Spending any time on social media these days can make you feel, to put it bluntly, like shit. The constant barrage of news, almost none of it good, is enough to make you swear off all of the apps entirely.
But for the last few weeks, there has been at least one notable exception: the saga of the glory hole at Smitten Kitten.
The rumored glory hole, we should clarify. That’s what started this whole thing: an online review that mentioned—incorrectly!—that there’s a glory hole at the Lyn-Lake sex shop.
“Probably like three times over a two-week span, people had come in asking about it,” says Smitten Kitten’s Mikayla, one of the folks who handles social media for the shop. In response, her colleague posted a quick video to dispel the glory hole goss on Instagram, and we mean quick—the clip was filmed in one take, and posted more or less in its unedited form.
“I forgot about the video,” Mikayla says. “When we came back to the store the next day, my comrade said to me, ‘The glory hole video is going viral.’ And I looked up at them and I said, ‘What glory hole video?’”
(We don’t need to explain to you what a glory hole is, right? We’ve all seen that episode of Always Sunny.)
That first glory hole video was posted September 24; when we chatted on the afternoon of October 14, it had amassed 3.4 million views, with thousands of likes and comments. Remarkably, nearly all of them have been positive—we really all need the glory hole in These Trying Times.
Sensing the peoples’ hunger for glory hole content, SK staffers have put out more than a dozen other related clips, “that all did exceptionally well,” Mikayla says.
For example…
And…
And who could forget…
Even neighboring Twin Cities Leather got in on the fun, printing an “I know where the secret SK glory hole is” shirt.
“You couldn’t even teach this at marketing school, because it’s just, like, a one-off phenomenon,” Mikayla says. And while there are probably a few other reasons you couldn’t teach it in marketing school, the point stands: It’s the kind of lighting-in-a-bottle moment you just have to ride out. “We’ve been casually referring to it as ‘Glory Hole Gate,’” she adds.
Staffers have overheard people walking past the shop and asking, “Is there a glory hole in there?” and nearly every shopper over the last few weeks has brought it up. Smitten Kitten even hosted its first-ever Glory Hole Games on October 1, with “Glory Hole Cornhole” that had attendees chuckin’ dildos down Lyndale Avenue. What a world.
(If you think it’d be a bit tricky to chuck a dildo or other sexy toy with accuracy, you would be correct. “We definitely picked out toys to throw that had maximum bounceability,” Mikayla laughs. “Or, if the way they landed was humorous, we made sure to use those ones.”)
The first Glory Hole Games was such a success that SK will reprise the event tonight (October 15), from 7-8 p.m. And if you can’t make it to toss a toy yourself? You can stream all of the sex- toy tossing action via streambet.tv, which will also let you bet on the outcomes.
I say to you again, what a world!
“At Smitten Kitten, we are big proponents of giving people what they want,” Mikayla says—a good ethos for a sex shop! “With everything going on politically and economically, people are in a very tense place, I think, a lot of the time. I think over the last couple years, those unhinged little moments on the internet really take off, even more so as things get worse.”
As long as people are laughing along with the glory hole posts, SK’s social media duo will keep churning them out. At least… within reason.
“I think we’ll reach a point where people are going to start associating everything we do with the glory hole,” she chuckles, “and at that point maybe we should back off.”
