Gendered morality in the sex toy market: Entitlements, reversals, and the irony of heterosexuality

Abstract

This article characterizes norms of sexual morality in the sex toy market, revealing a core contradiction in the morality of gendered heterosexuality. Taking a novel approach to the study of the sex industry, the study’s data focus on producers rather than consumers of sex toys. Sex toy professionals understand women as ideal users whose sexual desire and consumption are morally defensible. Not only do girl-power sex positivity discourses valorize women’s orgasms, but men’s sex toy use is disavowed and even openly reviled by producers. This seems to upend existing configurations of heterosexual privilege, which ordinarily benefit men’s sexual desire. However, the reversal reveals a shared moral feature of gendered heterosexuality, which privileges women as sexually purer than men, who are encumbered with tainting lasciviousness.