Welcome back to A Slut’s Guide to Happiness where your body is perfectly imperfect, and it’s safe to be as sexual, kinky, queer or slutty as you want. 

Today we are interviewing our amazing guest, Bambi, who is going to talk to us about something we haven’t had a chance to talk to them about yet – undoing shame and stigma around sexuality, particularly through the lens of their work in an adult store.

We’ve talked about full service sex work. We’ve talked about porn work, but we haven’t talked about this aspect of what some people think about is just retail. 

I think it’s super important to recognize that it is so much more than that, that there is sex education and communication and relationships with customers involved. 

I’m excited to hear about the things that Bambi has gone through throughout the duration of their time exploring this in the adult stores. It also has lessons for people who are processing their sexuality, wherever you may be on your journey of feeling comfortable and confident, talking about who you are and what you want.

Bambi, thank you for joining us. 

Bambi: 

Thank you for having me. 

Vanessa: 

By the way, I’m loving your style with your hair. 

Bambi: 

Thank you. I enjoy them. 

Vanessa: 

Owning how you are in the world. I love it. So can you talk about background first? What kind of work you did in the industry thus far, how long you’ve been doing it and why you got into it?

Bambi: 

Yeah. So I have been selling my panties. That’s how I started in the adult entertainment industry, outside of adult retail, actually being more involved in the industry as a sex worker. I’ve been selling my panties since May or June. So that has been about six or seven months. And then from there, I started doing custom videos, video chats and started an OnlyFans.

Vanessa: 

Do you want to do shout out to your OnlyFans? 

Bambi: 

Yeah. If you like me, it’s BubblyBambi.xoxo. Come see me. 

Vanessa: 

That’s awesome. So this is your online work. What did you do in the adult store? Where did that start and how? What kind of work were you doing?

Bambi: 

To be honest, when I got that job, when I applied, I really just needed a job really badly. A friend of mine had worked there previously, said, dude, just apply there. I felt like, h, I don’t know. I don’t want to mop up jizz in the rooms in the back. 

Vanessa: 

So did this place have gloryholes in the back?

Bambi

Yeah. Not the entire time that I worked there. Just pre-COVID. And then once Covid hit, they closed them all down. But at that time, yes. 

Vanessa: 

So you were there for a while. 

Bambi: 

Yeah, I was there for five years. 

Vanessa: 

And that is interesting that you weren’t feeling excited to go sell sex toys and work around gloryholes. You needed some money. So what motivated you to work there instead of a coffee shop? 

Bambi: 

So, funny enough, I actually got hired there, at a coffee shop and a diner at the same time. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how I was going to juggle three jobs. 

Vanessa: 

Oh, you had to accepted them all?

Bambi: 

Yeah, I accepted all of them. I worked about three shifts at the diner. That was an absolute nightmare and I quit so fast. 

Vanessa: 

What did you not like about it? 

Bambi: 

So at my first job, there was this older woman who was mean, And I was so glad I didn’t ever have to deal with her again. But then she worked at the diner. She came back to haunt me. So I decided, I’m not dealing with this again. Bye. 

Then I got hired at a coffee shop and was trying to work from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the coffee shop, go to sleep, wake up, work from 5 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. at the adult store, and then stay up a little bit, go to work at 5am till 11am, go to bed. 

Vanessa: 

This is the story of unlivable wages, where people have to work two jobs to survive. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. 

Vanessa: 

Trying to make that work, but that sounds exhausting as fuck. 

Bambi: 

It was horrible. I had one day off. I insisted that I had one day to myself. So at least there’s that. But I still couldn’t do it for more than two weeks. It was too much. 

Vanessa: 

So then were you working full-time at the adult store? 

Bambi: 

Yeah. 

Vanessa: 

Why did you decide to quit the coffee shop instead of the adult store?

Bambi: 

I felt like the adult store was more fulfilling. They were able to give me more and more regular hours. That was definitely one of the deciding factors. 

And I was really interested in where the adult store was going to take me, like the people that I would meet. There was so much more to learn at the adult store than there was at the coffee shop. Because I had already done coffee for probably a collective two and a half years. So there wasn’t much more to learn in that industry. 

Vanessa: 

So I imagine that the average vanilla person wouldn’t be like, “Hell yeah, I want to go work in the gloryhole. That feels super comfortable to me.” 

You started your sex work online much later. So you hadn’t done sex work before. So what in your history of sexuality or kink made you feel okay or good about going to work at an adult store?

Bambi: 

A couple of the friends that I had who were more open and I would see them and feel a little envious, I guess. I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but I would see them being so free. I was always a very vanilla person. 

I had bought one vibrator ever in my life from the local seedy store. I knew I knew nothing, I knew nothing about toys. I was always a very vanilla person prior to that, never in the kink scene or anything. 

Vanessa: 

Were you monogamous at the time? How did you identify your relationships and your sexuality? 

Bambi: 

It was actually right around the time that I applied and started there that I started to discover polyamory. I didn’t know that that was a thing that people could be. I think through meeting more polyamorous folks and more folks in the queer and kink community, I realized I relate to a lot of them. I felt like that was my vibe so I’m going to dive in a little. 

Vanessa: 

Wow, all of this happening at once. This kind of stirring in your life of relationships and sexuality and kink and working in a store. One of the things that stood out to me was that you had one vibrator in your life, and then you went to work at a store with lots of vibrators. What was that transition like? 

Bambi: 

Oh, they had a good employee discount. So, after five years, I have a lot. My toy collection, I haven’t weighed it in pounds, but it’s probably close to just 40 pounds of stuff.

Vanessa: 

Wow, yeah, that is perhaps more than my daughter weighs. 

So, when you first started, you probably did a lot of training, and not just, how do you ring at the cash register, but also how do you talk about sex toys that you haven’t used? How did that go? How did you learn that kind of depth of things?

Bambi: 

A lot of it was just to go around and look at the toys and play with them and learn and good luck. You’re on your own. 

They would teach us how to use the register and basic stuff like that. But as far as product knowledge, they just said, go around and open up boxes and play with toys. 

Vanessa: 

In your hands. 

Bambi: 

Yeah, in your hands. 

Vanessa: 

There wasn’t a back room where you could test it out. 

Bambi: 

I had so many people during that time, the whole five years, I can’t even count how many people asked me if they could try out a butt plug in the fitting room, as a joke. Probably as a joke, I hope.

Vanessa: 

Yeah. I feel like I’m a pretty open person and I don’t know if I’d want to buy it. Used butt plug if I’m going to purchase it at retail price over there, expecting some new and unshitty butt plugs. 

But, that’s a funny question that people ask. Especially at the beginning, when you’re new to this… I guess as a corollary, when I first came out as bisexual, I was doing a lot of advocacy around LGBT rights, and this person’s just really memorable question was like, “Why do you like pussy?” And how about so many responses in my head since then, but at the time I was like, “ah, I don’t know how to respond to that”. 

So did you have any experiences where you had interactions with customers that felt super awkward at the beginning? 

Bambi: 

Oh yeah. Yeah, for many different reasons. Sometimes it was them feeling awkward in the store, then I picked up on it and I can also feel awkward. It was my job to break through that and I’m sure we’ll touch on that later. 

A lot of weird creepy jokes from people. 

Vanessa: 

Did you feel sexual harassment ever? 

Bambi: 

Every now and then. Honestly, it was not as common there as it was when I was serving. When I was a server, when I was waitressing, I got creeped on way, way more than I ever did with the adult store. 

Vanessa: 

What’s your hypothesis for that is? 

Bambi: 

To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Vanessa: 

That feels different from the stereotype that people would make. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. You would think I would be harassed more in that environment. 

Vanessa: 

So did you feel like you were thrown in? You had training on the register but you didn’t have a lot of training on how to have these conversations confidently about sex and sexuality with customers coming in.

Bambi: 

Right. 

Vanessa: 

So how did you navigate that process of both, learning about the toys, but also, perhaps more importantly, feeling confident talking about sexuality with awkward people?

Bambi: 

The biggest thing for me was to learn from my coworkers. I would watch them, I would listen to them, shadow them as closely as I could without making the customers uncomfortable.

That’s the other thing. It’s a very private, intimate thing that they’re shopping for. Knowing where that line is and like giving them space while being able to help them, that’s something that’s another skill that you have to learn there. 

I think that comes from experience. You can’t really learn that from anybody, helping customers feel more comfortable. 

I got product knowledge from playing with toys and watching coworkers. But making people more comfortable, I think it’s a personal skill. I think that’s one of those things you have or you don’t. How much empathy do you have? How sensitive are you to small changes in people’s behavior? How abused were you as a child? 

Vanessa: 

That’s interesting. Can you tell me more about the relationship to that? 

Bambi: 

Oh, yeah. Having a very reactive parent and having to learn to pay attention to the slightest change in their behavior. That could be the difference between having dinner or being sent to bed bruised.

Vanessa: 

Wow. So that trauma actually also translated into a skill and real awareness of details of people’s behavior and emotional changes. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. It came in handy for something. At least there’s that. 

Vanessa: 

That’s pretty powerful, translating a challenge into an opportunity into growth.

You also talked about empathy. I think there are some people also who have stereotypes about sex toys as frivolous nonsense. 

I remember in the Covid era, when people were having to work in warehouses, sending a lot of things. Many were absolutely terrible, unsafe places with terrible business practices. And, separately, there’s this strange narrative that popped up, that warehouse workers were having to send “frivolous” things like dildos. But, actually, there’s something really meaningful, emotional and personal about the sex toys and sexuality. 

It’s interesting to me that you connect that to empathy, which is a complex interpersonal thing. How did your conversations get to this emotional level? Did they require that emotional intelligence? 

Bambi: 

They didn’t always require that. When they did, I think that a lot of the time, when I did connect with somebody on that level, they didn’t realize it. That was my thing, trying not to influence or manipulate, but to find an in. I don’t know how to describe it. 

Once you know how to do it, you see this thread and you can just grab it and follow it. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Vanessa: 

You notice something that someone expresses that they’re curious about or wanting to explore? 

Bambi: 

Not necessarily that, but maybe boundaries that they may have or something that they don’t want to talk about things to avoid. I think that’s mostly what I look out for, because the things to show them or the positive things, those are endless. You could go so many different ways. 

But you will not lose somebody faster than when you say something you shouldn’t. So that’s where the child abuse correlates, because it’s looking for things that you should not say or do. Being able to pick on those very subtle signs. 

Vanessa: 

That’s an incredible life skill translation. And it also makes me think of something we talked about in previous podcasts that sometimes spaces like gloryholes are an opportunity for, in super misogynistic, homophobic culture sometimes, where straight men can go and explore fantasies of homoerotic desire in gloryholes. 

But sometimes some folks may feel uncomfortable talking about or acknowledging it. Is that a dynamic you saw in your store? 

Bambi: 

Oh, definitely, yeah. We got so many people that were buying a dildo and said, “Oh, it’s a prank for a friend.” Or like a penis pump, like “Oh, my friend has trouble. It’s not for me.” 

Vanessa: 

It’s interesting that they felt the need to say that. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. And they lie about it. Everyone who works there knows. There have been some times that I genuinely did believe that they were buying something for a prank. But most of the time when somebody says that, they’re an older trucker dude or whatever.

It’s okay. I understand that being, especially more blue collar from that generation, it’s very taboo to explore your body in that way or to need a penis pump or something like that. I understand why there’s so much shame and stigma. 

But in those instances, I think for the sake of simplicity, those were not times we tried to break that down. We would just say, “Okay, great. And, does your friend need this?” 

Vanessa: 

Meeting people where they’re at. 

Bambi: 

Exactly. 

Vanessa: 

I see that empathy in you. As a very sex-positive person, you’re also able to see people coming from different backgrounds and having different stigma and fear that they’re working through. It’s great that despite those stigmas and shame, they’re able to also access things that allow them to explore their desire. 

As you worked there more, did you, on a personal level, feel your comfort with your sexuality or body or identity shift over time? 

Bambi: 

Yes, absolutely. The more I worked at Fantasy, the more queer folks that I interacted with, the more polyamorous people I interacted with. I saw myself in a lot of those people. I was creating these new friendships and relationships with people that I met at the store. 

Vanessa: 

It was disproportionately poly and queer people working at the store? 

Bambi: 

Oh, yeah. There were probably 2 or 3 cisgender, straight people that worked there in the entire company. 

Vanessa: 

Why do you think that is? 

Bambi: 

I think a lot of queer people are just drawn to that type of industry, because it’s really nice to be able to help fellow queer folks. 

There’s a stereotype of the nasty straight guys sitting behind the counter in a nasty seedy store saying “hey”. And you don’t want to buy your vibrator from that guy as a young woman or young queer person. A lot of people see that stereotype and feel, I want nothing to do with that, which is super fair. 

I think in Portland, a lot of queer folks would like to take over that industry and take over that stereotype and reverse that so that everybody can feel comfortable going into those stores and buying things that they want to help with their sexuality.

Vanessa: 

That makes sense and is a beautiful collective desire for safer spaces. So you’re meeting all these queer and poly folks, how did that change you?

Bambi: 

I was able to actually examine myself for the first time in my life. I spent a lot of time in very bad relationships, ones where I was not really allowed to be myself. 

So it was really cool being an adult, being free in the world, meeting these people who were even more free than I felt at that moment, after just leaving a terrible relationship. I felt like that’s so cool. I need to know what you’re doing there. 

Vanessa: 

I really value this concept of freedom. For me, I think that’s really connected to happiness, and I would love to know more about what that means to you when you say that you saw them being more free. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. I think they were just less tethered by the rules of society at large, not worrying about what the mainstream thinks as much, doing what brings them pleasure and happiness because they want to. That’s something that I was never allowed to do. That’s something that I want for myself. 

Vanessa: 

What was the process where you decided, my parents or media or culture or society or whatever no longer the thing that gets to tell me what I am and am not allowed to do? How did you make that process in your mind? 

Bambi: 

I think the moment for me was when I was dating somebody who was non-binary, and they used they / them pronouns. They used they / them by default for a lot of folks, as you do. I heard them refer to me as they. And I realized, woah, that felt really nice. Why did that feel so nice? 

Then after spending more time with non-binary folks who I never, ever understood before, spending more time with them, listening to them, hearing their stories and asking them questions, I realized oh crap, that’s also me. 

Vanessa: 

That’s so cool. I hear the common theme, and I think this is something we’ve heard from other people too, is that a huge part of what helps you feel free and get out of those conventional expectations was finding your queer and poly folks at the store, finding your non-binary community, and feeling like, because I have these other people who I’m learning from now, I feel like it helps me to redefine myself for myself. 

Bambi: 

Yes. 

Vanessa: 

So you are increasingly free in your life. And this is a feedback loop. How did that change, or did it change the way that you were able to show up at the store? I’ve heard you talk about undoing stigma and shame attached to sexuality. I imagine that as you’re getting free in your personal life, that also impacted the way that you felt about sexuality and shame in your workplace.

Bambi: 

Yeah. After I started to feel more free and more like myself, I had to resist the urge to scream it from the hilltops because there were times when I just wanted to tell each and every person about it. I wanted them to understand this. I was so excited about it at the time. 

But I felt that I couldn’t do that. It would scare people. I found ways to hold that back and still find a way to communicate my excitement about it, about plenty of different things, not just being queer, but just very gently gauging where they’re at.

Vanessa: 

So you’re, you’re balancing not wanting to cross people’s boundaries while also wanting to support people in getting free the way that you have been. 

Bambi: 

Yeah. 

Vanessa: 

Another piece of shame is I know that we live in a whorephobia society. When you first started working in the adult store, did you talk to your friends and family about it? 

Did you have any internalized feelings about it, and if so, how did you work through any of those things about being a sex worker specifically? I mean, I don’t know if this is true for you, but I think of the adult industry is like the sex work umbrella attached to when you’re working at the adult store. Did you have any stigma or shame or internalized stuff attached to making that choice? 

Bambi: 

A bit, yeah. And a lot of that had come from a previous relationship where I had actually expressed at one point like that might be a cool thing to look into and he shamed me for it so hard. 

He was awful. I was with him for seven years. He said, you’re just going to be mopping up the jizz in the booths and people are going to do these terrible things to you. You’re going to get assaulted at work. Why would you even think that would be a good idea? 

So I just wrote it off in my mind. I’m never doing that. I’m never going to work in one of those places. And then my perfectly normal friend was like, hey, why don’t you just go work there. Actually, now I’m free through this. 

Vanessa: 

That’s awesome, being able to redefine yourself past the ex. You mentioned that you had abusive situations in your childhood. Does that translate to separating yourself from your family? Do you still have contact and tell your family about your work? 

Bambi: 

Yeah. Actually, my mom is my best friend. I love her so much. Her and my bonus dad. I call him dad anyway, papa. They’re very wonderful people. 

My biological dad, I think he lives in Michigan, I don’t know. I’m surprised he’s even alive. I haven’t even talked to him in years. So, bye. 

Vanessa: 

I love that. Boundary setting. 

Bambi: 

Yes, yes, yes. He finally stopped texting me on my birthday, so that’s a win.

Vanessa: 

Nice. So did your mom and your papa know about your work? 

Bambi: 

Yes. 

Vanessa: 

They were supportive? 

Bambi: 

Oh, totally. I really love both of them. My mom knows that I’m being safe, and she said that, as long as I’m being safe, she knows that she doesn’t have to worry about me. And she said, “Yeah, baby, get your bag.” 

Vanessa: 

I love that for you. That’s awesome. 

So I would like to conclude this with a love note. In this case, you mentioned that you’ve met a lot of queer folks at the store who were doing empowering things that impacted you. If you would like to share a love note with those folks or with anyone who’s thinking about working at an adult store, or currently in an adult store? 

Bambi: 

For those who are still finding themselves, anybody who’s queer, who was born with a uterus, all marginalized people, really. I wish you the best. I wish you peace. And I hope you get to a place where you can feel freedom. 

Vanessa: 

Beautiful. Well, thank you very much, Bambi, for sharing all of this. 

And one last time, I want to remind folks what your OnlyFans is your username because you do lots of other types of adult work now. 

Bambi: 

Yes. BubblyBambi.xoxo 

Vanessa: 

That’s so perfect. You’re definitely bubbly. 

This has been another episode of A Slut’s Guide to Happiness with your host, Vanessa Cliff, and our amazing guest, Bambi.

You can find us wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple and Spotify, and on our website, cliffmediaproductions.com. 

If you are over the age of 18, you can check out Cliff Media’s video content, including lots of LGBTQ-led porn our website, cliffmediaproductions.com. 

And most of all, I invite you to join us in the pleasure of being awkwardly human, naked and without pretense.

Let’s get free.