When people use an acronym to sum up a cultural trend, it’s hard to take them seriously. So I paid no attention at first to the 2004 article in Harvard Business School’s student newspaper that gave us the term “FOMO,” or “Fear of Missing Out.”
In the article, writer Patrick McGinnis observed that our hyper-connected lives, fueled by round-the-clock social media, have thrust us into a perpetual state of unease about our choice of activities. Sure, I’m at a party, but I got invited to 10 others—shouldn’t I be at those too?
I try not to do FOMO; it seems a neurosis for overachievers. Even so, I felt a bit coming on recently when a conversation with some friends turned to the topic of sexual lubricants.
My pals were dissing K-Y Jelly, big man on campus at the school of lube. This shocked me. How is K-Y anything to hate? It’s an institution. It makes the world go round (or at least in and out). Hating K-Y is like hating internal combustion, or radio waves, I said. It’s just there.
My friends looked at me like I’d shown up to their game of beach volleyball wearing pleated khakis. That’s when the FOMO hit. I thought I knew how to play the game. But did I?
Still, my friends’ perspective didn’t really take hold until the other day, when I followed a colleague’s tip and stood in front of the extensive lube counter at Oh My! Sensuality Shop located in a basement space off Main Street in Northampton. Ah, so this is lube, I think. It tingles. It heats. It comes in colors. It tastes like things.
“We sell an incredible amount of lubrication,” shop co-owner Carol Gesell tells me. “Everybody finally figured it out. When I was starting out, there was just K-Y Jelly. Now we can fill four counters with all of the lubes.”
Some of the brands’ gimmicks are obvious, like the lube that boasts all-organic ingredients. (I get an unfortunate image of a bearded man at a farmers market booth, decanting a viscous liquid into Mason jars.) Other brands, like the mysteriously stamped “überlube,” seem to get by on simply having an awesome name.
Oh My! is giving me a creeping sense of how vanilla my sexual mindset has been. Call it FOKYO: Fear of K-Y Only. Then this evolves, over a few minutes, into acute, full-blown FOSO: Fear of Sexual Obliviousness.
I try to shake off my anxiety by taking a few laps through the store, lifting boxes and browsing price tags. Lubes tend to run between $10 and $15. For $30 you can get a fair-quality dildo or a low-end vibrator, but a vibrator is often a bigger investment: between $70 and $150 for a model you can really get to know over the years.
I evaluate a leather switch ($20) by flicking it back and forth, nodding thoughtfully like the discerning shopper I hope I resemble. I study the vibrating sponge and suction handcuffs, for shower play ($15-$30). I pass by a strap-on and silicone dildo set to puzzle over some vibrating crotchless panties ($16.99), couture nipple covers and Elastabind ankle restraints.
I resist the urge to pull open a $10 box of Pleasure Tape (don’t worry —it only sticks to itself). I consider buying a bondage starter kit for $24.99. I don’t quite know what to make of a large system of folding metal pieces stuck with a label that says simply “gizmo.”
Then I spot the floggers, made by hand at Latticework Designs in the Valley burg of Sunderland. I notice some custom bondage gear made by Royal Cherry Leathers, another small-scale endeavor based in Rockport.
Who are these local craftspeople so committed to kink? Surely these are not people who are Missing Out.
Latticework Designs is run by Jean Olenick, 27, who lives in Sunderland and works full-time at a home goods warehouse. In her spare time, she braids strips of fabric together, secures them at the ends, and nails them to wooden dowels. Voila—homemade floggers for that naughty someone.
“It’s been a process of fine-tuning. When I started out, I didn’t know what I was doing,” says Olenick, who got into kink a couple of years ago. “I just knew that I didn’t want to pay for the expensive toys I was seeing online. I’ve always been a craftsperson, so I looked through the cloth I had left over from various sewing projects. I thought, hey—I can make a flogger out of this stuff.”
Jean’s floggers run about $30 each. To enjoy one, you’ve got to be prepared for a little pain—but not too much. “I can hit myself on the forearm to see how a flogger is coming along, but that’s only so helpful,” Jean explains. “Luckily, I have friends who are willing to be my crash-test dummies. They give me feedback on how it feels—whether it’s creating a thudding or a stinging sensation. They help me give it enough oomph.”
It’s not uncommon for people in what Jean calls “the kinky community” to make their own toys. One of Jean’s friends from Amherst, who gives her name simply as J, has capitalized on her seven years of blacksmithing experience to form a small local business called New Anvil Restraints, where she makes a type of hand-forged metal brace for ankles and wrists called a spreader bar.
“I sell them through a local collective,” says the 32-year-old. “Different people like to play with different materials. I provide a framework, and people can use it with ropes, or leather, or whatever they want.”
As J’s involvement in the kinky community grew, she found a demand for her products. “It was just like starting a business within any community. If you can meet a need, and make it affordable, then why wouldn’t you do it?”
“I see my business mainly as a way to help people explore who they are,” J says.
And with a base price of $45, her spreader bars are affordable. “There’s no need to overprice things just because they’re seen as salacious. If you just read 50 Shades of Grey and you start Googling bondage websites, most will charge you a lot of money to get started. But a good craftsperson won’t do that to you.”
Paul Durgin, the creator of Royal Cherry Leathers, has a similar goal in mind. The custom work Paul does with clients must be at once completely professional and deeply intimate. “You feel a connection with your customer,” he explains. “I’m making something for them that they hope will enhance their lives. To feel that connection with them is a big part of why I’m passionate about what I do.”
Paul started working with leather as a 26-year-old apprentice at Primitive Leather in Northampton. “That place was as much a drop-in center for kinky people as it was a store. People would come up from Hartford and New York just to say hi, catch up, and ask questions. That was the atmosphere there—it was a social thing, and it had a good reputation for discussion among people who didn’t really have someone to sit down and talk to about what they needed and what they were missing.”
Now 40, Paul wholesales to Oh My! and to Hubba Hubba in Boston, but since the spring he’s been focused mainly on opening a shop of his own in Rockport. He does jackets, pants, handbags, and belts. His kinky custom work, for now, is done on the side.
These jobs come to him mainly through word-of-mouth, explains one recent customer: Beth, 25, from Cambridge, who withholds her last name. “I was at a concert and made an off-hand comment about bondage to a friend. Two guys overheard me, and one handed me Paul’s card.”
Paul made a leather collar and four cuffs for Beth. Before ordering a custom set, she couldn’t find cuffs small enough to fit her narrow wrists.
“I could have just emailed him my measurements, but I wanted to go up to Rockport and check out his shop,” Beth says. “Paul really makes you feel comfortable. We picked out the style and colors I wanted. I put down a deposit. Then I picked up all five pieces in about a week.”
The total: about $160. “I was really pleased with the price and with the quality. I always assumed a custom order would be prohibitively expensive. But now I’m full of ideas. I want to order again.” At the top of the shopping list, she explains, is a custom-fit strap-on harness for her girlfriend, and maybe some thigh cuffs.
“What are thigh cuffs?” I ask.
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “They’re cuffs,” Beth says. “For your thighs.”
Those are pretty normal compared to certain pieces Paul has built for his customers. “I love it when it’s something I’ve never heard or done before,” he says. “Ideas really come out of left field sometimes. I’ll say, ‘You want what?’”
One example: a couple who wanted a body harness built to hold a toy too large and heavy to be supported simply by the wearer’s hands. “It was probably six pounds. I had to build a suspender rig for that thing. It was like a forearm.”
I’m relieved to hear that this one worked out. But not all of them do, says Paul.
“Occasionally people come to me with an idea that’s not physically possible and I have to talk them down a bit. Or it’s something that’s actually dangerous, and they don’t realize it. That’s pretty rare, though. Mostly people want variations on collars and cuffs and restraints that are already out there. Or they want more decorative and artistic pieces. So I do inlays and different types of appliqués—things that elevate my pieces to a more polished state.”
Paul builds ongoing relationships with customers. That’s why he’s so fond of Oh My! in Northampton. “They really are all about a sense of community and wellness in there,” he says. “That’s where my stuff belongs.”
Which brings us back to Carol Gesell, 61, strolling around Oh My! with a proprietary warmth. Her daughter Beth now runs the business, but she still works here two days a week. Now, for an hour of one of them, she listens to me fret about how little I know about most of the things she sells.
I can’t help but think that this shop represents, in FOMO terms, the other 10 parties that I’m not at. Carol dismisses this idea, very politely, as nonsense.
“Everyone’s hard on themselves,” she says. “I don’t care if it’s kink or if it’s Sex 101. The problem is really simple. It’s that people don’t talk about it enough. They don’t ask questions. And they should.”
Carol doesn’t tell customers to have all kinds of sex. She just tells them to have good sex. That’s her mission. And she’s reminded every fall, as young students from Smith and elsewhere start wandering in, how important it is.
“I can get a read on the sex education these first-year students have had, and it’s horrible,” she says. “They know almost nothing of serious consequence. They tell me stories about using spit for lubricant, about getting drunk and going home with people. So I’m having conversations with them about what they need to watch out for. Like, really basic conversations about consent.”
It’s unnerving, she says. “I don’t know why parents think they can leave sex education up to the schools. That makes no sense to me. Sex is dangerous. You teach your kids to drive, don’t you? Well, here’s another way for them to get hurt that they’re not aware of. And I get girls coming in here all the time who can’t even name their own body parts.”
Carol didn’t become the fairy godmother of safe fun overnight. She knows what’s up. So I decide to officially abandon the other 10 parties, and pay attention to the one I’m at. I might call such a choice LOKO—the Love of Knowing Ourselves.
“The more you know about your body, the more you know how to be in charge of it when you share it with people,” Carol says. “There doesn’t need to be so much mystery about it.”•
Hunter Styles is on Twitter at @hunterst7les
