START ME UP
The new breed of feminist sex-tech entrepreneurs.
SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THE 75 PER CENT OF WOMEN who rarely has an orgasm from vaginal sex, or the five per cent who can’t. Or, say, sex has been painful for you since having a baby and you need a whole lot of lead-up before anything is going anywhere; that you’re between partners or with someone who isn’t, so to speak, a dab hand. For whatever reason, you need a vibrator.
But say it’s also 1995, or 2005, or 2015, for that matter. Your options? Ascending the dark stairs of an adult shop to pick from a shelf of veiny plastic penises, made of who-knows-what kind of Bpa-leaching materials from an unregulated overseas factory, while a leather-clad man behind the counter follows you with a lecherous gaze, getting ready to deploy some shudderinducing innuendo at the register.
Shopping for a sex toy online would be better, if it didn’t require wading through images of whip-holding women in nasty lingerie, while avoiding accidental click-through to porn sites. You may have started bravely, but you come away with nothing, except for a lingering sense of unease, embarrassment, I-needa-shower kind of grubbiness, in all senses unsatisfied.
“Historically, the industry has been dominated by men and the products available are overwhelmingly phallic-shaped dildos,” explains Polly Rodriguez, a New York-based entrepreneur and co-founder of Unbound, one of a new generation of female-led companies aiming to close the so-called pleasure gap in an industry that’s now worth more than $20 billion globally and predicted to pass $69 billion by 2020. Their offering: “sex tech” devices made truly for women, marketed in ways that are beautiful and cool and uncoupled from porn. Their greater mission: to revolutionise the way female sexuality is thought about in the mainstream, and experienced, valued and understood by women. Even branding products collectively as sex tech feels like a move away from the term “toys”, which at best makes light of women’s sexuality, and at worst infantilises it.
“Products designed by men through the male gaze just aren’t working for us. In any field, the best solution to a problem [is from] someone who has personal experience with it,” says Rodriguez, who has found her customer response overwhelming. “Most women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm and with the shape of products available previously, there’s been no correlation to that.”
So great is consumer demand, a trend-forecasting company dubbed 2017 the year of vagina-nomics. “There are more products made with vaginal health and wellness in mind than ever before,” says Melbourne-based Bryony Cole, founder of the Future of Sex, a think tank and incubator for sex-tech companies and a major voice in the sex-positive movement through her podcast of the same name.
“It’s a super interesting cultural moment, and part of it is an influx of women getting started in this industry, because they
think, ‘I can do this better. I understand this body.’ They’re positioning themselves as rebellious feminist brands that speak to women directly, in a way that gives them permission to talk about sex like it’s a completely normal everyday occurrence.”
The result is products that Cole rightly says wouldn’t look out of place in the Museum of Modern Art store; to wit: Unbound’s Squish, a millennial-pink, egg-shaped vibrator with a smart memory that lets your record your preferred combination of speed and pressure, or Dame Products’ Eva II, a tiny hands-free clitoral stimulator that can be worn during sex and, testament to its aesthetic and mainstream appeal, is stocked by Goop beside orgasm-enhancing Luna Beads, Moon Juice Sex Dust and the phone-synced pelvic floor trainer, Elvie. Female-founded personal products company Maude sells personal lubricants and natural condoms in Aesop-like packaging, from a Remodelista-like website.
“There’s definitely been shame and taboo around sexuality in a way that is different for women,” says Dame Products co-founder Alexandra Fine, who trained as a clinical psychologist before venturing into sex tech with her business partner, Janet Lieberman, an engineer. “A lot of women have [sexual] expectations that they feel they’re not allowed to discuss, which means they had to exist in the dark. Women have really been underserved in this industry. Even five years ago, when I started, I feel like there wasn’t this trend.”
As one UK columnist noted, until recently there had only been a handful of TV shows that ever went near masturbation and sex aids from a female perspective: Girls, Mad Men and
Sex And The City. But, says Fine, cultural change is occurring at a rapid rate. “There are so many things that are happening right now, in terms of feminism, tech entrepreneurship, the wellness movement and #Metoo. I definitely feel like we’re in the middle of all that.”
“Sexual pleasure is coming into the mainstream of health and wellness, and no longer this shadow industry,” agrees Rodriguez. “I think we’ll start to see it the same way we see exercise and diet, with women getting to define how and when and why and what they need.”
Although society and pop culture are hyper-sexualised, access to medically accurate sex education that focuses on pleasure (rather than prophylactics) has been largely non-existent for women, as has the language to talk about this openly. “Sex follows us everywhere,” says Cole. “But actually talking about it, real things – what is female pleasure, what is desire, what does it mean to be intimate with someone – that’s what we haven’t had any sort of ‘normal’ everyday language for.”
Her own podcast, as well as apps like Tabu and Juicebox, have a focus on sexual education, while Yes To Sex provides information on consent, and Callisto – so far only available in the US – enables anonymous assault reporting for victims.
“There is a sisterhood and an energy and a mission,” says Rodriguez, “and every woman who is buying into it is giving another woman permission to tap into this part of life, without feeling weird or shamed or stigmatised.”
Still, there’s a long way to go, with female entrepreneurs in the sector facing even greater obstacles to success than regular start-ups, with limited access to physical and social media advertising and basic business functions like bank accounts and online payment systems because of providers’ so-called morality clauses. The greatest challenge is venture capital, where around 91 per cent of investors are men who give, on average, two per cent of their total funds to female-led companies in all sectors and are still yet to notice the vast potential in this area. While investment in production of generic Viagra was around $175 million last year, says Cole, females working in sex tech shared a $10.1 million pot. Dame Products’ Eva II was famously crowdfunded.
“It can be exhausting and isolating,” says Cole, whose Future of Sex runs hackathons that allow would-be entrepreneurs to pitch to sympathetic investors, “which is why it’s important to feel like we’re all here in this community, helping each other.”
To support and represent the female entrepreneurs, educators, writers, artists and engineers in the field, Rodriguez co-founded the Women of Sex Tech collective in 2015. “If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s community organising and it’s so much more powerful when you’re part of a network because we still run into huge institutional barriers.”
Still, as always, women persevere. “We’ll just continue to legitimise our sexual wellness, and treat it like a valuable thing,” says Fine. “I’d love to one day see sex toys kind of like, in Sephora.” Maybe next to the blush.
“REBELLIOUS FEMINIST BRANDS SPEAK TO WOMEN DIRECTLY, GIVING THEM PERMISSION TO SPEAK ABOUT SEX”