San Diego- A worker installs an eyeball into a head for one of the life-size silicone sex dolls made at Abyss Creations in North County. Although upscale strip clubs, Internet porn sites and on-demand X-rated movies are now in vogue, old-school sex consumers still have places to go in San Diego.
Traditional sex businesses aren’t nearly as plentiful as they were a generation ago, but a flip through the Yellow Pages still yields a variety of services, such as massage parlors, peep shows and lingerie modeling studios.
One such business is Fantasy Shots, on Pacific Highway, where lingerie models offer private strip shows.
“We get all walks of life,” one of Fantasy Shots’ models, Daisy, said of the clientele. “Bums to limos.”
For $40 plus tips, a customer gets to watch one of the models strip nude in a private room for 20 minutes. The only rule is that the customer can’t touch the entertainer.
Daisy, an attractive woman with long curly hair who was wearing a string bikini, said the money is far better than working for one of the area’s 20 strip clubs.
“We’re getting naked for just one person,” she said. “Here, we’re tipped 20s instead of ones.”
If a customer can’t afford Fantasy Shots, there are still a few peep shows in town.
For a $4 cover charge, customers at the Jolar Cinema on University Avenue have access to a back room where women dance in glass booths for $10 plus tips.
Patrons with a few dollars more can go to the Barnett Avenue Adult Super Store, where, for $20 plus tips, they can talk by telephone to a girl behind glass and direct her in an eight-minute “fantasy show.”
Then there are massage parlors, which at one time were as common as penny arcades.
Patrons enter a sparsely decorated waiting room and are directed to ring a buzzer for service. The standard rates for a massage are $50 for a half-hour, $80 for 45 minutes and $100 for an hour.
Although it’s illegal, customers at certain parlors can obtain sexual favors by tipping beyond the posted rates.
These days, the operations, which police say are often fronts for prostitution, occupy far fewer storefronts. Most fell victim to the downtown revitalization efforts on the 1970s and 1980s and the military base closings of the 1990s.
“The massage parlors are just about all gone,” said Robert Brown, a longtime San Diego Police Department vice detective. “They used to be a big deal. We’d go in with a wire and catch them soliciting.”
Those still operating in San Diego are most likely found on stretches of El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue. Others are still operating in Pacific Beach and in Escondido and Chula Vista.
Now, Brown and other vice detectives say, more erotic massage businesses operate by appointment in clients’ homes or hotel rooms and, like escorts, advertise in the Yellow Pages.
For those customers who want to avoid human contact, one North County business has come up with an unusual solution.
Abyss Creations has created a global business by making and selling Realdolls: life-size, anatomically correct silicone figures that sell for about $6,500. The company said it ships about 365 dolls a year.
Shelly Couture, the company’s spokeswoman, said Realdoll buyers range from artsy types to people in the Bible Belt.