In the sex toy industry, Valentine’s Day is basically Christmas: Products start flying off the shelves weeks before, with couples’ toys like cock rings and wearable vibrators doubling or even quintupling their sales numbers. It’s not hard to figure out why that is. For consumers trying to make their February 14th as special, as perfect, as possible, a little technical upgrade can seem like a guaranteed way to ensure a magical night of passion. And whether you’re looking for explosive orgasms, greater staying power, more effortless anal sex, or a raging libido, there’s a sex tech company out there that promises to deliver.
For many folks, technology really can offer a solution to all manner of sexual woes. Does your clitoris need vibration to reach a state of physical arousal? Sex toys can solve that, as many enthusiastic vibrator owners are happy to attest. Is your penis struggling to achieve and maintain erection, even when you’re extremely aroused? Viagra, Cialis, and their numerous generic counterparts are all readily available. Suction devices can improve clitoral sensitivity, especially for people who find vibration more irritating than arousing. Anal toys make it easier to relax the sphincter and enjoy truly pleasurable anal penetration. And some wonderfully innovative couple’s vibrators have made it possible to experience hands-free vibration during penetrative sex—a game changer for people who require intense clitoral stimulation to achieve sexual pleasure.
As disparate as these struggles might seem, there’s one clear element that unites them: They’re all functionally engineering problems, ones that can be remedied with a carefully designed pill or product that’s calibrated to meet the body’s needs. But there’s more to sex than just our physical engineering. Yes, our nerve endings and genital structures play a major part in our experiences of pleasure. But so does our brain, and the complex cocktail of chemicals known as our emotional state. And it’s this less tangible side of sex where sex tech, including medications, often falls flat on its face.
Sex predates human existence. But even after millennia of engaging in the activity, there’s never really been a consensus about what “normal” sexuality is. Depending on when, and where, you are in history, you’re likely to encounter a wide range of ideas about what sex and desire are “supposed” to look like. Within cultures that celebrate chastity, like Catholicism and, to some extent, Buddhism, a lack of libido could be seen as a sign of enlightenment and holiness; in modern America, that same level of sexual desire is more likely to be pathologized, as evidenced by the supposed “sex recession” that took over the headlines a few years ago.
With the rise of modern psychology and sexology, various experts—including Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson—have attempted to authoritatively document the details of human sexual response through a dispassionate, unbiased lens. Yet that task has proven far more challenging, and far more susceptible to cultural preconceptions, than anticipated. Even questions as seemingly simple as why some people feel pleasure when the “g-spot” is stimulated, or the biological mechanisms behind “female ejaculation,” have led to heated debate. Toss in a bunch of tech entrepreneurs eager to make a quick buck, and you quickly wind up with an industry that causes as many problems as it solves.
Take, for instance, the modern marketplace for erectile dysfunction drugs. Erectile dysfunction—sometimes referred to as impotence—is an age-old issue, even appearing in medieval texts, where men blamed witches for robbing them of their ability to get an erection. For most of human history, there wasn’t really a cure for an unresponsive member; the best bet was to be patient, or potentially seek help from a therapist. But in the 1990s, the advent of Viagra upended everything. In its early days, the medication was primarily marketed to older men, whose declining health made it harder to keep and maintain an erection even when the spirit was willing. But in the ensuing decades, Viagra has strayed from a straightforward solution to impotence caused by declining health, as profit-driven distributors began to advertise the medication as cure-all for men who are dissatisfied with their erectile performance—a category that is dangerously vague and heavily dependent on men’s personal, and often unrealistic, expectations for their penis’s responsiveness.
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In recent years, telemedicine sites like Hims have helped advance the idea that even men in their thirties and forties are good candidates for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs, despite the fact that these men are unlikely to suffer from the kind of impotence that Viagra was originally intended to treat. Though the company has moderated its marketing copy in recent years, in its early days, it leaned hard on the idea that erectile dysfunction pills could be a recipe for erections on demand: “You deserve to have an erection when you want one, not just when your penis says it’s allowed,” an early version of the site declared in big, bold letters. Less discussed in the site’s marketing materials (aside from tiny, rote fine print at the bottom of the purchase page) was the fact that overuse of erectile dysfunction medication can lead to serious problems, including creating a psychological dependency on the pills and, in the most extreme cases, damaging the penis to the point where erection becomes permanently impossible.
And it’s not just people with penises who are being promised effortlessly good sex in the form of a pill. In the wake of Viagra’s commercial success, researchers hoped to develop a similarly groundbreaking medication to address the sexual woes of cis women—“pink Viagra.” But vulvas don’t really have an equivalent to impotence, or to the extent that they do, it’s something like lack of lubrication, which can be readily addressed with a cheap bottle of lube. So pharmaceutical companies turned their attention to a different problem: lack of libido. Seventeen years after Viagra hit the markets, the FDA approved a daily pill called Addyi. A few years later, an injectable known as Vyleesi became available. Both promised to revolutionize sex for women with a condition known as “hypoactive sexual desire disorder,” or HSDD—a potentially major breakthrough given that some researchers have estimated that as many as 10 percent of women suffer from HSDD (men can also be diagnosed with HSDD, though the diagnostic criteria are slightly different). Yet several years, and many hype cycles, later, neither medication has gotten much traction.
The problem is that HSDD itself is a bit of a controversial diagnosis. In order to be diagnosed, a woman’s reduced libido can’t be due to menopause or medication or illness or relationship struggles; it has to be reduced libido of unexplained origin, one that’s causing distress. Unsurprisingly, that definition leads to more questions than answers. Because, who exactly is determining what counts as “low libido”? And in a society where anything less than constant horniness gets flagged as “recession,” where more sex is supposedly the key to greater happiness, many people might feel distress not wanting sex “enough”—whether they want it as often as a few times a week or only once every few years. (This is the only way I can see how, even after eliminating post-menopausal women, women on libido altering medications, women with chronic illnesses, and women in unhappy relationships, researchers are convinced there’s still a full 10 percent of women who have HSDD.)
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Not surprisingly, then, Addyi and Vyleesi have been found to be modestly effective at best. Only a small number of women find Addyi helpful, and even within that population, results aren’t exactly overwhelming. Users on average get one-half to one extra sexually satisfying events per month, which is basically the difference between wanting to have sex twice a month versus wanting it three times a month. Vyleesi, which can be used more spur-of-the-moment style, also doesn’t work for that many people: Only 25 percent of users found it helpful, and that’s compared to 17 percent who benefited from a placebo. More troublingly, both these medications have potentially serious side effects. When combined with even a small amount of alcohol, Addyi causes users to faint from low blood pressure, while 40 percent of Vyleesi users experience nausea. Neither medication feels like a slam dunk way to effortlessly improve your sex life.
Indeed, despite some eye-popping claims—like this 2016 statement from the company behind Womanizer about a study that found that 100 percent of participants orgasmed while using their product—even sex toys aren’t guaranteed to improve your sex life. A butt plug won’t make anal sex easier if you find the activity inherently off-putting; and different bodies can have a range of responses to the exact same product. The Magic Wand vibrator may have millions of fans, but there’s an equally notable contingent of people who find its high powered motor painful in its intensity. Suction toys like the Womanizer work great if you love direct clitoral stimulation, and terribly if you don’t. Notably, that Womanizer study involved a paltry 22 women.
Sex tech can work wonders, but even the Magic Wand isn’t actually magic. There’s no one product that’s going to work for everyone; no simple piece of tech that’s going to transform a sex act you’re uncomfortable with into one you’re excited about. Living your best sex life involves patience, trial and error, and a willingness to listen to your body and respect its needs. Tech can absolutely play a part in that—especially low-cost “beginner” toys that help you understand your likes and dislikes—but even the costliest vibrator can’t magically induce a mind-blowing orgasm at the push of a button.
It’s not hard to understand why so many companies are given to such grandiose claims about the merits of their products. The people selling us better sex are, after all, selling to us, and they care far more about how many units they sell than how many people their products help. It’s not that different from the fitness or beauty or fashion industries. But with sex, the commercial space often feels like the only place that people can go to for answers.
Although openly discussing sex is much less taboo than it once was, Americans are still pretty uncomfortable when it comes to, well, talking about coming. Sex ed in schools remains a controversial topic; even when it’s on the curriculum, it’s more likely to be focused on pregnancy and disease prevention than pleasure. The majority of doctors aren’t comfortable talking about sex with their patients, and those who are aren’t necessarily given the proper training to competently address their concerns. And we can’t really rely on proper FDA regulation when those sources of authority aren’t interested in thinking through the sexist and harmful messages we get about “normal” sexuality. Sex tech often feels like the easiest place to turn for answers: but without a solid foundation of education, self awareness, and comfort with our own unique sexual desires and identity, we’re just as likely to wind up buying a nostrum as we are an actual fix.
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There’s an obvious appeal to the idea that we can take a pill or purchase a product that will instantly make sex better. But sex is too complicated, and too personal, to work that way. In a truly sex-positive society, we’d learn from a young age that our bodies and our experiences of pleasure are all unique to us—that “doing it right” isn’t about mastering a preset list of sex moves, but about giving ourselves and our partners the space to experiment, to explore, and, above all, to honor our own bodies by saying no to things that we don’t want or enjoy. If we as a society want to make sex better, then consumers and customers alike have to stop treating the experience like it’s nothing more than a physical engineering problem, something that can be addressed with a quick and easy fix that miraculously brings everyone to the height of pleasure. Sex is a multifaceted experience that’s as much about our emotions, state of mind, the quality of our relationships, and the cultural messaging we’ve received as it is about physical inputs and outputs. Embracing that truth is more powerful than any sex tech breakthrough could ever be.
Updated 2/10/22 12:20pm ET: This story has been updated to clarify Buddhism's attitudes toward chastity.
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