5 Things I Learned About Your Sex Life As A Porn Store Clerk

5 You Cannot Hide Your Filthy Preferences

When you choose to rent porn the old-fashioned way, the clerk is inevitably going to find out about your weird fetishes and sexual orientation. There are only so many times you can rent Buttmaster IV: Return To Ass Mountain before the girl behind the cash register starts to think you might be a booty connoisseur. Nevertheless, people try to hide it. They'll even pull the long con by renting videos that, looking back, they clearly weren't interested in. "I noticed a hilarious trend where new customers would rent hetero titles for about a month, six or seven at a time, and then one day, they'd slip a bi title in with all the straight ones," Pam says. "And they would keep trying to hide one bi title for a couple weeks, and then eventually grab a gay video. After a bit, they would switch to all gay titles. It was really strange how they were worried we would think they were gay."

Your porn preferences say a lot more about you than you think, sort of like a sticky horoscope, and porn store employees have tons of data on you. For example, racism abounds in the titles and customers alike. You would think prejudice or racism would be the last thing on the mind of the masturbator, but it turns out your issues leak out through your dick. "They were totally fine -- and in fact very excited -- if it was a black dude , but never if there was a black woman," Pam says. "If there was even one teeny tiny square on the back that featured a black woman in the middle of a sea of blonde women, they wouldn't take it. We had titles with black women on the cover that went five, six, seven years without anyone buying them."

Come on, people; if love is totally blind, surely boning is at least colorblind.

4 You Might Develop A Strange Relationships With Your Clerk

When someone knows so much about your private life (and parts), it's natural to start thinking of them as a friend. You tell them about your day, ask them for advice, or even do nice things for them.

"A lot of them brought me presents, which was initially terrifying," Pam says. "I have no idea why . Like with the M&Ms; I assumed they were full of roofies. They sat on the counter until my boss got back and I was like, 'I'm afraid I'm going to die, will you try one first?' and he was like, 'Yeah, this happens all the time.'"

"The main guy was the produce guy," she says. "I ended up having a customer who brought me probably $50 worth of produce every week, sometimes six-pound bags of pecans ... I think he was just lonely, like he started thinking of me as a surrogate granddaughter. It became a casual thing, like it kind of overcame the stigma that this is a porn store. I guess they just felt very comfortable with me, and eventually I felt comfortable with it and I was just like, 'Sweet, free watermelon.'"

This customer/clerk relationship, much like Lance Dickstrong: The Bi-Cyclist, goes both ways. For example, knowing that someone hasn't been to a porn store for a few weeks probably doesn't raise any red flags for you. But all your porn store clerk knows is that a regular has stopped showing up, so they fear the worst. "One guy didn't come in for like three weeks and we actually bought a newspaper to check the obituaries," she says. "Then when he finally came in we were like, 'Oh my god, it's so good to see you!' and he was kind of offended, I guess either because we thought he was so old that he would drop dead at any second or because this was how sad his life was."

Hey, even if the only people who miss you are the employees of your favorite porn store, at least you're still missed.

3 There Is No Such Thing As A Typical Porn Store Customer

Everybody dances with Mr. Bojangles now and again, but most people are content to fulfill their illicit needs from the privacy of their own Internet. However, sometimes you need to see what's going in your genitals in person before committing. Angela's store specializes in high-end lingerie, so she gets a fair number of women and men shopping for their wives.

"If you walk in, you don't even know . So we get a large chunk of men who are more comfortable coming in to my store because we don't have things like videos, and they don't want to be seen in that kind of setting. Usually, they're actually looking for something for the wife or girlfriend, from stockings and corsets to regular toys to bondage gear. Usually the wives are too shy or conservative or scared to come in for themselves, so want to do something nice for them, but they're not sure what. They'll ask me 'What's good here? I wanna get her a toy. What's a good toy?' So I tell them what are good starter toys, hook them up with a book or a game. These are women who are made to feel like they shouldn't like sex, or sometimes maybe they just had a baby and they don't feel very sexy, or they just don't feel very sexy for whatever reason, and they want them to feel sexy again."

But there are some surprises.

"There are quite a few businessmen who come in for strap-ons," she says. "We also have a lot of guys shopping for themselves, because there's not a lot of businesses catering to the crossdressing community ... There's a lot of guys walking around this town with corsets."

It probably sounds like the last place you'd go on a family outing, but Angela says, "We get a lot of mother/daughter customers. I have one mother/daughter that come in together on a regular basis, and the daughter asks for certain stuff and the mom asks for certain stuff, and they have no problem talking about it together or in front of each other. One woman brought in her son's girlfriend, and that was hysterical because she was like, 'He doesn't know what you need, you need one of these.' One mom brought in her daughter just after her 18th birthday, as if to say, 'You're a woman now, here you go.'"

Isn't that heartwarming? Or ... something-warming, at least? But not every interaction is such an X-rated Hallmark moment:

"I had a regular customer who made a special arrangement with the manager to rent 20 titles at a time, because the standard maximum was 10," Pam says. "But it wasn't like he would take 20 and come back in a week," she says. "It was like four hours. When his wife was out of town, it was every single day." How could anyone possibly watch that much porn? We're not even making a moral judgment here -- that's simply not how time works. Unfortunately, this rhetorical question has an answer. "He told me that he fast-forwarded them and watched them on multiple screens," she says. "I was like, 'How is your dick not eroded?'"

Then there are the people with much larger problems. Well, relatively speaking:

"I had a guy who would routinely put on a penis extender -- which I sold to him, by the way -- and let it hang out of the bottom of his short shorts as he walked around the store," Pam says. "You could tell he was trying to get a reaction, so I thought it was really funny to completely ignore it. The lengths (ha!) he would go to, to draw attention to it were amazing ... He would be standing there and like thrusting it at me, and I just kept talking to him and never looked down and you could tell he was getting so frustrated, like, 'MY DICK IS OUT. LOOK AT MY DICK."

Of course, that's technically sexual assault, but Pam explains:

2 People Hate Porn Stores Almost As Much As They Love Porn

There are still people in the world who find the purveyance of Fleshlights to be an affront to God, as though the almighty is up there wringing his hands over some rubber dick-sheaths.

"The local neighborhood watch on Facebook started talking crap about me and saying they were going to go to the meeting and complain," Angela says. "The people who actually went were more concerned about how late we were going to be open and that kind of thing ... But I was all over the news, in all the newspapers. The local councilman was saying things on the news, something like 'This is our neighborhood's worst nightmare.' But it was just free publicity for me."

That happened in New York. Yes, that New York. What, did you think Puritanism was indigenous to the South? From what Angela has seen, the South is actually more open and accepting than so-called "liberal" places like New England. "Geographically, it's not what you'd expect," she says. "We'd have people coming over the border from Vermont, which is a very blue state, here to upstate New York, because there's nothing over there. And then I'd have people visiting from the South and they would say, 'Oh yeah, we have this kind of thing everywhere.'"

How down you are to clown (or rather, to purchase clowning assistance) may be up to wealth, rather than region. For example, in the obscenely wealthy suburb of Plano, Texas, the opening of a "Condom Sense" store in 2013 was met with random gunfire from angry, upper-middle-class locals. The yuppies have made their stand: It's totally okay for the government to monitor every page they visit and phone call they make, but remind them that penises exist, and may God have mercy on your soul.

1 You Can Save -- And Destroy -- People's Relationships

A lot of men come into adult stores on a noble quest to get their wife going, but they probably didn't mean going out the door.

"I started calling the Hitachi Magic Wand 'The Divorcemaker,'" Pam says. "We'd usually suggest a toy like the Rabbit, but sometimes the guy would come back very soon after complaining that it wasn't getting the job done." They would end up with the Hitachi, which Pam says is "A vibrator Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor would have designed. It plugs into the wall and sounds like a lawn mower. And for most of these guys, it was their replacement. Many a sad purchaser returned to my store looking for a masturbator because their wives were done touching their non-electric junk. I started trying to discourage people from buying it. I think I caused about 100 divorces."

Let that be a lesson to you: Feeling genuinely uncomfortable with your body will slowly kill a person, the same as how lack of (or unfulfilling) sex will kill a relationship. Sex is not shallow; it's a natural, healthy human need, and sometimes you require a little shrink-wrapped help and a knowledgeable person to guide you through it. May we suggest the Buttmaster series? The fourth installment is particularly good. We hear. F-from a friend. But not like ... a close one.

Manna has a super sexy Twitter, if you have a pizza and/or nap fetish.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Things You Don't Know About Strippers (Until You Are One) and 5 Myths About Prostitutes I Believed (Until I Was One).

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