In last Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Anna North wrote a fascinating story called “Women of Sex Tech, Unite” about the savvy female entrepreneurs — many of them millennials — who are pouring their attention, energy, talent, and skills into developing sex toys and related products and helping other women who are marketing and distributing them.
North writes:
In 2017, women entrepreneurs in the field still seem to be very much in the minority. Today around 70 percent of sex product companies are run by men, according to an analysis by Unbound. But women, many of them millennials, are starting to harness their economic and social power to disrupt the industry, both on the business and on the consumer side, Ms. Fine said. Millennials can be more comfortable talking about sex than their elders, explained Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. “It’s a transparent generation that’s practical, go-getting, tech-oriented and eager to have it all.”
Besides providing surveying the modern history of sex toys without the usual sniggering tone, the article mentions a whole bunch of resources (products, companies, websites, publications, podcasts) that I’d never heard of but that I’d like to know more about, in the interests of supporting women in expanding their access to greater sexual pleasure and erotic awareness.
North leads with Janet Lieberman and Alexandra Fine, two Brooklyn-based entrepreneurs (above) who started Dame Products, the first company to receive Kickstarter funding to develop a sex toy.
If the movement has an ideological center, it’s probably Women of Sex Tech, a group founded last year by Polly Rodriguez [pictured below center, with her team], 30, the chief executive and co-founder of Unbound, a Manhattan-based sex toy company that sends subscribers a box of products every quarter, and Lidia Bonilla, 38, who started House of Plume, which sells storage boxes for sex toys. Based in New York, the group has since expanded to include more than 70 people, including members in California, Spain and China. New York City-based members include Meika Hollender, the co-founder of Sustain, which makes organic and fair trade lubricants and condoms; Mia Davis, who created a sex education app called Tabú; and Bryony Cole, the host of the popular podcast, Future of Sex.
Check out the whole article here and let me know what you think.
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