Sex Inc.

Sex sells.\nThis law of nature is the reason people will read this article. It's the reason the title alone might hook some from the second they pick up the magazine.\nIt's for this reason nearly every city in America has at least one strip club. It's why there's a little adult bookstore on street corners the world over. It's how Playboy and Maxim became the most popular and fastest growing magazines in the nation shortly after their release.\nBecause sex sells -- a lot.\nZoom in on Bloomington. We have three strip clubs and two adult bookstores dotting College and Walnut Avenues, serving the town's 37,000 college students throughout the year. Eighteen- to 29-year-olds have sex an average of 112 times per year while 23 percent of men and 11 percent of women bought X-rated movies in the last year (www.sexuality.about.com). One would think the sex business should be booming then, right?\nNot exactly. While we have our fair share of adult venues, the majority of residents will tell you Bloomington isn't what most would call a hotbed for adult entertainment. That is, of course, excluding the rendezvous with a certain Campus Invasion last year. Peep shows and topless bars hardly line the streets. In fact, most adult entertainment venues fail here. \nSince its inception, the strip club has been the most forbidden of forbidden places; the place seen in mo vies by young boys, enchanted with the mystery of this unobtainable Disneyland of taboo. And often, these boys grow up to visit them for the first time in college. \nAnd yes, there are young college women on the stage more than half of the time. \n"I'd say that over half our dancers go to Indiana University," says Larry Holtz, owner of Night Moves, the most successful and longest-running show club in Bloomington. \nWhy is it that only one of the B-town nudie bars has been around for more than a year? \nHoltz points out that Night Moves does a fair amount of college business.\n"We get a lot of college-age kids here after one-thirty in the morning, after the bars start to close," he says.\nYet, where Night Moves has succeeded, far more have failed.\nThe adult entertainment industry has a long, dark past in Bloomington. Places like the ill-fated Mickey G's and Eve's have all come and gone, deteriorating anyone's hopes of succeeding at adult entertainment in Bloomington.\nIt turns out that, aside from the occasional birthday celebration, most college kids don't make a habit out of going to strip clubs. Most will tell you that instead of stages with thong-laden stripers, dimly lit rooms and blacked-out windows or bouncers and menacing security, they have found something far more interesting: other college students.\nFreshman Kelly Hannon agrees.\n"I think that there probably isn't much interest in strip clubs because the college environment is so sexually charged anyway," she says. "There's just no need to go and pay for taboo subjects like nudity and sex because it's all around us anyway."\nSupposedly, 18- to 24-year-olds are the most beautiful, wild and sexual group of people in the world. As a result, college kids have more sex more than any other demographic in the nation. \nTo open a show club is to try and convince young men to come out of their cocoon of hedonism, where the girls roam free and beautiful, and get them to come pay for drinks and merely watch women -- never to touch or talk to them. \nDanny Jordan, owner of After Hours, both a topless venue and a dance club, has some ideas about how to do just this.\nUnlike most clubs, After Hours is 18 and over. The upstairs is merely a dance club -- no nudity, just music and dancing. Downstairs is where the shirts come off.\n"This way, if people don't want to watch the girls dance, then they can just stay upstairs and dance themselves," Jordan says. \nHe hopes his venue will give the under-drinking-age crowd in Bloomington an actual club to hang out and dance in instead of just parties. After Hours also offers pool tables, video games and a 20 foot projection screen playing music videos and sports when the occasion calls.\n"The kids who are under 21 just don't have any place to go in this town; there's just no place that lets them in," Jordan says.\nAnd not only do they employ professional dancers, but the amateur dancing, Jordan says, has been a big hit. \n"Tuesdays and Thursdays are amateur nights, where anyone can get up on stage and dance if they want to. But on pretty much any night we let anyone who wants to get up and dance," he says.\nAnd that has drawn the crowds. \n"People come in big groups, sometimes 20 or more, just to see one of their friends dance. Sometimes guys have their girlfriends come in and dance for them," he says.\nOnly time will tell whether After Hours will succeed where others have failed. College students, once again, prove unpredictable. Young men who are expected to flock to sexual subject matter reject it; instead living for the excitement of hunting down their own personal adult entertainment, wherever it might be.\nBut what about women?\nIf the availability of adult venues for straight males to enjoy in Bloomington is what you'd call lackluster, then for straight females, it's dead. It's next to impossible to find a male strip club in all of Indiana, let alone in Bloomington. So what's a girl to do?\nPerhaps it's that females prefer to enjoy a more secretive, undercover-type of entertainment. Of course the ladies in college enjoy steamy evening encounters just as much as the guys do, but what about those times when the action is less than satisfactory?\nGuys, they can just break a $20 bill into ones and enjoy an evening in a show club, quietly contemplating the physics of a G-string. But girls -- they have no place to turn for cheap, anonymous satisfaction ... or maybe they do. \nCollege Adult Books, an adult bookstore and sexual toyshop on College Avenue, might hold the key for a bit of female fun. The first thing to notice when walking into the small store is that books are in short supply. Videos, magazines and sex toys galore assault the senses. The adult playstore does a pretty good little business in Bloomington, due in no small part to the local female population. \nBack in the day when the 1953 Kinsey study was conducted, 62 percent of females reported that they had masturbated and 45 percent of them reported that they could reach orgasm within three minutes. Even if sex toys weren't as commercialized a half century ago, in only three minutes, one might assume that a little help was involved.\nBut back to the books. The second thing to notice in the store is that women seem to have very little problem being seen in the taboo tavern of toys, checking out the newest and kinkiest merchandise. While their male counterparts are off in the strip clubs, imitating the boys in movies, many young women are feeling more comfortable expressing their own sexual desires. Perhaps this is a sign of the times. Maybe women are feeling increasingly comfortable about experiencing their own little episodes of "Sex In The City." \nSo what have we learned from college? To openly seek sexual contentment; whether it's sitting next to you in class, chilling in the VCR or hiding in your underwear drawer.