Disheartened. That’s the word that comes to mind after watching last night’s Sex Toy Stories on Channel Four. I didn’t plan on writing this post. But I went to bed feeling annoyed about it and when I woke up with my teeth still clenching, decided to let loose on the keyboard.

If you follow the Chintz Twitter account, you may have seen the tweets I posted following the show’s the conclusion late last night. They were, largely, to do with the colour pink and how annoyed I was that sex toy manufacturers-slash-sellers seem to think that every women wants something that looks like a piece of rock candy to stick between her legs. However, for me, this gripe was really the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

A quick recap for those who didn’t see get the chance to see this documentary … Eight everyday women – the ‘O Team’ – are recruited by adult toy/lingerie giant Ann Summers to produce a range of sex toys for ‘real women’. A camera crew follows them around for a year as they share their thoughts and ideas, and documents the Summers team taking them from concept to completion. The final (pink/purple) products are unveiled, everyone claps, and Ann Summers make a sh*t load of money. The volunteers? Oh, they get the kudos of having designed something for Ann Summers. And maybe a few free toys.

Really? Are we honestly still in that pastel-coloured place in which ‘acceptable’ sex toys look like they were produced for Barbie and fashioned from bubblegum? Are we actually cheering the fact that a massive, multinational retailer, with an annual turnover of £117.3 million in 2007-2008, was happy to exploit the ideas of eight – albeit willing – volunteers for profit?

Er, yeah, apparently.

Companies are there to make money. I get that. However, I have a big, big issue with them making it off the backs of volunteers and trying to portray their actions are magnanimous and benevolent (‘Here, have an orgasm, love’). How much would the time of those women have cost Ann Summers if they’d used a market research agency? A damn sight more than two airfares to China to see a sex toy factory, I’ll bet.

Back to the toys themselves, the tooth grinding started the moment the slightly more alternative suggestions were pushed to the side in favour of more traditional approaches. The lady who suggested an erotic dressage range? Uh, uh. No ‘scary’ BDSM-esque products allowed. The great grandmother who came up with an idea for an electrical-based product to stimulate the breasts? No, no. Health and safety issues. (Hello? Tens machines? Violet wands? The former are used during childbirth for crying out loud.) As one participant said on camera (and I’m paraphrasing rather than quoting here): ‘It’s like they’ve [Ann Summers] already decided what they want and our ideas don’t matter.’

And that’s the crux of it. This program was supposed to be about what women want from their sex toys when, in reality, it was about taking some interesting (free) ideas, sucking the most profitable into the Ann Summers’ brand machine, giving the participants contained choices so that they felt like they had options, and saying: ‘Look!’ This is what women want! Pink things that vibrate!’

I can tell you right now that not all women want those things. Heck, at least two women in that group didn’t want those things. But were they listened to? No. Probably because their ideas weren’t going to increase Ann Summers’ already significant bottom line to the required extent.

On top of the fact that these women weren’t being paid for their time, there was another moment of blatant disrespect in this thing that increased my digust to epically high levels. It came when the Ann Summers team didn’t even have the good grace to show up on time to their own product review meeting and left the eight participants sitting around until they had themselves sorted. So long, in fact, that one of them had to leave before she was able to see what she’d helped them to create. Rude. Plain rude. And disrespectful. And a very good indicator of how the eight participants were treated by Ann Summers in general.

Sex toys have come a long way in the past decade. They are a big part of my sex life and the sex lives of many men and women that I know. I had hoped that Sex Toy Stories might show that we were continuing to move forwards, that manufacturers are really listening and acting responsibly towards consumers. Being open-minded about their wants and needs. But, disappointingly, it showed that we’re going to be stuck in this vibrating pink bubble for the foreseeable future.

My kingdom for a camouflage-coloured dildo, a set of electrical nipple clamps, a melting butt plug, and a burnt umber cane. (All credit to @DomSigns for that last idea.)

* Total kudos to those eight women who were involved in Sex Toy Stories – I applaud them for taking part and being so candid. And Ann Summers? Why are only three and not the entire eight credited on your website?!

 

 

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