Why should a sex toy for women be shaped like a penis?
This includes excerpts from Part one of my book: Venus Genius: The Female Prescription for Innovation.
There is a simple answer to this: the sex toy industry is a “boys club” according to a Fast Company article. Men are usually the ones designing the devices, so of course they assume that the only way for women to achieve pleasure is to mimic their wonderful organ.
It happens though that women have a clitoris, that has long been dismissed, demeaned, and misunderstood in the history of sexual anatomy. I am sorry to report that when a French physician dissected this organ for the first time in 1545, he named it membre honteux — “the shameful appendage” — and declared its sole purpose to be urination, according to a Scientific American article. That article reports another fun fact for men who are obsessed with size and consider the clitoris as an atrophied penis: “it is not just some pea-sized nub. Around 90 percent of the clitoris’ bulk lies beneath the surface, with arms that flare out up to nine centimeters into the pelvis. And by the way, it is boasted two to three times as many nerve endings as the penis”.
Understanding this sheds a totally different light on how female orgasm works, driven by the clitoris and not the vagina as stated by Sigmund Freud.
Women’s sexual pleasure is still a taboo subject — with a long road ahead. Despite their courageous attempts at addressing this market, women still face patriarchal barriers. Lora diCarlo’s Osé massager was granted a CES 2019 Innovation Award in robotics prior to the CES show (Consumer Electronics Show) by a panel of independent expert judges for its cutting-edge technology. However, the CTA (Consumer Technology Association) revoked the award a month later, citing the product as “immoral”.
In Lindsay Goldwert SPENT podcast, Alexandra Fine, who has a master’s in clinical psychology, takes us through her journey. She co-founded with Janet Lieberman (an MIT engineer) the company Dame Products that manufactures innovative sexual wellness toys. They had to overcome a lot of barriers. Alexandra struggled for her business to be taken seriously and to make it known: advertising is allowed for erectile dysfunction, but a challenge for women’s sexual pleasure.
“Money and sex are running the world and control relationships, but women are ashamed of talking about both and/or made to feel it is morally wrong to converse in those conversations.”
It was also difficult for Janet as a female engineer in this male-dominated industry. It took all their passion for sexual health and great deal of empathy for the female experience to make this company successful.
This is not a marginal topic, as reemphasized by some information I gathered after having written the book.
A recent Global Wellness Summit (GWS) panel discussed how we’re moving from a wellness industry narrowly focused on “looking and feeling good” to “a massive and seismic cultural taboo toppling”. Cecelia Girr, Senior Strategist at Backslash, exposed how wellness is radically expanding its boundaries to riskier “cultural pain-points…and the really big stuff,” such as sex, money and death–issues that “have a much larger impact on our health than the day to day vanities of wellness.”
Claire McCormack from Indie Beauty Media Group/Beauty Independent agreed, and discussed the many ways that “women’s sexual wellness and reproductive health will burst out of the closet in 2021: with so many women feeling left behind by the medical system and “suffering in silence.”“ She noted that ”sexual wellness brands have seen a massive spike in sales (300–400%) during lockdown.“
One of my beta readers recently sent me an article where French philosopher Catherine Malabou beautifully describes the power of the clitoris. What struck me was her statement that the clitoris “allows power without domination and without penetration”. I realize that it is sort of irony that I mention the clitoris in my “introduction” chapter of the book — hey, in all serious matters we need to keep our sense of humor… The philosophical messages are here though: “the feminine is not limited to women”, “affirming the specificity of female sexual pleasure”, and that “an erotic specificity without penetration leads to intellectual freedom.”
It all boils down to reclaiming the clitoris as a freedom tool against patriarchy.
Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from Part one of my book, Venus Genius in this article series. Venus Genius launched on December 7, 2020 on Amazon, here is the link to buy it: https://lnkd.in/dXbs_WK! If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email: contact@innoveve.com or connect with me on social: www.linkedin.com/in/fabienne-jacquet — https://www.facebook.com/innoveveLLC — @innoveveLLC.
