Having a clean-cut spokesperson helped the fair’s image—and that of the industry as a whole. When he sought their participation in 2004, says Kibrit, he found sex shops on the second floors of the buildings that line Mexico City’s Eje Central, a main street that’s a mayhem of questionably legal enterprises. “I was panicked to go inside them,” he says. Since then, adult-entertainment retailers have acquired a sheen of professionalism, and have been creeping into posh Mexico City neighborhoods: An unabashedly upscale erotica shop, Ficus, was the first to open on one of swanky Polanco’s prime shopping streets in December.

The Erotika Sex Shop chain, the country’s largest sex retailer, evidences the growth. In the five years since the first Expo Sexo, the nationwide count of Erotika stores jumped from 12 to 52. All feature a signature hot-pink facade with a magenta-and-white cartoon dominatrix standing guard. Of those, 18 belong to C.E.O. Uriel Valdez; the rest are franchised by various small-business owners around the country.

The market’s recent growth worries educator Gabriel Contreras, a sexologist with the Mexican Association for Sexual Health. “Compared to 10 years ago, things are very much in public view now, but there’s no broad consciousness of sexual education,” he explains. He points out that few public schools offer sex-education classes.

Of course, some entrepreneurs see an undereducated populace as an opportunity to build business. Valdez’s stores all have in-house sexologists with weekly “office hours” for customers. Each Tuesday his employees can attend sexology classes, and on Thursdays it’s Sex Toy 101. With educated staff manning the company’s almost 11,000 square feet of booths at the Expo Sexo, says Valdez, everyone wins. “We’ve seen the results in our sales,” he says, citing his stores’ nearly $10 million in sales in 2007, a 25 percent increase over 2006. “What people want is information.”

Not surprisingly, the Sex & Entertainment Fair has come under fire for promoting promiscuity. Some insiders have reservations too. José Roberto Cáceres, chief executive of SXO, which markets massage oils and lubricants exclusively to couples, has shown at the Expo Sexo. But he empathizes with its detractors; he says that there’s little middle ground between past conservatism and new promiscuity. “The atmosphere keeps getting worse,” he says. “We haven’t been able to process our sexual freedom like we should.”

Still, there has been scant public opposition to Kibrit’s enterprise: 2008’s fair passed with not a peep of protest from conservative groups, which demonstrated during the first year. For the sake of his profits, Kibrit hopes that public acceptance will follow with his next step: bringing the fair to the Mexican countryside. On May 15 to 18, 80 exhibitors will occupy a tent just 10 minutes from the center of Monterrey, Mexico’s second-largest metropolis. “Again, we’ll crash into the same issues as when we began,” says Kibrit. He seems nonplussed about the social taboos his business plan confronts. Asked how the Monterrey fair is shaping up, he says that it’s padrísimo, Mexican slang for “way cool.”