A (Sex) Toy Story
Armed with a cascade of data provided by Lovehoney.co.uk, (relating to 1 million sales over a five month period in 2013) Ideas Detective Jon Millward ventured some time ago down the Jessica rabbit-hole (only the one pun intended) of erotic play. This week, he returns a king of sex-gadget-related sagacity.
If some of what he has ‘discovered’ is fodder for the University of the Bleeding Obvious, we turn a blind eye because a lot of Millward’s findings are genuinely surprising. Single straight women buy butt plugs from Lovehoney at only half the rate of single straight men. Female customers of all sexual orientations buy fewer feminine hygiene products than their male counterparts. Men tend to buy more of the largest dildos (8 inches plus). And, most baffling of all, almost ten percent of those who buy sex dolls throw condoms into the same order.
Preoccupation with cleanliness; an unwavering insistence on birth control; and the fetishisation of the big D. Women readily admit these days to the little (or big) bit of man in them: could Millward’s analysis suggest that there is just as much woman in men?
