The Joy of Sex Toys
An interview with Oh Joy, Sex Toy creator Erika Moen
A few months ago, I discovered the web comic Oh Joy, Sex Toy — and I immediately fell in love. Created by artist Erika Moen, the comic is a weekly exploration of everything related to sex: sex toys, porn, and various sexual health topics are explored in a friendly, accessible format, with Erika serving as a friendly guide through the oft intimidating world of sex.
Curious to learn more about the inspiration for Oh Joy, Sex Toy, and what it’s like to write a comic that deals honestly and explicitly with sex, I reached out to Erika for an interview. Our conversation below.
What was the inspiration for Oh Joy, Sex Toy?
OJST has been a long time coming (no double entendres intended).
It began nine years ago when I was a dyke in college and I made this sixteen page minicomic called GirlFuck which was a really friendly, fun, introduction to the hows and whys women would have sex with each other — in comic form. Back then, my girlfriend and I would get all these really rude, inappropriate questions from friends and strangers alike about how sex worked, and even though it can feel really empowering and righteous to tell someone off for being a jerk, I realized that people were asking because they were coming from a place of genuine ignorance and that nobody learns anything when you yell at them. So, I made this really cute comic that made the reader feel like they were being included in a conversation, instead of being lectured at for not already knowing this stuff. Plus, it was something I wished I had when I was first starting to figure out how to fuck girls! Mind you, this was almost ten years ago, so it’s preeeetty out of date now in regards to the current discourse about gender identity and all that. But considering I made it in a vacuum as a young twentysomething before Tumblr existed, it’s still got some solid groundwork.
So! My future-husband read it, long before we ever communicated with each other, and really dug it. He was a fan of my work for years before we ever met. When we did finally hook up, he kept telling me, “You have a great ability to educate people through comics! You have a good, friendly voice. You need to do more sex education.” Fast forward through the next eight years of our relationship, where he kept encouraging me to do more sex ed comics and I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will someday.” Here and there, I’d do little one-off strips in my series, DAR!, like when I did a little vignette about how to buy a vibrator [Ed. Seen here, here, and here.].
I also used that comic series to talk a lot about my own evolving sexual identity, which I guess was kind of sex education-y too.
After DAR! I took a couple years off of doing anything autobiographical to try and figure out where I wanted to push my career in comics. When 2012 rolled around, I’d figured out that I want to use comics to educate about sex, so I began work on this giant book for teenagers about how to become sexually active safely. I worked so hard on that thing; I was super disciplined, researching and writing every single day for almost the entire year — until I burnt myself out.
I’d never done a project like this before. All my other comics were about my personal experiences, but now I was doing an educational book to help other people with stuff that can be super complicated and even dangerous if not done correctly — I was going to need trained professional sex educators to read over everything to make sure I wasn’t accidentally wording things in an unintended way or overlooking something important. I’d worked out a timeline and this book was going to take me several years to complete before I could start releasing it online and publish it.
Here’s where things get weird.
In December 2012 I took a break from my magnum opus sex ed book to go be on a reality TV show.
I know, right?
The show was Strip Search, which was basically “America’s Next Top Web Cartoonist.” Twelve comic artists lived in a mansion for two weeks and were filmed twenty-four hours a day as we did silly and serious challenges against each other in the attempt to win $15,000 and the opportunity to be embedded in the Penny Arcade empire for a year.
For your readers who may not be familiar with webcomics, Penny Arcade is the most successful online comic that’s ever existed. It’s a multi-million dollar company that has its own charity (Child’s Play), multiple conventions (PAX) around the world, its own video game series… Just wildly successful. And it’s because of their business manager, Robert Khoo. The creators of the comic were internet popular before he came along, but once Khoo came on board, they went from barely scraping by to, well, becoming millionaires. It’s a common refrain in the webcomics world for a cartoonist to say “I wish I had a Robert Khoo,” and when I saw the call for contestants for this reality TV show, I thought to myself, “Oh my god, I could meet Robert Khoo. Even his most basic business advice would be so valuable.” So I signed right up.
Though I didn’t win Strip Search (6th place!), I did get to go have dinner with Khoo one-on-one and it was over that evening that I basically said, “What am I doing with my career? How do I make this work?” I told him all about my sex ed book that was going to take years, and in the meantime I was worried the internet would forget I existed if they didn’t see anything from me during that time. He basically said that I should give my audience what they want, which is for me to talk about sex in comics, and do it now, not wait till my book was done. And that’s when I realized I needed to do Oh Joy, Sex Toy. It’s bite-size, self-contained updates that are about my personal experiences and observations on the World of Sex, with some sex education strips thrown in.
My poor husband. He encourages me to do just that for nearly a decade and then I have one talk with this other dude and suddenly I’m ready to jump in feet first.
So yeah, sorry, that was a whole big, long answer to your question. But that’s where it came from.
Sex is really important and fascinating to me. Not just the Act Of Sex, but where sex fits into our culture, our industry, our identity; the rules we have around, what’s okay, what’s not okay, what’s normal, what’s weird. It’s a subject I care a lot about and I want to help other people have a healthier relationship with it, if I can.
Comics are such a uniquely power educational tool! Personally, I’m a super visual learner so having fun, engaging illustrations of bodies and how they interact with each other or toys is much easier for me to understand than it is for me to read a wall of plain text that has maybe one weird-looking anatomical diagram that doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen in real life, you know?
I’m trying to make the comics that I needed when I was younger and learning about all this stuff.
What’s the response been like?
Amazing. The response since we launched six months ago (April 2013) has been far more immediate, intense, and positive than anything [Moen’s husband and collaborator] Matthew or I could have possibly anticipated. I’ve never been involved in anything this successful before. I keep getting emails from people and even having strangers tell me in real life that they bought this toy or that toy because of my comic, or that they tried out this new thing, or I’ve even had a few emails from people telling me that reading my comic helped them talk to their partners about sex. I’ve had several people, both online and in real life, thank me because they had some awesome sex with their partner after reading my comic! It blows my mind. I feel like I’m finally doing the kind of work I was meant to do.
Haha, and of course there are the people who let me know how annoyed or angry they are with me because they don’t like how I’m doing the comic, too. I make a really conscious effort to include a wide variety of body types, races, and gender presentations in the comic, but of course anyone who hasn’t personally seen themselves represented writes to let me know they’re offended at being excluded. Or they’re mad because I don’t use or experience the toys the same way they do. Or the way I worded something didn’t include everyone who’s ever existed and their experience with that subject. I try my best to be inclusive, but I also have to accept that I, quite literally, cannot make everyone happy. I hope the people who are dissatisfied will use their frustration to make their own comics that share their own experiences! I want to read them! The more people making comics like this, the better.
What’s the general process for making an Oh Joy, Sex Toy comic? How long does it take you from toy review to finished product?
Matthew and I have weekly development meetings, where we sit down and plot out what toys we’re going to review, what sex ed topics I’m going to cover, and any other subjects I may want to cover in a comic (like reporting about an event or an interview). We have our schedule figured out about four months in advance. (Since we’re a weekly comic, we can only get four strips done a month.) The process of creating each comic takes between 4-7 days. Monday I script, Tuesday through Wednesday I pencil, Thursday I ink, Friday I color. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go. My health has been suffering lately so things have been taking longer than they should, in which case Matt helps out as much as he can, like doing layout or coloring a comic for me. He also edits all my scripts and writes his own when it’s a toy that he’s reviewing. Each comic that appears as a single image on our site is typically between four to five 9.5" x 14" individual pages. It’s a lot of work!
What’s your favorite comic that you’ve done so far?
You know, it’s really hard to pick! I’ve really enjoyed working on them all, honestly. Maybe the nJoy, because both Matthew and I were reviewing that toy together, he had a lot of input into the layout, and I love getting a chance to draw the Anal Safety Snails. Ooh! And the Crashpad strip! I had such a blast drawing all the performers and the San Francisco cityscape, and I think that comic came out really pretty. I’m most proud of my sex ed strips, like Pregnancy and Emergency Contraception because they make it super clear…exactly what’s going on in your body — and they’re fun.
What’s the strangest sex toy you’ve been offered a review copy of?
The Sqweel 2! Oh, and the Little Rooster. Such ridiculous toys!
Is there anything you’ve refused to review (or would refuse to review)? Why?
Matthew and I have had to turn down a bunch of offered toys because we just don’t have time to do them all or they look shoddily made. I won’t review anything that looks like it’d be unsafe (like jelly toys). We’ve also turned down more BDSM-y stuff, things that are designed to hurt. We’re actually a really vanilla couple, but I’d like to get some more kinky guests to be Special Contributors who cover that stuff for us. But whips and stuff, we wouldn’t know how to use them ourselves and even if we did, we wouldn’t give them the right kind of review because we just wouldn’t be able to appreciate them, you know? Light bondage is fun, though, people can keep sending us stuff for that (wink).
From a financial perspective, we’re also not working with any companies that don’t have an affiliation program anymore. If you want us to review your toy, you’ve gotta have that in place! I gotta pay my rent, y’know?
What’s on your wish list for things you’d like to review in the future?
I’d looooooove to review more sex furniture! I’d also really love to try out Doctor Xtreme’s Orgasmatron and a Sybian. I also really want to do more interviews with sex industry professionals.
While many of the comics feature you as the speaker, others feature your husband or other guest writers. Do you have any guidelines to make sure everyone stays within the Oh Joy, Sex Toy voice?
Haha, yes, we have an intimidating list of requirements that I’m afraid have scared away some of our would-be guests (sorry guys!). The major one is that I ask people to keep their terms gender neutral. No “Hey ladies!”, no “Hi fellas!”, no labeling bodies as female or male. It can be really tricky! Especially when I was doing the Pregnancy comic; man, I had to do some mental backflips to figure out how to not refer to male and female. The thing is, I want OJST to be accessible to all genders, so rather than going with gendered terms, I try to keep them focused on body parts — “Penis-havers” and “People with vulvas,” wording that can sound kind of convoluted. But it’s important to remember that not all women have vaginas, not all dudes have penises, so I try to respect that in the comic. God knows that’s not good enough for everyone (I definitely hear from the people who do not adhere to the strict gender binary about how I’m not doing a good enough job), but I’m trying. The Masturbateers (the characters who try out all the toys in the comic) are officially gender neutral and their pronouns as individuals are They, Them, and Their. They have breasts, they have penises, they have vulvas, they have balls, but if you were to hypothetically ask one what their gender identity is they wouldn’t have one. But, I digress!
We ask our guest cartoonists to write as if they were talking to a friend in a coffee shop, personal and friendly and jokey. I’ve been so happy with our guest comics and I’m super excited to add more! I want to have a wide variety of voices and experiences represented on OJST. Because Matthew and I are cisgender, oppositely-sexed, white people, our reviews are going to reflect that, and I hope that by having guest contributors we can have other points of view and experiences that wouldn’t even occur to us, you know? The rest of the requirements (the stuff that’s scared away people) are a bunch of technical guidelines about the size of the pages, the coloring, etc, etc. In about six months we’re going to collect the first year’s worth of OJST strips and publish the first book, so it’s important that all the pages be standardized.
Check out Erika Moen’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy!
