Tickle Your Fancy

Where celebrities once branched out into fragrance lines and restaurant franchises, the new arena for fame-fueled ventures is self-care, and Paltrow isn’t the only star hawking high-design sex toys as the latest wellness product. Pansexual model-actress Cara Delevingne and her serious eyebrows co-own the “femtech” company Lora DiCarlo—their trademark product is a $290 robotic massager designed to simultaneously pleasure both the G-spot and clitoris. 50 Shades of Grey actress Dakota Johnson is co–creative director of “modern intimacy” brand Maude, whose massagers are a little cheaper at $45. And cheeky English singer Lily Allen has designed a toy with Womanizer, which is known for products that gently stimulate via streams of air rather than direct contact—the Liberty as it’s called retails for $99 and Allen is lending her face to the brand’s #IMASTURBATE campaign, its credo to destigmatize the taboo topic of masturbation.

While Cardi B put her signature raunch into plugging the Majesty 2 vibrator from Aussie-based company Vush in her “Up” music video, touching tongues and rubbing up on four other women in a clam shell, most celeb-helmed sex-toy marketing is tripping over itself to be tasteful. Even the aesthetics of these new toys are more sophisticated than the cutesy Rabbit Vibrator—on Sex and the City, Charlotte gushes, “Oh the little bunny even has a little face like Peter Rabbit”—or the Hitachi Wand that looks like a kitchen appliance. These new toys have pretensions that they’re design objects: they’re shaped like a Postmodern sofa and come in colors like clay, charcoal, and mint green.

When I was 18, I lived with a young woman who thought it was “desperate” to masturbate. I’m well-versed in the stats outlining the orgasm gap — during sex straight women come the least, by a lot. Southern states like Texas and Georgia criminalized the sale of sexual devices as a response to the interconnected women’s and sexual liberation movements of the late 70s (and these laws stayed on the books well into the 21st century). In Alabama the sale of sex toys is still illegal, under the Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act. I know that the taboos and stigmas, which Paltrow, Delevingne, and Allen all pledge they’re fighting against in their respective messaging, are a very real problem. Truly, I want to be excited by this movement of women-led companies with a more sophisticated understanding of female anatomy, making products that expand the tools available for facilitating pleasure.

From the wellness industry co-opting sex toys to suburban moms poledance-ercizing in Lululemon, it feels like there’s a new culture war going on, and you could make a case that its roots trace back to the 90s. In 1993, a year after Madonna published her coffee table book Sex (“less the display of an erotic imagination than a cliched catalogue of what the middle class — her target audience, after all — is supposed to consider shocking,” according to critic Caryn James) and two years before then New York mayor Rudy Guiliani worked out a deal with Disney to start cleaning up Times Square, spelling the beginning of the end for the area’s infamous adult video stores, porn theaters, and peep shows, in 1993 Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning founded Babeland (originally Toys in Babeland), in response to the lack of women-friendly sex shops in Seattle. The 90s saw third-wave feminism come in tandem with neoliberal urbanization policies. Somewhere along the way the culture war got more complicated than vice districts v. morals squads, BDSM v. family values. Today we’re living in an era when a sign of gentrification is less likely to be an XXX business being run off than a queer-feminist sex shop moving in.

Part of the story is of course that a lot of sexy stuff went online. Horny people with a dial-up connection started watching what they wanted in the privacy of their own homes, making outmoded most adult video stores and movie theaters. Porn drove the internet’s explosion, and in turn, parents always seemed suspicious of what you were doing on the computer. But at some point, the world wide web was made respectable, and these days Facebook and Instagram vigilantly enforce “community standards.” Silicon Valley might pay lip service to technolibertarian ideology, but social media companies and digital payment platforms make it difficult for adult businesses — including sex toy sellers. Still the low overhead of e-commerce made launching feasible for early-adopter indie sellers, the ones who first framed sex toys in the context of wellness, before the whole thing got Gooped.

In 2012, Polly Rodriguez co-founded Unbound, what she calls a sexual wellness company — they sell sex toys, lube, and fetish accessories online. (Rebranding sex toys as wellness perhaps can be seen as part of a long legacy of semantic obfuscations which over the years have helped the industry skirt obscenity laws and restrictions from financial institutions as well as dodge social tabboos). Next came Zoe Lignon with Spectrum Boutique in 2015 and Amy and Nick Boyajian started Wild Flower in 2017, both catching a similar wave as Unbound: sex-positive, inclusive, and direct-to-consumer, but with an added emphasis on education. All three brands revel in selectively colorful millennial aesthetics. Lots of ovoid vibrators and oblong dildos in web-safe colors that look made to be displayed on a marble plinth, under a white archway, next to a leafy green plant. The vibes are cute and fun—this is play!

What wasn’t so cute was the behavior Wild Flower founders got called out for by a group of Black femmes, all sexuality professionals. In 2019, they co-authored a Medium article sharing their experiences of how they felt the Boyajians had manipulated them “into doing the dirty work of uprooting their competition.'' The couple behind Wild Flower had beef with the fact that Unbound had taken a check from the Peter Thiel-cofounded Founders Fund, which they thought made them ethically compromised. Instead of sounding the alarm themselves, though, they tried to enlist these Black influencers as pawns to take down their competitor. Meanwhile they didn’t seem to have any qualms about using Instagram to grow their business, which also had taken money from the same fund. About the scandal, dominatrix Karmenife X told Paper Mag, “The bigger picture is, this is how white supremacy is perpetuated,” she says. “Just because someone claims to be something or posts pictures of Black people holding dildos, doesn't mean they really care. Just because you use our bodies, doesn't mean you care about the people in those bodies.” (Black-owned sex toy and sexual wellness companies to support include Bay area-based Feelmore, trans-owned Enby, queer-founded New York Toy Collective, and Bedroom Kandi, started by Real Housewife and singer-songwriter Kandi Burruss in 2011, long before celebs like Paltrow and Delevingne jumped on the bandwagon.)

Wild Flower is an example of how the prudent pastels of woke branding can mask a lack of caring. Like countless other millennial companies, Wild Flower, Unbound, and Spectrum Boutique’s identities are respectively founded on the idea that they aren’t just selling toys, they’re making change, they’re fighting stigma, they’re being inclusive. These companies might each live up to these claims with different degrees of authenticity, but the branding and messaging is pretty similar. Now the newer celebrity-helmed sex toy companies have in turn used similar tasteful millennial aesthetics to signal their own id-pol era politics, albeit more watered down, basically amounting to “feminism!” The self-righteousness that sometimes seeps into activist-tinged branding can be annoying, and even “problematic” (to use the affront woke brands are probably most desperate to avoid). In spite of their inclusive messaging most of them are really not talking to everyone, but rather to white women with high bank balances and low BMIs, ladies who lunch with turmeric lattes and for whom walking into a sex shop with latex fetish gear and XXX-movie posters triggers pearl clutching.

Wellness has been part of a total cultural reorientation, mainstreaming a more holistic approach to integrating mind, body, and spirit as well as a feminist reprioritizing of previously-neglected issues. There’s lots to find welcoming about it, but it’s also been called to task many times for white-washing traditional cultures’ medicines and practices as well as propagating the idea that a healthy lifestyle is inaccessibly expensive. Now the industry is framing sex toys as the latest must-have self-care tool, making them over in soft Pantone colors and ambiguous orb-like shapes tasteful enough for display on your nightstand or on Instagram. It’s going to turn on a whole new demographic to the joys of better orgasms whether alone or partnered, but if the wellness gurus really want to destroy taboos, they shouldn’t pit themselves against the adult industry whose work they’re building on. Or else they’re just reinforcing new versions of exactly what they’re purporting to fight.

Whitney Mallett is a New York-based writer and filmmaker. She's writing a Da Vinci Code-inspired novel and co-hosts a food podcast called Mukbangers.