Tupperware parties with a twist

On my last night with Reinertsen, I see how powerful the lure of these parties can be. We drive down a country road looking for Tanya and Matt Willoughby’s place. When she spots a couple of balloons tied to a mail box and a pickup truck for sale in the yard, we turn into the gravel driveway. 

Inside the small house, two photo portraits of Tanya Willoughby’s brothers sit on a bookcase; one brother is in his National Guard uniform, the other in his Marine Corps dress blues. A copy of "The Open Bible," a popular study Bible, sits on the coffee table, and baking dishes of sweet butter cake and other snacks are spread on the kitchen counter.

Once again, this party turns out to be multi-generational. When I tell 48-year-old Peggy Frizell, whose daughter is one of the hostesses, that I’m surprised by the sight of mothers and daughters talking sex toys, she laughs at me.

“We’ve had these parties before and they are usually multi-generational,” she explains. “People are going, ‘That’s your mom? That’s your aunt? Your cousin?’ My sister would be here but she’s working … There’s a joke in our family, ‘Who gets the toys when we die?’”

Reinertsen begins her presentation but, unlike the other parties, about half the women here are weirdly subdued. A young woman in a John Deere T-shirt (“Been there. Cut that.”) eyes me nervously. Reinertsen sweats like a stand-up comic working a tough room.

After a few minutes, I ask for an explanation and they tell me it’s my fault. They have no desire to be exposed attending a Passion Party. They may be eager to expand their sexual menus, but they don’t want the rest of their community to know.

But they do loosen up a little, and begin cracking a few jokes about vibrators and talking about where to go for a bachelorette outing the next weekend.

Somebody suggests Shaft, a gay nightclub in St. Joseph. “I like it there. The gay guys know how to dance, they’re fun, and they don’t try to pick you up.”

Her first time

America Unzipped     |   FULL COVERAGE L. Kleinhenz/Docuvitae A sizzling sex life is no sin MSNBC.com Adult superstores seduce a new crowd MSNBC.com Sex and the suburbs Bob Croslin All dressed up – in latex and dog collars Getty Images file The thrill of putting it all out there  MSNBC.com Are we satisfied yet?

After her presentation, Reinertsen and I sit in a tiny back bedroom with a half-finished Winnie the Pooh wallpaper border — Willoughby is expecting — and wait for orders. (In what seems like a quaint practice, given the freewheeling talk at most parties, all ordering is done in private.)

After a few minutes her first customer, a 26-year-old single woman, walks in.

“I come from a small town,” she says by way of explanation for why she won’t give me her name. “My graduating class was 18 people.”

She’s reluctant to buy, or more precisely, to be seen buying. It would be her first sex toy, “so this is a big deal," she tells me.

“I want the Pulsating Orbiter,” she decides.

Brian Alexander, a California-based freelance writer and MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist, is traveling around the country to find out how Americans get sexual satisfaction. Alexander, also a Glamour contributing editor, is chronicling his work in the MSNBC.com special report "America Unzipped" and in an upcoming book for Harmony, an imprint of Crown Publishing. In the next installment in this series, he attends a fetish convention.

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