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Course:CSIS200/2024/Toying with Sexual Pleasure & Social Stigma: A Contextual Analysis of People With Vulvas’ (PWV) Sex Toy Usage in Western Countries

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Toying with Sexual Pleasure & Social Stigma: A Contextual Analysis of People With Vulvas’ (PWV) Sex Toy Usage in Western Countries

Term Definition
Heteronormativity The idea that heterosexuality is the standard, natural, or superior sexual orientation and that people should conform to traditional gender roles and relationships.
Non-procreative sexual behaviours Sexual activity performed for intents and purposes other than biological reproduction.
Patriarchy A social system in which men traditionally hold authority, responsibility, and power, and women and people of other marginalized genders are largely excluded.
People with vulvas (PWVs) In this essay, I use the term “PWVs” to be more inclusive to people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned to at birth but are still relevant to this issue due to their genitalia and perhaps the way they were socialized. I also use the term “women” in reference to studies or time periods where this category was assumed to be synonymous with PWVs in order to more accurately describe the group(s) being discussed.
Sex toys “Tools used on the genitals by many sexually active people as stimulating tools for pleasure and other considerations.”[1] The most commonly owned kind of sex toy worldwide are vibrators and rubber penises (i.e., “dildos”).[1]
Vaginal orgasm Orgasms that are achieved through sexual activity that is internally stimulating for PWVs, such as "P-in-V" (penis-in-vagina) sex.

Introduction

Pleasure can be described as “a feeling, a sensation, [and/or] a subjectively experienced phenomenon”[2] that in a general sense can come about from engaging in activities ranging from the mundane to the extraordinary. Sexual pleasure in particular typically derives from engaging in sexual activities, either with a partner(s) or by oneself. Despite its linkage to other forms of pleasure, sexual pleasure has been widely stigmatized in Western society today as a matter that is at best, refrained from being discussed, and at worst, characterized as sinful. The women's liberation movements that spanned the 1960s and 70s played a large role in shifting public conversation about pleasure and masturbation, particularly for cisgender women. As a result, sex toys are now widely used by people with vulvas (PWVs) in a way that enhances their sexual experiences; on the other hand, however, not everyone has the same experiences navigating their use. In this Wiki page, you will find information about sexual pleasure, non-procreative sexual behaviours, stigmatization, the sexual revolution, and other women's liberation movements, which contextualize PWVs' modern day use of sex toys in the Western world.

Sexual Pleasure & Its Stigmas

Saint Thomas Aquinas identified four sexual activities as particularly abhorrent and in violation of Christian doctrine.[2]

The Christian Church has played a large role in the stigmatization of sexual pleasure and non-procreative sexual behaviours, as it has for centuries adopted the idea that non-procreative sex is “unnatural” or a “crime against nature:”[2] by the middle of the thirteenth century, this was explicitly incorporated into orthodox Christian doctrine. Four specific activities were identified as particularly abhorrent: “masturbation, bestiality, homosexual copulation, and heterosexual coitus in other than the Church-mandated ‘missionary’ position.”[2] Similar applications of this stigma to other bodily functions would condemn kissing and simple caressing, which proves the absurdity of this position.[2] In the late sixteenth century, the Church finally legitimized sexual pleasure between married men and women, so long as procreation was the primary purpose for the sexual activity at hand and that no contraception was utilized.[2] Eventually, medical practitioners claimed that masturbation caused “disease, insanity, and social-sexual maladjustment.”[3] Therefore, any kind of sexual activity that existed outside of these limitations still remained taboo, despite ample evidence of the prevalence of non-procreative sex in the ancient world. For example, historical studies have proven that people have used dildos since at least the 3rd century in Greece,[4] and in 2005, what researchers believe to be the world’s oldest dildo, estimated to be over 28,000 years old, was found in the Swabian Alps in Germany.[1] Today, procreation is said to be neither the sole nor dominant function of human sexuality in contemporary Western society,[2] yet residual stigma continues to persist.

An example of an amphora (a storage vessel used in Ancient Greece) which depicts a woman’s use of a phallic object.[5]

The stigma against sexual pleasure today manifests in a multitude of ways, from the censorship of sexuality in the media to legal action against adult entertainment stores. It is speculated that John Cleland’s 1748 novel, “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” which depicts a young girl’s exploration of sexual pleasure, incited the most famous rage regarding the subject of female sexual pleasure, which caused its repeated seizure by authorities and book bans across multiple jurisdictions.[6] The influence of religion and religious authorities is also relevant to this case; in response to the novel, the Bishop of London called it an “open insult upon [r]eligion and good manners” and blamed it for two London earthquakes that occurred in 1750.[6]

More proximate to the Canadian context are the multiple examples of legal action that adult entertainment stores have disproportionately been targeted with. In 1985, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that sex toys are “obscene publications,” which made it illegal for Canadian business to sell items that represented sex organs.[7] This followed a raid on a Montreal-based sex store in 1977, which seized a variety of products that were being sold despite only being visible and accessible to adult shoppers. When the prosecutor for the Montreal Police Department was asked about the legality of selling other styles of vibrators, he responded saying that they were not a problem so long as they were not shaped like genitalia, which implies a connection between the stigmatization of sexual pleasure and of the human body more generally.

Sex shops are sites of sex-positivity which have historically been heavily targeted by “morality policing” and other effects of social stigma.

Similarly, in the city of Vancouver in the early 2000s, city inspectors played a large role in “morality policing,” imposing tight restrictions on local adult entertainment stores.[8][9] In particular, inspectors targeted Granville Street’s “Source Adult Video” on multiple occasions for selling sex toys that resembled genitalia and violating zoning bylaws that dictated where sex toy sales could take place, which city planners justified by pointing to other stores’ “illegal activities and poor maintenance.”[9] Interestingly, in 2004, when the store manager went to city hall, he was told that “the law [in question] was antiquated and shouldn’t really be there” and the deputy chief licensing inspector had been quoted saying that they "live[d] in a different society than when the bylaw was written,” and eventually concluded that “it may have to be changed.”[8] The resulting rhetoric acts as a signifier that society has begun to evolve past the stigma that had been inextricably tied to sexual pleasure in Western society at least since the Christian Church’s involvement, however this does not mean it does not have effects today. Another more recent example of how this stigma has manifested includes the removal of a scene portraying oral sex and the female orgasm in the movie, “Charlie Countryman” (2013), due to public outrage, which the actor portrayed in the film had said would never occur in reference to a movie's violent scenes, that arguably pose more harm to its audience.[6]

Sexual Pleasure & Women's Liberation Movements

The first state-approved oral contraceptive pill was invented by American scientists in 1960.

Before the 1960s, women’s bodies were largely considered as engines of population growth.[10] The sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement paved the path for women to start reclaiming their bodies in a way that addressed issues of sexuality and sexual morality, including the larger question of whether sex serves any purpose other than biological reproduction. At the time, it was widely held that women’s sexual activity ought to be constrained to marriage. The hippie movement also advanced the case for non-procreative sexual behaviours, as well as an end to marital monogamy. Tangible effects of these movements in Canada included the legalization of the sale of condoms and the long anticipated invention of the birth control pill, which the Roman Catholic Church reiterated as contraceptive strategies that ultimately distort the nature and purpose of sex. These developments helped to construct sexual intercourse as no longer exclusively a means of reproduction, which was also made possible by changes in attitudes toward the family unit and pre-marital or extra-marital sex.

A 1970 journal put out by the "new Women's Liberation Movement." One of the articles in this edition is titled "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm."

Despite the so-called sexual revolution in the 1960s, many women felt let down by the lack of social change that had been expected to occur.[3] While non-procreative sex, including extramarital relations, had become a more socially visible and acceptable phenomenon, sexual double standards and unequal power dynamics between men and women persisted. In response, during the early 1970s, women began to take greater responsibility for their own sexual education and pleasure, and started to frame female masturbation and orgasm as fundamental ingredients of women’s liberation.[3] These were the roots from which sex-positive feminist activism and entrepreneurship eventually grew. Part of this new feminist movement included a confrontation of the myth of the vaginal orgasm, which had discursively produced a version of female sexuality that was anchored in heterosexuality and patriarchy,[3] and rediscovering the clitoris, the center of female sexual pleasure and orgasm.[3][4] It is in this context that vibrators began to be openly sold as tools for sexual enhancement or achieving sexual pleasure, at first being marketed in non-sexual terms as “body massagers” in the 1930s, and later as sex toys beginning in the 1960s.[3] This process took several decades from the initial invention of steam-powered vibrators in the 1860s as a strategy to treat “female hysteria,” which often necessitated the approval of the patient’s husband;[1][3][4] electric vibrators started being sold in 1902.[1] By the early 1970s, the taboos around masturbation were starting to fade, and the sexual revolution, combined with the rise of feminist and queer liberation movements, had produced a cultural climate in which masturbation and other forms of sexual expression were more openly discussed.[3] This is where cheerleaders for female masturbation, like Betty Dodson, came in.

Betty Dodson, an American sex educator and pioneer of feminism and sex-positivity.

Through her important work, Dodson gave many women the permission they needed “to explore their bodies, take control of their orgasms, and make sexual pleasure a greater priority in their lives.”[3] One of the women she ended up helping was Dell Williams, who eventually became the original founder of the first business in the United States exclusively devoted to women’s sexual pleasure and health in 1974, which she called Eve’s Garden.[3] She hoped that like Dodson had done for her, her business would serve as a resource center for women to ask questions and receive advice on exploring their sexual attitudes and new sexual behaviours.[3] Within two years, the business’s catalogs and products were reaching customers both across the country and internationally.[3] The numerous letters that Williams received from Eve’s Garden customers testified to how deeply they had internalized cultural messages about gender and sexuality, recounting how they weren’t having orgasms or any access to accurate information about sex, as well as the guilty feelings that arose from their engagement with sexual behaviours intended for pleasure.[3] With the availability of these resources and sources of support, women experienced a shift in cultural discourse, in which they were now enabled to see themselves as sexual agents rather than sexual objects that existed solely for the pleasure of men.[3]

Sex Toys & Stigmas in the 21st Century

Buttons from the sexual revolution.

Regarding how sex toys are used in the modern Western world today, many benefits have been researched in connection to their usage, including improvements to women’s self awareness, body image, self-esteem, perception of worth, and overall sexual pleasure,[2][4] as well as increased comfortability with their genitals.[11] As a result of orgasm, many people experience emotional and physical release that is characterized with decreased tension and irritability.[2] Once a newer phenomenon conceived as a tool for women’s sexual liberation, sex toys have become increasingly common both across the world and within a Canadian context; researchers have consistently found that at least over half of women and PWVs have used vibrators or other sex toys/enhancements,[1][4][11] with 68% of participants in one study reporting typical engagement with these enhancements in solo sexual experiences and behaviours.[1] These statistics are highly relevant to our understanding of the increased performance of non-procreative sexual behaviours and their normalcy since the stronghold of the Christian doctrine in the thirteenth century.

Decades after the so-called sexual revolution, feminist sex toy stores and other safe, sex-positive spaces prove to be just as important as sites of women’s personal sexual conversations, as research points to how women and PWVs still believe that sexual pleasure during masturbation is not something they can readily discuss.[4] Generally, women often feel uncomfortable expressing that they derive pleasure from sex toys to others.[4] In particular, heterosexual women often construct sex toys as a threat to their male partners’ sense of sexual prowess, often purposefully hiding them and reporting that they equate penetration with sexual normality. On the other hand, queer women and PWVs across multiple studies were more likely to describe sex toys in positive ways, reporting less shame and more openness about enjoying them with their partners compared to heterosexual women.[4][11] This discrepancy between heterosexual and queer PWVs has been attributed to the directed promotion of vibrators as aids to achieve greater sexual pleasure and orgasm for PWVs.

Religion still plays a large role in individuals' perceptions of sexual pleasure, and therefore, sex toys.

Additionally, although the movements of the 1960s and 1970s freed various modes of sexual behaviour from the constraints of social disapproval, there are lingering socio-religious constraints on many forms of sexual expression in many communities.[1] Today, religion still proves to have a conservative outlook towards sexual pleasure; in one international study, 59.7% of participants with a religious background disapproved of sex toy use as immoral, in contrast with 26.5% of non-religious participants (i.e., atheists, agnostics, and those who did not disclose their religions).[1] Based on this data, the researchers concluded that religious adherents often harbour negative feelings towards sex and sexual pleasure, which can be linked to negative attitudes towards sex enhancements and toys. However, on the other hand, the number of religious participants who did openly address their use sex toys and their willingness to talk about it with others perhaps points to a paradigm shift towards sex by religious adherents.



This video depicts a diverse variety of women’s experiences with orgasm and sexual pleasure. It surveys a small sample of 100 women with different identities, backgrounds, and experiences about the first orgasm that they experienced during their lifetime. According to my count, about 25% of the participants credited their first orgasmic experience to sex toy use or masturbatory means, and an additional 3% detailed having their first orgasm with another woman. On the other hand, about 5% of the participants explained that either a long time had passed or sexual experiences with multiple partners had taken place until they finally experienced an orgasm. Some of the participants that were questioned opted to not participate in the video, which could be interpreted as a result of the residual stigma that still surrounds these topics.[12]

Critiques of Sex Toys

An array of different types of sex toys.

As the movement for women's liberation clearly opened more doors and pathways through which women were given the opportunity to explore their sexuality and take ownership over their sexual pleasure, this does not mean all PWVs prefer to use sex toys in solo or partnered sexual behaviours; the reasons for this are wide and varied. For example, some scholars have started to question the capitalistic implications of sex toys, including the dangerous and financially exploitative conditions in which sex toys are produced.[4] On the other hand, sex toys have also been the subject of academic critiques which claim that they often replicate racist, sexist, and cisheteronormative themes which construct women as passive sexual objects and Black men in particular as sexually aggressive, as well as cisheterosexual relations as the norm. From the early 1970s, many women resisted vibrators because they viewed them as too mechanical or feared that they might become addicted;[3] similar sentiments are reflected in modern research.[4] In addition, some PWVs recount negative experiences with sex toys, such as when their male partners forced them to use sex toys, in which they functioned as extensions of misogynistic power,[4] or when they experienced side effects such as changes in genital sensitivity, numbness, pain, and dyspareunia.[1] Other experiences that PWVs had using sex toys were characterized as neither positive nor negative, in which the sex toys they used ultimately failed to enhance their sexual experiences.[4]

Conclusion

Since at least the thirteenth century, sexual pleasure and the various methods used to achieve it have been widely stigmatized in Western society. The women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s played a large role in combating these social stigmas, particularly for cisgender women. As a result, sex toys are now widely used by PWVs in a way that enhances their sexual experiences; the current moment is characterized by a heightened accessibility to sex toys and other sexual enhancements used with the goal of achieving sexual pleasure, regardless of an individual's biological sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. On the other hand, not everyone has the same or any experiences navigating their use, with religious doctrine, as well as other ideologies, still playing a large role in whether people choose to engage in these behaviours. Ultimately, everyone has the right to feel good in their bodies and choose to engage in activities that make them feel good, whether that implies the use of sex toys or not, and we can all play a role in combating the stigmas rooted in heteropatriarchy and control over women regardless of this fact.

Biography

Hilla Kabazo (she/her) is a fifth-year student studying Sociology and Jewish Studies at UBC.

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Kwakye, Ahenkora S. (2020). "Using Sex Toys and the Assimilation of Tools into Bodies: Can Sex Enhancements Incorporate Tools into Human Sexuality?". Sexuality & Culture. 24 (6): 2007–2031.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Abramson, Paul R.; Pinkerton, Steven D. (1995). With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality. Oxford University Press. pp. 21–52. ISBN 9780195357585.
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 Comella, Lynn (2017). Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Duke University Press. pp. 15–42. ISBN 978-0-8223-7267-7.
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 Fahs, Breanne; Swank, Eric (2013). ""Adventures with the "Plastic Man": Sex Toys, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and the Politics of Women's Sexual Pleasure". Sexuality & Culture. 17 (4): 666–685.
  5. ↑ ῎Ολίσβοι - III. (2015, September 29). Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/69716881@N02/21829496981/in/photostream/
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Dykerman, Katelyn (March 20, 2014). "The Censorship of Female Pleasure: Cleland, Charlie Countryman, Cunnilingus". NOTCHES.
  7. ↑ "Ruling Bans Genital Toys, Sex Dolls, Police Say". The Globe and Mail. October 17, 1985.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Hainsworth, Jeremy (December 9, 2004). [link.gale.com/apps/doc/GIQPJE563873499/AHSI?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=bd103f3d "Fear of Sex Toys"] Check |url= value (help). Xtra! West: Vancouver's Gay and Lesbian News (295). pp. 7–8.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Perelle, Robin (April 18, 2002). [link.gale.com/apps/doc/ZUAMKJ454286331/AHSI?u=ubcolumbia&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=747487c7 "Sex-toy Gestapo"] Check |url= value (help). Xtra! West: Vancouver's Gay and Lesbian News (226). p. 7.
  10. ↑ Belshaw, John D. (2016). Canadian History: Post-Confederation. Victoria, B.C.: BCcampus. pp. 590–595. ISBN 978-1-989623-13-8.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Wood, Jessica; Crann, Sara; Cunningham, Shannon; Money, Deborah; O'Doherty, Kieran (2017). "A Cross-Sectional Survey of Sex Toy Use, Characteristics of Sex Toy Use Hygiene Behaviours, and Vulvovaginal Health Outcomes in Canada". The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. 26 (3): 196–204.
  12. ↑ Cut (2022, August 25). 100 Women Describe Their First Orgasm | Keep it 100 | Cut. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKSf-_EjeI
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