Porn Town

There’s a district of Tokyo called Akihabara. It’s where all the Geeks go to find electronic goodies from complete computers and gadgets to individual components.

It strikes me that there ought to be an equivalent adult gadget town somewhere. Preferably somewhere in the UK.

Yes there are sex toy stores both online and in the high street, but nothing to match a whole area of a city dedicated to the enthusiastic devotees of porn and sex toys. Everyone has sex, even geeks, so it follows that there is a market.

Soho in London used to be the place to go but it’s been “Cleaned-up”. By which I mean most of the old, characterful but frankly seedy stores have gone. It was never the equivalent of the Akihabara district because there simply wasn’t the range and sophistication of sex toys, pornographic literature around when Soho was at its height. However that’s just the sort of place we need.

Going in to a sex shop has never been easier or less embarrassing. You can shop online and this is the way many people choose to purchase their sex toys. But physical retail outlets are now light, friendly and despite the efforts of some puritanical individuals they are everywhere.

However they suffer from being isolated by zoning laws and a finite demand for the goods they sell. While everyone does have sex and/or masturbate they don’t buy a new sex toy every day.

Very often the embarrassment factor is if a customer is seen going into or out of a shop. What if you were in a district where almost every shop was an adult shop? Then everyone would be in that area for the same reason – no embarrassment because you’d all be up to the same thing.

I don’t think it will happen but can you imagine an industrial estate somewhere central to England, say Birmingham, another in Glasgow, maybe one in Swansea and one in Belfast totally dedicated to adult products. It would be a one-stop-shop for consumers and a place where even really specialist outlets could exists because it would be the place to be to retail every conceivable adult item.

So, when do we start laying the foundation for our new porn towns?