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Sex doesn’t always sell – just ask the handful of guests at a flaccid Sexpo

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Sexpo 2017 at the Sandton Convention Centre.
Sexpo 2017 at the Sandton Convention Centre.
Tebogo Letsie/City Press

Pricasso isn’t happy. It’s the second day of Johannesburg’s Sexpo at the Sandton Convention Centre and a handful of visitors dot the exhibition space.

“It’s about 300% less people than last year,” the penis artist says. Pricasso paints with his prick. His prick and his butt cheeks, to be exact. He’s doing my portrait as we speak and a scattering of people have gathered around to record it all on their smartphones.

The whole recording thing seems to be the point of Sexpo, as far as I can tell from my few hours here so far. Tweet a selfie with a penis cookie, Instagram the biggest dildo, get a picture with porn star Anna Belle Peaks (that will cost you R150, just so you know). It’s all a big goof to share with your friends later, and I struggle to find the sexiness amid all the camp.

Billed as “South Africa’s premier health, sexuality and lifestyle expo”, Sexpo has been going for 11 years. From what I can see it pulls a mostly white audience, and seems to cater for cis-heterosexual couples. The Convention Centre is filled with exhibitors that sell toys, while two floors down visitors can pay an extra R50 to R200 to see striptease, watch live sex shows (more on that later) and listen to workshops with topics like “Anal Sex 101” and “The Mystery of the G-Spot.”

PHOTO:
PHOTO:

The stalls are a bit repetitive, with most of them selling vibrators, lubricants, Fleshlights and faux-leather whips. There’s a confectionary stand with chocolate penises, cupcakes with icing vaginas on top (some brown, some pink), and penis lollipops. Here and there is a lingerie shop with fishnets, furry handcuffs and “sexy nurse” and “sexy cop” costumes in cellophane packets. To incorporate the “lifestyle” component there are also car displays and stalls that sell things like beard oil, nail polish and hair extensions. Completely randomly, one booth sells jars of chillies and pickles.

At around 3.30pm a harried-looking organiser runs up to the “Airvolution” body airbrushing booth where I’m having a tattoo spraypainted on to my forearm to tell the booth owner that entrance to Sexpo is now free from 5pm to 7pm. Put it on your social media, he barks, and leaves for the next stall.

“We’re hoping it’s going to pick up over the weekend,” the owner tells me. I wonder if any of the exhibitors have made any money, but decide against asking. Rumour has it the exhibition might run at a loss this year.

At around 4pm we saunter on to Anna Bell Peak’s booth, which is set up to look like a bedroom. Anna Bell is a famous US porn star and she’s about to start a webcam session. Titled “oil and water fun”, internet users log onto a website called Chaturbate and get to watch and ask her to do things on camera. Sexpo visitors get to watch it live, and Anna Bell even asks people to “interact” with her by spanking her and dousing her in water and baby oil.

It’s absurdly hard for Anna Bell to get the audience involved. We are all South African after all, that is – mostly conservative and painfully shy around each other.

After a while a tall guy wearing jeans and boots volunteers to give the tattooed star a baby oil massage. He grabs her breasts, somewhat harder than I thought he would, and starts groping her. She giggles and plays to the camera. The guy’s girlfriend stands on the side, watching.

In an interview afterwards, Anna Bell tells me she’s a qualified chartered accountant, and that she quit her job because she enjoyed doing webcam work so much. Later she moved on to porn, where her specialty, she says, is deep-throating.

“I get paid very well and get to travel, I love my life,” she says, and you can see she means it.

By all measures she’s a gorgeous, intelligent woman expressing her sexuality on her own terms. Perhaps it’s my own convoluted ideas about the sex industry, or the Salvation Army stand in the corner raising awareness about human trafficking, but I keep wondering whether Anna Bell, with all her education and privilege as a white American woman, is indicative of the industry as a whole.

Watch the video of our visit to Sexpo here:

On the main stage in the expo hall, acts like burlesque, pole dancing and dance troupes take the stage every half an hour. A woman dressed in glittery heels and white underwear is doing a theatrical dance with four male dancers. Three of them are fighting over her, sort of pulling her this way and that. She’s resisting, hair flying, trying to escape.

Finally the fourth male dancer fends off the other three in a theatrical faux fight. The woman sinks into his arms, grateful to her hero. They start a stomping sort of Tango thing together. Britney Spears’ Slave For You blasts over the speakers. The audience claps politely.

We go two floors down from the exhibition hall, where Sexpo’s live shows take place. The cordoned-off booths include a Teazers and a Tease-Hers, as well as a “red light district” where you can watch live sex.

Apparently yesterday the male performer strained without success to get an erection, and after a while tried to insert his semi-flaccid penis into his co-star. It was awkward as hell, everyone tells me. Later I run into a Huffington Post journalist who went and ask her how it was it was. She just shakes her head, eyes big.

A male strip show by an Australian troupe called “The Thunder From Down Under”, and a workshop on “The Ultimate Blowjob” are billed for later. But the day has come to an end for me. It’s almost like this big exhibition space has stripped away all the sensuality and mystery I associate with sex, turning it into something cold and mundane. Though I go home hoping that the turnout gets better for the likes of Anna Bell Peaks and my friend Pricasso, Sexpo just isn’t for me. After all, sex is better without fluorescent lighting.



Grethe Kemp
Journalist
City Press
p:+27 11 713 9001
w:www.citypress.co.za  e: Grethe.Kemp@citypress.co.za
      


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