ABSTRACT
For most of the last decade, sex shops have been operating as ‘healthcare centres’ selling ‘medical aids’ for the sexually dysfunctional. I use the Adam and Eve, China’s first legal sex shop, and a selection of sex shop products, to exemplify how the medical paradigm has been typically realized in this market. In recent years, however, conflicting interests have been visibly tussling over the development of the industry, and the profit motive is pushing the market into areas that have no clear curative purpose. It is a driving force that is proving hard to resist. Medicine is retreating as the justificatory principle on which sex shops operate. Pleasure, fashion and what happens in ‘the West’ are taking its place. I look at two examples – a sex aid factory’s latest designs and the recent emergence of bondage gear – to suggest the direction in which the industry is moving.1
