Abstract
This article characterizes norms of sexual morality in the sex toy market, revealing a core contradiction in the morality of gendered heterosexuality. Taking a novel approach to the study of the sex industry, the study’s data focus on producers rather than consumers of sex toys. Sex toy professionals understand women as ideal users whose sexual desire and consumption are morally defensible. Not only do girl-power sex positivity discourses valorize women’s orgasms, but men’s sex toy use is disavowed and even openly reviled by producers. This seems to upend existing configurations of heterosexual privilege, which ordinarily benefit men’s sexual desire. However, the reversal reveals a shared moral feature of gendered heterosexuality, which privileges women as sexually purer than men, who are encumbered with tainting lasciviousness.
[T]here has been a general tendency within feminism to view all forms of perversion as symptoms of male sexuality and all forms of heterosexuality as tainted by perversion. (Williams, 1989: 26)
Sexual behavior is regulated morally by rules prescribing what is permitted in a given society (Foucault, 1985). These rules determine “what is considered right or wrong—sexually speaking” (Fischer, 2011: 38). Sexual morals separate acts into symbolic categories that serve as the grounds for judgments and can be enforced legally, or otherwise. Sexual morals have historically been constituted by mutually exclusive binaries that separate sex acts into either licit or illicit (Seidman et al., 2016), pure or dangerous (Douglas, 2003). The elaboration of immoral sexual acts operated as a disciplinary mechanism of modernity (Foucault, 1978); indeed, perverse sexualities are implied by the definition of the normative (Mulholland, 2011: 119). Gayle Rubin’s (1984) diagram of sexual hierarchies offered a key visualization of these distinct yet mutually constitutive categories of sexual activity. Rubin’s visualization is constituted by a circle of twelve sections, each divided into two by a smaller concentric circle. The internal stratum, or “charmed circle,” houses “good normal, natural, blessed” sex acts. At the outer strata, across the solid boundary are the “outer limits” of “bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned” sexuality (Rubin, 1984: 281). Within this moral landscape, for example, sex with “bodies only” is charmed and “good” relative to sex “with manufactured objects,” which is mapped on the immoral sexual margins.
Modern sexual morals, however, do not just dictate which acts are customary and which are deviant. Notions of sexual morality have come to contaminate the moral standing of sexual actors, such that engaging in a perverted act leads someone to be understood as a pervert, for example. Our contemporary standards therefore do more than just stipulate how people should properly desire and have sex—though they certainly do that. They also stipulate what kind of people they are if they violate these proper standards. In this sense, sexual standards are tenets of sexual morality in a “formalist” sense, or in the sense that moral qualities fulfill three precepts (Tavory, 2011: 273). First, they define a person as a certain kind of socially recognized person, like a “pervert” or a “slut;” second, they provoke predictable emotional reactions, like aversion or repudiation; and third they are expected to define a person inter-situationally to a greater extent than other available definitions of the self. In other words, more than a sister, gardener, or chemist, a whore is always and, in every context, a whore.
How does this formalist dimension of sexual morality inform Rubin’s framework? Certain groups of people are more or less likely to attain sexual morality, or else legitimately distance themselves from the formal moral stain of engaging in certain acts. In this article I explore the relation between Rubin’s binary landscape of moral and immoral sexual acts and the heterogeneity of sexual subjects who find themselves in morally contested locations. To do this, I focus on one segment of Rubin’s sexual pie chart, that of sex with “manufactured products,” or the vibrators, dildos, and other paraphernalia known as “sex toys.”
Much has changed since Rubin’s mapping of the landscape. Women’s sexuality has been relatively liberated. Second wave feminists pioneered sex toys as totems of feminist struggle over gendered sexual prohibitions and inequalities (Comella, 2017; Loe, 1999; Williams and Vannucci, 2005). And today’s sex stores have undergone a “postfeminist ‘makeover’” (Wood, 2018: 51), through a combination of feminization and gentrification that has ‘cleaned up’ the industry (Tyler, 2012: 69). Vibrators are increasingly marketed as luxury goods offering distinction (Smith, 2007: 176; Wood, 2018: 58) to women as “sexual entrepreneurs” (Harvey and Gill, 2011). In all, this “up for it” femininity is now more widespread (Gill, 2009), such that femininity appears more “active, raunchy and sexually agentic … and there is an emphasis in contemporary culture to achieve good, fun, frequent sex” (Mulholland, 2011: 131).
By and large sex toys have undergone a moral relocation from the margins toward the center of sexual morality, as Mulholland (2011: 132) has argued (see Figure 1). Mostly through their association with feminist retailers, sex toy stores vow to deliver “sex positivity and personal empowerment” from retailers who are in it to “live the mission” and “putting feminist theory in practice” (Comella, 2017: 78, 80). Nevertheless, the moral status of sex toys is not entirely uncontroversial; and conflicts persist. Most recently the US Consumer Electronic Show (CES) revoked an award for a sex toy in 2019 on the grounds that it was “immoral, obscene, [and] indecent” (Sharman, 2019). Against the backdrop of these sorts of moral threats, sex toy market actors actively work to define their markets and their intended users. This article offers a systematic analysis of the terms under which sex toys, and specifically their users, are understood by their designers to have moral standing. I catalogue whose sexual desire is understood to be properly served by sex toys, and analyze the moral implications.
The sex hierarchy circle revisited by Monique Mulholland, showing the relative relocation of sex with manufactured objects toward the center.Source: Mulholland M (2011) When porno meets hetero: Sexpo, heteronormativity and the pornification of the mainstream. Australian Feminist Stuides 26(67): 1465-3303. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd. (www.tandfonline.com)
Considering existing research on sexual norms at large, we would expect men to be the target audience for sex toys, since they are understood to be more sexual than women. Yet I find that this is not the case. Instead, it is women’s heterosexual desire that is central to the moral legitimacy of sex toy consumers. At face value, this is a surprising inversion of the broader double standard under which men are sexually privileged relative to women. Yet, this inversion is also unsurprising. Women are less likely to orgasm in coupled sex (Hite, 2000; Masters and Johnson, 1966). So, it seems unremarkable that the majority of today’s sex toy design companies design for the “women’s market.” Can these mirroring configurations of gendered privilege be reconciled? This suggested contradiction—whereby men are privileged in sexual behaviors in society at large while women are favored in the consumer market—is this article’s chief motor.
I identify a notable feature of sexual culture: under which women are generally disadvantaged within practices of sexuality, yet as consumers of sex toys they are distinguished and commended—perhaps even privileged. I reconcile ideas of gendered inequalities in these two domains: those of (1) heterosexual sex, with those in (2) women’s entitlement to sex toys, deepening our understanding of this relation using theories of morality. I offer an explanation of both configurations of sexual privilege using a common gendered morality; positing gendered morality as a confounding variable, as it were. For, heterosexual men are afforded a freer hand in sexuality in general, but this freedom is justified by a morally lesser—tainted, uncontrolled, and even corrupting—masculine desire. Meanwhile feminine desire is understood as purer and more righteous, which explains why women are less morally troublesome sexual consumers. I thereby show how cultural and commercial entanglements in the heterosexual sex toy market complicate our existing understandings of gendered heterosexuality
Literature review
Gender has long been a pivotal organizing principle of sexual moral standards. The traditional gendered double standard judged women more than men for premarital (thus, immoral) sexuality. To some extent, a lot has changed. With modernity came “plastic sexuality,” (Giddens, 1992: 2), an “unbound” sex (Seidman 1991) that now occupies an autonomous domain of pleasure. Sex has thus taken on the “neoliberal culture” of people as singular consumers with freedom to choose how to improve themselves (Wood, 2018: 48).
Despite changes, contemporary standards continue to bind women where they grant men freedom. The “Virgin/Whore Dichotomy” (Tiefer, 2018), also called the “Madonna/Whore Dichotomy” (Tolman, 1994), captures the constraint—women are either judged as virginal gatekeepers or tainted strumpets (Schwartz and Rutter, 1998). Contemporary standards may have moved away from the rigid, mutually exclusive dualism of sacrosanct or sinful, towards a more graded “gendered moralist continuum” (Bay-Cheng, 2015: 279). But an amended gendered double standard remains (Armstrong et al., 2012: 438). Women who seek casual sex outside of relationships today are still judged more harshly than men who do the same, while men continue to be rewarded for sexual conquests. Men are thus privileged sexual actors in that their “conferred dominance” (McIntosh et al., 2003) affords them more freedom to sleep around mostly without judgment.
Just as sexual norms have retained unfair double standards, private sexual scripts show remarkable continuity with the 19th-century “androcentric model” of sex as proceeding in three main steps: “preparation for penetration (‘foreplay’), penetration, and male orgasm” (Maines, 2001: 5). This model is similar to Simon and Gagnon’s (1986) typical heterosexual script: “kissing, tongue kissing, manual and oral caressing of the body, particularly the female breasts, manual and oral contacts with both the female and male genitalia, usually in this sequence, followed by intercourse in a number of positions” (Simon and Gagnon, 1986: 2). These models of sex are “performance-oriented” (Masters and Johnson, 1966), abiding by a “coital imperative,” that considers sex to be vaginal penetration and to end with men’s ejaculation (McPhillips et al., 2001). These scripts affect understandings and expectations; indeed, the only sex act widely understood as “having sex” is “penile-vaginal intercourse” (Peck et al., 2016; Sanders and Reinisch, 1999).
At their core, these scripts assert “a male heterosexual drive discourse” under which men have more active sexual desire than women, who “give themselves” and are mostly passive during a male-dominated activity (Gilfoyle et al., 1993: 217–218). Women are thus primarily understood as sexual gatekeepers who must adjudicate men’s sex drives; and their own desires are ambiguous, constrained, or absent (Hollway, 1984). Even when women do experience orgasms, they often talk about them as if they were passively received rather than actively arrived at (Nicolson and Burr, 2003: 1739). The heterosexual scripts thus naturalize sexual inequalities premised on a “hegemonic construction of heterosexuality which assigns power, autonomy and subject-hood differently to men and women” (Wilton, 1992: 506).
Little of this is contested; whether researchers consider it a patriarchal injunction or a biological sequela, there is agreement that sexual norms and sexual scripts are organized around men’s privileged experiences of freer, more accepted, and more pleasurable sex.
Alongside this scholarly consensus on sexuality in society at large, research on the sex toy industry documents a growth of women’s sexual consumption (Kent and Brown, 2006) in the UK and France (Coulmont and Hubbard, 2010; Evans et al., 2010a; Martin, 2014; Tyler, 2012) and the USA (Queen and Comella, 2008). Feminists were a part of this transformation, but so were the declining profits in pornography following the introduction of the internet. Rising “pornografication,” or increasingly sexualized media, has led to the domestication of sex (Juffer, 1998).
Scholarship is not entirely sanguine about the rise of a sex toy feminism. Many understand sex toy consumption as part of “postfeminism,” a “sensibility” (Gill, 2007) that both assimilates some feminist gains and yet obscures (Moran, 2017), or even denies (McRobbie, 2009), other elements of feminist ideology. Critical of the regulatory function of sexual discourses, this research argues that ideas of sexiness in neoliberal consumer culture “hail” women into critical self-surveillance, narrow sexiness standards and increased emotional labor (Evans and Riley, 2015; Smith, 2007). What’s more, since sexual consumption has become relatively mainstream—even everyday—sexual commodities are increasingly marketed to women as objects of fashion and classed distinction, not merely for erotic pleasure (Attwood, 2005). Sex toys have thus become “near compulsory” tools of women’s self-discovery (Evans et al., 2010b: 115).
Whether or not women are free sexual agents, they appear to be freer sexual consumers. This article clarifies the relation between these disparate sexual sites. In the sexual culture in general, men orgasm at greater rates than women, and men’s sexuality is privileged. Meanwhile, within the realm of sexual consumption, cultural discourses of sex toys promote a girl-power sex positivity that valorizes women’s orgasms and women as consumers. It is within this nexus that I uncover a core contradiction in the morality of gendered heterosexuality.
Methods
I collected data through participant observation for one year at two sex toy companies. I also attended several industry-wide trade shows—events where manufacturers exhibited their inventory, and conducted 75 semi-structured interviews with sex toy market actors. Attendance at trade shows allowed me to conceptualize the industry at large, by observing product demonstrations and interactions between market professionals, and hearing differing visions of what the industry ought to be.
Using the list of exhibitors from the last five years I constructed a database of mostly US-based sex toy companies, supplementing with companies that advertised in two industry magazines, AVN and XBIZ. This came to 126 companies of which 108 were still selling toys in 2016. The 75 interviews with sex toy market actors included respondents from 53 of these companies. Sampling theoretically (Charmaz, 1996), I selected interviewees that participated in the conceptualization of sex toy users. I thereby focused on upstream processes that shape objects that consumers subsequently use intimately. Focusing on market actors on the supply side of the market rather than the terminus of retail, I offer a new approach to the study of sex toy consumption.
My sample of 75 people included 33 men and 42 women, of which 39 were designers and 32 founders. 1 The remainder worked in marketing, advertising, sales, operations or management. I asked respondents about their careers, experiences of designing products, challenges they faced in the work, or in disclosing their work to others. Most rattled off marketing pitches or official language for their flagship products. I solicited less polished, “backstage” reflections on the products with probes or during observation. Respondents also often told me about how the industry had changed, what they expected of the future, and sometimes what they thought of other companies. Some often volunteered information about their own use (or not) of sex toys, which gave additional insight into their understandings of their consumers.
The analysis is organized so as to reflect the lay theories of respondents, which conceive of gender as inescapably binary. 2 I begin by showing how the sex toy industry’s newfound moral standing coincides with the industry’s primary focus on products for women, and a growing ambivalence toward products for men. I then deepen my engagement with the implicit moral matrix by drawing out themes of women’s superior entitlement, refined taste, and sophistication, in contrast with a view of men consumers as coarse, simplistic, and indecent. I conclude that this moral arrangement reveals an assessment that men’s heterosexual desire is baser than women’s purer longings.
Analysis
The expo’s main hall was a microcosm of the larger sex toy industry (Comella, 2010), albeit a US-centric one. Shelves of pink and purple vibrators lined the walls; their shiny plastic forms undulating elegantly, chrome accents glimmering, and the occasional rhinestone winking under the lights. Images of attractive, smiling women and couples beamed on posters behind sales representatives. One marketing video depicted the company logo buzzing as if vibrating, before an unseen woman let out a satisfied moan. Just like in sex toy stores (Tyler, 2012: 46; Wood, 2018: 46), at this expo, the message was loud and clear: these commodities were for women, intended to elicit women’s moans, as corroborations of highly sought-after female orgasms. Only rarely could I find any indication that men were sex toy users. What this trade show had to offer was women’s sexual entitlement to vibration and orgasm.
The symbolic dominance of women’s sex toys at tradeshows was corroborated by a systematic count of companies in the industry. Of 108 companies that sold sex toys, a total of 70 companies (∼65%) were boutique brands that specialized in products for women, 3 as compared to only eight (∼0.07%) that made products only for men. 4 There were also 17 companies (∼13%) that produced for mass rather than niche markets, selling any and all kinds of toys without specializing. One company in this group sold every kind of sex toy except for male masturbators, or ‘strokers’ 5 —a notable exception since it is the only kind of product that is exclusively explicitly designed for users with a penis.
Centering the clitoris
Women are expected to inspire lust rather than experience it. Women’s bodies may be visible everywhere … but as people we are usually absent from the sexual equation. (Kent, 1995 quoted in Malina and Schmidt, 1997: 353)
Sex toy designers often referred to the clitoris as their main anatomical target when describing their design processes. Jasmine, a high-end designer, told me, “We decided to focus on the clitoris and the tip [of the vibrator] is actually designed to surround the clitoris.” In adherence with understandings of women’s orgasms as “complex and elusive” (Frith, 2015) designers understood the clitoris as a challenging target. Several designers estimated average measurements of the human vulva to properly estimate the clitoris’s position relative to their devices. William, a computer engineer, used average vulvas from gynecological studies to model vibration delivery: [We] went out and bought data from gynecological studies. And so, we have—there exists in a CAD [Computer Aided Design] program … a 95th percentile imaged female with all of the orgasm-related components properly located. And so, then we could actually experiment with shapes and say, “well where do these motors hit?”
The focus on the clitoris held true whether the toys were made to be used by a woman by herself or with a partner. Phil, a cock ring designer, had to consider male genital anatomy—since the rings he designed were made to be affixed to penises. But he talked almost exclusively about the challenge of optimizing the stimulation delivered to a nearby clitoris. In accordance with the coital imperative and the rise of couples’ toys as mainstream (Martin, 2014; Wood, 2018), Phil presumed that the ultimate goal for his sex toys was use during penetrative intercourse. This would also be the act during which the base of the penis would come into contact with the clitoris. As such, Phil’s design task required pairing the ubiquitous coital imperative with a new, gynocentrism.
Phil shared with me a design tool he had developed, which he called the “clit stick.” It enabled him to optimize the distance between a cock ring and the target point for delivering vibration, like William’s CAD images of the average vulva. Initially when interviewing Phil, I had expected this “cock ring company” to be more concerned with selling to men. But I came to see that the mandate of targeting women and their genitals, reigned supreme among my respondents. I remarked to Phil, that even when products seem to be for men, they are actually still for women. Amused by my obvious observation, he chuckled, and nodded in confirmation.
The place of men?
With women centered as the primary consumers and beneficiaries of toys, men were often configured as gatekeepers. Just as consumers perceive sex toys as outside extras whose introduction should be carefully managed (Wood, 2018: 30), my respondents sometimes reflected on the challenges of producing goods that could overcome men’s insecurities. Heather, PR director for a luxury sex toy company, confirmed this idea when telling me that “the couple’s angle” made selling sex toys easier: For some reason positioning it with couples makes it so much more approachable as a subject … [T]here’s not as much concern either about “threatening to his manhood” anymore, couples are enjoying it more together and seeing how it can enhance their relationship.
The casting of men as gatekeepers is echoed in public discourse and marketing material on sex toy blogs. Companies’ own online outlets often featured articles written in chatty tones full of self-help tips with promotions loosely disguised as informational articles. One recurring subject on these fora was how to introduce a sex toy to sex with a partner. Responses frequently encouraged women to “start small.” Common advice on how to introduce a vibrator reinscribes the woman as user and places her in the unusual role of initiator, carefully coaching a tentative heterosexual cis male partner. Thus configured as reluctant gatekeepers, men occupied an inverted position, reticent towards toys alongside sexually adventurous and demanding, vibrator-wielding women. Admittedly, these configurations were potentially imaginary, and assessing their veracity is outside the scope of this article. Furthermore, laboring to sensitively introduce a sex toy to a tentative partner, by framing it as “fun” and “silly” to circumvent emasculation (Wood, 2018: 132), does fall to women. This facet should temper any enthusiasm we might feel about women’s liberated sexual agency in such a scenario. But real or otherwise, and emotionally taxing or not, these imaginaries posited women’s entitlement to sexual commodities—and the better sex they claim through them. With women as central sex toy consumers and men as reticent gatekeepers, gendered relations differed greatly from conventional configurations of subject-hood in heterosex.
Women: underserved and underestimated
In other ways my respondents also confirmed some aspects of broader cultures of sexuality. They repeatedly framed women as underserved users. One of the most successful crowdfunding videos raising money for a new vibrator in 2015, opened with a question, “Did you know that a third of women say that recent sex was unpleasurable?” The speaker followed up, “We call this ‘the pleasure gap’ and we’re out to fix it.” Women’s dissatisfaction in unaided sex and, further, their disappointment with existing vibrators came up repeatedly during interviews with vibrator designers; in this sense, the position of women as sexual subordinates was preserved.
Many respondents shared how they entered the sex toy industry, and almost all narrated some shocking encounter with the dissatisfactions and “disappointments” of existing goods. Most were motivated to redesign sex toys for women because they saw them as so egregiously deprived. Like other makers “out to fix” a widespread problem, Jasmine drew on this shared understanding of women, which struck her while at a sex shop, I was just completely shocked and disappointed at the only options that were available to me. All the stereotypical toys, you know, nasty toys that you can think of—those like big purple jelly things and the little rabbit thingy or a blue dolphin, you know whatever. Mainly there were penises everywhere, like of every single color you can think of. So, I was like, wow, this—I mean as a designer I’m paid by Fortune 500 companies to try to make things better, I’m like well you know, maybe I should have a go at this.
For Alexander, it was at the suggestion of his female cofounder that he came to learn about the sex toy industry, but he quickly saw that there was a need for women’s products in particular. The team became interested in “pleasure products or sex toys,” he remembers, and soon had “some conversations about—I guess ‘disappointment’ is a good word—with the level of product that was available … it felt like an area where a lot of improvement was possible and also would be valuable to people.” Almost a decade before Alexander, Peter had also made the same observation about the state of the sex toy industry. In 2004, he found that women were badly in need of better products, noting the sex toys available at the time were “disappointing.”
Peter was an industrial designer who worked at a well-known design consultancy before entering the sex toy space. Soon after it was founded, his company won several mainstream design awards and quickly became a prominent brand. I didn’t speak directly to Peter, though I heard Heather’s (the PR director’s) retelling of the story. Peter’s initial research into the sex toy market, she reported, made him realize there was an opportunity because existing products were so unattractive. Peter hoped to offer women beautifully designed objects. He “actually went to [a trade show] … and felt the quality wasn’t there and kind of was amazed that there was no design in this category.” By “no design,” Heather implies that Peter observed sex toys had been made by competent mechanical engineers, and so were likely functional, but not attractive or particularly easy to use—aspects of consumer goods more often associated with design. Because “most of his women friends owned a vibrator … he felt there was an opportunity to create something that had certain standards, as any products in our lives, and also would appeal to a more—the everyday person—[a] more approachable appeal.”
William also positioned his company as having access to an authentic contribution to women’s choices. He told me that he and his wife Lucy were conducting focus groups to workshop their designs. Though their ideas were not sufficiently developed for him to disclose details about their innovation, William says, “But it’s not going to be some hot pink phallic shape!” By describing the most common and iconic vibrator design—a magenta penis-shape with a clitoral stimulator—William was suggesting that his company was poised to do something different from what was already available. William told me confidently, “that [pink phallic shape] turns out to be not what women are asking for.”
Implicit in William’s statement about the pink phallic vibrators was also the idea that other actors in the industry had failed to understand or listen to women consumers. Other companies offered pink phallic shapes not because women actually wanted them but because it was stereotypically presumed that they would. Instead, as William presented it, his company was going to give them more credit. They were going to give them something they had actually asked for.
Engineer Hannah put this a different way. She disclosed one of her motivations was to counter practices common to the field of misogynist competitors. Past manufacturers, she said, had relied on the taboo nature of their products in order to get away with selling goods of questionable quality; “… because the consumer was women and people were kind of assuming that women weren’t going to call them on it because they were ashamed or were too dumb to realize that it’s behind the rest of the [design] industry.” For Hannah, the inadequacies of yesterday’s vibrators showed that companies took advantage of women’s reticence to complain. Thus, Hannah framed her orientation towards women consumers as a corrective for this corporate fleecing. So, both as sexual partners with inattentive male sexual partners and as consumers with companies looking to take advantage of them, sex toy designers told me they aimed to service unmet needs for women.
It may not be surprising that women’s needs directed sex toy designers to center female genital attributes and women’s tastes. For an industry looking to sell a good, it pays to have a market that has a “need” that can be met by the good. And the discourses of consumption are arranged towards women consumers “working” on their sex lives (Evans and Riley, 2015). But products for women were not just more numerous and resonant, they were associated with high-class luxury consumption (Smith, 2007) and were more respected.
Refined taste and morality
[I] Briefly cruise by section of convention devoted to dolls and anatomically correct toys. Gentleman working area offers me coffee. And sparkling water. And suggests I might want to check out the company’s line of toys for women. They’re super classy, not at all raunchy. (Brennan, 2011)
Sex positivity towards women’s pleasure did not translate into a generalized acceptance of sex toys for all genders. Men’s products were relatively shunned by my respondents; they provoked more discomfort, even among professionals making their livelihoods by selling goods for sexual use. That is, among those most disposed to tolerate sex toys for all, goods for women occupied a high-class moral high ground.
As a direct reflection of their moral inferiority, goods made for men were less likely to be displayed at expos. As I circulated at an expo, I slowly noticed the occasional sex toy for men. They were dotted amidst the vibrators, dildos, themed lingerie, and other goods. More often skin-colored and resembling human vulvas, toys for men were kept slightly hidden from view. Some objects were encased in forms that “camouflaged” their genital likeness (Maines, 1989). The booth for one of the most iconic masturbator brands, for example, featured a table stacked with products shaped like large flashlights. Underneath the plastic casings were silicone sleeves made for male masturbation with openings shaped to resemble mouths, vulvas or anuses. But these more graphic details were not prominently displayed. They were covertly stored under the hard, plastic housing.
Some sex toys for men were in boxes that featured female porn stars. In an industry looking to cement respectability, distinguishing itself from associations with pornography or prostitution was paramount (Malina and Schmidt, 1997), and on these counts products for men were more hazardous. Expo participants’ distastes for pornographic packaging and associated men’s products was consistent with the arrangement of most brick-and-mortar sex shops. Stores commonly arrange lingerie and novelty items (like penis-shaped straws) at the front of the store; and anal toys or love dolls towards the back (Evans et al., 2010a: 7; Coulmont and Hubbard, 2010: 207). As marketer Rita explained, “generally the merchandise with lingerie in the front, or massage oils or games or something that’s appropriate. Then you move further into the store and then it’s more graphic.” To her, stores kept more “appropriate” goods up front, so that the less appropriate, “graphic” has to be more actively sought out. And what qualified as less appropriate and more graphic, tended to be goods made for use by men. It’s no surprise then that the expo’s few life-sized love dolls provoked a great deal of eye-rolling, hushed laughter, and other signals of distaste. During one expo, a sex doll lay on a table while buyers and sales representatives awkwardly navigated around it. Very few people touched it, where vibrators were ordinarily handled by booth visitors.
Not only were women’s toys more approachable and less intimidating to touch, but their acceptance and superiority was also reflected in their degree of sophistication and quality. Vibrators in particular were extremely diverse in terms of forms and aesthetics. With multiple functionalities, a given vibrator often featured two or three buttons to control vibration speed and vibration patterns. Offering repeating patterns of intermittent pulsing, vibrators displayed diverse utility and complexity. Rosemary explained that women had become more discerning. Talking about the specifics of vibrators that offered both internal and external vibration, she said, The angle of the clitoral stimulator to the shaft is really important. And some people just don’t quite understand. They figure if they just stick on a really strong motor it’s fine. But that’s not the case. I mean I think women are definitely getting—I wouldn’t say picky but they’re getting specific about what they want and they don’t want to have to push down this way and turn that way and stuff to get the stimulation that they want.
I was struck by the conversational contrast between respondents designing vibrators and those designing strokers. The former enthusiastically enumerated the details of vibrator designs and the technical aspects of women’s sexual needs; not so with the latter. None described the precise angle of stroker openings, and only one designer mentioned the ergonomics of a device that must be gripped and moved vigorously. Not insignificantly, his stroker came only in one non-skin color and had no features that resembled human body parts. He specifically identified his product as “raising the standard” for men’s strokers. I interpreted this designer’s fervor to be consistent with a courtesy status—as a complement to Goffman’s (2009) “courtesy stigma”—conferred on designers who made products for women consumers.
Boys, their toys, and moral inferiority
Sexual innocence is not symbolically available to everyone in society. For example, adult men are almost never thought of as sexually innocent. (Fischer, 2011: 42)
Equal and opposite to designers’ understandings of women’s tastes as sophisticated and morally superior, was their repudiation of men’s taste. Most obviously: brands for men were more likely to be stigmatized by fellow designers. This often came up when they talked about others’ products and distinguished themselves as having better goods. On the whole, my respondents were hesitant to speak critically of other manufacturers; some were even reticent to name their competitors. However, companies or product lines exclusively making products for men were the few objects of criticism and derision.
When the topic of sex dolls came up over lunch one day, several employees didn’t know what sex dolls were, and then guffawed and sighed with repulsion when they were explained. Soon after, the lead salesperson, Lisa, told me about a line of toys made for men that had been a notorious failure. It was the brainchild of a former executive running a mass-market manufacturer. When the product line was released it made “everyone so outraged and disgusted.” Why, I followed up? Lisa inhaled deeply as if to steel herself before going into the details. The line featured strokers for men in the shape of a vulva, an anus, and mouth, with themed lubricants that were colored and textured to simulate menstrual blood, feces and vomit. “Disgusting,” she repeated, then noting how this line threatened the entire industry’s credibility, saying, “Come on, we’re already fringe enough.” Even despite having “failed miserably,” in her eyes these products threatened to propagate the idea that all sex toys were equally repulsive.
Though this particular product line was especially troubling because it marketed paraphilia, 6 it is notable that Lisa’s memory of this product line was prompted by discussion of sex dolls. Even un-themed strokers for men inspired this kind of repulsion and dismissal, because men’s sexuality was easily associated with troubling sexual tastes. These specters of sexual “seediness” (Evans et al., 2010a) threatened to disqualify the relative respectability that the industry had managed to accumulate, much as sex toy stores have had to grapple with vestiges of “immoral landscapes” sometimes in the form of “old men in dirty raincoats” or ‘pervs’ who masturbate in the store (Hubbard, 2000; Tyler, 2012: 81).
I met up with CEO Mark at his booth during an expo, and he graciously showed me around and we chatted. The aesthetic of his booth was reminiscent of a high-end department store: women sales representatives wore pencil skirts and uniform silk scarves. They stood by a shiny white counter upon which their products were set. As we talked, Mark looked into the center of the ballroom, and subtly directed my attention towards a full-sized humanoid sex doll, posed on her belly with her genitals offered up behind her, below ample, silicone buttocks. Nodding in the direction of the doll as he talked, he told me that that company was part of the short-sighted past of the industry. They produced “misogynist” products like this doll, and they held back the industry. Businesses like his own, on the other hand, were trying to break into the mainstream, to sell in so-called “big box” stores. Why continue selling to a few small sex shops if you could sell to Walmart or Target? Entering this mainstream would require disentangling the industry from the moral suspicion of prurience, he implied, so as to enter peak profitability. But, for this notion of mainstream, Mark saw products that served men’s pornographic sexual appetites as liabilities. They threatened to hold Mark’s company back by contaminating the industry with politically offensive and morally inferior sexual tastes.
No doubt Mark’s objection to men’s sex toys was widely felt. Those who designed for men were quite defensive, offering me complex or scripted explanations for why their products were needed. The designers I interviewed who worked on vibrators rarely spent time explaining to me why they designed them—they assumed I understood why vibrators were necessary. Indeed, Jasmine was noticeably surprised when I ask her who her vibrators were for, pausing awkwardly before saying, “in case it’s not obvious, our products are for women and for clitoral stimulation,” as if to ask—isn’t it obvious? In this sense, women’s sexual needs were privileged by their unproblematic acceptance in the market. Since invisible advantages that are afforded to privileged groups don’t require being questioned or named (McIntosh, 1995), they operate through unremarkable invisibility (McIntosh et al., 2003). In this limited sense therefore, women’s sexual consumption was privileged in that it was taken for granted.
In contrast, Zach, who specialized in masturbation aids for men, said, “men have a biological need for release and whatever their rate of release needs to be, it’s not the woman’s responsibility to take care of that. It’s his responsibility.” For Zach, a “biomedical framing” (Frith, 2015) for orgasm was best suited to explain why his products were necessary. What’s more, to him, failure to deal with men’s natural sexual urges could lead to problems—most alarmingly, infidelity. So those using his product were able to “take care of that” naturalized need without having to turn to less desirable alternatives. Robert, likewise, worked in sales for a company exclusively making strokers. He compared masturbation to other fundamental needs like eating and sleeping, assimilating it into a triad of biological needs: Masturbation is a natural act to respond to one of man’s basic needs. There is a plethora of products out there that deal with the other two basic needs; the variety of food is beyond imagination, and there is a vast market of products to improve sleep. So why, then, are there no products to facilitate, or even improve the act of masturbation?
Yet within the field of the sex toy industry, these justifications rang hollow. Even as Zach and Robert drew on naturalistic justifications for men’s need to ejaculate, theirs was a marginal and sparse specialty within the industry. Meanwhile vibrator designer William struggled to imagine the conditions under which his company would design goods for men. When I asked “do you expect [your company] will make any products for men?” He replied, “hard to say.” Though he didn’t rule it out, it was much less evident to William that products for men would be next. And even as Zach and Robert saw their products as non-competitive alternatives to ways of improving sex with a (presumed) woman partner, they still defended the need for their products, something that did not arise for makers focusing on sex toys for women.
Conclusion
My respondents reported that for the most part, women were the ideal sexual consumers. Women were more frequently designed for, and most symbolically dominant. It was female genital anatomies that directed product designs (even those made to attach to penises) and women were included during the design process. In these ways, this article documents a reflection of the feminization of downstream sex toy consumption. Yet, this gynocentrism is still in some ways surprising, as it contradicts widespread androcentric sexual scripts of heterosex. Given that broader understandings of heterosexuality indicate that men have higher sex drives, masturbate more frequently, and are willing to exchange more for sex (Baumeister et al., 2001), it’s notable that sex toy companies did not also court or revere men as sexual consumers. What’s more, rather than retaining a dependably superior sexual drive, men were cast as potential gatekeepers whose discomfort with phallic objects threatened to undermine what women stood to gain by introducing vibrators in their partner sex.
Many designers justified their work by mobilizing (post)feminist discourses criticizing gendered sexual inequality. This is logical given the history of the industry, which includes influential feminist advocates and retailers. Indeed, feminist activists were instrumental in shifting the industry through their efforts in the 1970s to advocate for the woman consumer as a deserving and profitable target market. For those who consider women’s sexual disadvantage in heterosex is caused by patriarchal denial of women’s rights, making sex positive toys would be an obvious political correction for patriarchal denial. And indeed, many designers did promote a “sex positive” attitude towards women’s sexuality in a world that is less permissive.
But, critically, I note that sex toy companies’ sex positivity was not equal-opportunity sex positivity. It was not only that women were being welcomed into sexual consumption closer to the charmed circle of accepted sexual indulgence. Women were being welcomed while men were shunned. Women were actually being constructed as superior sexual consumers—as more sexually worthy than men.
The industry’s legitimate focus on deserving women consumers would not in and of itself necessitate a repudiation of commodities for use by men consumers. A permissive attitude towards sexuality, especially one oriented towards expanding the pleasure of specifically heterosexual women, would logically also dovetail with a sex positivity towards men’s pleasure. In other words, just because you’re looking to help women get off doesn’t mean you have to refrain from helping men. But these instances of subtle (and not so subtle) repudiation of commodities for men and their designers show that the project of the contemporary sex toy industry was not merely to raise the standard for women’s orgasmic pleasure, it involved an implicit subordination of men’s sexuality as morally lesser than that of women.
Products for women like vibrators were not only more proudly displayed in the expo context, but their designs were also more technologically complex and associated with high-class aesthetic refinement. Women’s implied sophistication conferred a purifying courtesy status, a ‘classiness’ that reflected back onto designers of high tech vibrators, much like “courtesy stigma” contaminates those working closely with stigmatized groups (Goffman, 2009). Meanwhile, goods for men’s pleasure were often camouflaged, or else hidden at trade shows. The often-pornographic forms of toys for men made them more symbolically loaded and intimidating than vibrator designs that were pink, purple or shaped like teddy bears or cupcakes. Those designers who made toys for men were criticized even by their fellow designers, who otherwise adopted a sex positivity that was intentionally nonjudgmental and permissive. This made it less surprising, perhaps, that those specializing in male masturbators went to greater lengths to justify their products.
Considering the moral underpinnings of heterosexuality
Men who consume sexual material are therefore typically understood as sexual, seedy and problematic. (Evans et al., 2010a: 6)
How are we to make sense of this focus on women’s sexuality in light of assumptions that men like and need sex more, alongside well-documented double standards towards women’s sexuality? It initially appears that these data uncover an inverted gendered double standard in the site of consumption. Upon closer inspection, however, we see that the gendered inversion is caused by features of heterosexuality that are internally consistent with the extant double standard. Since norms of heterosexuality are shared between these two sites, their distinctions illuminate an underemphasized feature of heterosexuality—namely, gendered morality.
These sex toy professionals found legitimacy in making products that helped women attain orgasms, and more actors in the industry chose to do that. It was more onerous to make products for men, since a focus on men risked the taint of their sexual prurience. How then can such prurient male sexual consumers be sexually privileged subjects in general? I argue that foundational to the male sex drive discourse—which constructs men as having an urgent and unstoppable biological need for sex—is an implicit evaluation of men’s sexuality as morally lesser than that of women. Simply put, men’s sexuality is understood as just more ‘gross’ and ‘raunchy’ than women’s desire, which is acceptable and high-class. Women’s sexuality may, till recently, have been less permitted, but it was also constructed as more moral, purer—and therefore is today a more acceptable consumer indulgence than masculine sexual desire.
This moral feature of heterosexuality, which is revealed in the sex toy industry’s struggles with moralization, is both remarkable, and ironic. The configuration of sexual entitlement and morality means that it is precisely because of men’s privileged sexual desire that their sexual consumption is treated as tainting and repellant. Theirs is a sexuality that is both given a free pass, yet repugnant. Conversely, precisely because women’s sexual agency has been de-emphasized in cultures at large, they are conferred status as purer, more sophisticated sex toy consumers.
Till now, research on sex toy consumption has largely focused on massive historical changes which have either enabled women to claim vibrators as tools of liberation—or alternatively—assigned women the added responsibility of using consumer goods to work on their sexiness. But both accounts, whether optimistic or critical, emphasize transformation. This study finds there is remarkable continuity in the regimes of gender and the moral legitimation under which sexual consumers can claim entitlement to sexual goods. Women have indeed become much more worthy sexual consumers, but where the acceptability of sex and the ideas of individual personhood have changed a lot, women’s sexual morality has been a consistent feature of gender from which the sex toy industry has managed to benefit greatly. This study thus connects this case with extant work on gender and morality (Tuana, 1993).
Till now, research in the feminist sociological tradition has conceptualized women’s sexual liberation as constrained by political forces that enshrine masculine privilege. This article’s data suggest that we should also attend to the complexity of sexual morality, whereby gendered entitlement to sexual desire appears to be more of a double-edged sword that is as undermining as it is empowering. In this sense, attention to the moral dimension of sexuality can improve our existing conceptualizations of heterosexuality, and the promise for sexual liberation.
