How sex toys went from “sleazy” to “empowering”

How sex toys went from “sleazy” to “empowering”


You know sex toys have officially gone mainstream when a profile of a vibrator company graces the Style Section of the New York Times. In case you missed it in all its newsprint glory, that happened earlier this summer when the founders of the feminist-minded sex toy company Dame Products were featured talking about “Eva,” a “hands-free” couples product, which they hope closes the “pleasure gap.” It’s no coincidence that this $105 luxury item was also the first sex toy to ever be funded on Kickstarter, which bent its own internal rules barring such items from being on the site.To get more news about warrior automatic male masturbator, you can visit pinkkittytoys.com official website.

Dame Products, which describes its mission as designing sex toys “to heighten intimacy, and to openly empower the sexual experiences of womankind,” and its many competitors seem to have unlocked a fundamental formula for success that is equal parts wellness and women’s empowerment.
“I think the fact that we have a more holistic view of sex than sex as this one act makes us a lot more relatable,” Alex Fine, CEO of Dame, told Salon. “Self-love is the key to all of it.”Make no mistake, bringing innovative sex toys to the masses is still an uphill battle, even for high-profile companies like Dame. Often, banks and payment processing services have clauses that flat-out ban any adult-oriented business, and venture capitalists are known to avoid such investment opportunities for fear of alienating stakeholders. But on the whole, sex toys just aren’t the kind of taboo topic they once were, as evidenced by the profits rolling in. It’s estimated that the sex toy retail market will surpass $50 billion within the next three years. And it’s more than just sales. We’re also witnessing the advent of corporate appropriation: Broad City, the girl power stoner comedy series set to debut its fourth season on Comedy Central, will soon have its own sex toy line.

All in all, the world of sex toys is a far cry from the seedy, underground image this market conjured until relatively recently. Naturally, part of this has to do with how far these products themselves have come, quality-wise. But this shift can also be attributed to the way women have taken charge of the industry, using real talk to sell wellness rather than pseudoscience, and empowerment as opposed to sexualization.
“If I were making a food product, I’d probably want to make you hungry and make you imagine eating this amazing food, right? So it makes sense that a lot of people have previously marketed sex toys in that way, and that way when done by men tends to objectify women,” Fine said. “But for us, we see these products as being about more than just sensual pleasure. In fact, I can’t tell you how many women don’t really make it sound like a sex act when they talk about masturbating. Sometimes it’s just a fun fast way of disconnecting, letting go, and relaxing.”

When sex toys were first introduced directly to consumers in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, they were almost never marketed for what they actually were. Instead, they were sold as pseudo-medical implements. Vibrating chairs, wands, and other manually-operated devices were advertised as massagers meant to “improve blood-flow,” though where exactly that blood was supposed to be flowing to was typically left to the imagination. Later models were even marketed as weight-loss devices.