When it comes to women and vibrators, we’ve come a long way since their 19th century invention to relieve a made-up called hysteria.
When we look at the booming sex toy industry today featuring the likes of Dame Products which raised more than a million dollars in crowd-funding for its signature hands-free device, men aren’t so welcome to the pleasure party.
A Stuff Mom Never Told You fan first alerted me to this male sex-toy stigma which led me to a compelling Reddit post. User cismalefeminist asked, “When a woman admits to owning a sex toy, they’re viewed as being sexually experienced. When a man admits to owning a sex toy, they’re viewed as being perverted, creepy, or lonely. Where is this double standard coming from?”
Since one, y’all know I can’t resist unpacking a double standard; two, these are arguably tools that promote sexual health; and three, this contains a lot of implications about the relationship between masculinity and sex, it’s a topic definitely worth exploring despite this taboo and giggle factor.
Reddit user cismalefeminist was definitely onto something because every article I read on the topic mentioned the problem of the creep guy stigma.
To break it down, there’s a heteronormative negative stereotype which maintains that men who use these kinds of products are just desperate losers who must resort to fake women because they can’t get real women of their own to have sex with, which does seem to stand in direct contrast to the normalization of men’s pornography consumption.
Furthermore, this stigmatizing contradicts concerns and outright complaints about some men pathologically seeking sex partners in order to validate their own masculinity as well as patterns of boys rewarding other boys for racking up as many sex partners as possible.
That stereotype is also ignorant as most stereotypes are of the fact that a lot of straight guys in the US use vibrators. Now it’s time for academic statistics!
According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 44.8% of straight dudes reported having ever used a vibrator, which isn’t terribly lower than the 52.5% of women who reported the same thing. Not surprisingly a majority of the time male vibrator use happens when a lady is in the room presumably next to him and not in the closet being like, “I need to organize.”
Still a third of those guys reported using it also when alone. A narrow 5.5% reported using it only when by themselves. When it comes to relationship status, not surprisingly, again, men were likelier to use vibrators when they were paired up with a lady. About a third of those guys also reported using it when they are single and ready to mingle with themselves.
As for motivation, most guys reported just wanting to change things up a bit and were typically more comfortable using it with a partner rather than alone, which sounds to me like this stigma has definitely been internalized.
Because while there seems to be a general acceptance that a good amount of women sometimes need external help achieving orgasm, if a guy is interested in using these kinds of tools for spicing things up or possibly getting help achieving orgasm or just exploring his own body in various ways that don’t involve his body, or someone else’s body, then society looks at him and says, “You are less than a real man.”
That doesn’t seem quite right, now does it?
