Buzz

It’s 2004, and Christy is rattling off her order: a jelly vibrator, a cock ring, a bottle of Eros lubricant. Then, mid-order, she hesitates and turns to me. “I’m thinking of surprising my fiancé with a butt plug on our honeymoon,” she says. “But do you think he’ll think it’s gay?”

“He won’t think it’s gay,” I assure her quickly. “Lots of people bring butt plugs on their honeymoons.”

I am lying. I have no idea what people bring on their honeymoons because I am unmarried, as are all my friends. My knowledge of honeymoons encompasses only my parents’ honeymoon, which didn’t involve a butt plug, as far as I know. But it is Christy’s bachelorette party, and I am there to sell her and her friends as many sex toys as I can. It’s my job. Plus, I think that in a perfect world everybody would bring butt plugs on their honeymoons and that all men would be open-minded enough to realize that stimulating your prostate doesn’t automatically make you a homosexual.

“Okay, I’ll take it,” she says, to a round of applause from her bridesmaids.

As I add the butt plug to her order, I feel a twinge of guilt. Will her fiancé really like it, or will the butt-plug gift lead to a fight? Did my exuberant sex-toy salesmanship destroy a marriage before it even began? But these concerns pale in comparison to what I really should be worried about: whether the thirty-four-year-old, soon-to-be-married Christy is an undercover cop.

(*)

I was living in Austin, Texas, at the time, going to graduate school and working for Forbidden Fruit, a local in-home sex-toy sales business. We held events that were like Tupperware parties, except instead of selling plastic casserole containers, I sold dolphin-shaped vibrators and jelly cock rings. It was actually the second such company I had worked for, and it was one of about a half dozen that were operating in Texas at the time—a higher number of businesses than one might suspect, given that selling sex toys in Texas was illegal.

The year before, in 2003, the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas had overturned antisodomy laws in Texas and thirteen other states because they violated the right to privacy guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.1 But the sex-toy laws weren’t affected by Lawrence because Lawrence only made private homosexual sex acts between people legal.² Texas’s sex-toy laws were about what happened in public: the promotion or sale of sex toys was their main concern.³ Not only was the sale of sex toys illegal, but their use on a partner technically was as well, since “penetration of the genitals or the anus of another person with an object” still remained on the books as a crime in the Texas Penal Code.⁴ So bringing a butt plug on your honeymoon was not only unusual but also potentially illegal. Oops.

Forbidden Fruit—which in addition to its sex-toy parties also operated a local female-friendly sex-toy store—had been raided on obscenity charges in 1989, so they were particularly concerned about not violating the law. One of the first things impressed on me by my trainer (and Forbidden Fruit’s owner), Lynne, was to say that all the items we sold were for “artistic, educational, and scientific purposes.” That was her way of circumventing the obscenity law, which declared that something was obscene if “taken as a whole [it] lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.” In the Texas Penal Code (Ann. §43.23, [7]), a device was illegal if it was “designed and marketed as useful primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs.” And so we sold Hitachi Magic Wands as back massagers, and we sold silver bullet vibrators as point-specific massagers. As long as you lied about a sex toy’s purpose, it was legal. Some of the items were harder to pass off, however. But if customers wanting, for example, a double dong with realistic balls would just sign Forbidden Fruit’s form that said that they were buying it “for strictly educational, artistic, and/or scientific purposes,” then they too would be in the clear.5 I dutifully took notes as Lynne gave me her tips on how to avoid arrest.

It wasn’t the first time my job had put me at risk of jail time. I had started my career in the sex-toy industry six months earlier, working for a company called Passion Parties after a friend had suggested that selling sex toys might be the perfect job for me because I was fascinated by sex toys, masturbation, and the taboos surrounding them. Part of a group of in-home sex-toy companies that emerged in the 1990s, Passion Parties had been founded in 1994 by Pat Davis, who started the company because she wanted to “create an environment of fun and trust in which a woman and her partner can discuss sex comfortably.”⁶ It was the typical direct-sales pyramid scheme model, in which salespeople spent just as much time recruiting women to work for the company as they did actually selling sex toys.⁷

When I first started, the company assigned me a “mentor,” a sweet, young army wife at Fort Hood who peddled sex toys to women on the base. She invited me to her home, and, upon entering, one of the first things I saw was a framed biblical quote. I was surprised, to say the least. Was she socially conservative? I thought all the women who sold sex toys were bleeding-heart liberals. It wasn’t the last time I’d find myself surprised by the sex-toy industry and those involved in it.

One of the first things my Passion Parties mentor relayed to me was the most important tenet about the business: that the sale of sex toys was illegal. In fact, possessing more than six sex toys was in and of itself illegal because such a quantity indicated that the owner had them “with intent to promote.” The one loophole was if the owner had a “bona fide medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement purpose” for such possession.8 Forbidden Fruit got around that by claiming that sex toys had a higher artistic, educational, or scientific purpose; Passion Parties’s technique to evade obscenity laws was to use euphemisms. My mentor gave me a lexicon of such terms to keep me out of jail: The clitoris became “the man in the boat,” vibrators became massagers, and cock rings were “c-rings.” All the sex toys we sold were “for novelty use only.” The whole scene felt surreal. There I was, standing on government property and being taught by a good Christian woman how to break the law.

“We’re using this language just to be on the safe side, right?” I asked nervously. “Nobody would really be arrested for selling vibrators.”

And that was when my new mentor proceeded to tell me that a Passion Parties consultant had been arrested earlier that year in Burleson, Texas, a small city on the edge of Fort Worth, about a three-hour drive north from Austin. Briefly, I pictured being locked in a cell with murderers, having to explain that I was there for peddling vibrators. I obviously didn’t know how jail worked. Nevertheless, I decided to take her instructions seriously.

After I’d returned home later that night, I looked up the story my mentor had told me. I learned that the arrested woman had not been some left-wing free-speech advocate but a forty-three-year-old churchgoing Republican mother of three named Joanne Webb.⁹ Local police had responded to rumors that Webb was selling sex toys by setting up a sting operation. Two officers posing as a couple went to Webb’s husband’s construction business where she worked the front desk and asked to buy some sex toys. The couple told Webb that they wanted a toy for anal stimulation and said that they didn’t have time to host a party. (This should have been a red flag for Webb, but she wasn’t exactly expecting to be the subject to a sting operation.) So she sold them a Double Hot (a vibrator that penetrates the vagina and anus simultaneously) and a Nubby G (a vaginal G-spot vibrator) and sent them on their merry way.¹⁰ Unbeknownst to Webb, the police officers had been videotaping the encounter.

For her violation of Texas’s anti-sex-toy laws, Webb faced a possible year in prison and up to $4,000 in fines, all for selling a couple of vibrators. Passion Parties started a Joanne Webb Defense Fund and raised more than $10,000 for her legal team.11 Webb’s charges were eventually dropped, but not before she spent thousands on legal fees. And, perhaps even worse, Webb was shunned in the community. The pastor of a local church in Burleson (not the one Webb attended) told Texas Monthly exactly why she was so upset about Webb. “The Bible teaches us that sex is a sacred act between a man and a woman, blessed by God,” the pastor said. “And adding some kind of rubber toy into the sex act only diverts attention away from your partner, which is where God wants you to focus.”¹²

Webb’s case received international attention, which meant my mother in Venice, Florida, certainly heard about it, which resulted in teary phone calls from her, pleading with me to stop selling sex toys.¹³ I told her that my chances of being arrested were very low, and besides, if I did get arrested, it would make for a great story. Not surprisingly, my arguments didn’t convince her.

But Webb was far from the only person to be arrested in the late 1990s and early 2000s for peddling sex toys. In 2000, Texas resident Dawn Webber sold a vibrator to an undercover cop and was sentenced to thirty days in jail and a $4,000 fine.¹⁴ She lost her later appeal, yet even the judge who affirmed the conviction couldn’t help but comment on the law. “I do not understand why Texas law criminalizes the sale of dildos,” she wrote in the judgment. “Even less do I understand why law enforcement officers and prosecutors expend limited resources to prosecute such activity. Because this is the law, I reluctantly concur.”¹⁵ In Louisiana, Christine D. Brenan was arrested three times in 1996 and 1997 for selling sex toys at her store, the Dance Box, and sentenced to “two years hard labor and a $1,500 fine.” Her charges were later reduced to five years probation. After Brenan’s multiple appeals, the court finally reversed her conviction in 1999. The state appealed in 2000, but the reversal stood.¹⁶ Adult bookstore employee Ignacio Sergio Acosta was arrested in 2003 for selling a “crystal cock vibrator” to undercover officers in El Paso, Texas, and telling the female officer it would give her an orgasm.17

It was such a weird position to be in: risking arrest for selling dildos. If I lived in a repressive country under a misogynistic regime, sure, this would be expected. But I lived in America, where strip clubs abound, binge drinking is celebrated, and possession of semiautomatic weapons is legal. So why the hang-up on sex toys?

It was a question that would take me more than a decade to answer.

At the time when I first started selling sex toys, Texas was one of at least five states—including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia—that made the sale of sex toys illegal, with specifics varying from state to state.¹⁸ It was a law that a number of people wanted to change and, after the Lawrence decision made antisodomy statutes unconstitutional, some groups saw an opening to challenge anti-sex-toy statutes. In 2004, Phil Harvey Enterprises—the corporation that ran Adam & Eve, a large sex-toy retailer with a robust website and a chain of sex-toy stores—lost their challenge against the Mississippi anti-sex-toy law. The court said that buying sex toys was not “protected by a constitutional right to privacy” because “people who are sexually dysfunctional (presumably those people who cannot achieve sexual enjoyment and fulfillment without a sexual device) should be treated by a physician or a psychologist.” As a result, the court determined, since the sex toys Adam & Eve sold were “novelties,” they “had no medical purpose.”¹⁹ That same year, the Alabama state court also upheld their anti-sex-toy law.²⁰ The ACLU appealed the decision, but their appeals failed. In 2007, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Texas again declared that the statutes could stand.²¹ It took until 2008 for Texas’s anti-sex-toy laws to be declared invalid, using a right-to-sexual-privacy argument as justification. It was of note that the court portrayed sex toys as devices “that an individual may choose to use during intimate conduct with a partner in the home,” not as masturbatory aids.22

The line of distinction between masturbatory use and use in a couple wasn’t the only double-standard in sex-toy law. There was also a difference in the legal standard between male and female sexuality. While vibrators and dildos were illegal in many states at the time I was selling them, Viagra was not only legal but covered by health insurance.²³ Not only was male sexual dysfunction considered a legitimate medical problem, but the pill used to cure it was advertised openly on national television—and even endorsed by former U.S. Senator Bob Dole. Meanwhile, someone could get arrested for selling a clitoral vibrator in a private home in Texas. It was ridiculous, to say the least.

But I wasn’t always this cynical about sex toys. As I drove the three hours from my home in Austin to my first sex-toy party in Houston—equipped with the bag full of vibrators, lube, and massage oil I’d be peddling—I felt pretty empowered. I’m a sex educator, I told myself. That’s the line my mentor had given me, and, in a way, it was true. I was a woman on a mission.

My confidence started to wane as I ascended the two flights of stairs and entered the cramped apartment where I was supposed to present. The host, a boisterous nurse, had invited all her coworkers over to drink a fluorescent green Hypnotiq-based cocktail called “The Hulk” and buy some vibrators. I immediately got flustered. Nearly all these women had been trained in the knowledge of the human body. Who was I to think I could teach them about the intricacies of female sexual stimulation?

I was sweating visibly as I set up my sales kit next to a table arrayed with various bottles of liquor, Boone’s Farm wine, and chicken taquitos. I briefly contemplated running out the door, but I’d driven nearly two hundred miles, and turning back seemed crazy. And so I started to unpack my bag, gingerly placing down the White Chocolate Passion Pudding, Silky Sheets, Edible Massage Lotion, Tighten Up, and various other lubes. My presentation would begin with these nonthreatening lotions and lubes; we always left the toys for later, so guests wouldn’t be frightened by such intimidating devices as the nine-and-three-quarters-inch-long realistic-looking vibrating dildo deemed “Big Thriller.”

As the women gathered around me in the living room, I scanned their faces, hoping they wouldn’t realize that this was my first party. I began the way I had been taught to, by introducing myself and explaining the ordering process. I was nervous and unsure of what tone I should strike. I landed on a vaguely authoritarian one, which was belied by the shaking of my hands as I picked up a bottle of UniSex Enhancement Gel and began extolling its benefits of promoting arousal by strengthening penile and clitoral erection through its activation of nitrous oxide pathways. It’s important to state here that I was pretty sure a lot of what I had been taught to say about this gel wasn’t quite accurate. Our training materials claimed that “a group of Scientist [sic] were awarded the Nobel Medical Prize” for research on nitrous oxide pathways, but I wasn’t sure that a gel—our gel or any gel—could actually “activate” them.24 Yet my job was to convince these women that they ought to pay forty dollars for three ounces of this gel, so I tried to sound authoritative even though I’m sure it was obvious to anyone listening that I was just reciting statements from a training manual. But the women looked mildly interested, so I carried on.

It wasn’t until I began talking about Tighten Up—our virgin-simulating gel—that things took a wrong turn. Tighten Up was made of alum, the same ingredient that was historically used to make pickles pucker up and get extra crisp. As used in our product, it was supposed to make the vagina snugger, as it would have been in its virgin state. I held up the tiny half-ounce bottle and was just starting to praise its ability to create a tighter vagina when laughter began to erupt from a corner of the room and soon evolved into raucous clapping. I had lost the crowd, if I’d even had them to begin with.

As the women all started to talk over my presentation, I finally stopped, resigned. “Why are you laughing?” I asked.

One of the women proceeded to tell me that a patient had come into their hospital after using a similar product. The patient had had an allergic reaction, and her labia had swelled up to almost three times their normal size.

I was speechless. The product I was selling—one my training manual assured me was perfectly safe—was in fact so dangerous it had sent a woman to the hospital? My mentor hadn’t trained me on how to deal with this kind of development, so I decided to react the way I would have if a friend had told me the same story.

“Oh my God!” I said. “That’s horrible. Nobody buy Tighten Up!”

The women seemed to accept my reaction as a sign that I had a tiny bit of integrity, but I don’t think they really trusted me when I recited any of the other pseudo-medical claims. I wasn’t sure how much of it I believed anymore either.

Finally it was time to bring out my first sex toy—the Jelly Osaki. This item was an eight-inch-long purple vinyl vibrator that had a rotating shaft with a woman’s face on it; the shaft itself was attached to a hummingbird-shaped clitoral stimulator. Why the face? Well, Japan has anti-sex-toy laws too, and one way to get around them is to make the sex toys look like dolls.25

This presentation was even more challenging than the lube presentation in terms of following the law. Imagine trying to sell someone something without being able to say what it is or how it works. I couldn’t say “clitoral stimulator” or describe what the Osaki actually did. Instead, I had to parrot the training manual (while cringing on the inside): “And once you put your massager on the man on the boat, you’ll want to go out to sea every day.” (In this confusing analogy, the “man” was supposed to be the clitoral head and the “boat” was the clitoral hood.) This atrocious euphemism for the clitoris felt like it was pulled from a poorly written children’s book, and it landed like a thud in the room. To break the tension, I decided to resort to the party trick I’d been taught. I bent the shaft of the Osaki, placed it on the ground, and turned it on. The brightly colored vibrator flopped all over the place like some kind of demented robotic snake. As the women broke out into laughter, I relaxed. But I felt like a fraud. I had successfully entertained people with a sex toy, but I hadn’t taught people how or why to use it. I sold a lot of Osakis and lube that night, but I had not mentioned masturbation a single time. I left feeling ambivalent: satisfied with my sales prowess but feeling as if I wasn’t actually teaching people anything.

I had been so hopeful before that first party, but it wasn’t long before I came to the realization that selling sex toys wasn’t going to be as socially progressive as I thought it would be. Sure, there would be small moments where I would feel as if I were making some slight difference in people’s lives. For example, three generations of women attended one of my parties, and as I watched them test out Pocket Rockets on their noses to feel the intensity of the vibration, the sight warmed my heart. I thought it might be possible that I was actually bringing sexual enlightenment to women of all ages. But more parties involved women gingerly calling up their husbands, asking for permission to charge sex toys on the family credit card; I couldn’t help but wonder if those calls would have happened had they been spending a similar amount of money at Macy’s. I’d hear them talking to their husbands as they rattled off their carefully constructed list of sex toys, explaining each with a giggle, as if they were apologizing for their sexuality. Was this really the state of modern womanhood? Even at the parties where the guests openly celebrated their sexuality, they still held up monogamous marriage as the ideal. Their hope was to bring sexual variety into marriage, squeezing the sexual revolution into a traditional framework dictated by gender norms. These women were more in line with 1950s housewives than the sexually liberated women I’d thought I’d be working with.

If I was surprised by the makeup of the clientele, the companies I worked for understood their audiences quite well. Many of the products we sold were marketed with the idea that sex was either gross or a chore to be endured. Case in point: Both home party companies I worked for sold products for oral sex that went by names like Tasty Tease, Fireworks, Happy Penis Cream, or D’Lickious Head Gel. These gels came in flavors such as cherry, piña colada, banana, mint, and more and were meant to make a man’s penis taste better when performing fellatio (and for cunnilingus as well, although we weren’t instructed to focus on this use). I had been taught to make jokes at this portion of my presentation like “They don’t call it a job for nothing” or tell the guests that some women only give “ABC blow jobs: Anniversary, Birthday, and Christmas.” There seemed to be a tacit agreement that fellatio was a chore to be endured and that the only way of improving it was to slather a man’s penis with a gel that smelled and tasted like children’s fluoride. God forbid any woman admit to actually enjoying the act of fellatio.

For parties geared toward women (in fact, men were barred), it was interesting how many of our wares were solely intended for male sexual pleasure. Not one of the six books we sold was about masturbation; all were about enhancing sex with your partner or pleasing a man. The first chapter of the only book we sold on sex toys, Toy Gasms!, was titled “How to Spring a Sex Toy on Your Lover,” with a large chunk of it devoted to convincing a man that a sex toy wouldn’t replace him. Passion Parties’ bestselling book was Tickle His Pickle—a guide to sexually pleasing a male partner. Sure, women at our parties bought some sex toys for masturbation, but more of their attention seemed to be on learning to please their men and therefore keep their marriages intact.

One of our most popular items was male masturbation sleeves. Our top seller was the cheapest of these, the twenty-nine-dollar Gigi. Supposedly “modeled after a real vagina,” the Gigi was bright pink, and our demonstration for it involved filling the Gigi with lubricant and sliding a penis-shaped lube bottle in and out of it to show how pleasurable it would be for a man. Following in the blow-jobs-are-gross theme, we were advised by the training manual to tell customers, “If a woman is reluctant to perform oral sex on a man, a well-lubricated masturbation sleeve like Gigi can serve as an excellent substitute—and if you’re under the covers, he may never know the difference.”26 The specter of cheating also hung over this presentation; in fact, the training manual specifically mentioned that the Gigi was a device intended to “keep him thinking about you” when “he” was traveling.

I sold a ton of Gigis.

I learned a lot of things from my time in the sex-toy-party industry, but the main takeaway was that it wasn’t at all what I had been expecting. I had thought that the women hosting such parties were going to be liberal feminists whose homes were decorated with Frida Kahlo reproductions and African art. Instead, I found myself in the homes of gun-toting, religious Republicans. They were women who were buying sex toys to spice up their relationships and save their marriages. If they bought toys to use solo, it was most often because their husbands were away fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq. It was a glimpse into a world that was decidedly less progressive than the one I thought I was going in to.

The more I dove into the world of sex toys, the more I realized how sexually regressive it was. Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence that the mainstream sex-toy industry was promoting an ideology more in line with archaic gender and sexual norms than with radical sexual empowerment. Even the industry-standard term “sex toys” was infantilizing. Male sexual problems were given “erectile dysfunction” drugs, a serious-sounding term that legitimized these sexual issues as diseases. Meanwhile, women’s sexuality was trite, fixed or improved by “toys.” And more insulting still were the sex toys themselves. Many of them actually looked like children’s toys, shaped like dolls, bunnies, monarch butterflies, or the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

I had thought that the whole existence of the sex-toy industry was a sign of the liberation that had come out of the sexual revolution. My time in the industry itself taught me that maybe we hadn’t come quite as far as I had believed. But sex toys were hard to ignore, as they were the physical embodiment of the conflicted relationship the modern world had with sexuality. Sex toys were being shown on television in shows like Sex in the City while, in other parts of the country, people could be arrested for selling them. And yet despite their legal status, they could be found in bedside tables across the nation—and even worldwide.

My questions were: How did we get here? How did a giant vibrating penis come to be thought of as the key to matrimonial bliss? And, why, in spite of the fact that sex toys were popular with social conservatives, did they remain illegal in many conservative states? It would require a look back at the strange history of sex toys to be able to answer these questions.