The cashier with green press-on nails and wispy blonde hair looks up shyly when asked whether Lucky Seven regularly stocks Playgirls.
"We usually sell out of Playgirl pretty quick. We only get like five a week, and sometimes the rack is empty in a few days," said Donna, who did not want to give her last name.
The Lucky Seven store on the Corner, which sells everything from candy to condoms, has a wide selection of mainstream magazines - and quite a selection of not-so-mainstream publications.
On the right-hand side of the stale-smelling store, a myriad of glossy magazines line the shelves. The bottom portion is devoted to titles such as Cosmopolitan, Newsweek and Vanity Fair. But at eye level in the back, those covered in opaque wrappers announce headlines like "Teen cheerleaders' lesbian orgy" and "Voted #1 in downright dirty hardcore." These magazines are called things like Fox, Hustler, Busty Beauties and Leg World. A 'variety pack' can even be purchased at a discount cost.
At the register, the tab on three magazines, Hawk, Fox and Sweet 18 comes to just under $20.
Donna said she is uncomfortable with some of the adult magazines the store sells. When ringing up the magazine, Sweet 18, a magazine with a feature story entitled "Brook: A hot-to-trot vixen who loves older men!," Donna makes a face.
"I don't like the ones with the young girls. It's just weird when 50-year-old men come in and buy those magazines," she said.
Despite the overwhelming collection of male eye candy, however, the store carries only one magazine catered to a female audience: Playgirl. But on this occasion, there are none to be found.
When The Cavalier Daily called Lucky Seven with the intention of speaking with a manager about its adult magazine stock and the lack of female-oriented pornography, a cashier hung up abruptly saying only, "No thank you."
But this did not deter The Cavalier Daily and its quest to locate both male and female pornography at local convenience stores.
The next stop at Route 29's 7-Eleven yielded no flesh magazines whatsoever. The bright, bustling convenience store next to Blockbuster does not carry pornographic magazines. In fact, neither of the 7-Elevens in the University area sells adult magazines.
"The owner of the stores is a very religious man, almost a minister. He took the magazines out more or less for moral issues," said Elaine Webb, an assistant manager of the store on Route 29.
A cashier at the 7-Eleven store on Ivy Road said that whether or not a store sells adult magazines is up to the franchisee, not the national chain.
Finally, a stop at Jefferson Park Avenue's Seven Day Junior revealed that Playboy finally had a companion on the shelf.
The smoky store stocked a healthy number of adult magazines, although the pickings were scant in comparison to Lucky Seven on the Corner. But unlike the Lucky Seven, the Seven Day Junior had Playgirl in stock, with a headline proclaiming "George Clooney: Raw, Ready & Revealed."
There was only one remaining.
A cashier at Seven Day Junior, who asked that she only be identified as Mary, said that Playgirl is the only adult magazine for women sold at the store.
But Mary said that adult magazines in general are very popular at Seven Day Junior.
"We sell a lot, mostly to men. A lot of times we sell out before the week is over," she said.
She said that those who buy adult magazines are both students and older people. "It's a mix," she said.
Third-year College student Areshini Pather, president of the University's National Organization for Women said she believes that pornography objectifies all women and that that there is a disparity between male and female pornography.
"There is a stigma for women attached to pornography, while it's like this huge bonding experience for men," Pather said. "Women have to go to more extremes to find porn than men."
As part of a project for her Gender Studies class, Pather also went on an excursion to unearth female-oriented porn in Charlottesville.
Her search was futile.
She said she thinks that men are attracted to pornographic magazines because it allows them to be more manly and controlling.
"They can take this voyeuristic transgression into a totally different social environment," she added.
Male-oriented pornographic magazines can be readily obtained at local convenience stores, but Professor of Women's Studies Eileen Boris does not believe that this makes it right.
"Pornography reduces people to bodily parts and feeds into a cultural climate that devalues women," Boris said. "It's technically legal but that doesn't mean I can't struggle against it to put the industry out of business."
But Boris said she believes pornography is a contentious issue and would be difficult to ban because it fits into the parameters of common speech and social norms.
The source of the popularity for pornography among men is power, Boris said.
"With these magazines, men enjoy having total control over the young school-girl image," she said.
Although Boris speaks primarily against female pornography, she thinks that it degrades both sexes.
"It gives a false sense of what relationships should be between people. It has negative consequences such as self-esteem problems and anorexia," she said.
While both Boris and Pather believe porn to be an unjust degradation of people, many students pass off pornography as a non-serious topic.
"I think porn is rather silly," said first-year College student Anna McHugh. She said she has only looked at pornographic magazines a few times in her life.
"I didn't find porn for women particularly cool. None of the male models are attractive. And some are just disturbing, like the naked picture of Marilyn Manson I once saw," she said.
First-year College student Levi Fox thinks of pornography more as a rite of passage and recounts the first time he purchased pornography with some friends on South Street in Philadelphia.
"We bought this magazine called Barely Legal," Fox said.
Although he said he does not "read" pornographic magazines on a regular basis, he said that he "is fine with it" - with the exception of child pornography.
Fox has never purchased adult magazines in Charlottesville, but understands why many guys might.
"Porn has pictures of naked women and we like naked women," he said. "I also like those little stories with the pictures. If porn didn't have those stories, I would like porn a whole lot less."
Fox said he believes that men who enjoy pornographic magazines do so because they do not benefit from the real thing.
"Guys who like porn don't get any. And that's not just generalizing from me," he said.
Although second-year College student Jessica Lewis doesn't enjoy pornography, she does find that it sparks her interest.
"It's interesting because it says something about our culture," Lewis said.
Specifically, she is interested in how naked women appear in pornographic magazines for men as well as in those targeted at women.
"Naked women are of course more beautiful than naked men," she said.
Lewis muses that though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with pornography, she thinks that there is both tasteful and tasteless porn. For her, the tasteful porn is "kind of funny," though the bad kind includes child pornography.
For Lewis, the downside of pornography is how it has cheapened the body and made it artificial.
"I think porn has gone downhill. We have narrowed the spectrum of what is attractive with perfection and the help of an air brush," she added.
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