Modern Sex

Exploring My Prostate One Eggplant at a Time

The adventure of purchasing my first dildo in Seoul, South Korea

Koreans are discreet. Their capital, Seoul, is made up of satellite cities — smaller cities that are thirty to sixty minutes outside of the city proper. If you take the red or yellow lines from Gangnam, you’ll find yourself in one called Seongnam, within that is a district called Bundang, and a neighborhood called Jukjeon. From the subway stop, you go right to find a store called E-Mart, similar to Walmart or Target, and inside, you’ll find Electromart. There, between the beauty supplies and gaming gear, through a virgin white store of revitalizing electronic facial masques, there is a door with a sign that reads 19+. Inside, there is a pale young shop boy named Jun. He is very shy.

I grew up in the 90s and early 00s when sex toys were still being socially advertised as female-only products. But that didn’t stop my curiosity. As a teenager, I was something of a DIY sex toy masturbator: An escalation of inserted Sharpies, a variety of soft fabrics, a squishy water snake from the Boston Aquarium Gift Shop, a rubber band here, a bit of rope there. And, for some time, I became very interested in my belly button.

My roaring twenties involved a lot of sex, and I mostly used sex toys as props in various performances. They were never mine, and I was never allowed to take them home to practice. Now, fifteen years later, I’ve started to re-examine my teenage obsession with a more mature eye, like revisiting a favorite book. And, more importantly, with money.

As a basic bougie bitch, I started where I always start. On Amazon. “Male Sex Toys.” The leading contender was, of course, the Fleshlight. I had heard of the Fleshlight for two reasons. First, as the punchline to every virgin joke throughout my college years. Second, because once my friend Matt had smoked too much pot and spent an entire day on a forum dedicated to them. “They call fucking the Fleshlights ‘flights’ and based on how many times they’ve fucked it, they give themselves rankings! There are pilots, and sergeants, and commandos and stuff. It’s wild, man — wild.” I was in college in the late 2000s into the 2010s and sex toys had drifted into the realm of possibility for men, but they clearly marked you as a weirdo.

I wasn’t prepared to make my way through the ranks of the Fleshlight Air Force just yet, so I settled for something called a Quickshot. It looked like my trusty old water snake — a fat little waterbed straw — except this had a thick plastic belt around the middle. I ordered it. And this is when Amazon’s algorithm kicked in. I’ve made 50 orders on Amazon over the past six months, so as soon as I buy something new, the ads turn ravenous: handcuffs, lube, sex dolls, prostate massagers, eggs, blowjob machines, something called a Quickshot Launcher. But it was the prostate massager that caught my eye. And, it was the first thing to catch my eye as I entered the clean, white-walled, fluorescent-lit sex shop in the Electromart of Jukjeon, South Korea. I’d gone to the store for a new keyboard, but, per usual, I walked out with something entirely different.

I was listening to The Black Tower on Audible when I walked in. There was a sectioned basket of discount toys right in the front, and I started rummaging through them when I noticed the clerk was trying to get my attention. He was young, a boy mostly, and I doubt he’d seen the other side of twenty yet. I pulled off my headphones and smiled. “ID?” he asked. He was clearly nervous. I frowned at him. I am not a bad looking thirty, but I clearly look thirty. I showed him and said, “A bit over nineteen.” He laughed, and I perused.

In the first section of the basket were several small vibrators shaped like vegetables. There were four out of the box that all had stickers that said, “TRY ME!” There was corn, carrot, zucchini, and eggplant. I picked up the eggplant and clicked it a few times. It was dead. I rolled it around in my palm, closed my fist around it, and thought, “I could fit this in my ass.” Then I frowned and placed it back where I found it. I wasn’t embarrassed as much as startled by the calm way my brain came to that conclusion. I am not shy, but I thought at least some apprehension was called for.

I turned to find the shop boy looking over my shoulder.

“That is the best one,” he told me. “But — hm — sold out?” he added, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

I put the eggplant back and strolled over to the wall of vibrators. He stood three feet from me and watched.

“You can try,” he said, reaching across and picking up a large vibrator and clicking it on. He put it in my hand.

It was warm. This, clearly, would not fit. “Do you have any that are the size of the eggplant?”

“Eggplant?” He eyed the bottom shelf of truly massive dildos.

“No!” I said quickly, “No, like that one over there.” I pointed to the baskets by the front.

“Ah!” he nodded and reached up to grab a small dildo from the shelf. He put it in my free hand.

Not knowing the etiquette here, I awkwardly weighed them back and forth as though testing to see just how much weight my butt would hold. I looked down at the small one. It was better, more what I was looking for, but had a little clit-massager on it. I don’t know about other butts, but mine doesn’t have a clit, so I asked, “Do you have one without this little thing?”

His face went a shade of pink, and I realized that he’d just realized something: I was not shopping for my girlfriend. He let out a nervous giggle, reached over, and plucked the massive dildo from my hand.

“Umm…,” he said.

I waited.

“Hmmm…,” he went on.

And so I said, “I can just browse, you know.”

He let out a great sigh of relief and said, “Thank — ” cut himself off and scurried back behind the counter. I browsed. It seemed that South Korea was not the place to rediscover solo butt stuff. There were plenty of dolls, fake vaginas, handcuffs, lube, condoms, games, but a suspicious lack of anything that said “prostate.” (Though there seemed to be no issue taken with child-like anime sex dolls). I realized that, while I felt like the world of modern sex had moved on to where the modern man could peruse some prostate simulators, the sex world of Korea had not.

I made my way over to the lube. I figured the Quickshot didn’t come pre-lubed, and, if it did, I’d likely not be too keen on it. That is when the shop boy reappeared.

“I can order you the eggplant,” he said. He was holding a pad of paper, and his hands were shaking a little.

“Great!” I said, “Let’s do it.”

He beamed.

“And, this.” I handed him a bottle of K-Y lube.

He took it and said, “It is thirty-thousand won for free shipping You are at twenty-seven.”

“So, I need to spend three thousand more?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.” I looked back at the shelf. There were a number of odds and ends: a wide selection of lube, nipple clamps, and an assortment of games including sex Jenga, sex cards, sex dice, and so on, all in Korean. I was about to start browsing again, but the shop boy reached in front of me and grabbed a box of finger condoms.

“These. Three thousand. For finger. You put them on, so your fingernails don’t cut when you rub her…” He had his hand halfway to his crotch and then paused. His face went the same shade of pink as before, and he laughed nervously. “Or…or…,” he stumbled.

I saved him by half-shouting, “Great! No, these are great — I’ll take them.”

We walked over to the cash register together, and he started filling out the paperwork. I handed him my phone with my address typed out in Korean. He didn’t say anything as he entered my details, but when he got to the end, he asked, “Do you want a safe delivery?”

“Safe?” I asked.

“Safe,” he repeated.

“Safe, like, they’ll check it for anthrax or something?”

He frowned. “No,” he said. “No.” He hunted around his mind for a moment before making a face like someone who had just snagged something that’d been stuck in their teeth and cried, “WIFE!”

“Wife?”

“Yes.”

“No — no, no. I don’t think I’d marry someone who didn’t approve of these purchases.”

There was that pinkish cheek-burn again. This boy was surprisingly shy for working in a sex shop. If it weren’t for the sold-out eggplants, I might’ve wondered if he’d ever had a customer before.

We made our awkward goodbyes, and he told me my “shipment” would arrive sometime next week.

When I walked out of the sex shop, an old Korean woman was walking by. She stopped, locked eyes with me, drifted to the 19+ sign above my head, and then, instead of looking back at my face, she trailed down to stare directly at my crotch. Then, she jumped a little, looked away, and scampered off.

“Get with the times, lady,” I said, not loud enough for her to hear me. But it wouldn’t have mattered if she had — she wouldn’t have understood.

Modern Sex is a new column with a focus on the ever-evolving modern landscape of sex. We want to offer a place where we can see sex and sexuality develop.

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