Editor’s note: This feature from author Suzannah Weiss was originally published on Playboy.com in 2019.
As a kid, I was expected to play with “girls’ toys” like dolls and horses, but I also enjoyed “boys’ toys” like race cars and action figures. As an adult, when sex toys became my playthings of choice, I found there wasn’t much wiggle room: The ones designed for my body were pink or purple, often with photos of women in sexy underwear on the package.
In recent years major retailers have begun to offer gender-neutral products or to market existing ones as gender neutral. Target has removed gender-based signs from its kids’ sections, Amazon no longer uses gender filters in its toy listings and the Disney Store has stopped labeling children’s costumes as either “boys” or “girls.” But one product category has remained stubbornly gendered: sex toys. Many adult companies are surprisingly regressive in assuming that certain toys are made for certain bodies and certain bodies map onto certain identities.
Slowly, though, that’s also changing—and, in the process, changing how we think about sex, gender and pleasure. Carol Queen, resident sexologist for the feminist sex shop Good Vibrations, says her customers have long been vocal about their desire for less-gendered toys. Some of those customers are among the increasingly visible population of trans and nonbinary people. A recent study from the Williams Institute at UCLA found that the estimated percentage of adults in the United States who identify as transgender has doubled in roughly the past decade. These people may feel excluded by toys that come in pink pouches emblazoned with photos of women just because they’re designed for vulvas.
“Labeling toys by gender puts the power in the sellers’ hands to make assumptions about buyers based on their gender,” says Ambrose Heffner, a trans man. “Labeling toys by function puts the power in buyers’ hands to make a judgment call and make their own empowered decisions regarding their body and sexuality.” Restrictive labeling affects cisgender customers as well. “Our cis-women customers have long disliked the ‘porno lady’ boxes because they were being sold an image of what a woman should look like along with their vibrator,” Queen explains. Gender-neutral toys appeal to people who want to experiment with new sensations but feel intimidated by—or are simply unaware of—products marketed to a different demographic. “There are many men out there who could benefit from using toys marketed to women but haven’t because the toys are bright pink or designed to look like a realistic penis,” says Daniel Saynt, founder of the sexual-wellness digital agency NSFW Creative.
To meet these customers’ demands, brands are tailoring their colors, designs and packaging to a broader range of buyers. Over the past few years, Lovense has released at least two toys, the wand vibrator Domi and the vibrating butt plug Hush, exclusively in black—a stark contrast to its couples’ set from 2013: a pink vibrator named Nora and a white masturbation sleeve named Max. Anal-toy seller b-Vibe offers most of its products in black, and sexual-wellness brand Maude offers a plain gray personal massager simply called “vibe.”
Dame Products, which launched the couples’ vibrator Eva to close the pleasure gap between men and women, now markets its products as sex aids for all people with vulvas. Some companies have even designed new products to work on a variety of bodies. MysteryVibe’s Crescendo vibrator folds and twists into different shapes so users can stimulate multiple body parts. Customers appreciate the Crescendo—which, according to MysteryVibe, doubled the company’s sales between 2016 and 2018—because they can use it not just on themselves but also on their partners, regardless of how they identify. “The fact that you can have one multipurpose, fully adaptable product helps shift your focus off the need for the ‘correct’ toy for a specific region and allows the user to be more creative in the application of it—and thus more creative and engaged in sex in general,” says chief marketing officer Dominnique Karetsos.
Lelo’s Transformer, which morphs into a rabbit vibrator, cock ring, prostate massager and more, raked in more than $1 million in its first year, according to the company’s brand expert Stu Nugent. Users like that it isn’t in your face about being gender neutral, he explains. “Most nonbinary customers don’t want to be reminded of gender all the time.”
It’s not just sex-toy inventors hopping on the gender-neutral bandwagon; some online marketplaces, including Wild Flower, Spectrum Boutique and Vibrant, avoid grouping products by gender or mentioning gender in their descriptions. “Wild Flower has grown by five times its size over the last year alone, and based on customer feedback, a lot of that growth is in part because of how accessible toys become once gender is removed,” says Amy Boyajian, Wild Flower co-founder and chief executive officer. “Customers are getting the products they desire easily while also being introduced to new options.” (Boyajian also notes that gender-neutral sex toys push back against the “pink tax”—the higher prices typically placed on female-gendered products.)
Many retailers similarly avoid labels such as “sex toys for women” and “sex toys for men” in their signage and conversations with customers, says Lynn Comella, author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. “Some of the most interesting conversations I had with sex-toy retailers and buyers were about ‘queering’ sex toys and breaking open boxes that didn’t need to be there,” she says.
Although the “gender neutral” label often attracts a wider customer base, many—one could argue all—toys originally made for one gender are already gender neutral. Lelo, for example, says it initially marketed its Mona as a G-spot massager but saw an uptick in sales after promoting it as a prostate massager. “While it’s possible to make a versatile sex toy and phrase everything vaguely to avoid making assumptions or dictating how a product should be used, you also occasionally have to say very directly, ‘Hey, try putting this thing directly up your butt,’” says Nugent.
The evolution goes on. The first gender-neutral toys had generic bases with male and female attachments, but as more people identify outside the gender binary, brands are accommodating a broader range of identities. “You can sell a gender-neutral toy to a much larger market than you can a gendered toy, so there’s more opportunity to make money,” Lieberman says.
Perhaps one day it will become common knowledge that sex aids of all varieties, just like clothes or children’s toys, can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of their anatomy or identity. Personally, the chance to use gender-neutral sex toys has helped me feel freer to forge my own identity, just as the ability to play with dinosaurs did when I was a kid.