The ‘Fifty Shades’ effect: How a kinky novel boosted the sex industry | The Lookout – Yahoo! News.

Term for the day – soft bondage

The Pleasure Chest, a high-end sex shop with stores in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, saw a 20 percent increase in sales in the aftermath of “Fifty Shades,” according to Kristen Tribby, the store’s director of marketing and education. And sales of items specifically mentioned in the book have continued to be steady, she added.

She likened the book’s impact to what the TV show “Sex and the City” did for female masturbation when the character Charlotte (Kristin Davis) purchased a vibrator called ‘The Rabbit”—an item that continues to be a best-seller more than a decade later.

“It’s not the quality of the book, but rather the conversations surrounding the book that continue to make it something of a phenomenon,” Tribby said. “It’s really changed the way people look at sex. … And for us, it’s really made the mainstream start to take us as an industry more seriously.”