Sex Aid: Porn to Save the Third World

By Steve Almond, Nerve.com. Posted July 22, 2002.

It's not every day that I'm offered the chance to tour a sex factory. In point of fact, I'd never been offered the chance until a couple of months ago, when I visited my friend Sean in North Carolina. Sean works as a copywriter for Adam & Eve, the nation's largest adult-oriented mail-order company. A&E's headquarters is a nondescript building outside of Chapel Hill, just past an artificial lake with several geese. It's full of the standard corporate stuff: cubicles, workers hunched before computer monitors, bulletin boards with perky blood-drive announcements. Only when you take a closer look do you start to see the nature of the office tchotchkes: dildos, photos of porn stars, the odd butt plug.

One of Sean's jobs is to write the blurbs that go on video boxes. This requires him to watch half a dozen movies a day, fast-forwarding through the sex scenes so he can get a sense of each film's deeper ambiance and setting. The porn no longer arouses him, he says, though, given that he's heterosexual, the gay stuff is still a little tough to watch. (He'd just finished up Ass Angels 3 when I visited.)

Sean's tour of the facility included the administrative offices of A&E's film division, which does not house an actual studio — the movies are shot in Los Angeles — but did include two women cheerfully talking P.T.A. politics while splicing money-shot scenes together.

The company's warehouse is 40,000 square feet; it contains, in addition to videos and DVDs of every possible persuasion, the largest selection of lubricants and sex toys in the world. On the day I visited, Sean was quite excited about a new device which, when affixed to the end of the tongue, aids in cunnilingus.

Attractively enough, the TongueJoy™ Vibrator is not the most unusual thing about Adam & Eve. That would have to be Phil Harvey, who founded the company three decades ago as a way to generate seed money for family planning programs in the developing world. Despite a steady campaign of harassment from the religious right and the U.S. Department of Justice, Harvey has become one of the most unlikely Robin Hoods in the annals of American business. By selling sex products to the world's richest citizens, he's been able to distribute cheap contraception to the poorest.

He agreed to speak with me from his office outside Washington D.C. I'd never talked to a real, live porn czar before, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. (A grubby self-promoter along the lines of Al Goldstein? A loudmouth martyr à la Larry Flynt?) Harvey, sixty-four, is neither. He speaks in a flat, midwestern accent. The language he uses is often academic, bordering on technocratic. The very tag "porn czar" is decidedly un-Phil.

After graduating from Harvard in 1960, Harvey enrolled in the Peace Corps. He was drafted instead, and served a brief stint in the army, after which he traveled to India to supervise feeding programs for the charity CARE. "I possessed what I would call a normal youthful enthusiasm to save the world," he says, one he attributes both to Kennedy-era idealism and to a passion for other cultures. His experience in the subcontinent radicalized him. "I was in charge of the pre-school feeding program. Every year we would increase the benificiary roles and every year we'd sit back and realize we were farther behind than when we started. It became very clear to me that shipping food from the U.S. to India was nuts. That if the industrial world really wanted to be helpful to countries like India, voluntary family planning was the way to do it."

CARE officials were less than enthralled by the idea, so Harvey returned to the States to earn a masters degree in family planning administration at the University of North Carolina. In Chapel Hill, he met a British doctor, Tim Black, who shared his vision of making contraception available on a mass scale in the Third World.

The two men launched a mail-order condom business. Sending condoms through the mail was illegal in 1970 due to the Comstock Law, which classified them as obscene. "But we decided to go ahead and take our chances," Harvey says. "As a result of the fact that no one else was doing this, the orders just poured in. Tim and I had no idea what to do. We never had any intention of making money. We were out to save the world."

But both men quickly saw the potential. They could use the profit from their mail-order venture to seed their overseas programs. This led to the establishment of a non-profit, called DK International. (The organization is named after the late D.K. Tyagi, one of India's first crusaders for family planning, who befriended Harvey during his years in New Delhi.)

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