Lover’s Playground

Basically what you’d expect for an Indiana college-​town smut shop, circa 2012 (sex toys, gag gifts, video arcade booths, DVDs, copies of 50 Shades of Grey that seem better suited for a suburban Target, etc). The porn is a little kinkier – 12 shades, shall we say – than I expected, and I wonder if that’s a development of the post-​Bush years when obscenity prosecutions are on the wane, but it might also just reflect the tenor of our times, when heterosexuality has become representationally… complicated? («dismal,» perhaps).
The very pleasant and personable young woman working here dug up old VHS tapes from the backroom for me (nothing that quite fit the bill, alas, but still a generous gesture), and told me that the Craigslist posts vastly overstated the extent of the arcade-​booth cruising. Which immediately led me to the Bloomington CL, of course… which I now can’t help but read as laced with pathos. Ah, the melancholia of desire, this is what College Adult Books has led me to contemplate. Probably not what the director of Anal Twin MILFs 16 intended…