February 17, 2006

Portland's Willamette Week talks about Sex Machines

Machines of Loving Grace
February 17, 2006
by Kelly Clarke

Is the future of the adult industry sitting in your neighbor's basement?

In the basement of a ranch-style house not far from North Interstate's MAX Line, four feet from a work bench littered with screwdrivers, glass jars filled with nails and an enormous can of lube, sits a 50-pound, $2,500 machine that was designed, built and sold to have sex with women. It's called the "Thrillhammer."

"After I saw three women get off like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, I thought, 'Cool...I can afford that,'" says Randy, a 55-year-old ex-machinist and bondage lover. He flips a switch and the machine, in essence a souped-up, pump-action vibrator on steroids, lurches into action.

Now all he needs is somebody who wants to go for a ride.

While the fever dream of a "sex machine" is hardly new among BattleBots television-show aficionados and James Brown fans, to most people the idea of a collection of metal parts, pistons and rubber that can bring a woman to orgasm countless crazy-making times still sounds like something out of a porn version of Blade Runner. But since the late '90s, sex machines have actually become a real, live adult-business proposition. And one of the small hotbeds of sex-machine ingenuity and use? Portland, Ore., the town some say—in terms of sexual freedom—is the San Francisco of the new millennium. It's a city where men like Randy shell out big bucks for the ultimate home entertainment system and women, like Theresa "Darklady" Reed, throw parties featuring the metal monsters as interactive parlor games. According to Adult Video News, Sex Machines 8, a $20 video produced by Portland's own Homegrown Video, is the 35th-most rented Pro Amateur adult title in the nation, a category that includes more than 600 videos.

It's not just us: Suburban home tinkerers across the United States are creating toys with names like "Monkey Rocker," "Ultimate Ride" and the less euphemistic "Fuck Rogers" in their garages. Entrepreneurs like Seattle-based inventor Allen Stein, who built Randy's Thrillhammer, sell "luxury" retail and custom machines online to busy businesswomen. Since 2000, thousands of individuals paying $29.90 a month have logged on to Cybernet Entertainment's fuckingmachines.com to eyeball a hardcore library of more than 160 graphic hours of women exploring this final sexual frontier in iconic porn settings like barns, dungeons and the bathtub.

Now, the trend is poised to penetrate the mainstream consciousness. Powell's is currently displaying stills from photographer Timothy Archibald's startlingly charming new book, Sex Machines. The book pokes fun at this geeky-kinky lot, but it also does them the honor of presenting their lives in their own words. Shockingly suburban images, like a sunny, cluttered kitchen with an electric sex machine crafted from old pasta-maker parts sitting on its linoleum floor, often speak louder than the interviews themselves.

Read the rest of the write-up at The Willamette Week online.

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