In a recent piece for The Irish Times (Sex Siopa : Toys aren't the answer to spicing up your sex life, you are; June 20th, 2016), Sarah Waldron interviewed Shawna Scott, owner of online sex toy emporium Sex Siopa. Scott describes herself as a "smut pedlar who sells dildos and lube for a living". Intrigued as to what had attracted Scott to the smut-peddling business, I came across an interview with Emily Carson on the website totallydublin.ie.
Scott had been “chatting with my friend on Facebook about the vibrator I’d just bought. I thought it was a really nice product and she was like ‘I can’t find anything like that in Dublin’.” At first the entrepreneurs sold “handmade nipple pasties and soy wax candles in little milk jugs for pouring on people”.
The only pasties I’ve heard of are deep-fried ones, usually eaten with chips, but I don’t think Scott and her friend sold those.
More baffling, however, than Scott’s nipple pasties is Carson’s stern admonition that “maybe we can finally stop giggling at the diamanté-encrusted dildos down the back of Ann Summers and start taking pride in the products that are becoming ever more ubiquitous in the modern relationship”.
Earnestly, Carson opines that “with features like programmable vibrations, USB charging and much more, it seems like we’re finally getting access to the body-safe sex life of the future”.
Well, it’s a point of view, but, what with “programmable vibrations, USB charging and much more”, whereas a sex life of the past was largely confined to the bedroom, the demands of a sex life in the future, and present, would appear to be best met in a small workshop equipped with cans of WD40, operator manuals and a spot-welding kit.
Sex toy success
What Carson’s encomium ignores is the possibility that the success of sex toy businesses represents – to quote from Germaine Greer’s
The Whole Woman
(1999), where she addresses the Ann Summers phenomenon – “women’s final capitulation to their partners’ reliance on commercial pornography”.
It seems that of an evening, and with “programmable vibrations, USB charging and much more” making quiet suburbs hum like medium-sized industrial zones, at least one person wants to ask whether a simple hug is allowed. Not, it appears, while many females are grimly doing their best to live up to their partners’ porn-based fantasies.
As Carson and Scott beckon us towards a sex life replete with the full panoply of sex toys, clamps, whips and motorised dolls, it is clear that for them body safety is a priority.
For example, the Sex Siopa website states: “All our adult toys and accessories are bodysafe,” and Scott told Waldron: “It still gets me that there are still no regulations when it comes to sex toys,” highlighting the hazards posed by a group of chemicals called phthalates.
Scott’s concern over sex toy-associated chemical hazards is commendable, but medical research indicates that microbiological hazards might also warrant further scrutiny.
For example, factors associated with bacterial vaginosis (BV) include vaginal discharge and a reduction in the number of normal vaginal lactobacilli.
Sexually facilitated condition
Writing in the journal
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
in 2011, researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, concluded from a study of 320 women that “recent penetrative vaginal sex with a toy was associated with decreased quantities of hydrogen peroxide-producing lactobacilli in women who were colonised with those bacteria”. The authors suggested that “BV is a sexually facilitated, if not sexually transmitted, condition.”
In an American study published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections in 2014, researchers assessed both the potential for the transmission of human papillomavirus (HPV) via shared sex toys, and the efficacy of cleaning practices using a commercially available sex toy-cleaning product.
The authors stated: “HPV was detected on sex toys after use in women with HPV detected on vaginal swabs; HPV was detected on sex toys after cleaning, even up to 24 hours depending on vibrator type; [and] HPV transmission may be feasible via sex toys, in sexual events involving shared sex toy use.”
Citing evidence that HPV can retain infectivity on environmental surfaces for up to a week, the authors conclude that there is a need “to develop evidence-based recommendations for sex toy-cleaning to reduce transmission of HPV and other sexually transmitted infections”.
In an investigation of "Sexual Behaviours and Other Risk Factors for Oral Human Papillomavirus Infections in Young Women", researchers reported in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases in 2014, their study of 1,010 female university students, of whom 19 had an ongoing HPV infection.
They found that “Oral HPV was significantly associated with lifetime coital sex partnership numbers, lifetime and yearly oral sex partnership numbers and hand and/or sex toy transfer from genitals to mouth.”
But any assumption that the sex toy industry is skewed towards women fails to take note of a market for male sex toys too, an area also freighted with potential infectious hazard.
Thus, when researchers examined "Risk factors for syphilis infection in men who have sex with men: results of a case-control study in Lille, France", their conclusion, published in Sexually Transmitted Infections stated: "Receptive oral sex without a condom and use of anal sex toys were identified as presenting a major risk of syphilis infection." George Winter is an author, medical journalist and a Fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Science.
