Purveying Passion With a Giggle

In a spacious, modern home in Upland, 30 women have gathered on a sunny Sunday afternoon to see the latest in home gadgets. With filled champagne flutes and plates piled high with finger sandwiches and petits fours, they gather in the living room to hear the sales pitch and inspect the Valentine’s Day wares.

“Is it dishwasher-safe?” asks one woman, before bursting into peals of laughter.

The products they are passing around aren’t for the kitchen -- they’re for the bedroom.

Shannon Oliver, a “romance-enhancement specialist,” is selling sexual aids, including the innocuous -- lingerie and pheromone-laced potions -- and the unmentionable -- battery-operated gizmos.

Pitched as the Tupperware and Avon parties of the new millennium, the events attract a wide spectrum of women, including college students, career women, stay-at-home moms and older women.

Many said they would be too embarrassed to walk into a sex shop, but are willing, even eager, to make a few discreet purchases in homes of friends and relatives.

“I would much rather be in an environment like this, with people I feel comfortable with,” said Phillips Ranch resident Windy Oliver, Shannon Oliver’s sister-in-law.

Pat Davis, president of Passion Parties, said that’s a common sentiment among women.

“Men are very open about their sexuality. Women are wanting to become more open about it,” she said. “They’re looking for a place to learn how to enhance their relationships. It’s safe, it’s comfortable, it’s educational, and it comes with a giggle.”

It’s also big business, with sales growing every year. Passion Parties, based in the Bay Area, has 3,200 saleswomen who sold $20 million in lotions, games and toys in 2003.

Cincinnati-based Pure Romance boasts a sales force of 4,000 and $30 million in sales last year.

Slumber Parties, out of Baton Rouge, La., has a sales force of more than 2,000 with sales of $9 million in 2002.

These companies and others throw women-only parties in homes, a form of direct marketing that prospered after World War II when Tupperware parties were popular social gatherings and the Avon Lady regularly dropped by.

In 2002, direct marketing accounted for nearly $29 billion in sales in the United States, according to the Washington-based Direct Selling Assn.

“No matter what you’re selling, we’re able to sell constructively by giving information, personalized service,” said Joseph Mariano, executive vice president of the trade group.

“You go into one of those big-box stores, you’re lucky if you can get the 16-year-old clerk to look at you, much less explain or demonstrate the product.”

There are similar aversions to adult stores, Davis said. Party promoters say the educational aspect is vital.

“Women want to know how it works, why it works, what the product is,” said Chris Cicchinelli, vice president of Pure Romance and son of the company’s founder.

He attributes the parties’ increase in popularity to the mainstreaming of sex, particularly on television and movies.

“Let’s face it, it was very taboo for the longest time,” he said. A paradigm, he said, is the Emmy-winning HBO series “Sex and the City,” which featured an episode in its first season that focused on a sexual aid called the “Rabbit.”

Dr. Ava Cadell, a clinical sexologist in Los Angeles, said the parties empower women.

“Obviously, it’s about money, but with that comes a form of sex education, even therapy if you will, because it helps the women become less inhibited about their bodies,” she said.

Still, there is a stigma attached, and some question the need and potential effects the adult items might have on marriages and relationships.

“It’s cover-up for something that’s not right,” said Craig Gross, a founder of the XXXChurch, a Christian anti-pornography organization based in Corona.

“We try and enhance [sex] and end up cheapening the act. That’s what it just becomes -- an act, when it’s meant to be so much more.”

In rare cases, saleswomen have faced criminal charges. In 2002, a Texas woman was charged with felony obscenity after police found 17 products in her car during a traffic stop.

Prosecutors dropped the charge after Kathy Grubbs pleaded guilty to a drunk-driving charge and agreed to surrender the items to police.

And in November, a woman was arrested after selling sex toys to undercover police officers in a community on the outskirts of Fort Worth. If convicted of selling “obscene devices,” the woman could face up to a $4,000 fine and a year in jail.

But in a sales force of thousands, these two arrests are anomalies.

Shannon Oliver is a full-time saleswoman from Maryland who showing products at another sister-in-law’s home in Upland.

Marlene Oliver, a mother of four with spiky black hair, invited more than 40 people, including longtime chums, relatives, neighbors and acquaintances from the gym and church.

The guests included a Claremont pediatrician and a silver-haired Riverside woman.

Oliver showed the most innocuous products first, dabbing a pheromone-based liquid on each woman’s wrist.

“It attracts men like bees to honey,” she said.

Linen spray, body glitter, warming balms, lubricants and massage lotions were passed around, sniffed and tasted.

Manuals on sexual positions and massage techniques, and a beginner’s bondage kit, came next. Champagne flowed, and the woman grew boisterous. The women were eager to get to the most scintillating part of the beginning -- the toys.

Some were waterproof, some were glittery, some were remote-controlled, and one lighted up.

Oliver sold $2,000 in products, nearly half of which she will keep.

One of her customers was Liz Dichirico, 48, of San Dimas, who has been married for 14 years. She bought lacy black lingerie, plus an item she declined to identify, spending between $150 and $200.

“I’m very happy I came. Maybe I’m naive, but I didn’t know there was this stuff out on the market,” she said.

“My husband was excited about me coming to this, and I think he’s going to be more excited when I get home.”