A day in the life of a sex shop

I had been standing behind it for less than five minutes when the first customer of the day approached the Miss Fantasia counter. A smartly dressed youth in his late teens or early twenties, he’d slyly sidled into Dublin’s premier sex and fetish emporium just moments before, making an immediate beeline for the back of the shop. He soon returned, carrying something that looked like a small baseball bat in his right hand. Despite his reasonably respectable appearance, for a split second I thought he was about to attempt to rob the place.

It wasn’t until he’d placed it on the counter and reached for his wallet that I realised it wasn’t actually a baseball bat – it was a giant plastic phallus. Or, more specifically, a 24-inch ‘Raging Hard’ double-ended dildo, similarly proportioned to the fake appendage worn by legendary ’70s porn star Long Dong Silver. A bigger prick than Ariel Sharon, the thing was so enormous, even horses would be impressed if they saw it dangling between your legs.

Up close, I could see that he had the greasy hair, pasty pallor and glazed, baggy eyes of a dedicated onanist. Call it male intuition but I had a strong sense that the dildo was for his own personal use, rather than a present for a lover. A series of deeply disconcerting images flashed through my mind. Unless he could unhinge his jaw like a boa-constrictor, there was no way he’d be able to fit it into his mouth – at least, not without choking more than just the proverbial chicken. And as for the only other possible orifice… ugh! Or rather, ouch! It didn’t bear thinking about.

Totally unfazed, Justin Parr, the 33-year-old Miss Fantasia proprietor, placed the dildo into one of the shop’s anonymous white paper carrier bags, expertly sellotaped the top closed and announced, “That’ll be Euro 86, please.”

Eighty-six fucking euro!

The youth kept his mouth shut, calmly handing over five twenties. His change stashed in his pocket, and carrier bag in hand, he swiftly disappeared out the door into the morning sunshine. It was all done as casually as if he was buying a new pair of jeans. I was the one who was embarrassed.

“Jesus! What do you think he wanted that for?” I asked, shuddering afresh at the possibilities.

“Dunno,” Justin shrugged, smiling. “Sometimes they tell you, sometimes they don’t. Personally, I’d usually rather not know.”

“But he didn’t really look the… type,” I said, not really sure what that was supposed to mean.

“One thing you realise very quickly from working here is that there’s no such thing as ‘type’,” Justin said. “I’ve seen the scruffiest looking guys you’d ever encounter coming in, and yet they’re buying the finest lingerie in the shop. And then a suit and tie will come in, looking for butt plugs.”

“Er… what exactly do you do with butt plugs?” I enquired (I’ve often wondered).

“You plug ’em up your butt, of course,” he grinned, giving me a withering look.

“To prevent… em, accidents?” I was thinking of the young guy and his anus-expanding new toy.

“No, nothing like that,” Justin laughed. He was enjoying my naievety. “They’re purely for pleasure. I guess some people just like having things stuck up their ass.”

“Do you sell many of them?”

“Not a huge amount, but they’re fairly popular.”

“What’s your most popular item?”

“We sell a pretty wide range of stuff,” he said. “You know, it’s different horses for different courses, and here at Miss Fantasia we cater for everyone – young, old, ugly, beautiful, fat, slim, gay, straight, whatever. We’re the best sex shop in Dublin – if not the whole country. Maybe that sounds a bit arrogant or whatever, but we’ve been doing this for a long time now, and we know what we’re at. We cater for just about every sexual taste and fetish imaginable. At Miss Fantasia, we’ve got something for everyone.”

Hmmm. From butt plugs to, em, blatant plugs. But scanning the shelves, I had to admit that he was probably right.

Come on in and have a look. Cross the threshold of the South William Street store, and it’s immediately obvious that this isn’t your typical, seedy, wank mag, hardcore video and inflatable sheep-type establishment (though they do a fairly brisk trade in at least two of those items). Catering for women and couples as much as for men in dirty raincoats, the major difference between Miss Fantasia and the general run of sex shops is that it’s actually quite sexy.

Opposite the front door, you’re greeted by a wall of kinky lingerie – all much more S&M than M&S. Among the array of bras, bodysuits, corsets, stockings, suspenders and knickers (crotchless and crotched), that hang there tantalisingly, you’ll find nothing even remotely sensible, but plenty that promise occasions of sensual indulgence. And rather than the standard one-size-fits-all, nylon nightmares that sex shops usually sell, Miss Fantasia’s lingerie range is both extensive and expensive. “We don’t do any cheap or tacky stuff,”Justin explains. “Nobody would come back if we did.”

In the next section, there’s a wide range of rubber, leather and PVC fetish-wear – encompassing everything from PVC trousers and rubber cloaks to latex dresses and chain mail underwear. Think Ann Summers meets Anne Rice, and you’ve got the flavour. A selection of leather biker jackets aside, there’s very little on offer that you could comfortably wear anywhere outside the confines of a fetish club or the privacy of your own home. Then again, much of what’s on sale isn’t designed to be comfortable.

Justin is visibly proud of Miss Fantasia’s footwear collection, an eclectic and expansive range of thigh boots, high heels and sexy stilettos that would make even Imelda Marcos blush.

“We do stuff that you just can’t get anywhere else,” he told me. “Things like 12” stiletto heels – we don’t sell them every day, but we stock them. We also have a fabulous selection for women with large feet, who can’t buy sexy shoes in Dublin, because the maximum size is probably an 8. But we supply stilettos, boots, knee-boots, any kind of shoe, up to a size 12.

“So there’s a huge market of women with larger feet. We do very well out of that. And these women aren’t necessarily into the sex aspect of the shop. They just want a pair of sexy shoes and they can’t buy them in BTs, so they come over to us. They look at our catalogue and if we don’t have it in stock, we can get it fairly quickly.”

It’s not really until you’re halfway down the shop that you realise what Miss Fantasia’s main stock-in-trade is. Roman Polanski once defined the difference between erotica and pornography thus: With erotica, you use just a feather – pornography uses the whole chicken. They sell feather boas and head-dresses at the front of the shop, so I guess that’s the erotica section. In stark contrast, the back room is an Aladdin’s Cave of Kentucky Fried carnality.

The place is more crammed than Dolly Parton’s brassiere. Hundreds of hardcore magazines line the bottom shelves, a lustful library of titillating titles to rival even Philip Larkin’s infamous porno stash. The whole (legal) sexual spectrum is covered, and they stock everything from top shelf mags like Hustler, Razzle and Readers’ Wives, to rather more extreme publications dealing with everything from ‘Fat Grannies’ and ‘Chicks With Dicks’ to Bears (hairy, middle-aged homosexuals) and rubber fetishists.

Just above the magazine shelves are long glass cabinets, filled with a vast array of dildos, vibrators, cock rings, nipple clamps and various other sex toys. Bamboo canes, leather whips, metal chains, wooden paddles and anal love beads the size of oranges decorate the display stands. Leather restrainers, ankle cuffs and masks – both gimp and gas – hang from the ceiling. There’s a small video room off to the right, boasting a selection of gay, straight and fetish titles – everything from Kinky Butt Freaks to Pissing Party 5 (apparently the best of the series).

“We’ve actually only been doing videos for the last four years,” Justin explained. “When we started out we wanted to specialise in fetish clothes and we didn’t go near videos at all, which is kind of funny for a sex shop. Eventually, so many people were looking for them and I realised that every other shop was stocking them, so I caved in.”

At the very back of the store there’s a small doorway, behind which you’ll find a body piercing salon and a tattoo parlour. They’re independently owned and operated, but Justin rents them the space because, as he explains, “Piercing and tattooing pretty much go hand in hand with sex shops, and they help bring business in.”

All in all, catering for just about every taste imaginable, you might say that Miss Fantasia is the Virgin Megastore of sex shops. Except, of course, that very few virgins shop here.

I wound up working in a sex shop for a day because it came easier than the alternative – attending a swingers’ party for a night. In the wake of the recently broadcast television series Fergus’s Wedding, Hot Press wanted a report on one of the wife-swapping parties rumoured to be rapidly proliferating throughout the suburbs of the nation. Apparently Ireland’s booming has had a significant effect on Irish banging, and many people are now riding the Celtic Tiger in more ways than one. As the owner of a sex shop, Justin would know who to talk to, and so I dropped into Miss Fantasia, just up the road from the Hot Press offices, to get the name and the phone number of one of the organisers.

They’d been burnt before by a tabloid hack and so the swingers were nervous about the idea of a journalist hanging around while they strutted their stuff. I wasn’t interested in doing a sensational number on them and reassured the contact on that score. And I guaranteed them anonymity:I might describe their arses accurately, but not their faces. Suitably reassured, they eventually agreed to allow me to attend a party. But fixing a date was easier said than done. They were already booked out for months in advance.

“We’d have no locker or towels for you,” I was told. Apparently they can’t keep up with the demand.

I offered to bring my own, but no dice. There’s a limit to the number who can swing at the same time. To be honest, I felt a twinge of relief. I wasn’t sure that the prospect of a night watching other people fornicating – or engaging in an elaborate build-up at least – would be good for my health. But I wasn’t planning to take my trousers down either.

Anyway, by then, a different plan had hatched. Having visited Miss Fantasia a couple of times, and watched the comings and goings of their customers, I’d come to the conclusion that there was more to be learnt about noughties Irish sexual mores from spending a day there, than from any swingers’ party. At least, that was what I told Hot Press.

So here I was packing dildos on a sunny Saturday morning in April. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.

“I don’t know if you’ll get a particularly representative Saturday today,” Justin said, staring doubtfully out the window. “The sun’s splitting the pavement out there. We probably won’t be as busy as usual.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Is business usually slow during warm weather?” (It looked like I might have to put my plans to open a sex shop in Seville on hold).

“No, not at all,” he explained. “We’re busy all year round. It’s just that this is the first day it hasn’t been pissing down in months and so people aren’t used to it yet. You know, we’re not gonna get many people in looking to buy rubber clothes on a day like today. But once they get used to the sunshine, they’ll start getting horny again.”

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a short, stout and surly female Northsider, with green swallows tattooed on both her hands, and a figure more pint-glass than hourglass. She’d come into the shop carrying one of their white carrier bags and, as she approached the counter, she reached into it, took out a black PVC dress and placed it before us on the counter.

“C’mere, I bou’ dis here last week,” she explained, “but it doesn’t fit rite, rite? It’z a bit too small, like. Can I swappet?”

Eyes narrowing, Justin picked up the dress and examined it carefully for stretch marks and lewinskis. Fortunately, it appeared to be unblemished and would still fetch its price tag of £150.

“Yeah, you can exchange it,” he said, “but I’m not sure if we have any of these in a bigger size. Take a look at what else we have.”

He led her down to the PVC section and showed her what was on the rack. After a couple of minutes, she walked back up to the shop door and held a pink version of the same dress up to herself, mouthing the words “what do you think?” Somebody was standing outside and she was getting some helpful advice. The response was obviously negative, and an annoyed look crossed her face. She huffily waddled back down again and returned with a white version, which she duly modelled. Again, the response was less than positive. From where I was standing, I couldn’t actually see who was giving the little white number the thumbs-down – but I could certainly see why.

“Jeezus, Mary and Joseph,” she said, invoking the holy family in her hour of need. “For fux sake, will ya come in yerself den and take a luke!” With that, she stormed off back down the shop.

The door opened and her partner – a wiry, bushy moustached fellow in his early 40s, wearing an expensive tracksuit and far too much gold – stuck his shaven head in. “D’ye moind da young fella?” he asked, indicating the three-year-old toddler, clad in identical track suit, in the buggy behind him. “Yeah, it’s alright,” Justin told him. “But you can’t bring him down the back of the shop. Leave him over there.”

The guy wheeled the buggy in and parked it just in front of the glass cabinet beneath the counter. A variety of shiny metal studded wristbands and handcuffs were displayed within it, but nothing that could cause any serious psychological damage to a three-year-old. Kids nowadays! He didn’t even look all that interested. Probably doped by sunshine. That – or the sickly stink emanating from his nappy area. Discreetly, I took a few steps down-fan of him. Whew! He really ponged.

After an odorous age, the toddler’s guardians eventually returned, having settled on a shiny red number. “Diddy see anyting he liked?” the woman joked, as Justin removed the security tag from the dress. “Wood yiz have anyting for da young fella?”

She was having a laugh, but I thought the question merited serious consideration.

“Well, we do sell butt plugs,” I muttered, not quite loudly enough for her to hear as they exited.

Justin sniffed the air suspiciously and then quickly reached under the counter for an air-freshener. “Jasus – you’re right!” he exclaimed, as he started to spray. “That child was mingin’!”

I have to admit that, as shop assistants go, I was pretty useless. I didn’t know what most of the merchandise was for, so I left the explanations to Justin. When it comes to sex toys, hazarding guesses can be extremely hazardous, and I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s trip to the emergency room later (“But the guy in the shop told me it was meant to go up there!”).

After a couple of hours hanging around, I was able to point people in the general direction of whatever it was they were looking for, but for the most part, I was keeping an eye on what was going on, and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

Occasionally, a customer would catch me staring and give me a funny look. “It’s OK, I work here,” I’d explain, “can I help you in any way?” “Oh right, can you tell me how much this is?” “Yeah, no problem,” I’d reply, “just ask that guy over there.” If I was feeling particularly cruel, I’d call loudly across the shop, “Justin – this gentleman here is wondering how much the MIRACLE PENIS EXTENDERS are!!”

In truth, they didn’t really need any extra hands on deck anyway. Shortly after the shop’s 11am opening, the rest of the staff began to arrive and, within a couple of hours, there was a full complement on duty.

First through the door were Jessica, Sharon and Tara, three bright and bubbly young students, all of whom work in the shop on a part-time or weekend basis. Sharon and Tara are assistants to the body piercer and tattooist, respectively. Jessica works directly for Miss Fantasia, but the other girls regularly help out when the shop’s busy, and they’re not.

None of the girls’ parents is aware that their daughters work there. Sharon and Jessica weren’t sure what their families would think, but had decided that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Tara, on the other hand, had no doubt as to what the reaction at home would be.

“They’d kill me!” she shrieked, laughing so hard at the thought that the numerous rings through her ears began to jangle. “Not just the sex shop, but they’d freak about the whole piercing end of it – you know, all these diseases that you can get out of it. I can just imagine the conversation that we’d have if they found out. That’s what happened to the last girl who worked here. I was friends with her and her parents found out and… well, she doesn’t work here anymore.”

Cathal, the quiet-looking, bespectacled tattoo-artist, came in next, trailing just behind two women who had travelled down from Drogheda to avail of his services. He led them down to the parlour at the back of the shop and I barely saw him again for the rest of the day. Curiously enough, given his profession, he didn’t seem to have any tattoos – at least not on his arms or neck.

The same couldn’t be said of Glen, the body-piercer, who arrived moments after. A shaven-headed, stockily-built guy in his mid-thirties, he is one big tattoo personified. “Apart from me bum and a few other delicate bits,” he explained, his whole body is more ink than pink, intricately decorated from neck to ankle with the kind of fantastically gory imagery you usually see on the covers of horror videos and heavy metal albums. Quite literally a colourful character, Glen is obviously a man who has suffered for his body art.

But then, his tattoos are the least of it. He has several piercings – including a metal rod through the inside of his nose (only visible by staring up his nostrils) and massive 25mm rings stretching out the lobes of both ears. It doesn’t stop there. He has also invested in sub-dermal implants in his arms and head – an eccentric extravagance that required minor surgery and makes him look like a Star Trek Klingon (which was the desired effect). And just to top things off, he’s also had two porcelain fangs fitted to his teeth. Yes, you read me right – fangs!

All in all, Glen has the appearance of the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to meet in any kind of alleyway – let alone a dark one. And, as is often the case with such types, he also turned out to be a hugely likeable and humorous character. The polar opposite of his intimidating image, he spent most of the day cracking lame jokes (Q: How do you piss your girlfriend off when you’re having sex? A: Ring her!).

Glen brought me down to his piercing chamber – a small and surgical white room, full of computer and sterilisation equipment, and dominated by a black reclining chair, similar to a dentist’s. Originally from Sheffield, he told me that he had been operating out of the back of Miss Fantasia for the past four years. Business is generally good. He’s even had some celebrity clients. A few years ago, he pierced Sinéad O’Connor’s tongue and, more recently, performed the same service for Mel B’s former husband. Mostly though, he pierces moody teenagers.

“The most popular piercings would be nipples, navels, eyebrows and tongues,” he explained. “They’re the four regulars, and they’d be far more popular than ears these days.”

“Do you pierce clits?” I asked.

“No, we don’t do the clitoris at all. It’s too dangerous. If you hit the actual nerve you can lose sensation. You can do the hood, the bit above it, but not the actual glans. Same with penises.”

While he may not pierce penises, he does offer another dick-related service, albeit one that he’s never been asked to perform. The ‘Deluxe Penis Slicer’ is a silver mousetrap-like device that does exactly what it sounds like it does. You place your penis on the end and let the razorblade, which is attached to a spring, snap down and do the rest, slicing the head into two distinct halves.

Just thinking about it was giving me the, em, willies, but I could barely hold down my breakfast when he showed me some photographs of post-operative penises. Aside from causing you an awful lot of pain and making you very unpopular at public urinals for the rest of your life, I couldn’t even begin to see any possible attraction in having your cock cut in two.

“Why would anybody want to do that to themselves?” I asked. I was genuinely aghast.

“The Arunta tribe of Northern Australia used to get it done,” he explained. “They believed that it made them more virile.”

“And did it?”

“Fuck knows!” he laughed. “Probably not.”

I went back up front to find that the last two members of staff had arrived. A pair of pretty blondes, one in her thirties, the other in her teens, Justin introduced them to me as Jacinta and Aisling.

Unfortunately, he didn’t choose to expand on his introductions and, as the incredibly cute Aisling went down the back to leave in her coat, I whistled my approval. “Wow – that Aisling is a bit of a babe,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind giving her one!” (I know how crass that sounds but, in fairness, I was standing in a sex shop).

Justin and Jacinta’s faces visibly froze.

“She’s our daughter,” they said, in unison.

After my Aisling gaffe, I thought it prudent to go down the back and talk to Jessica for a while. A 20-year-old student, she is smart and sassy, with a great sense of humour – an essential requirement for a successful dildo and vibrator salesperson. At my request, she unlocked the glass cabinets and gave me the lowdown on the stock. Coming in various sizes, shapes and colours, to the neophyte the display of sex toys on offer was bewildering. Jessica, however, knew her way around these talismanic objects.

Apparently the best way to test a vibrator is to touch it off the tip of your nose. I tested two of them – ‘The Black Beaver’ and ‘The Butterfly’ – in this way, and could only conclude that they weren’t very good. I held the ‘Black Beaver’ there for a full minute, and didn’t even come close to an orgasm.

“We’re actually out of our most popular vibrator, which is ‘The Roger Rabbit’,” Jessica explained, in a sultry voice. She held up a price tag with ‘The Roger Rabbit – 87 Euros’ printed on it. “They’re very hard to get in stock and we always sell out of them really quickly.”Now this was the kind of insider information I had been gagging for. “The ‘Jessica Rabbit’ is just as good,”she elaborated, “but for some reason ‘Roger’ sells much better. But this one here has been really popular since it was featured on Graham Norton.”

She was holding up something that looked disturbingly like Mick Jagger’s tongue, attached to the end of an electric razor.

“What’s it called?” I asked. I’m a reporter after all.

“It’s called ‘The Tongue’,” she giggled.

My nose was still itching from the Black Beaver, so I was unlikely to be able to roadtest it effectively for myself. “Is it any good?” I asked.

“Apparently it is,” she said, “but I don’t really know. I don’t actually bring any of the stuff home to test myself. I think a lot of people just buy it because they’ve seen it on the telly.”

Jessica told me that she had been working, for two days a week, in the shop since January. Soon she would abandon her prestigious position to sit her college exams. “I find it really interesting working here – just from an observational point of view,” she said. “It’s really mad just seeing what kind of people come in. You really do get all sorts. People you’d never expect to see in a sex shop.”

I asked her to nominate her weirdest customer.

“There’s actually a lot less weirdos than you’d expect,” she said. “But last month there was a real creep. This guy kept trying on the clothes, but he wouldn’t try them on in the dressing room, he kept trying them on out there. And he kept asking me for my opinion. I was just going, ‘yeah, it’s grand’ and then I’d kind of walk off. He was trying on PVC trousers and tops but he kept walking out half naked. He seemed to be getting off on it.”

Working in Miss Fantasia hasn’t led to any significant changes in Jessica’s sex life, although she recently attended a city-centre swingers’ party, invited by someone she met in the shop.

“It was mad,” she told me. “Those swingers are just really weird people. There’s no fun in them. They take themselves real seriously. When I went into the place, I was basically interrogated by this couple, who were wearing gear from the shop and kept asking me all these questions about what I was and wasn’t into. You know, it was all very regimented and organised, almost like they were ticking things off a checklist, and had to put everybody in their box. I felt like I was at a job interview or something.”

“What was the party like?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I started laughing at them and they threw me out! It was gas – the woman kept on saying that this was an exclusive party for exclusive people, and I should feel privileged to be invited and all this stuff. I couldn’t stop myself laughing and she freaked out. She told me that the room was full of really powerful people and all this stuff – basically, that I didn’t know who I was messing with. She got really pissed off that I was laughing. I was glad to get out of there.”

Justin was right about the balmy weather being bad for business. The shop was quiet for the first few hours. Cathal and Glen had queues down the back, but sex sales up front were slow. It was a dildo here, a magazine there, a bottle of poppers here, a tube of lubricant there – but nothing moved of any great significance. The customers were a mixed bunch – mostly men, leavened with a few women and occasional couples.

“You’ve picked the wrong day,” Justin sighed, at one point. “We’re usually jammers at this stage. Maybe you should try again next Saturday.”

Shortly after lunchtime, a very pretty Californian girl, aged about 23 or 24, came in and spent almost half an hour trying on various different items. She eventually left with almost £500 worth of stuff – a PVC dress, some lacy lingerie, a whip and a pair of thigh boots. Justin was cheered by the sale, but still far from ecstatic.

“I think she’s a lapdancer actually – we get quite a lot of those in,” he said. “Still, it’s Saturday and so you’d normally expect a sale like that every half-hour or so. We’re usually much busier.”

It seemed to me that it would be busier if Justin wasn’t turning away half of the potential customers. Watching him refusing entry to wave after wave of horny teenage boys – citing an ‘over 18s only’ rule – I saw that you had to be a bit of a bouncer to do the job.

“It’s a pain in the ass with kids on Saturdays,” he told me, having despatched yet another group of disgruntled delinquents. “I spend half the day checking their bloody IDs. They drive everybody else away and they never spend any money.”

Is the over-18s rule a legal requirement?

“No, it isn’t illegal for them to be in the shop but most of the sex shop owners around Dublin tend to enforce a general over-18s policy,” he explained. “There’s no law against younger people coming in – not to my knowledge anyway – but an awful lot of the shops are self-governing. We’ll let a 16-year-old in to get a body piercing, if we have their parents’ permission, but we won’t sell them anything from the shop – at least not a video or a magazine.”

As for his own under-18-year-old, Justin explained that Aisling didn’t really work in the shop but, because she was in boarding school all week (yikes!) and he and Jacinta couldn’t take Saturdays off, she sometimes hung out in Miss Fantasia in order to spend some time with them.

Originally from Jersey, Justin told me that he’d lived in Dublin for most of his adult life. He used to work in the building trade, but a serious back injury put paid to that. Recognising the gap in the Irish market, he started the sex shop with Jacinta, who dropped out of a science degree in Trinity to go into the business with him twelve years ago.

“We actually started off doing mail order,” he explained. “We ran it from a house that we rented from a person who was very liberal – he knew the score and his attitude was ‘what you do is your own business’. Fair whack to him! An awful lot of people helped us along the way, who didn’t have these prejudices. And only for those people we wouldn’t be in existence today.

“If you talk to a sex shop owner who was in the business back then, they’ll tell you that trying to get a premises for a sex shop was near impossible. It was like trying to find a hen’s tooth. And it still is today. If you get a premises and tell the landlord you’re going to open a sex shop, suddenly the rent doubles.”

Having said that, he’s more than happy with their current location. He and Jacinta have plans to expand the shop in the coming months – opening upstairs as well, and effectively doubling their space. Slow sunny Saturdays aside, business is obviously pretty good then, eh?

“I think some people have a misconception about the sex industry, that we’re all making millions,” he laughed. “We’re not! When we first opened, I think there was just two other shops going. In fact, I think there was just one – Utopia on Capel Street. There’s now something like twenty shops around the country – fourteen in the Dublin area alone. So that’ll give you some idea. The market has gotten bigger. But there are also more outlets there to serve it. Irish people have embraced sex shops very, very well.”

Embraced being the appropriate word.

“Like I was saying, there’s a misconception that sex shops make millions. They don’t! Compare it to pints of milk – you’ll sell a lot more pints of milk than you will porno mags.”

I wasn’t quite sure I was following Justin’s line of logic.

“There is a market there, fair enough,” he adds, “and there’s thousands of mags sold in Dublin every month. But that’s spread over 14 shops and, with all these new titles from America and the Eastern Bloc countries, magazines are now half the price of what they were when I started in this business. Same with videos. The profits aren’t what they used to be.”

This detailed analysis of the vagaries of the sex trade was interrupted by the arrival of a balding, middle-aged guy from Cork, wearing a black leather jacket, backwards baseball cap and a pervy smile. He looked like a priest. He was with an identically dressed friend, and they were in search of a pack of gay playing cards. Justin found them the item (same as normal cards, only with pictures of naked men on them) and then added them to the bill the boys were racking up – five videos, five magazines, two dildos, several tubes of gel and a couple of bottles of poppers. In total, their purchases amounted to almost £400.

“They looked like priests,” I commented, when they left.

“Who knows?” Justin shrugged, cheerfully counting the money. “I’m sure we’ve had some in – though obviously they wouldn’t come in here wearing the collar. We get a lot of country gays in, though, and you’d never know for sure what they are in civvies! They always spend a lot of money, because they buy for all their friends back home as well. Funnily enough, the foot and mouth outbreak really affected sex shops because there weren’t as many people coming up from the country.”

And we never heard a word from Minister Walsh about it! I asked Justin had they ever gotten any grief from religious groups or the authorities.

“The police used to raid us years ago in Fairview, before we were based here. It was because we were doing fetish mags like Skin Two and O and Shiny, and they’d never seen anything like them before. Since we moved here, though, we’ve only had a problem once. Last Christmas, we had a big window display and some woman claimed that she could see a dildo buried in the fake snow. The cops were looking for it for about five minutes. I had to actually point it out to them in the end. They were just laughing, but they asked me to take it out – so I did.”

Sounds familiar…

“Another day, these two old wans came in and were hanging around by the boots for a while. I was actually busy with another customer but I saw them come in and I remember wondering what they were up to – or if they were gonna cause a scene. But they left without saying anything. To anyone.”

Go on Justin, I have a feeling there’s a punch line coming…

“Then I went down and I found some rosary beads and a folded-up prayer hidden in a pair of boots. What it was all about is beyond me, but that’s about the only time we’ve had any religious nuts.”

I wondered did any celebs frequent Miss Fantasia? The odd archbishop perhaps?

“Sure, we’ve had a few celebrities, but it wouldn’t be fair to name them. They’re only human, after all. And they’re as horny as the rest of us.”

“Is there anything you won’t stock?”

“We won’t stock child pornography, obviously, and I’ve never been asked for it. We won’t stock stuff with animals – bestiality. We’ve been asked for bestiality before but it’s not our line. And we don’t do snuff or anything like that. Everything else is fine though.”

Two laughing female German tourists came up to the counter, brandishing a couple of vibrators which Jessica had helped them choose. Justin showed them how to insert the batteries, warning the girls to remove them – the batteries that is… from the vibrators – before flying home.

“One of our regulars told me that she caused a bomb scare in Dublin airport last month,” he said. “Her vibrator went off in her suitcase and they wound up calling security. She was mortified!”

I can’t imagine why.

At about 3 o’clock, the citizens of Dublin suddenly started to get extremely horny. One moment I was listening to Justin moaning about how slow the day was and the next the place was more packed than a truck-full of asylum seekers. From then until around 6 o’clock, it was vibrators a gogo. Suddenly Justin had a smile on his face, as if someone was pleasuring him under the counter.

There were more men than women among the customers, but only just. Ages ranged from late teens to mid-fifties. Attractiveness ranged from the highly challenged to the stunningly beautiful. And the variety of purchases was unbelievable – furry handcuffs, nurses’ uniforms, magazines and videos, vibrators, dildos. You name it, we were selling it.

Justin and Jacinta took turns at the till, while Jessica and I kept an eye on things down the back. Most of the customers didn’t need much assistance, except when it came to coughing up the loot. “People tend to know what they want,” Justin said. “But the great laugh is watching them coming in and seeing something that they didn’t even know existed – something they didn’t think they could buy in Ireland.”

Justin’s mood had improved but he still grumbled that the day was slower than normal. Having sold his third pair of thigh boots in as many hours, he laughed and said, “You’d know that Pretty Woman was on telly the other night. Every time that movie is shown, our sales of thigh boots go up. The number of phone calls we get is mad!”

I asked him did any other movies boost sales in the same way?

“I can’t really think of any. But sometimes Sex And The City will have something on it – like a particular kind of dildo or something – and the next day people will be in looking for it.”

Miss Fantasia’s interior has featured on the small screen on numerous occasions. The shop has been used as a location in various TV shows and documentaries, including Bachelor’s Walk, Fergus’s Wedding and Podge & Rodge. “We’ve been in loads of documentaries as well,” Justin said. “Stuff for the BBC and Channel 4. And we actually supply a lot of stuff to theatres, advertising companies and places like Ardmore Studios.”

As if on cue, a woman appeared at the counter, looking for red feather boas as props for a play in the Gaiety. Justin found what she was looking for and then asked what the play was.

“The Vagina Monologues,” she replied.

She’d definitely come to the right place.

By the close of business at 7pm, I was tired. And I hadn’t even got around to properly checking out the merchandise.

What had I learned?

That Irish people have embraced sex shops “very, very well”. And I guess they have. It’d make you laugh, really. Eleven years ago, you couldn’t even buy Playboy in this country, let alone a box of condoms. Today you can load up with a 24” double-dildo and a copy of Kinky Butt Freaks at 11 o’clock in the morning and nobody bats an eyelid. I suppose that’s what they call progress.

As I packed up my stash of booty, I asked Justin what he hoped for out of my literary doodlings.

“I’d like it to show that Miss Fantasia – and sex shops in general – are not the evil dens of iniquity that they’re made out to be,” he said. “Of course, there are shops that are dodgy but they’re still owned by human beings.”

We can, I think, rest easy on that score. Although the inflatable sheep might just surprise us all by taking over in the long run.

“There’s women who own them, and men who own them – and they’ve kids and wives and families. You know, at the end of the day, they close up shop and they head home and they watch Coronation Street, just like you and me. That’s really it.”

As I gathered my things, I casually asked him what his plans for the evening were. Grinning widely, he told me.

Trust me – he wasn’t going home to watch Coronation Street…