In reference to this week’s column for the Chronicle @ SF Gate, Not All Butt Plugs Should Glow in the Dark — the Destiny’s Child lyric was on the front page of the Chronicle today sending people to read my column, an excellent surprise. (Thank you!) I cracked up when I saw it in the store, and paid *actual money* for a newspaper IRL. Whoa. Yay!
I’m only just now getting to blogging about it, and the 160+ comments (!). Today’s published work of mine includes:
* The intriguing bizarreness of Candice Royalle’s new “non-toxic” G-Plus attachment.
* Forbes’ yoga porn, after a fashion.
* Totally fucking awesome, and about time: Anti-Hysteria – The Sexies: Sex-Positive Journalism Awards.
* And of course, the column, with the state of toxcity and sex toys with new indy studies (following links in this one is especially current and informative and the new linking policy = awesome, finally normal). Also, in this piece I question Good Vibes about their statements on being bought by one of the largest distributors of questionable toys, after saying they’d phase out toxic toys — and they replied. Snip:
When I worked at a sex toy store, we could smell the boxes before we even opened them.
Once the boxes of mass-manufactured “novelty” vibrators, dildos and assorted sex toys were open, the chemical smell would fill the room and linger wherever we kept the back stock. Some materials stank more than others; certain “lifelike” or “cyber” materials smelled like wet asphalt. Each item was individually packaged or bagged, often with misogynist or offensive marketing or labeling. So, we’d don sterile gloves and put the products into plain, clear, sealed bags. But each of the “jelly rubber,” “jell-lee”, and “sili-gel” products would be oily, with beads of some kind of chemical sweat oozing through its often visible pores.
It was so not hot.
It’s ethically tough to sell sex toys you think might be toxic. For years I had a well-rehearsed speech I’d give to every customer who bought a fun, though chemically dubious item: Wash it first, please use a condom on it; if you don’t, then clean it thoroughly, and throw it away after it loses its shine or after a month or two of enjoyment. It didn’t take a brain surgeon (or Dildo Hut clerk, often confused) to figure out that the novelty industry was making a mint off having sex toys manufactured cheaply and sans health regulations in China. “Made in China” is printed on most sex toys. And selling sex toys as novelties means no one is responsible for how they are used (or if they function properly, or if they function at all).
It wasn’t until the word phthalates hit mainstream consciousness — in conjunction with safety in plastics, children’s toys and human endocrine disruption — that women-run adult retailers started to make noise about what we’d all been saying: These sex toys might be toxic. Working the sex toy retail front lines, it had become clear that jelly toys were cheap and accessible, but some customers complained of rashes and others had latex-allergy reactions. Jelly rubber toys, we cautioned, can’t be stored next to cyber toys or they’d turn into chemical goo. Some cyber toys were so porous you could set them on a newspaper and then practically read the headlines on them — absorbing newsprint like a Silly Putty dick, even though CyberSkin’s manufacturer professes the material is phthalate-free. We wondered, just what the hell were we all sticking in our collective orifices?
Link.
* Nofollow bonus: My current strange, bedside-with-the-laptop obsession: Breast expansion fetish (BE) videos on YouTube. Especially check out this video depicting the height of BE extremeness, Bambi Blaze Breast Expansion, She-Hulk.
Photo by Steve Diet Goedde, via Stockroom. And: Thanks to Cyrus for the Environment Report’s “Sex Toys Safety” audio show link in my column!
