FACE MASKS IN 50 SHADES OF GREY
Lockdowns are helping us get in touch with our sensual side
Picture the scene, Joburg circa 1988. A car pulls up and a man in a trench coat, fedora and fake moustache emerges and high-tails it into a seedy 24-hour sex shop.
He looks around to make sure he hasn’t been spotted — relieved to go unrecognised by the judgmental eyes of suburban SA. Not that this was the worst of his worries: during the days of the verkrampte apartheid state, sex toys were completely illegal.
The Immorality Act of 1969 (which forbade sexual intercourse between the races) also outlawed the manufacture or sale of any “article intended to be used to perform an unnatural sexual act”.
Now, SA wasn’t unique here. Other countries, such as the US, had similar laws.
In her book Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, Hallie Lieberman, who has a PhD in sex toy history, says the 1973 Texas obscenity statute prohibited the sale of sex toys in the state.
This law has still never been fully repealed, though in 2008 a US district judge declared it “unconstitutional and unenforceable”. But as late as the early 2000s, a Texan was found guilty of selling a vibrator and sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Sex toys aren’t new — and they aren’t going anywhere, despite the efforts of the fundamentalist.
In 2005 the oldest dildo — a carved siltstone phallus dating back about 28,000 years — was discovered. (Some archaeologists, however, believe this might have been a ritual object rather than a provider of sexual pleasure.)
“Apparently before humans invented writing, we had invented dildos,” Lieberman says, adding: “If the importance of an invention is gauged by how long it has existed, then dildos are some of the most important devices humans ever created.”
She explains how, in our more recent past, sex toys were often advertised as having health benefits to legitimise their use — such as Young’s rectal dilator from 1892, examples of which are in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
Despite the anachronistic laws that are still on the statute books in some places, most of the world has adopted a far more permissive attitude to sex since the 1980s. In SA, 1994 brought not only a democratic government, but sexual freedom too.
Our ancestors would be proud that we’re now living in an age of sex positivity.
Lust in a time of Covid
Covid, as you might expect, has written an entirely new chapter into the history of the adult retail industry.
Though the headlines speak of the failure of restaurants and hotels thanks to Covid, the adult toy industry provides a stark contrast.
In April last year, The Guardian reported that sales at New Zealand’s largest sex toy store tripled after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a month of lockdown.
This illustrates, perhaps, that Netflix and Scrabble can only do so much to relieve the tedium of lockdown.
Similar trends were seen in Australia, Denmark and the UK. And in a polar inversion of many other struggling industries, the global sex toy market is expected to grow from $28.6bn in 2019 to $52.7bn by 2026.
But what about closer to home? Have South Africans flocked as eagerly to the sex toy playground?
George Masche, founder of Passionfruit.co.za — one of SA’s first online adult stores — says that during the first hard lockdown, his business took a hit since all businesses except essential services were shut down.
“It was a bit of a knock, but we quickly recovered once the e-commerce ban was lifted,” he says.
As the lockdown became a catalyst for people to switch to online shopping, SA’s adult industry boomed.
Masche’s decision in 2005 to go online, so Passionfruit could offer a 100% “discreet shopping experience”, proved to be a visionary one as soon as Covid took root.
Right from the beginning, Passionfruit prioritised privacy, wrapping deliveries in nondescript packaging so they could be delivered without embarrassment.
The very first order, Masche tells the FM, went to the small town of Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo.
Bricks-and-mortar adult stores have also done a roaring trade during Covid.
Charmaine Brewis is a former chartered accountant who owns and runs Lady Jane, a retailer with four stores in Durban and Joburg that sells mainly sex toys and lingerie. Brewis tells the FM that people having to stay at home led to an increase in “couples looking to spice up the bedroom, reconnect and improve their romantic life”. In particular, she says, sales of sexrelated card and board games spiked.
But the surge in business brought new challenges for both Brewis and Masche: pandemic-induced international shipping backlogs, outof-stock suppliers and a wildly oscillating exchange rate.
Brewis says her physical stores are still doing well because some customers want personal one-onone advice and to view products.
Her clientele, she says, is “you and me — just normal people, moms, dads, cousins and sisters. Really, anybody with an open mind.” What helps, perhaps, is that Lady Jane has distanced itself from the sleazy adult chain store image. Brewis says she pitches Lady Jane as a boutique store with an extensive range of high-end products and a strict return policy. (This is in contrast to the cheaper stores, where products might have passed through the hands of many customers. Yuck.)
Cutting the sleaze
Eliminating the sleaze was also one of Masche’s priorities at Passionfruit. To do this, he cut the explicit images and vulgar language.
Masche says many SA sex stores had their heyday in the 1990s as the country opened up after apartheid, but they got stuck there — still selling hardcore DVDs, blow-up dolls and penisshaped drinking straws.
“Though the online sex toy industry had a difficult and rebellious childhood, it
has reached adulthood, so to speak,” he says. “People thought sex sells, but like all businesses it requires hard work and dedication to survive and most of the fly-bynight businesses have come and gone.”
Today, crass packaging doesn’t cut it.
His business, says Masche, is part of a “younger generation of sex toy manufacturers that focus on premium quality and slick designer pieces, where cutting-edge technology is beautifully hidden under soft silicone and presented in Apple-like packaging”.
Masche credits two cultural phenomena for the opening of minds towards sex shops: Sex and the City, which aired in the late
1990s; and the best-selling Fifty Shades trilogy. Both brought such topics as vibrators and BDSM (bondage, discipline, domination and submission) into the mainstream.
So what are South Africans buying?
Though Lady Jane offers 13,000 products, Brewis says she needs to keep up with the latest sex toy trends, and regularly ends up sourcing specific items for buyers.
A big seller is lingerie in risqué and erotic designs, as well as men’s underwear. This popularity is due in part to the diminishing and conservative choices available in the mainstream retail space.
Personal lubricants are a big seller for both Brewis and Masche, with one local brand, Assegai, doing particularly well.
Masche says his all-time best seller is the classic vibrator, though it faces competition from “a sonic clitoral stimulator which uses
gentle air pressure technology and is said to have mind-blowing, orgasm-inducing superpowers”.
It’s the kind of product that is shooting the lights out; as a consumer report by US brand Ella Paradis found, 96% of Americans aged between 20 and 60 have thought about buying a sex toy during the pandemic.
Clearly, there are ways to add fizz to your Pfizer.