Alex K Goes Shopping: Whips & Chains Edition

What a week it has been for newly opened erotica emporium Kiki De Montparnasse! Not only did The Times Thurday Styles resident consumer Alex Kuczynski make her way there to file a report, but New York Magazine's Charlotte Druckman has made a handy graph chart comparing Kiki with the city's other upscale sex shops, the Upper East Side's Myla, and downtown stalwart, Babeland. We already visited two weeks ago, so we are forced into a bit of Cindy Adams style gloating, but just a little, as we want you to keep reading. It's been a big week for Alex Kuczynski too, what with the pre-publicity for her new book beginning. Earlier this week, we learned that she considered heself to be a "method journalist", so it was with trepidation that we approached her examination of an upscale sex store.
More after the jump

It seemed like a too-perfect opportunity for Alex to share way more than she should, as is so often her way. And so we are simultaneously disappointed and relieved to report that even Alex K. is not entirely without propriety, and instead takes on the role of curious neophyte as she allows a fresh faced sales clerk to guide her through some of the more challenging items on display.

She could explain everything in the store with a fluency that belied her saintly appearance. We passed displays of restraint tape ($25), a nonstick plastic binding material used for “the restraining arts,” she told me. She wrapped some around my wrist.

As usual, the charade eventually stretches the bounds of credulity.

We approached a glass case in which a number of small unidentifiable sculptures lay nestled on black velvet.
“What is that for?” I said, pointing to a threatening-looking squiggle of a thing in tempered glass.
The device, she said, her eyes as big and dewy as Bambi’s, was an instrument of pleasure, intended to stimulate an extremely personal part of the body. For those interested in it as an object of purely visual pleasure, it is available for $750 in rose quartz.

We have a difficult time believing that even a newly chaste Alex couldn't recognize a dildo in a sex shop (or we should say "diletto" as they are called in the genteel world of Kiki De Montparnasse). Oh, Alex, don't be so shy. We knew it was you all along.

Kiki De Montparnasse  79 Greene Street, SoHo

Photos by Donna Alberico from NYTimes.com