D’Mahdnes Failey posed for photos in the PornHub live section of the website’s pop-up shop in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan on Sunday.
In today’s squeaky-clean version of New York City, there’s a dearth of smut. Crunched by restrictive regulations and eclipsed by the internet, the once-plentiful naughty bookstores are thin, and only a few peep shows remain.
So the lines down the block for a new adult store that opened on Black Friday in SoHo were to be expected in such a sex-shop-starved city, even though the newcomer is but an ephemeral pop-up shop by PornHub, an online library of explicit videos. The clamor for the store, which sells things like branded handcuffs and hosted a book signing by pornographic actors last weekend, underscored the near absence of raunch from New York’s shopping offerings. And for some, it put in high relief the loss of a city’s character as rising rents and tightening laws make the metropolis ever more sanitized — and that much more boring.
At the store, located along the rarefied cobbles of Wooster Street until Dec. 20, it appeared that 90 percent of the merchandise was PornHub branded goods like hats, underwear, hoodies and even socks (as well as a few Taschen art books full of differently shaped breasts).
Perusing the rather tame offerings in the pristine space, it became clear that the boutique is pure promotion — not the channel’s venture into the market void left by the tawdry sex shops of yesteryear.
The clamor for the pop-up, which sells things like branded handcuffs, underscored the absence of raunch from New York’s shopping offerings.Those shops have been in free-fall as New York has evolved from gritty to ritzy. Rules put in place in 1995 require so-called adult establishments to be 500 feet away from things like schools and religious establishments, by city regulation. The effect was swift: In 1993 there were 177 shops, theaters and bars of the adult variety, according to a study conducted by the City Planning Commission. A subsequent survey found that number had fallen by nearly a quarter by 2001, according to the Department of City Planning. The city does not keep a current tally, but today, there are fewer than 50, according to Erica T. Dubno, a lawyer who has handled legal challenges to the city’s sex shops for decades.
A June decision by the Court of Appeals stands to shrink the number further. In it, the court upheld a 2001 city rule that expanded the criteria for what may be considered “adult” to establishments that offer explicit imagery like videos or peep shows. It broadened which stores may be subject to its stringent regulation.
“Porn has been around forever, and it is going to continue. And it is either going to be aboveground where people are going to pay taxes on it, or it’s going to be underground, where they won’t,” said Judith Lynne Hanna, the author of “Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right” and an anthropologist who studies the First Amendment implications of stripping. “And so it should be available just like any shop or any business.”
In Greenwich Village, once an emporium of kink, at least five stores have shut in the past seven years, according to several sex shop employees who work in the handful that remain. While things like real estate values have contributed to the decline, exacerbating it is the fact that the city paints the definition of an adult shop with a very broad brush, according to Ms. Dubno. Images on the packaging of lingerie, for example, have sometimes been interpreted to put a shop within the scope of the 2001 law, she said.
Some stores have stopped carrying certain items, including books and magazines, to avoid crackdowns, she said. “This is the most liberal and the most creative and the most vivacious place around,” Ms. Dubno said. “And if you can’t have it in New York, it sets a bad precedent for the rest of the nation for free speech.”
Amanda Nina Abdel Hadi, the creative director at PornHub, organizing toys on a display table at the store.
While perhaps a boon to real estate values, a city without its kinky refuges loses something vital, said Jazmine Balmaseda, who works at the Pink Pussycat Boutique on West Fourth Street. “They are not places just for pleasure, but for knowledge,” Ms. Balmaseda, 20, said as she stood behind the counter at Pink Pussycat on a recent day. Behind her was a wall of rainbow-hued dog collars, none of which were intended for dogs. “This here is an open space.”
Even as comparatively tame as the PornHub pop-up is — with its cozy corner stocked with cups of flesh-toned colored pencils for doodling in coloring books of which your mother would never approve — some customers felt it helped push the city’s envelope.
“It’s mostly about trying to break loose of what society thinks is O.K., and turning that into fashion,” said D’Mahdnes Failey, 19, a fashion student from the Upper East Side who was visiting the store over the weekend. “They’re taking this PornHub pop-up as a way to embrace sexuality itself.”
Trying on black leather harnesses, Mr. Failey and his friend Corin Christian, 18, posed in the Wooster Street fitting room. A camera trained on the mirror streamed their preening live to the PornHub website, which last year had 23 billion visits, according to PornHub. “Even with hoodies, jackets, bombers, pieces people could wear on just a normal day, you’re trying to expose sexuality,” Mr. Failey said. “Not just shame the people that are into very explicit content.”
At Fantasy Party, an adult shop on Sixth Avenue in the West Village, where the window displays included buxom Santas and scantily-clad elves, staff members said they welcomed more players in the brick-and-mortar adult shop game — even temporary ones.
“We are part shop, part sex therapists,” said a longtime employee who asked that her name not be used because of the explicit nature of her job. “People need this.”
