual products and services’
in intent if not in content (Brassington and
Pettitt, 2007: 43). This is achieved through
the creation of themed retail environments,
such as female play spaces at Sh! and lavish
erotic ‘boudoirs’ at She Said and Agent
Provocateur. At Agent Provocateur, stock is
housed in dressers and dark red fabrics
adorn the windows and walls. Products are
delicately hung on rails, stored in heavy
wooden cabinets, placed on book shelves or
displayed on marble top tables. The stores
are uncluttered and the displays are minimalistic,
emphasising a sense of scarcity,
uniqueness and expense. The feeling of scarcity
and expense is further highlighted by
certain products being displayed in spot-lit
wooden and glass cabinets as akin to the display
practices more typically associated with
the museum or art gallery. The store’s decoration,
layout and design are an attempt to
replicate non-sex product, designer fashion
stores and are highly engineered and stylised
retail environments based on the premises of
luxury, expense, design and fashion.
Designer erotic boutiques make conscious
attempts to align their brand images with
discourses of fashion, design and style
through the products they sell as well as the
spaces in which they are sold. Agent
Provocateur and Myla, for example, manufacture
their own lingerie and mirror the seasonality
of the fashion industry by launching
new ranges to follow the fashion seasons of
Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. Coco
de Mer’s founder, Samantha Roddick,
Crewe and Martin 591
recounts the strong influence that fashion
has on the brand:
We design most of our products and most of
those products were designed in England and
they were then, or are still are . all hand
crafted and had a huge fashion influence
attached to it. So we had like everything for
every orifice and everything for every kind of
form of sexual expression that actually functioned
but we had Testino shoot our stuff,
Kate Moss in it, or we had Naomi Campbell
in our kind of . gear. (Interview, 2011)
The overt reference here to the famous
fashion photographer Mario Testino and
the supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi
Campbell emphasises the importance of
high-end fashion to the branding of Coco de
Mer. The example of Myla similarly reveals
the close alliances being developed between
the fashion, design and sex-product market;
‘Myla is a sensual lifestyle brand at the cutting
edge of fashion and design . Our aim
is to be the global lifestyle brand of choice’
(Myla [Brand book], 2007: 31 [sent to author
July 2012]). Alongside fashionability, highend
erotic boutiques place a great emphasis
on the design and quality of their products;
particularly sex toys and specifically vibrators
and dildos. In the following quote
Samantha Roddick recounts how consumers
interpreted her products as being part of
their larger fashion repertoire: ‘women
bought these products and they bought them
and they were like oh my God, thank God
that they can match their Chanel shoes with
their f**king harness’.7
Many of the sex toys
sold at Coco de Mer and Myla are made of
rare and expensive materials such as glass,
jade, wood, ceramic, silver and pearl. Myla
place a great emphasis on promoting their
sex toys as high-design items akin to a piece
of art or sculpture: ‘our premium sex toys
are unique and the result of a creative collaboration
between an artist, sculptor or
designer and expert toy maker’.8
Myla also
emphasise the design elements of their sex
toys by highlighting that they are created by
professional designers, ‘we have a team of
designers whom we contacted through the
Royal Society of British Sculpture’ (Barber,
2001: 29). Tom Dixon, for example,
designed Myla’s famous ‘bone’ dildo which
is shaped like a shoe horn, made of black
crystal (Kent and Brown, 2006) and was displayed
in both Liberty’s and Selfridges
Christmas windows. The co-founder of
Myla, Nina Hampson, stated that ‘We’re
designing vibrators that are overtly sexy, but
could also sit on your mantelpiece as beautiful
sculptures’ (Barber, 2001). The statements
from Myla highlight how art, style
and design are drawn upon and combined to
convert the sex toy from an object that
should be hidden to one that should be visibly
displayed in the space of the home. This
is a dramatic departure from the assumption
that sex toys induce shame or embarrassment
and are renowned for being ‘secreted
in drawers and closets or otherwise kept out
of sight’ (Stein, 1990: 12). The statements
from Myla highlight how the development
of the store occurred through spotting and
exploiting a gap in the market ‘It occurred
to me that this powerful combination of
women’s huge interest in sex and their interest
in style and fashion was just waiting to
be exploited. There was simply no upmarket
outlet for such products’ (Interview,
2011). This demonstrates how fashion and
design are used to brand and package sexproduct
consumption to enable its visibility
and conspicuousness.
Taken together, these tendencies are
clearly targeting women as sex product consumers.
Attwood (2005: 394) argues that
that ‘sex is now often packaged for women
as a matter of style’ and ‘in the instance of
marketing sex products to women style and
fashion have become particularly important
resources in constructing a safe language for
the repackaging of sex as a pleasure for
592 Urban Studies 54(3)
women’ (Attwood, 2005: 395). This highlights
how discourses of fashion and style
are simultaneously used to repackage sex for
women and to re-position the image of sexproduct
consumption from something that
is heavily stigmatised to something that is
heavily stylised. Collectively, the promotion
of fashion-orientated stores and products
orientated towards the female consumer
demonstrates how fashion and design are
part of a branding exercise to remove the
stigmatisation of sex-product consumption
(Kent, 2005). Sex toys thus become ‘symbolic
markers of class, status and prestige’
(Woodward, 2007) that aid strategies of distinction
in the formation of cultural capital
as designer sex toys are aligned with discourses
of good taste and subsequent class
positioning (Bourdieu, 1984; Skeggs, 1997;
Skeggs and Wood, 2004). As Smith states;
‘these are not just toys; they are a reworking
of symbolic capital, offering distinction and
status to their purchasers’ (Smith, 2007:
178). However, if they offer both distinction
and status to the purchaser then they ‘ultimately
produce social hierarchies of cultural
value and taste’ (Comella, 2010: 215) as the
branding of designer sex toys as tasteful is
carried out alongside the denotation of
other sex toys as tasteless. Brassington and
Pettitt (2007) argue that the move towards
‘tasteful’ sex products via the upscaling of
sex toy retailing is ‘coded with class’ and
suggest that upscaling occurs ‘in order to
move away from traditional working-class
sexual codes’ (Brents and Sanders, 2010:
43). Sex-product consumption is therefore
clearly ‘embedded within a social class
hierarchy, where certain displays of sexuality
are seen as more legitimate or sophisticated
than others’ (Edwards, 2010: 155).
Sex-product consumption consequently
becomes based on strategies of distinction
and contributes to the promotion of class
hierarchies that can be both economically
and socially exclusionary.
Conclusion: Class, consumption
and exclusion
In this paper we have argued that the commercialisation
and commodification of sex
consumption to women is increasingly being
used to signal status and distinction (Tyler,
2004). It is thus both deeply classed and profoundly
gendered. Good sex becomes a commodified
set of practices and competences
that demonstrate the increasingly significant
interweaving of consumption with a sexual
lifestyle. The modernist ‘values of thrift and
self-restraint, of saving oneself rather than
‘‘spending’’ (Hawkes, 1996), have given way
to a slow yet consistent process of sexual
post-modernization’ (Tyler, 2004: 89).
Selling sex has become big business, a business
that capitalises on consumer anxiety
and insecurity. As Bauman argued, ‘like all
other constituents of post-modern identity,
[sexuality] is therefore permanently undermined,
incomplete, open to change, and so a
realm of uncertainty and an inexhaustible
source of anxiety and soul searching, as well
as fear that some precious kinds of sensation
have been missed and the pleasure-giving
potential of the body has not been squeezed
to the last drop’ (1998: 28). The long-held
social concerns about sexual excess have
given way to a commercialised quest to
improve sexual performance (Jackson and
Scott, 1997). In a cruel ironic twist, characteristic
of much contemporary consumption,
the pleasure that sex is intended to deliver
becomes displaced by the individual’s anxiety
over attempting to achieve this pleasure.
As under conditions of post-modern freedom
and choice, the subject is rendered
entirely responsible for the formation of
their own sexual subjecthood. Hawkes
(1996: 105) argues that this has led to ‘the
commodification of desire’ as ‘the market in
sex presents an ever-changing panorama of
choices in which the individual is encouraged
to construct their own identity through
Crewe and Martin 593
a form of erotic ‘‘window shopping’’’
(Hawkes, 1996: 115). This pursuit of sexual
subjectivity thus becomes an endless cycle of
consumption in search of an idealised sexual
self (Bauman, 1989; King, 1999). As Gutting
argues:
Isn’t promiscuity as demanding an ideal as
monogamy, the imperative to be sexually
adventurous as burdensome as a prudish limitation
to the missionary position? The magazines,
self help books and sex manuals that
guide us to a life of liberated sexuality seem to
induce in us as much insecurity and fear about
our own sexual attractiveness and ability to
perform as sermons and tracts did in our
grandparents over the dangers of self indulgence
. The irony of our endless preoccupation
with our sexuality, Foucault
argued, is that we think it has something to do
with liberation. (Gutting, 2005: 98)
Erotic boutiques clearly connect to wider
discourses within post-feminism. They
embrace a traditional ‘girlie feminity’ via
pink stores and products whilst also blurring
sexual objectivity and subjectivity. They
make claims of sexual empowerment and yet
continue to emphasise the female body as
sexual object. They emphasise female
empowerment through consumption and yet
this is an exclusive and exclusionary form of
shopping that comes with a very hefty price
tag. The challenge for female consuming
subjects is increasingly one that requires a
degree of agency over the creation of their
sexual selves. The research presented here
suggests that women can shop their way to
sexual satisfaction and can become active
sexual subjects. The freedoms presented by
the market are, however, open to debate
and, most crucially, only open to some. This
is a clear illustration of the prevalence for
many of financial exclusion in consumption
in the contemporary era. As Gill and others
have argued, this supposed sexual subjectification
‘has turned out to be objectification
in a new and even more pernicious guise’
(Gill, 2003: 105). Women’s agency and
empowerment is increasingly tied to their
bodily aesthetics, discipline and consumption
credentials under a retailscape in which
sexuality becomes synonymous with consumption
as pleasure (Storr, 2003). This
reveals just how adept capitalist commodity
markets have become ‘at appropriating the
language of freedom and the political project
of feminism to market products’ (Sonnet,
1999: 176). The erotic boutique’s allusion to
post-feminist discourse also serves to translate
sex consumption into something that is
valued and valuing rather than vilified. This
market repositioning in turn enables such
stores to by-pass legislative regulation and
position themselves visibly on the high street
and up-scale retail locations. This development
forms part of a broader process
through which the sex and the city lifestyle
becomes acceptable as part of the ongoing
gentrification of the contemporary city, a
process that enrolls women as part of the
project by virtue of their acceptable and
celebrated sexual consumption practices
(Arthurs, 2003; Kern, 2013; Lloyd, 2008).
Sex, space and consumption are currently
undergoing a significant transformation, one
that brings into question contemporary
debates about commodity culture, empowerment
and gender. The key question that the
paper raises is how the commodification of
sex retailing impacts on broader questions
about feminism, equality, space and consumption.
We have argued that there are
opposing discourses surrounding how sex
shops and erotic boutiques are socially perceived
and commercially branded. The longheld
perceptions of traditional sex shops as
dark, masculinised and ‘seedy’ has ensured
that such stores require strict regulation,
which brings with it a very particular geography.
In turn the regulatory regime that
regulates sex shops has opened up a market
opportunity for a new breed of sex-product
594 Urban Studies 54(3)
retailers to colonise the high street. Femalecentred,
unthreatening and centrally located
in the city this new genre of sex retailers
have capitalised on the commodification of
sex and the empowerment that this can
potentially offer women who have the financial
and cultural capital to enjoy their newfound
sexuality without regret or remorse.
Three broader conceptual questions
emerge from the discussion. First, it is clear
that the developments discussed above have
profound social implications. The emergence
of designer erotic boutiques on the high
street is premised upon a particular middleclass
sensibility that promotes gender equality
and an active engagement in one’s sexual
fulfilment which is in turn intertwined with
aspirational lifestyle branding and a freedom
to buy sexual gratification through consumption.
One reading is that these developments
are less about sexual freedom or
liberation and more about the means to conspicuously
consume. Sex-product consumption
is thus ‘positioned, and sometimes
caught, between new sexual possibilities for
women and familiar markers of class distinction’
(Comella, 2010: 215). As the majority
of women will not have the financial means
to purchase many of the products that are
promoted, it would appear that good and
gratifying sex remains largely accessible to a
sexual elite. The expansion of design-led sexproduct
retailing is a decidedly classed affair
which is yet another example of capitalism
seeking out and colonising new markets.
Second, we have argued that the geography
of sex retailing really does matter. This
paper has brought to the fore how both public
perception and government regulation of
sex retailing impacts directly upon its visibility
and transparency in the contemporary
city. As stereotypical discourses of sex shops
as dark, dirty and seedy render them hidden
and pushed to the margins of towns and cities,
so too discourses of design, style and
taste render sex in the city acceptable and
enable sex-product retailers to inhabit high
traffic, high-end and high-visibility locations
in the contemporary city. This reveals with
great acuity that the ways in which sexproduct
consumption is packaged and presented
affects its ability to ignite either moral
castigation or liberatory celebration. It has
shown how sex-product retailing displays
and reproduces sexual activity (traditionally
considered a private activity) in public space,
and thus reveals that when sex consumption
is made fashionable, exclusive, design-led
and aligned with female sexuality, it is
deemed acceptable and can uncontroversially
inhabit the high streets of the contemporary
city. The irony and contradictions
inherent in this encroachment of erotic boutiques
onto the high street is readily apparent:
whilst traditional sex shops remain
geographically marginalised and hidden
because of concerns that they can pollute
and contaminate their surrounding areas
and are considered a particular danger to
children, erotic boutiques require no formal
regulation or legislation and can thus locate
themselves in both design-led quarters
within the city or on high streets with high
foot-fall, adjacent to family stores. The key
point here is that it is the way in which sex
retailing is packaged and presented that
invokes either acceptance and celebration or
protest and regulation, suggesting that it is
not the presence of sex in public space that
ignites anxiety but the gendered and classed
representations of such activity.
Third, and finally, we have raised a number
of questions about how the commodification
of sex might empower women. The
optimistic reading of the developments discussed
above is that the commodification
and commercialisation of sex and sexuality
open up new opportunities for female liberation
and emancipation – the post-feminist
moment. Perhaps this opens up space and a
moment where women can really be in
charge of, responsible for, and excited by,
Crewe and Martin 595
their own sexuality. Possible though this
might be, our current reading is less emancipatory
and altogether more conciliatory,
commercial and compliant. The commodification
of sexual products, play and consumption
raises a number of issues for
feminist debate. As Cox (2000: 135) argues,
‘today lingerie and its relationship with sexual
play are totally normalized and the two
are entirely interrelated – one dresses rather
than undresses for sex’ and it is of course the
female body that must be ‘dressed’. This
positions women as aesthetic objects of sex:
women remain sexual objects and not subjects
of their own making: the normalised
female body remains that which is regulated,
restricted, managed and regulated. The ways
in which the female body is presented in sex
retail establishments continues to equate sex
and sexuality with the visual representation
and aestheticisation of the female body. The
‘mannequin’, whether she be displayed in a
sex shop, erotic boutique or bedroom, is
therefore a ‘simulacrum of the female form
for the purpose of commodity capitalism’
(Toffoletti, 2007: 65) as she is simultaneously
intended to be an exact replica of the
female body, and as an idealised female
form engineered to specifically display and
sell commodities. In sum, the political, social
and geographic issue becomes one of how
the commodification of sex retailing has (or
has not) enhanced gender equality in the
contemporary city. Women are, we would
argue, increasingly required to discipline and
maintain their bodies, to achieve (or at least
aspire to) an idealised representation of the
erotic and desirable female form (thin, hairless,
made-up, flawless). Women thus
become their own regulators of what constitutes
attractiveness, intermediated by
ongoing discourses, lifestyles and consumption
environments. But of course selfmanagement
and regulation is an ongoing
dialectic between what Foucault (1979) has
described as ‘self-surveillance’ ‘and the
expectations of sexual display’ (Donnan and
Magowan, 2010: 29). The representation of
women as aesthetic objects serves to ‘objectify
women within a certain convention of
beauty that relies on the endless consumption
of products’ (Juffer, 1998: 150). The
representation of women as aesthetic sexual
objects is directly related to capitalist accumulation
– women as sexual objects/subjects
have become the perfect vehicle through
which to commodify sex, legitimately, safely
and to the missing 50% of the population.
This directly challenges the central postfeminist
discourse of female empowerment
and strength, based on a form of ‘power
femininity’ (Gill, 2009: 103) that is ‘unapologetically
sexual’ (Wolf, 1993: 147), in which
the post-feminist subject is a ‘knowing,
active and desiring’ (Gill, 2003: 103) sexual
subject; an agent of her own sexuality.
Whilst sex shops and erotic boutiques have
promoted the idea that better sex is always
available, this pursuit of sexual subjectivity
inevitably becomes an endless process of
consumption whereby sexual subjectivity is
continually in the making but never quite
complete (Curtis, 2004) and ‘the ultimate
sexual experience remains forever a task
ahead’ (Bauman, 1998: 24). The promotion
of idealised sexual subjectivity and experience
highlights how contemporary retailing
offers yet one more space where sex, space
and capitalism collide (Storr, 2003). The
paper has explored both the emancipatory
and the oppressive effects of commercialised
female sex consumption and highlighted the
need to further interrogate the complex
social and spatial practices and exclusionary
power and class relations that have enabled
this latest episode in capitalism’s constant
quest for new market opportunities and new
ways to monetise sexuality.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Steve Legg and Phil Hubbard for their
insightful comments.
596 Urban Studies 54(3)
Funding
This research was funded by ESRC 1+ 3 Award.
Notes
1. http://www.ciao.co.uk/Ann_Summers_Shop__
Review_5538435 (accessed 7 May 2012).
2. The Local Government (Miscellaneous
Provisions) Act 1982.
3. http://www.bview.co.uk/listing/2391594/ShWomens-Erotic-Emporium-in-W11
(accessed
7 May 2012).
4. http://www.qype.co.uk/place/453084-SimplyPleasure-com-London
28th may 2011-05-28
(accessed 7 May 2012).
5. http://www.urbanpath.com/london/adult/sh.htm
(accessed 22 April 2011).
6. http://www.coco-de-mer.com/products/coco-demer-sylph-half-cup-front-fastening-bra/
(accessed
18 March 2013).
7. Interview with Samantha Roddick, Founder
of Coco de Mer, January 2011.
8. Myla Brand Book, September 2007, p. 39
(authors copy).
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