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In the cafeteria of Imperial College London’s Advanced Hackspace, Wan Tseng is laying out her modular jewellery across an empty table. As a man walks in to use the kitchen, the scene is innocuous enough even if the corresponding chat might not be. “We wanted to start with arousal, not necessarily something you put on your genitals,” she says. The man clears his throat, grabs his tupperware and leaves.
Of course if the table were covered in pink, penis-shaped vibrators, the accidental eavesdropper would have been instantly clued in to the subject of our conversation. Innovation in sex toys and accessories, though, has shifted away from a pornography informed obsession with penetrative sex and towards understanding female anatomy and how women get pleasure.
“There’s a moment for female sex toy designers now,” says sex historian Hallie Lieberman. Whether they’re concerned with microrobotics, hands-free vibrators or sensation-enhancing jewellery, a cohort of female-founded startups in places such as New York, Oregon and London are developing devices, building communities and trying to push the industry towards sexual wellness.
“A penis is designed for many different things, evolutionarily speaking, and female pleasure is not in its top three functions,” says Janet Lieberman, an MIT-educated engineer and co-founder of Brooklyn-based Dame Products. “That’s not to say penises can’t give pleasure but if you’re optimising for female pleasure, that’s not exactly the shape you’re going to end up with.”
Lieberman’s co-founder, sexologist Alexandra Fine, points to oft-quoted research that 70 per cent of women need clitoral stimulation to have an orgasm. In other words, the pleasure gap is yet to be closed.
Looking to address this is a smorgasbord of products, often referred to as “objects”, in all sorts of shapes, sizes and flexible forms. New York-based startup Unbound’s most popular products are its $74 Ollie wand vibrator and the $59 flexible, internal vibrator Bender and its next device, Palma, is a steel ring that will be released at the end of March for around $110. In development for two years, the vibration strength of Palma increases or decreases as you move your hand. “We’ve gotten really good at haptic technology,” says Unbound’s co-founder and CEO Polly Rodriguez.
Dame’s Eva line, now in its second generation Eva II ($135), is designed for clitoral stimulation during sex and has flexible wings that help it to stay in place. The powerful Pom vibrator ($95), meanwhile, was built without an internal plastic structure so that it bends and undulates with the user and doesn’t need to be tilted like regular vibrators.
Wan Tseng’s Wisp jewellery line is going one step further and concentrating not on orgasm but on what she calls “fore-foreplay”, exploring secondary erogenous zones such as the neck, the arm and the back of the ear. Wisp, which launches this week via a pop-up showcase in Brick Lane, East London, originated as a series of connected devices as part of Tseng’s Innovation Design Engineering graduate project at Show RCA 2016.
The £600 sterling silver collection is now launching without any electronic components, with a simple mechanism that releases a scent for the wearer. Tseng is also developing a similar-sized module that will act as a powered vibrator/massager, to be used around the body but not for orgasm, which is due to launch later in 2019. “I didn’t want to design some dildo you could wear on your finger, I wanted to start from a different, fashion forward angle,” she says.
Fine would like her customers to treat Dame’s vibrators more like foam rollers: “things we use everyday to make our lives a little bit easier” and Unbound’s Rodriguez suggests that when designs aren’t phallic in nature, they’re more likely to be “a product that you wouldn’t feel mortified leaving out on the bedstand.”
This sexual wellness messaging is in fact a return to the vibrator’s roots, before they became linked to pornography. As Hallie Lieberman, author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, explains, the electric vibrators during the first three to four decades of the twentieth century looked more like Hitachi Magic Wand type devices and all vibrators came with non-phallic attachments.
“It wasn’t until the 1950s, that the vibrator itself became phallic shaped,” she says. “The change in design came about not only because of myths that women got their sexual pleasure from penis-shaped things primarily, but also because batteries became smaller.”
It’s up for debate precisely when the current trend began, how uniform the shift in designs and tastes has been and how mainstream these female-led products are. Sarah Forbes, former curator of the Museum of Sex in New York, traces the focus on aesthetics and experiments with shape to a decade ago, around the time she put on an exhibition titled Sex in Design/Design in Sex and contributed a foreword to Rita Orrell’s design book Objects of Desire: A Showcase of Modern Erotic Products.
“They went from being these objects that were sold at novelty shops, supposed to look like human body parts, these veiny, gross, dildo like creations, to being beautifully designed and customised,” she says. Following this, and more so in the past five years, there have been increasing efforts to match innovative functions with beautiful forms.
So what’s actually selling? To get a sense of the scale, Dame has sold over 100,000 products since 2014 and Unbound has raised $3.3 million in investment and made around $4 million in revenue last year. Both are typically found in higher-end sex stores. “Will we see Dame and Unbound at Target and CVS in the US in the next five years? It’s hard to say, but I’m very hopeful,” says Hallie Lieberman.
Amazon UK declined to share recent sales stats but Bonny Hall, product director for online sex toy retailer Lovehoney, notes that since 2015, vibrators have grown from 35 per cent to 42 per cent of all their sex toy sales with a decline in people buying “realistic dildos” and “standout growth in clitoral suction vibrators.”
It’s far from a clear cut trend, though. “There are far more toys available than ever before that are non 'penis shaped' and this could lead to a decline of sales in the traditional vibrator,” she says, “however at Lovehoney, these products continue to fly out of the door.”
These startups are working at something of a disadvantage when it comes to morality clauses in advertising in particular, despite the changing optics of their products. Companies such as Unbound and Dame are not permitted to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter because they are viewed as “adult products and services” whereas “family planning” products including condoms and erectile dysfunction pills are allowed.
To counter this, many of the startups in this space are running successful Instagram accounts as well as informal sex ed blogs, which have the added benefit of capturing Google searches around these topics. They’re also creating loyal, engaged communities of testers. Unbound sends out regular surveys to its users about all aspects of their lives, not just sex, and Dame has over 8,000 people signed up to its Dame Labs list. It’s planning to expand this to allow for “more interaction between testers on forums” in the next month or so.
The founders are finding other solutions to the challanges. Oregon-based Lora di Carlo called out the CEA, organisers of the Las Vegas tech show, for rescinding an award given to its Osé vibrator this January. After being initially rejected, Dame’s Fine and Lieberman wrote Kickstarter a letter reminding the platform of its core mission to support makers and as a result, they crowdfunded the first sex toy on Kickstarter in 2016.
Wan Tseng snuck into a HAX program as she knew the people the hardware accelerator were working with in Shenzhen. These are all examples of what Hallie Lieberman refers to as women who have “muscled their way into position, creating grassroots business” with more assistance via groups like Women of Sex Tech and some outside funding.
The viral CES incident has become something of a rallying point in the industry. Osé is more traditionally phallic in shape, and the team hasn’t outlined precisely how their tech works, but it’s designed to provide more natural “blended orgams”, with hands free stimulation to the clitoris and G-spot not by intense buzzing but air flow, thumping and biomimicry. “Sex tech has long been pioneer but a quiet pioneer, because of shame. I think our product is uniquely positioned to be pushing miniature and soft robotics which is really exciting,” says Lola Vars, Lora di Carlo’s technical director.
A place in brick-and-mortar stores appears to be another, perhaps final, litmus test for design-led vibrators. Their physical shape plays a part here too. Dame products are sold in Urban Outfitters online and in stores at Free People. In the UK Soda Says, a curated online tech store geared towards women, has a timely Sex Edit, made up of six vibrators and toys by Lelo, Unbound, Mystery Vibe, Dame and Smile Makers.
“Our Sex Tech collection has launched on our homepage, not hidden in some corner of our site,” says founder Grace Gould. Tellingly, though, there’s still a way to go. The only device to be displayed on the shopfloor of its space on the technology floor of Selfridges’ flagship London store, and in stock for the week of Valentine’s Day, is Unbound’s Bean which, as a shop assistant points out, “doesn’t look like a vibrator.”
The move to offer an alternative to the nineties hen party aesthetic and shape not only makes functional sense, when it comes to addressing female pleasure, but is also helping shift the perceptions of customers, retailers and platforms. “Twenty years ago this was a vice industry and ten years from now, it’ll definitely be a wellness industry,” says Dame’s Janet Lieberman. “To go from being viewed as morally negative to being viewed as morally positive has interesting growing pains.”
This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing love, sex and relationships.
From keeping an intimate secret from the internet to the battle to destroy super gonorrhoea, we'll explore the technologies and ideas changing how we all live and love – for better or worse.
Click here to read more articles from this series.
– Inside the strange world of China's romantic video games
– Inside the disgustingly gloopy fight against super-gonorrhoea
– Why it's so difficult keeping your unborn child a secret from the internet
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
