Boutique Erotika has almost a five star rating on Yelp and rightfully so. It is a 34-year-old family run business owned by a man called Claude Moreau and was one of the first sex shops in Montreal to sell sex toys. Things have come a long way from the time when he would get put in jail for selling certain risqué objects to now when 19-year-old girls walk in to interview their store keepers. While I admit that I probably would not have gone in to ask for an interview without the prior coercion from my two friends standing outside the shop on the corner of St. Catherine and St. Laurent, I was surprisingly at ease for the entire interview. Maybe the absurdity of being surrounded by sex objects ironically takes away the discomfort of it all. Or maybe Dimitri, the 23-year-old sales man who I talk to, has mastered the job of putting people at ease in a sex shop that, by virtue of its catering to the kinky desires of its customers, could be very uncomfortable.
And Dimitri is comfortable with sex. He unabashedly uses personal anecdotes throughout the interview so that by the end of it, I too am joking about things that I normally would have done my best to keep hidden. A Quebecer from the South Shore of Montreal, Dimitri came to work at Boutique Erotika after taking a year off to travel. I got overexcited when he told me that he had run away from the South Shore, imagining that his dramatic escape could form the basis of this story. However, it turns out that it was just a misuse of language since by “ran away”, he meant that he had moved to Montreal with his parents at the age of eight. In any case, he loves Montreal. Soft-spoken and confident, Dimitri is anything but intimidating. He is therefore perfect for his job, which he insists is less about selling sex, and more about helping people deal with their insecurities about sex. He is there to make people comfortable— to give them advice and confidence in an area of life that many of them find uncomfortable. And people apparently do little to hide their discomfort. Dimitri rolls his eyes as he tells me about the numbers of adults that come in to the store, giggle nervously and then walk out. He resents the culture of shame that surrounds sex, stating: “If you like sleeping around, then you like sleeping around!”
“You don’t need any of this stuff!” he exclaims, gesturing to a crowd of sizable dildos. “The box is a lie!” he says, pointing to the image of the chiselled man on the packaging. “Everyone lies about sex”. This is why he is there for advice. Customers come in, needing someone to talk to about their insecurities, and Dimitri is there for them. Surprisingly, most of these customers are men. In order to prove this point, he takes me directly to a glass case in the corner. Centred on the shelf is their most sold product: a small pot of herbal penis enlargement pills entitled “ResErection”. I pick up the pot skeptically and Dimitri assures me that they work, casually telling me that he tried them a few times. He explains that the problem is that “a lot of people conflate sexuality with porn” and from there, the insecurities develop as people try to “follow the myth of porn”. Despite Dimitri’s opinion of porn, Boutique Erotika is full of it. Surprisingly, porn sales have not gone down since the advent of internet porn, as people still come in to buy collector’s porn, or to rifle through the discount porn bin. Dimitri looks concerned as he tells me about the addictive aspect of porn. His most frequent customer will come in once a week in order spend four hours selecting and purchasing piles of these discount porn DVDs. Dimitri is a source of comfort to the porn collector who, gathering from this story, seems to rely on their weekly conversations as well as the promise of the weekly selection of videos. I attempt to look nonchalant as I pick up “Domanatrix Destroys Her Man Slave” and Dimitri tells me that the sweetest and most open-minded of their customers are dominatrix.
“Get to know someone sexually, and you’ll get to know them well,” says Dimitri. “Sex is a way to see into people’s psyches.” A lot of people come into the store confused about their sexuality. Dimitri feels that men who buy transexual porn often aren’t ready to accept their homosexuality. But it is not just the confused that wander in. Boutique Erotika is also a destination for many prostitutes or “madams” as they call themselves. These women are the strongest of them all, often coming in with their clients to come prepare for a job. Dimitri says that he has a similar job to them as they too have to understand and manage people’s sexual insecurities. Strippers too come in before heading to the many Montreal strip clubs in order to get dressed for the night.
I ask him to take me on a tour of the shop as my prepared questions slowly run out. I comment out loud about how there are many more objects and toys on sale for women. “The penis is simple,” he retorts. But sex for a woman is supposedly more individual. We walk over to the remote controlled vibrators. Picking the package up, he recounts how a woman once put one of these under her skirt moments after buying it, turned it on, and then saluted him as she left the store. After two years of working there, he says: “Nothing impresses me anymore.” We then walk over to the row of dildos, walking to the boxes furthest to the left, containing those of a larger size. He picks up a dildo called “The Great American Challenge”, which might possibly be larger than my arm. My eyes may have gone a little wild because Dimitri picks up on my bafflement before knowingly disclosing: “With patience, and a lot of lube, anything can happen.”
Article and image by: Maxine Dannatt
