Sex Toys Store News

Channel 4 is launching a brand new dating show with a raunchy new twist.

The channel is lining up a new show where couples will be encouraged to have internet connected virtual sex on their first date.

Contestants will be provided with Bluetooth sex toys so they can get intimate with each other online, and later meet in person if they strike up a connection.

A TV insider said: Channel 4 has aired some bizarre dating shows, but this will be the most outrageous.

Channel 4 made a pilot towards the end of last year and the next phase is screen-testing it to audiences. Under the working title Sex First , single people will be introduced to each other online as avatars before ramping up their chemistry by having online sex, thanks to the Bluetooth-synced sex toys. If the pairs like what they experience and enjoy their first sexual encounter together, they can then meet to see if the bond is just as compatible in real life.

Let's hope that the remote sex toy feed could be shared with a network dildo equipped audience. Now that would be fun.

South Korean authorities have lifted an import ban on adult-sized sex dolls.

The Korea Customs Service gave the green light allow adult-shaped dolls through customs but added that child-like dolls resembling minors are still prohibited and will be confiscated.

There are no laws or regulations prohibiting the import of sex dolls into South Korea but since 2018 the customs service took it upon itself to confiscate thousands of them, citing a provision in the law that forbids the import of goods that harm the country's beautiful traditions and public moral.

The Supreme Court agreed in 2019 and upheld a decision that sex dolls are used for personal use and fall under the same category as pornography, which is tightly regulated, but legal. The court's decision caused a backlash and almost 250,000 people signed a petition to stop the import of the dolls into South Korea. The unnamed petition's author claimed the dolls could lead to an increase in sex crimes.

Common sense prevailed, however, and the customs service decided to lift the ban.

There's a buzz about Birmingham City after fans revealed plans to stage a mass sex toy protest for the club's next home game against Hull City on March 12.

The Big Blues Protest has been launched by frustrated fans who say they aren't satisfied with the lack of direction being shown by the club's anonymous board.

Now they plan to turn the air Blue by hurling sex toys onto the St Andrew's pitch during the 69th minute of their next home match.

Lovense, a leading US sex tech company has announced the worldwide release of the Lovense Sex Machine.

As the latest development from the pleasure design team at Lovense, the company said the Lovense Sex Machine combines super power with wide functionality. Its design allows for both solo or two-person use at the same time. Adjustable stroke length (up to 11.4 cm), tilt angle and height create a variety of possible deployment options and positions.

The Lovense Sex Machine is easy to assemble, stable, sturdy, and comes with a discreet storage bag. With a weight of 12.5 kg (27.6 lbs), it runs quietly, and offers a variable speed of up to 300 strokes per minute. The Sex Machine is compatible with all Vac-U-Lock attachments and accessories. Two silicone attachments and two Vac-U-Lock adapters are included in the package.

The Lovense Sex Machine can be controlled both from a wired remote controller and through Lovense apps. It is fully integrated into the Lovense ecosystem and supports the entire functionality of the Lovense Remote app. The device is designed for solo play, close-range, and can be controlled from any distance and synced with games and multimedia content through the Remote App.

Thousands of sex toys valued at more than 3 million baht (£65,000) have been seized by officers from the Thailand's Child and Women's Welfare Department in Bangkok. Two men were arrested.

Around 5,000 dildos, penis enlargement devices, penis massage oils and lubricating gels were seized from a warehouse.

Police say the men arrested admitted to owning the sex toys and products. The items were shipped from China and then sold through Facebook to customers in Thailand. The men were charged with importing pornographic materials that had not been cleared by customs officials.

Bizarrely sex toys are still illegal in Thailand.

A Turkish social media influencer says she's being prosecuted in her country for posting jokey photos inside the Sex Museum in Amsterdam.

Merve Taskin shared pictures of sex toys taken at the museum during a birthday trip to the Netherlands in January last year. A few months later she says she was arrested in Turkey, where sharing obscene content is considered a crime.

Now she says she has been summoned to court to face obscenity charges.

Thailand is very liberal about real sex but is bizarrely very uptight about porn and sex toys.

In fact sex toys are totally banned in the country with prohibition laws backed up by serious jail time and fines. The penalty for anyone caught selling, buying, or possessing sex toys is up to three years jail time or a fine of up to 60,000 Thai baht (£1500), or both.

According to Wisit Piemjai, the director of the Postal Customs Service Division, the customs department confiscated over 4,000 sex toys in 2020 alone. Wisit said:

Thailand is a Buddhist country and this is a generational issue. Older people still cannot accept sex toys and nothing can be done to change [that]. The law will remain in place for now,

A sex toy seller named Natasha, told VICE World News that the COVID-19 pandemic has made sex toys one of the hottest selling items online. Sex toys are sold openly in Bangkok's red-light districts, like Nana, Silom, and Patpong. In June 2020, the police raided an adult toy warehouse in a province just south of Bangkok and seized about 1 million Thai baht ($32,000) worth of illegal goods.

There have been efforts to change Thai society's perception of sexual wellbeing. In 2018, activist Nisarat Jongwisan pioneered the movement to legalize sex toys when she spoke out publicly against the Ministry of Culture in a TV program, sparking a debate about sex toys in the country.  In 2018, Nisarat launched a petition asking the government to legalize sex toys. She now plans to launch a new petition following the Thai parliamentary mechanism wherein she'll have to gather 50,000 signatures to submit a bill for a parliamentary vote.

In 2016, after reading a tabloid article about a woman who used plastic surgery to look like a sex doll, T, a sex toy reviewer from the U.S., started an Instagram account for his synthetic partner Celestina. T wanted to see if Celestina, a brunette doll who often sports a pixie cut and glasses, could amass more followers on Instagram than the sex doll wannabe. Within a few months, Celestina had succeeded.

Today, Celestina has more than 3,000 followers, and T is widely credited as a pioneer in the Instagram sex doll community, which numbers somewhere in the hundreds. Other sex doll 'influencers' have as many as 7,000 followers.

The Instagram trend has its roots in a 20-year-old website called The Doll Forum , which boasts over 70,000 members and has large sections devoted to photographing sex dolls. Using a combination of creative photography, in-character social media posts, and, more recently, deepfake videos , these doll photographers are working to make the synthetic women in their lives as close to organic as possible. Their goal is to give their dolls depth and personality, so they can show other community members, and the wider world, how the dolls appear through their eyes. If the owners can make some money off the pursuit, that's all the better.

See full article from inputmag.com

Sex toy maker Maude is attempting to generate a bit of hype by trying to impose politically correct terminology on sex toys. Maude claims that it is tired of seeing an 'outdated and gendered approach', their designers created a line up of vibrators and 'gender-neutral sex essentials'.

Dakota Johnson, who is now an investor and co-creative director, has joined the brand and spouts:

For too long sexual health has been poorly marketed, hyper-aggressive, and highly gendered. Maude is a company based on universal design making modern, body-safe, high-quality essentials for before, during, and after sex, with yourself or with another lovely human. The caliber and aesthetic of these products is excellent and elevated.

Now, Maude is taking things a step further with a new campaign denouncing supposedly outdated language that refers to vibrators as toys. Johnson added:

With our This Is Not A Toy campaign, we aim to activate hearts and minds in an effort to destigmatize sexual and intimate tools. Often the use of language surrounding sexual products is antiquated, gender-specific, and belittling.

A security flaw in a hi-tech chastity belt for men meant the device could be locked remotely by hackers. The flaw also made it possible for hackers to remotely lock all the global devices simultaneously.

A team of UK security professionals flagged the bug to Qiui, the Chinese developers of the app that controls the internet-linked sheath called the Cellmate Chastity Cage.

The developers have now fixed the bug in the sex toy's app and have also published a manual workaround, which will be useful for anyone with the old version of the app still at risk of getting stuck.

The Cellmate Chastity Cage is sold online for about $190. Tech-researchers Pen Test Partners believe about 40,000 of the devices have been sold.

The Netherlands top footbal team FC Emmen will be allowed to display the logo of a sex toys company on their shirts, following a decision of the Dutch football association (KNVB) to reverse a ban.

Emmen were stopped last week from displaying the logo of new sponsors EasyToys, on online sex toys business, but the decision was reversed after a compromise. The EasyToys logo will adorn the shirt of FC Emmen's first team for this season, instead of the previously proposed 3 year sponsorship.

Previously KNVB said:

It is not appropriate to display sponsorship from the sex industry on match kit, said a statement from the association, noting it was in violation of their regulations. We must take into account that football is for both young and old.

The KNVB were then given a bit of stick in the media for being out of touch.

Vibrators today go hand in hand with masturbation and female sexuality. Yet for American housewives in the 1930s, the vibrator looked like any other household appliance: a nonsexual new electric technology that could run on the same universal motor as their kitchen mixers and vacuum cleaners. Before small motors became cheap to produce, manufacturers sold a single motor base with separate attachments for a range of household activities, from sanding wood to drying hair, or healing the body with electrical vibrations.

In my research on the medical history of electricity, vibrators appear alongside galvanic battery belts and quack electrotherapies as one of many quirky home cures of the early 20th century. The first electro-mechanical vibrator was a device called a percuteur invented by British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Granville thought that vibration powered the human nervous system, and he developed the percuteur as a medical device for stimulating ailing nerves.

Current medical opinion held that hysteria was a nervous disease, yet Granville refused to treat female patients , simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked... by the vagaries of the hysterical state. The vibrator began as a therapy for men only. It then quickly left the sphere of mainstream medical practice.

By the early 20th century, manufacturers were selling vibrators as ordinary electric household appliances. The merits of electricity in the home were not as obvious then as they are today: Electricity was dangerous and expensive, but it promised excitement and modernity . Electric commodities, like sewing and washing machines, became the hallmarks of the rising middle class.

Vibrators were another shiny new technology, used to sell consumers on the prospect of modern electric living. Just as banks handed out free toasters for opening checking accounts in the 1960s, in the 1940s the Rural Electrification Administration distributed free vibrators to encourage farmers to electrify their homes. These modern electric devices were not thought of as sex toys.

In what may sound surprising to 21st-century readers, these appliances promised relief of a nonsexual variety. Users of all ages vibrated just about every body part, without sexual intent.

Vibrators made housework easier by soothing the pains of tired housewives, calming the cries of sick children and invigorating the bodies of modern working men. They were applied to tired backs and sore feet, but also the throat, to cure laryngitis; the nose, to relieve sinus pressure; and everything in between. Vibration promised to calm the stomachs of colicky babies, and to stimulate hair growth in balding men. It was even thought to help heal broken bones.

A 1910 advertisement in the New York Tribune declared that Vibration Banishes Disease As the Sun Banishes Mist. In 1912, the Hamilton Beach New-Life vibrator came with a 300-page instructional guide titled Health and How to Get It, offering a cure for everything from obesity and appendicitis to tuberculosis and vertigo. As such advertisements suggest, vibrators were not standard medical treatments, but medical quackery, alternative medicine that didn't deliver on their promises. Yet the electrical cure-alls sold by the millions

In 1915, the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote that the vibrator business is a delusion and a snare . If it has any effect it is psychology. The business was dangerous not because it was obscene, but because it was bad medicine. The potential, acknowledged by doctors, for the vibrator to be used in masturbation was just further evidence of its quackery.

Sex toy scholar Hallie Lieberman points out that nearly every vibrator company in the early 20th century offered phallic attachments that would have been considered obscene if sold as dildos. Presented instead as rectal or vaginal dilators, these devices were supposed to cure hemorrhoids, constipation, vaginitis, cervicitis and other illnesses localized to the genitals and the anus. Hamilton Beach, for example, offered a special rectal applicator for an additional cost of $1.50, and recommended its use in the treatment of Impotence, Piles--Hemorrhoids and Rectal Diseases.

The two most prominent scholars of vibrator history, Rachel Maines and Hallie Lieberman, argue that vibrators were always secretly sexual, but I disagree. Vibrators were popular medical devices. One of many medical uses of the vibrator was to cure diseases of sexual dysfunction. And this use was a selling point, not a secret, during an era of anti-masturbatory rhetoric.

Masturbation was thought to cause diseases like impotence in men and hysteria in women. Masturbatory illness was a pretty standard idea in the early 20th century. One of its surviving formulations is the idea that masturbating will make you go blind.

There's no way to really know how people were using vibrators. But the evidence suggests that they signified medical treatment, not sinful masturbation, regardless of the use. Even if users were doing physical actions that people today think of as masturbation, they didn't understand themselves to be masturbating, and therefore they weren't masturbating.

For most of the 20th century, vibrators remained innocuous quackery. Good Housekeeping even bestowed its seal of approval on some models in the 1950s . When the sexual revolution hit America in the 1960s, vibrators were largely forgotten, outdated appliances.

In the 1970s radical feminists transformed the vibrator from a relic of bygone domesticity to a tool of female sexual liberation. At Betty Dodson's bodysex workshops , electric vibrations changed feelings of guilt about masturbation to feelings of celebration so that masturbation became an act of self-love . She and her sisters embraced vibrators as a political technology that could convert frigid anorgasmic housewives into powerful sexual beings capable both of having multiple orgasms and destroying the patriarchy. This masturbatory revolt erased the vibrator's fading reputation as a cure for masturbatory illness and replaced it with a specific, powerful, public and lasting linkage between the vibrator and female masturbatory practice.

One of South Korea's top football clubs apologised for using properly clothed sex dolls to fill empty seats at a weekend game.

FC Seoul insisted the mannequins, used to replace banned crowds, had no connection to sex toys. But some of the artificial spectators wore T-shirts with the logo of SoloS, a sex toy seller. Other mannequins, which wore facemasks and were separated according to social distancing guidelines, held placards advertising the company and some of its models.

FC Seoul said in a statement:

We are sincerely sorry for causing deep concern to fans. We have confirmed from the very beginning that they had no connection to sex toys.

Update: Fined

21st May 2020. See article from newschain.uk

South Korean club FC Seoul have been handed a record £65,500 fine for using sex dolls to fill their stands during a behind-closed-doors game.

A statement from the K-League said: The incident has greatly insulted and hurt female and family fans. They added that the club had made a serious mistake by not removing the dolls before the match.

Poundland has launched a new gold-coloured vibrator - and it's 80%cheaper than luxury rivals including Lovehoney and Ann Summers.

The new £1 Caress sex toy arrives in stores this week and is described by the retailer as small, slim and super strong. Plus, it comes with batteries included.

Thai olice have launched an investigation after a video which showed a woman playing with a sex toy in public was shared 7 million times on social media.

Deputy police spokesman Pol Col Krissana Pattanacharoen said police are aware of the clip and warned that those involved face up to 5 years in jail and a fine of up to 100,000 baht (£2500) or both for creating and distributing pornographic or indecent material online in accordance to Section 14 of the Computer Crime Act.

Pol Col Krissana also warned that anyone who shares the clip online could also be breaking the law.

In fact the video is part of a worldwide internet craze often identified by the tag #VibratingPanties. The video in question is on Pornhub with the title Thai Cute Girl Remote Control Vibrator. Note that the video is not explicit, nor has nudity, nor is it proved that the toy is in use.

Ritex, Germany's largest domestic producer of condoms, saw sales nearly double in March. The company says its sales of condoms last month doubled compared with the same period a year ago, to 12.7 million.

The same trend is happening in other countries. Ann Summers, the British lingerie chain, said sex toy sales in the last week of March were up 27% over 2019. Its best-selling item was the Whisper Rabbit, which is marketed as its quietest vibrator. Customers are placing increasing importance on noise while they have a full household, the company said in a statement.

Dr. Axel-Jürg Potempa, a German sexual health specialist, predicts a coronavirus-related baby boom by Christmas.

However for all the surge in orders, there is a downside in that COVID-19 has interrupted supply chains. Karex, which makes 1 in 5 condoms globally, had to shut down its three factories in Malaysia for 10 days last month as authorities imposed strict restrictions on large gatherings to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The company was eventually able to win an exemption from the lockdown rule, arguing that it was a producer of essential medical goods, and restarted its plants March 27. But the plants are still only running at 50% capacity.

The coronavirus outbreak has forced countries into lockdown, and maybe sharing the time with a guaranteed virus free partner has its attractions. But just at the same time sex doll sellers are facing a shortage as most are are shipped in from Chinese factories that themselves have been affected by lockdowns.

Jade Stanley, who owns a sex doll business called Sex Doll Official, revealed that there has been a major slowdown due to the ongoing Coronavirus situation in China. They've gone home, been quarantined and been unable to return to factories.

The pandemic has also led to a worldwide increase in sales of sex toys. With the prospect of long periods at home either alone or with your partner, people are exploring new ways to make the best of the time available.

Lingerie retailer Honey Birdette says it was forced to censor an advert in Australia that would get the green light to be shown in the United States and Britain.

Eloise Monaghan, the founder of the company which started in Brisbane, stripped off for the photoshoot herself along with her wife Natalie. The two women and a number of other male and female models feature with their chests bared in the photoshoot campaign dubbed fluid.

The models are body-painted in rainbow colours in a nod to the famous Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras which is being held on February 29.

Monaghan said she could show the ad in her New York and London stores but constant complaints to the advertising watchdog in Australia forced her to censor the poster in her own country. Monaghan said Australia used to be free-thinking but has recently become stricter which she says is frightening.

The Australian moralist group Collective Shout whinged:

Collective Shout has campaigned against Honey Birdette's pornified representations of women for close to a decade. Honey Birdette has been found in breach of Ad Standards rulings 31 times since January 2018. Caitlin Roper of Collective Shout said:

Far from promoting equality, this is an act of rainbow washing for profit. The company claims diversity while featuring flawless bodies and large-breasted women.

The ad has received an outpouring of criticism on Honey Birdette's Instagram and Facebook page, including for profiting off of Pride and as a blatant attempt to cover up an orgy with a rainbow filter.

Collective Shout has supported a petition launched by Melbourne father of three Kenneth Thor directed at CEOs of shopping centres which host Honey Birdette's porn-inspired portrayals which has attracted almost 77,000 signatures. Honey Birdette has a counter petition which we have been told by a source close to the company comprises a large percentage of fake names added by staff.

The owner of a Russian sex shop chain has warned about disruptions to the sex toy market caused by Chinese flu.

Maximilian Lapin, founder of the 60 strong chain of Pink Rabbit shops, told website Gazeta that sex shops nationwide are facing a shortage because the country's Far Eastern border with China has been closed. A high percentage of the world's sex toys are produced there.

According to Lapin, supplies have so far stood firm as his company doesn't import many products directly from China. Most are from America, Europe, and Russia, he explained. However, the businessman added that many American and European companies produce their goods in China -- and this could lead to a scarcity of naughty merchandise.