Sherri Williams, the woman who has spent the past six years suing the state of Alabama in an effort to overturn its ban on adult toys, didn't set out to be a constitutional crusader for vibrators and dildos. Initially, she simply wanted to sell them.
    Williams is the owner of Pleasures, a small chain of adult stores in Huntsville and Decatur. They're noticeably less seedy than typical adult emporiums, which tend to resemble windowless bunkers cemented into the highway. The Pleasures branch in Huntsville is in a busy shopping plaza, a few doors down from a Chili's; there, couples in jeans and button-downs browse through zebra-print panties and more inventive products like the Ten-Inch Quivering Cock. The manager, a man named Wayne Tribble, likens the Pleasures experience to "walking into a Wal-Mart. But an adult Wal-Mart." Williams calls the stores "upscale adult boutiques," examples of a retail concept she claims to have invented.
    If there's such a thing as an upscale-adult-boutique look, Sherri Williams has it. Tall with dark blonde hair, a pixieish face and skin the color of a Coppertone bottle, she's fond of jackets and shiny blouses that accentuate her impressive bust. When I met her for dinner in New York recently (she was in town for an adult-industry convention), Williams, who is forty and single, passed her business card around to the waiters, suggesting both practicality and an up-for-anything attitude. "Anyone who knows Sherri," she said in a woozy Southern drawl between sips of a martini, "knows that I live to live."
    Until the state of Alabama intervened, Williams was living pretty well. She opened her first store in Huntsville in 1993 and quickly expanded into her current space, then a second location. Women whose sex lives had been dormant for years flocked to her stores, weighing the pros and cons of the "Silver Bullet" vibrator and the "Wascally Wabbit" as if they were shopping for washing machines. One seventy-year-old widow sent Williams a thank-you card after getting her new vibrator home.
    Then in June of 1998, Williams got a call from a reporter at the Decatur Daily, who wanted to know what she thought of the new law banning the sale of adult toys.
    Williams responded, "What law?"

Sherri Williams, in a Pleasures store

On the last day of the 1998 summer session, the Alabama legislature passed Senate Bill 607, which was intended to update the state's obscenity laws; it's goal was to ban nude dancing. But buried within language about protecting children from moral corruption was a clause that made it unlawful to distribute "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs."
     In other words, the bill made it illegal to sell vibrators and dildos in Alabama. Although the legislature stopped short of outlawing their possession and use, if residents wanted to buy a sex toy, they'd have to travel out of state or order one online.
    In essentially trying to govern the sex lives of its citizens, Alabama is hardly alone. Several states, including Georgia, Mississippi and Texas, have similar laws; others have tried unsuccessfully to institute them. What makes Alabama different, though, is the formidable presence of Sherri Williams.
    With the help of a lawyer and support from the ACLU, Williams brought a suit against the state, charging that the ban violated a constitutional right to privacy. Twice a federal court judge has ruled in her favor. Each time, however, the decision has been reversed in appellate court. Last summer, the 11th District Appeals Court voted 2-to-1 to uphold the ban, ruling that the U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to sexual privacy.
    Despite her recent defeat and dwindling legal options, Williams refuses to back down, fighting not only for her own livelihood (roughly sixty percent of her sales come from sex toys) but for the unalienable right to battery-assisted masturbation. "Our nation was born because we revolted against politicians legislating morality," she says, sounding like the Norma Rae of dildos. "This case is not just to repeal the ban on toys; it's to kick the government out of our bedroom."


With its pickup-driving populace and abundance of fundamentalist churches, Alabama is a red state in all the stereotypical ways. The attorney general who first defended the ban, Bill Pryor, is now a federal judge, appointed by the Bush White House for his conservatism. Huntsville, a city of 158,000 near the Tennessee border, is the most progressive in the state; it's home to NASA's rocket program, whose engineers and scientists ensure an educated and socially liberal mix. But drive twenty minutes outside of town, and rusty cars junk the lawns like a scene from Deliverance. "This is the buckle of the Bible belt," one Huntsville resident says. "People here aren't even sure if they should be having sex with the lights on."
    But what's curious is that there has been no apparent support for the sex-toy ban, either before it passed through the legislature or after. There's also no moral engine driving it — no conservative political group, no heavily perspiring, holy-rolling Southern preacher. Williams' lawyer, Mike Fees, says there has never been a concerted effort in Alabama to ban sex toys. "I have not run into a single soul that has approached me in six years and said they think I'm wrong," says Fees. "In a worst-case scenario, I think you could say people are ambivalent."
    Fees is a curiosity himself. A big, genial man with a graying beard, he's a seasoned trial lawyer who was raised in Huntsville and now represents the city in civil lawsuits. Until the Williams case, he had never had any contact with the ACLU. "I agree with them in many ways," Fees tells me in his wood-paneled

office downtown, "but I'm something of a gun enthusiast, and in my opinion, they forgot the second amendment."
    Fees took the case because he sympathized with Williams, and because no other lawyer in town would. Since then, many have assumed he is counsel for the adult industry. "I started getting calls from dancers in town, saying, 'we're getting arrested for wearing T-backs. Can you represent us?'" says Fees, chuckling at the notion of being considered an expert on thongs.
    Williams vs. Alabama is a comedy in its own way. According to several people involved in the case, the ban on sex toys was passed by mistake. The details vary depending on who's telling the story, but the general outline is as follows: several years ago, a Huntsville preacher built a church next to a topless bar and promptly decided that his new neighbor was a negative influence on the community. The preacher approached a state senator named Tom Butler, who then approached a local prosecutor and asked him to find a law that would prohibit nude dancing in Madison County. Legislation was borrowed from a nearby state (some say Georgia, others Indiana) and offered as SB 607.
    In what proved to be a crucial oversight, none of the legislators (including the bill's sponsor, Tom Butler) read the bill before voting unanimously to pass it. When the portion banning sex toys was later brought to Butler's attention, he sheepishly responded that he had nothing, per se, against them. When accused of governing bedroom activities, he countered that Alabamians were free to skip over the state line to buy vibrators. Now, he refers all questions to the Madison County District Attorney's office.
    So the citizens and lawmakers of Alabama have been left with a dubious law for which there is no real support. "The city attorney and county prosecutor have far more problems to worry about than the sale of adult toys," says Fees, who works closely with both parties. Even the state attorney general seems to be defending the ban more out of prosecutorial duty than belief in its validity. Asked to be interviewed for this article, a representative for the attorney general's office offered this reply: "The Alabama Legislature passed this Act and Alabama law requires the Office of Attorney General to defend it in court. This Office will do its duty."
    But while no one is actively campaigning against the sale of adult toys, there has been little public effort to overturn the ban: no pamphleteering, no pro-vibrator rallies. During the early stages of the lawsuit, the California adult-toy company Good Vibrations offered to airdrop vibrators over the populace. In a more serious mood, several adult-toy distributors hired a lobbyist to appeal to the Alabama legislature, but a bill to void the ban failed to pass in 2002. And although Pleasures customers are sympathetic, most would never state so publicly. Masturbation, it seems, remains too personal an issue.

The Pleasures store in Huntsville

While the number of people in Alabama who use sex toys is greater than some would like to believe, only a select group are willing to testify about it in court. For her part, Sherri Williams has always possessed a rebel streak. Raised in Kentucky, at age eighteen she loaded her belongings into a 1973 Nova, borrowed $250 from her grandfather and moved to Chicago, where she found a job at a shady adult store on the South Side. "I was so naïve. I lasted three weeks," recalls Williams, laughing. "I quit right after I found out what the holes in the walls were for. The manager called them glory holes, which is what I called the place: the Glory Hole."
    Years later, Williams opened her own stores with a similar mix of southern charm and pluck. "I asked the mayor in Decatur, did he mind if I open a store like that in his town?" says Williams. "He said he did mind. I said, 'Well, I'm opening the store anyway. I just wanted to be considerate and let you know my intentions.'" After she opened, Williams says, "I was nearly zoned out of existence." She then hired a top-notch strip-club lawyer from Tampa to zone her back in. As Williams puts it, "I'm not a lay-down-and-die kind of person."
    In addition to Sherri Williams, a small group of sexually liberated co-plaintiffs are named in the ACLU suit. In February of 2002, they gathered at the Huntsville courthouse to give sworn depositions to a lawyer for the Attorney General. Among those present were Williams; B.J. Bailey, a woman who throws in-home sex toy parties; Deb and Benny Cooper, a married couple who believe sex toys saved their relationship; and a thirty-three-year-old woman named Alice Jean Cope who has difficulty achieving orgasm without sex toys.
    A lawyer named Tom Campbell conducted the deposition for the state. Later described by several of the co-plaintiffs as a mild, balding man in his mid-forties who resembled Mr. Magoo, he was visibly embarrassed by the line of questioning his job required. Several times during the proceedings his face became flushed. The co-plaintiffs, meanwhile, seemed to delight in detailing their sex lives.
    At one point in the deposition, Campbell asked Deb Cooper, a prenatal nurse, what kind of adult toys she used.
    "Well," said Cooper, "I currently have a little briefcase full. But we have — I guess it's like a little red vibrator cock. And there's the Jack Rabbit, which vibrates and swirls around like this." Cooper rotated her hand before going on. "And then we have the Cyberskin, which you can put on your husband's penis to make it longer. Then we have — it's kind of like a Silver Bullet, but it's not; it's a little bit longer

and it has little attachments that you can put on."
    "Do you have any other sexual devices?" Campbell asked.
    "I think that's about all of them," Cooper replied.
    Reading the deposition, you can almost see the sigh of relief pass over Campbell's face as the line of discussion ends. Later, the lawyer asks Cooper's husband, Benny, about his own use of sex toys. "Ever use them alone?" Benny Cooper was asked.
    "Sometimes."
    "And do these devices serve any kind of medical purpose?"
    "I don't know what would be medical," said Cooper. "It's a stress reliever."
    "Does it serve any kind of psychological purpose for you?"
    "I guess it does, yeah," replied Cooper. "It's like a crutch or something, you know. It helps to achieve maximum pleasure."
    A brief pause followed, as if to allow the lawyer time to contemplate the concept of maximum pleasure. "Let me shift gears . . . " Campbell said.
    Since the lawsuit was originally filed, Williams has distanced herself from the other co-plaintiffs, particularly B.J. Bailey, whom she considers something of a loose cannon. There's an undercurrent of competition between the two women, as if Huntsville isn't big enough for two vibrator vendors.
    Yet their belief that the ban is ridiculous remains mutual, and, surprisingly, something that has never been refuted. Although Alabama's attorney general has fought two successful battles to overturn rulings that would have lifted the ban, the office has never championed the law itself. In fact, officials have candidly

Mike Fees

admitted during proceedings that it's absurd. Their principal concern isn't whether it's a good law, but whether it's unconstitutional.
    "In some respects, it comes down to how you define the issue," explains Fees. "Is there a constitutional right of privacy to sell and use adult toys? When you narrowly define the issue that way, you can easily come to the conclusion that, no, there is not. Our argument is that the right of privacy protects intimate relationships between consenting adults. Adult toys would be protected under that broader umbrella."
    So far, the 11th Circuit Court has disagreed.


B.J. Bailey and her husband, Dan, live about twenty miles north of Huntsville in a two-story, peach-colored house they describe as their dream home. It was built with the proceeds from Saucy Lady, the company by which Bailey throws parties to sell sex toys, Tupperware-style.
    Bailey is perhaps the person who's been most affected by the ban. Her target customers are women who are too intimidated to shop for sex toys in a store — women who have, no doubt, been further shamed by SB 607 — and her business model relies on a network of distributors who host their own parties and kick a percentage back to Saucy Lady. Since the ban, many of those distributors have quit, and Bailey has had trouble attracting new ones.
    A trim, anxious woman of fifty-one with pale skin and ginger hair, Bailey has a tendency to grow agitated when talking about the ban, her voice becoming gradually louder until she breaks the tension with a nervous laugh. She seems most upset by the hypocrisy behind the ban, which permits a sexual aid like Viagra to be championed by the same lawmakers who deem products geared to women obscene. "I bet there's not one Baptist church I could go into and not see one of my customers," she says, sitting in her family room, which is cheerfully decorated with Gone With the Wind memorabilia. "The lawmakers don't understand women's sexuality."
    While Sherri Williams is a businesswoman first and a cultural crusader second, Bailey views herself as an intimacy educator who's liberating the boudoirs of the South. In discussing sex, she is frank. "Men want a tight vagina," she tells me shortly after we meet. "If men have a choice between the Grand Canyon and tight, they want tight." In discussing her own coital history, she says, "Oh, honey, I faked orgasms until I was twenty-eight. My mother didn't tell me anything about sex."
    "I tell the women, 'Do your Kegel exercises,'" she continues. "If you don't do Kegels, your vagina can fall right out. A lot of women don't even know to use a water-soluble lubricant," she adds, shocked. "They

B.J. Bailey

use Vaseline, Crisco. One woman says her husband wanted to know if he could use gun-cleaning oil. Gun-cleaning oil!"
    Organized on steel shelves in the couple's garage are the various products that Bailey promises will unlock the door to sexual satisfaction: Coochy shave cream; the Flexi-Pleaser; the E.T. Finger. "This is the No. 1 seller," says Bailey, pointing to a product called Silky Sheets Spray, a bed-and-body talc that comes in flavors like Mystical Musk. "It has pheromones. Anything with pheromones is big." To date, Bailey has given 2,196 in-home parties.
    "Women in the South are raised to think their primary goal is to get married and have kids," says Williams. "They've been held sexually subservient to men for so long. These women have a need, and they used to be chastised for having the need, but society is finally starting to be comfortable with women's sexuality." The adult-toy ban, says Williams, "sets women back twenty years."
    One of the more noticeable ironies in the case is that vibrators have been in existence since the 1880s. According to historian Rachel P. Maines, they were the fifth household device to be electrified, right after the sewing machine, tea kettle, toaster and fan (and before the vacuum cleaner). Indeed, Bailey and the Pleasures staff both approach sex toys as if they were just another product designed to rescue women from numbing routine. Holding up a pocket-sized vibrator with a small cord attached, Bailey says, "I tell women to strap one of these under their dress. Takes the drudgery out of housework."
    Since their most recent defeat in July, Williams and her legal team have filed a motion asking the entire 11th Circuit to review the case and overrule the 2-1 decision. The motion was denied, but the court left an opening for the plaintiffs to pursue the issue again in the lower court. "We are suing for a fundamental right," Williams says. "We're not giving up."
    Williams still sells sex toys at her stores, and has since the ban was passed. Both sides seem to have an understanding that until a final legal decision is made, it's business as usual. This doesn't seem to bother the local police, who apparently don't relish the task of arresting a woman for selling dildos — or encountering someone they know buying one.
    Meanwhile, in case the final decision doesn't go her way, Williams is opening another shop next to Pleasures in Huntsville. A combination hookah bar and adult video store, it will carry a wide selection of the graphic XXX movies her romance boutiques have shied away from. "I don't believe in exploiting women," says Williams of her decision to carry traditional porn, "but because of the adult-toy ban, I may have to now." Taking inspiration from her legal battle, she has named the store Hipocratease.  n°

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