I thought I would post this article I read about sex toys in

  Bad, Bad Vibrations...

Sunday Times, The (London, England)
November 27, 2005
Author: India Knight

         Here's a bit of news: in the past year Tesco, Boots and Superdrug have started stocking vibrating penis rings (so that's your Christmas presents sorted out, then). Personally, I'd prefer it if the market were flooded with those French green peppercorns that come in little glass jars and seem oddly hard to come by, but never mind. The public gets what the public wants, and apparently the public wants to wear buzzy things on its willy.

         Last week SSL International, the company that owns Durex, reported huge sales of the old rubber-mongers' latest range, a line -coyly and rather nauseatingly called Play -of what used to be called "marital aids", now known as "sex toys".

         (I'm using inverted commas because I've always found the use of the word "toy" quite freaky in this context. A teddy is a toy; a vibrating penis ring is, well, something else. Interestingly, only the larger branches of supermarkets sell children's toys but most of them now sell adult ones. It does seem a bit upside-down, I have to say: any old store will sell you a vibrator, but only a select few will provide you with a dolly or a box of Duplo.)

         Garry Watts, chief executive of SSL, said he was now expecting the Play range, which includes lubricants as well as the penis ring and various other kinds of vibrator, to achieve annual sales of Pounds 10m in Britain.

That's an awful lot of sex aids in quite a short space of time: not so long ago, if you wanted a sex toy, you had to head for a sex shop and brave the dirty mac brigade. How things change: Catherine Gort, Durex's marketing manager, said last week: "More vibrators are sold every year in Britain than washing machines and tumble dryers combined."

         Blimey. Who knew? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd always assumed (completely wrongly, as it turns out) that sex toys were still a bit of a minority pastime.

         In my head the majority of Britons are still pretty buttoned-up, and the only people who keep a box of tricks by the bed are young women who know every episode of Sex and the City by heart, gay people, or seedy old pervs. But no: sex toys have become democratic, and everybody's got them, or will have them very soon.

         They'll probably turn up on The Archers next. "This is about people enjoying sex and having better sex," said Watts. Well, kind of. The problem with sex toys, as fans of the aforementioned Sex and the City will remember, is that they do have a tendency to do their job so efficiently that they render one of two people obsolete. Because they work, and with very little effort, they tend to make people bad in bed, much in the same way that a dependency on ready-meals tends to make people bad cooks.

         I expect that people may indeed start "having better sex" as a result of ranges such as Play, but they may also develop an unhelpful -in the context of a relationship -fondness for the solo version. This may lead not to the nation of loved-up couples envisaged by Mr Watts, but instead, hideous thought, to one of frantic masturbators. Is it good that the streets should be awash with vibrators? Does it mean we have become fabulously liberal, like the Dutch used to be? There certainly doesn't seem to be much harm in it at first glance, though I can't say I'd look forward to explaining the contents of those discreet Play boxes to my children the next time we're trawling the supermarket aisles.

         Having said that, I still have my doubts about the question of whether the wide availability of sex toys really will lead to great connubial bliss. There has always been a hearty trade in top-shelf mags in Britain, none of which seemed, or seems, to have enhanced the position of women in the bedroom.

         We can only assume that husbands and wives have not been reading these magazines together all these years. If they had, men's magazines -or websites -wouldn't still be so grotesquely misogynistic, and neither, for that matter, would men.

What is this notion of "play" anyhow? Where does it come from? What has adult sexual behaviour got to do with "play"?

         Like the mindset of many a tabloid -which creepily infantilises sexual desire without even knowing it (endless glamour model girls in pigtails or pompoms or romper-suits, or holding lollipops) -the sex industry thrives on a sort of idiocy and coyness about sex in which the public is gormlessly complicit.

         Sex is a serious, critical, emotionally fiery, life and death kind of a thing.

         Sorry to come over all DH Lawrence on a Sunday morning, but I really do weary of us always having to pretend that sexual fulfilment is a form of grown-up Twister, a little "game" involving "playing" with "toys".

         It's pathetic, and doesn't suggest a nation that is remotely sexually confident, despite appearances, but rather one with chronic arrested development.

         When I was a teenager, "sexual awareness" was an organic process. It had nothing to do with celebrities, or risque pop promos, or lurid gossip magazines. The current generation will no doubt find it perfectly natural to pass the vibrator aisle on their way to buying a pint of milk, because it's just another aspect of the ultra-availability of everything nowadays.

         Twenty-five years ago we didn't even know what a vibrator was. There was something rather fitting, or just rather nice, about having to tiptoe furtively around the whole issue of sex and its accessories. Those days are long gone, clearly, and perhaps the current preponderance of penis rings is a sign of great evolution. But I for one rather mourn the demise of the old brown paper wrapper.

         The Queen's Sister, on Channel 4 tonight, is a dramatisation of the late Princess Margaret's somewhat mouvemente life, and has already been discussed extensively in terms of its explicit content and the question of lese-majesty.

         The princess is seen, for instance, kneeling down to the sound of a fly unzipping; people merrily swap sexual partners at house parties; and the actress playing Margaret is not shy about nudity or intimacy, shall we say.

         How odd, then, that the viewing of a film that would have been unthinkably shocking on a number of levels a mere 10 years ago should actually succeed in making the viewer feel totally sympathetic towards the princess, spoilt and egomaniacal though she may have been.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

Section: Features
Page: News Review 4
(c) Times Newspapers Limited 2005
Record Number: 915324984

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Bad, bad vibrations...