Please Let It Stop by Jacqueline Gold Read Free Book Online Page B

sorts of restrictions on what it would accept in terms of wording. Even though I wanted female party organisers only I wasn’t allowed to say that and I couldn’t use the word ‘erotic’ so the lingerie became ‘exotic’ instead. The final wording went something like this:
    PARTY ORGANISERS REQUIRED TO RUN ANN SUMMERS PARTIES SELLING EXOTIC LINGERIE FOR LADIES ONLY. EARN THIRTY TO FORTY POUNDS FOR AN EVENING’S WORK.
    The ad appeared on a Wednesday in May 1981 and I was inundated with phone calls, which I answered myself. I have to admit that a fair few were from men, some asking for ‘Ann’ (Summers). In the end I managed to find twenty-five genuine applicants, whom I invited to a seminar the following week at The Strand Palace Hotel in London, something I did each week for a month. I attended the seminars with Chris and Ann who had given up Pippa Dee to become Ann Summers party organisers. I brought with me a starter kit which I made up with Chris and Ann’s help. It featured our products including some of the sex toys and novelties. At the first seminar I was hardly able to stand up and face the audience, I was shaking so much. The women in the audience looked unsure which made it worse but I just tried to get on with it. After I spoke I showed everyone the product range and then made a point of speaking to each attendee individually. We made a note of those who appeared interested in taking things further so that I could go and see them in their homes.
    Energised by what I saw as my mission to feminise the world of sexual pleasure, I threw myself into my work.Meanwhile Tony was getting fed up with his own job at De Beers and was thinking of going off on a complete tangent and buying a local wine bar called the Hungry Toad. He was advised against the move by my father, who then suggested he come and work in one of our Ann Summers shops. We discussed it and decided it would suit him; he was very outgoing and extrovert, and would be good with customers. With that, Tony went swiftly from diamond sorter for one of the world’s most prestigious companies to working in the sex industry. He was very good at his job but being part of my family’s business was making him insecure. There was little doubt that he was striving to make a major impact on my father. The problem was that he wanted it so badly. He was constantly demanding to know when I thought he would be promoted and I would have to reassure him while concentrating on my own rapidly increasing workload.
    At the time I regarded the shops as entirely separate entities from the party plan. They were nothing like the Ann Summers shops you see today but more like old-style sex shops in terms of both their stock and their customers. Their primary market was mostly the dirty-raincoat brigade as well as tourists and gay men. The shops did a roaring trade in nurses’ uniforms and maids’ outfits (large sizes!) among the cross dressers. Items like gags, whips, handcuffs, chains and masks were mostly sold to thepin-striped City boys as well as to judges, civil servants and politicians. Needless to say, these professional men were overly anxious to portray themselves as fine, upstanding citizens who did not really indulge in anything so sordid as sexual play. They were careful not to leave a paper trail, always paying in cash.
    Despite the board’s reservations about the party plan business, they were beginning to discover that women did actually like sex, with the result that the business developed very rapidly. In 1982 I set up a telephone orderline system and employed an eighteen-year-old girl to take the calls. (I wasn’t much more than a girl myself at the time, being still only twenty-one.) At the same time I wanted to make our catalogues more female friendly. Instead of being erotic and playful, until now they had emphasised the seedier side of things. And they definitely did not feature enough underwear that women
themselves
wanted: as countless department