The importance of women in sex tech

The week of January 7, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world's largest technology trade show, took place in Las Vegas. While the event has historically been known for its lack of diversity, this year showed some signs of improvement. This year, CES allowed female-led and oriented sex tech companies to appear at the show. 

One of the 12 sex tech companies that presented this year was Lora Dicarlo. Founded by Lora Haddock, the company states its mission is "to create a sexually equitable world." The company was infamously banned from entering the 2019 CES show on decency grounds even though the year before, a sex doll for men was allowed entry for exhibit. This year, however, the company exhibited two new massagers for women. 

Sex tech advocates argue that their products help open the kind of healthy sexual dialogue women haven't had access to in the past. Since its inception, sex tech has conventionally taken the form of VR porn and sex robots designed for the male gaze, while sex tech designed by and/or for women has been taboo. When made by and for women, sex tech allows conversations about women's sexual pleasure and wellness to take place in male-dominated spaces — and that's a good thing. As Bryony Cole, host of sex tech podcast Future of Sex, has emphasized, technology generally plays a positive role in promoting healthier attitudes toward sexuality. “When you put ‘tech’ on the end of ‘sex tech,’ you suddenly have permission to talk about sex,” she said in a 2018 Psychology Today article.

As important as creating technology to cater to women's sexual pleasure is, sex tech is also about more than just pleasure. It can also be an important part of the healing process for many women who have had traumatic sexual experiences — or even those who are trying to work through the day-to-day sexual repression women face on a larger societal scale. For instance, sex tech can help teach women about how to achieve pleasure in a society that has minimized, or violently thwarted, their ability to or interest in doing so. Take the interactive educational platform OMGYes, which has aimed to compile a dictionary for female masturbation techniques. In 2016, the platform performed a study among 2,000 women, ages 18 to 95, about their masturbation techniques, and also researched the existing scientific knowledge behind female pleasure, then assigned names to the techniques they found. Before 2016, no study had been done into the specifics of how women pleasure themselves, and these techniques had never had a language for themselves. 

Sex tech has the potential to be highly profitable, too. As a study by Stratistics MRC explores, if investment in sex tech is executed well, the worth of the sexual wellness industry, which is currently $40 billion, could rise to a whopping $122 billion within six years. 

Of course, sex tech still faces some hurdles to overcome before it can achieve such profitability. These hurdles can start in the production phases. Founder of sex tech company MyLorals, Melanie Cristol, told Paper magazine in May 2019 that a U.S.-based condom company was very interested in working with her brand to develop a product until they discovered its use was to enhance the experience of a woman receiving oral sex. After they realized this, the company ignored Cristol, then eventually told her that the board was "uncomfortable" with the nature of the product. Cristol noted this wasn't her first experience having her products shunned because of their being for cunnilingus. "It's kind of a recurring thing that comes up," she told Paper. “A lot of people are comfortable with the concept of vaginal intercourse, but when it comes to oral sex, I think there's a layer of taboo — particularly oral sex for the pleasure of women.”

Additionally, the combination of morality clauses in trade shows and social media advertisement policies, as well as a lack of understanding of what female sex tech is (it's often equated to porn), makes it difficult for startups to secure online and offline marketing platforms. Likewise, sites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have strict advertising policies for sex products, making it difficult for consumers to effectively search for, purchase, or even know about the existence of these products. 

Ultimately, though, these obstacles are not insurmountable, and this year's progress at CES goes to show just that.