An Important and Culturally Significant Gallery of Mannequins from the Sex Toy Show

After a few hours at this weekend’s enjoyable and successful Adult Novelty Manufacturers’ Expo (ANME) at the Burbank Marriott, it dawned on me that it must be a union thing that all the mannequins had to wear strap-on dildos. So few of the mannequins didn’t have dildos that I wondered if mannequins were just being manufactured that way these days, and I resolved to investigate further the next time I went to Marshall’s.

While the full-bodied mannequins are always my favorite—as I can relate to them, even without heads, hands, and feet—the more-than-usually-disembodied mannequins also made quite an impression. I liked these black mannequins from Rapture Novelties, the new fetishwear (you think?) division of Pulse, which handles DVD distribution of many of Porn Valley’s video companies. I think I liked them because they had heads.

I had not been to any of the competing adult novelty shows (there are three) in two years, and I was pleasantly surprised by how high-end ANME was; every item from among the several dozen exhibitors had a clear use and was solidly made. Until fairly recently, Novelty shows carried an unsettling amount of gag gifts, like the kind you’d find at bachelorette parties.

In fact, I got the impression from many exhibitors that they preferred the term “adult pleasure product” to “novelty”—that “novelty” was on the way out.

“‘Novelty’ sounds cheap,” says Taylor Means, sales manager of Synergy Erotic, a vibrator concern out of Las Vegas.

Out of three large rooms packed with toys, a smoking tent, and an eating tent with an excellent buffet, I searched far and wide for a mannequin I could understand—one without a strap-on dildo. An old school mannequin. I finally found one as the Golden Hour sun set over Burbank Airport.