I wanted to read this article by sex educator and burlesque performer Fancy Feast about her time working in sex toy sales because she billed it on social media as “a rant about sex positivity under capitalism” which is at least a little bit in the ErosBlog wheelhouse. It’s a good and wide-ranging article, too; you should go read it. I’m not even going to attempt to summarize, characterize, bloviate, or respond.

I do, however, want to highlight one paragraph of imagery that holed me below the waterline. We may think that we’ve come a long way in terms of gender equality, but socially? Naw. She’s talking about a point in her career where she was head of educational programming for the sex-positive sex toy store she worked for, mostly selling blow job workshops. But even though people would ask for cunnilingus workshops, they couldn’t sell enough tickets for the classes to make. She explains that most of the classes for the blowjob workshops were women who had been somehow convinced they need BJ skills to get and keep a man. Then she points out that women also worry about the oral sex they receive. But do men worry about giving it? It’s not a question she tries to answer per se, but what she does say is telling:

I try to imagine a bachelor party coming into the store for a celebratory cunnilingus event, the groom-to-be adorned in a crown of stylized, glittery cunts. Each man gingerly entering the room, wrapping a hand around a complimentary craft beer for the comfort of a familiar object. Each of them nervous that there is some secret out there to pussy eating that the other men aren’t telling, each of them worried that their girlfriends and wives or Tinder dates will leave them for someone who sucks clit better. I imagine each participant – the groom’s brother, his fiancé’s best guy friend, his cousins – adorned with vulva necklaces, sucking on ripe peaches and juicy mangoes, sitting on foldout chairs in a room of men, howling with laughter and cheering each other on as they practice tongue techniques. Thinking about this makes my heart ache.

Yeah. That’s like, so not happening. By which I mean, of course, that in my calcified imagination I can’t see it happening in what remains of my lifetime. Although it’s also true that we live in an age of wonders, and I am astonished every day…

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In this shunga dating to 1800 by Kitagawa Utamaro, a masturbating voyeur is peering through a fence at a squatting woman who has exposed herself, perhaps to pee:

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This gorgeous image is said to be Lynda Carter on the set of Wonder Woman, which would date it to the mid-late 1970s. Hat tips are owed to This Is Not Porn on Twitter and (perhaps less obviously) to Epimenides the Cretan and René Magritte.

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“But why aren’t there more women going into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers?” goes the lament. Why indeed.

Scene of a woman being groped and having her lab coat torn off by a leering much-older colleague is from the cover of Rep Special.

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In case you’re sometimes confused by all of the confusion spread in the arguments over sex work (especially by whorephobic paleofeminists who clutch at their pearls while trying to outshout actual sex worker voices) Erika Moen and Lux Alptraum have boiled the matter down into a refreshing 26-panel graphic at The Nib from which the following two panels are excerpted. It’s called Feminists Should Support Decriminalizing Sex Work. Here’s Why:

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From what I hear the life of a musical technician isn’t all that glamorous, but it does have a few little perks:

From the sex comic The Piano Tuner by Ignacio Noe.

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The SEXO loverealdolls website proclaims the company is a China factory manufacturer of sex dolls founded in 2009 as a “driving force” in sex dolls, with extraordinary design, excellent quality, considerate service, and favorable price.

Their extensive online catalog contains more than ninety models of sexy dolls, in wide-ranging categories that include the unusual and unexpected. In addition to a bunch of different body sizes, shapes, and racial “styles”, one may order elf-women dolls, pregnant dolls, and anime dolls (although I didn’t see any pregnant elf-women, or anime elves. Mix-and-match only goes so far!) And all that’s before customization options kick in: three skin colors, three eye colors, four nail colors, pubic hair options, and a decision about hardware in the feet that affects whether the dolls can be posed in standing postures. It looks to me as if foot fetishists would want to eschew the standing ability in favor of having feet that are better to play with, but I am just your humble scribe, I don’t make these decisions. Anyway, all this adult sexy-doll fun starts on the SEXO front page:

Unlike the fairly anodyne and generic sex dolls I’ve seen from other manufacturers, SEXO seems to go out of their way to make toys for men with some fairly specific fetishes around body type, like sex dolls with a big ass and huge breasts. And although I would not call this particular doll either fat or chubby, the manufacturer does:

Before anybody gets all up in my comments or my Twitter mentions about using words like fat or chubby in this context, I think a few preemptive words are in order about the whole sex-doll-ordering enterprise. Love it or hate it, it’s a fundamentally objectifying project. Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with is an object! Before you can order a flexible playmate from across the sea, you must cheerfully enter the vale of objectification; that’s no journey on which to be carrying baggage about it. You’ll want to keep that in mind; we’re about to discuss sex doll skin colors as labeled in a Chinese factory and then translated to English.

When it comes to translating words across both languages and cultures there is probably nothing harder to get “right” (if “right” even exists) than terms for skin tones. The sex doll above is shown in the middle shade offered by SEXO, the shade they call “tan.” Their lighter shade is something I would consider a blindingly-Nordic pale white, which they refer to variously as “skin” or “flesh” at different places on the website. This doll is offered that way, and also (along with most or all doll models) in a much darker-skinned “black” which is no blacker than “black” skin usually is.

I think my very favorite thing about the SEXO business philosophy is the sex-positive motto expressed on their website header: “Less stress, more pleasure.” I’m old enough to remember the vicious stigma that once permeated the entire sex toy industry, and to see that it’s been rather slower to ease and dissipate in the sex doll category than elsewhere. Sex dolls, like any other sex toys, are all about pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to see a manufacturer recognize that.