The dildo is daunting. At 2.25 inches wide and 6 inches tall, the marbleized green-and-black rubber phallus stands erect on a shelf to the right of the entrance to Early to Bed, a fantasyland of silver stars and slinky sex toys just a few minutes’ walk from the Berwyn El stop on the Red Line. A tag at the base of the fake penis reads “Randy.”

“That’s my dad’s name,” a customer says. She studies Randy for a moment, paying particular attention to the girth of the dildo.

“Is this even possible?” she wonders out loud, laughing, as she moves on to check out Randy’s neighbor, a slightly thinner, longer number named Claire.

Randy and Claire – along with Lilly and Ariel – are the love children of 28-year-old Searah Deysach, the sole owner and operator of Early to Bed, Chicago’s only female-owned-and-oriented sex shop. Although Deysach opened the store just this past September, she says the concept for the store had been brewing for a much longer time.

“Three and a half years ago, I started getting into buying sex toys and using them,” she says. “When I bought my first vibrator, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it or how to care for it. There’s no discussion or help or information about what comes next when you get home … you go into a store with 40 different lubes, and they can’t tell you what to do with them.”

And the lack of information wasn’t the only disappointment Deysach encountered as she entered the world of sex products. She was also shocked to discover that so many of the products designed to pleasure women were packaged, marketed and sold by men.

“We have this idea that women are sexually liberated,” she says. “But so much of our sexual liberation has been dictated by men or by the establishments of men.”

After what she calls “a constant series of little disappointments,” Deysach decided to take the matter of sex toys into her own hands. Then a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she left school and her office job there behind and packed her bags for Berkeley, Calif., the home of two things crucial to her education in the world of sex toys: her girlfriend and Good Vibrations, the 1970s grandmother of female-owned sex shops.

After spending the better part of two months hanging out in the store – essentially doing some undercover research on the selling of sex toys – Deysach returned to Chicago ready to get down to business.

“I thought it was ridiculous that Chicago, which has lots of women, didn’t have a woman-owned, women-oriented sex shop,” she says. “I thought someone was going to beat me to it.”

But nobody did. After nine months of planning, Deysach brought Chicago into the ranks of cities like Boston; Madison, Wis.; New York City; San Francisco and Toronto.

Deysach estimates about 80 percent of her customers are female. Most are in their 20s and 30s and are in partnered relationships – and most have never been in a sex store before.

“That is, for me, the crux of what I am doing,” she says. “That gives me a lot of satisfaction, when women say, ‘I would have never gone to a store like this.'”

But this is not your typical sex store. With walls painted a shade darker than baby blue, tiny white lights strung along the upper edge of the walls and soft blue sheets billowing from above to cover the ceiling tiles, the decor in Early to Bed stands in stark opposition to the neon lights and black walls typically associated with sex shops. Two cushioned chairs, a coffee table covered in books, and a potted plant create a reading nook in the back corner of the store, a respite for first-time visitors from the dildos, vibrators and lubes lining the shelves in the rest of the store.

The store is a cozy place, a reflection of Deysach’s comfort with all things sexual, something she says was encouraged, in particular, by her father.

“My dad, who died six years ago, would have been in seventh heaven if he knew his daughter had opened a sex shop,” she says.

A medical school drop out, Deysach’s father was the one she and her siblings went to with questions about sex.

“What it was that he gave us was this sort of openness to this idea of sexuality,” she says. “He gave us the language.”

The importance of “the language” is evident in Deysach’s store. On the coffee table, a copy of Punk Planet magazine is flagged with a tiny pink Post-it Note marking the page on which Deysach’s sex column appears. A wall in the store is lined with written product reviews from her customers. Aside from reading these reviews, one of the things Deysach enjoys the most in her business is naming the products.

When a look of recognition comes across the face of a customer holding a 7.75-inch, blue-ribbed dildo named “Marge,” Deysach’s laugh echoes through the store.

“Yep,” she says. “That one’s for ‘The Simpsons.'” nyou