How's Your Sex (Toy) Life?

 Most of my email is pretty boring.  But every once in a while a piece gets through that is life-changing,  and that is how I feel about Bedbible. Bedbible’s direct mail arrived on my computer in the form of a request to see if I wanted to test or review some of its products.

Yay or nay?  It’s a Scandinavian site that reviews, researches, and sells adult toys. What would you do?

Now lest you think that I asked for this opportunity,  let me assure you, gentle reader,  that it was a complete surprise and that it has been at least 20 years since I tested my last sex toy, which I only bought because USB was fairly new and I had been involved with its rollout when I was at Intel. The first sex toy I ever bought was a small USB vibrator called the Bullet, which I only bought because I love to be an early adopter and this was one of the first Bluetooth vibrators on the market. 

You can believe that if you want to. I sense I am protesting too much.

Apparently,  sex toys have become a huge industry. A few facts and figures: The global sex toys market size was estimated at USD 32.7 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 35.2 billion in 2023. The market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.50% from 2023 to 2030 to reach USD 62.3 billion by 2030.

One wonders where this kind of information comes from, right? Who does this sort of research? Well, Bedbible does, and then shares it with Statistica and we all know Statistica is “real.”

In the “real” world I hear that the population is declining in all the developed countries, that people are having less sex, and that fertility rates are low.

We have to figure out what to make of this. Have sex toys taken the place of sex? 

Apparently BedBible was started by two young men in  2018 who discovered there was no other website that provided expert guidance on sex toys. Find a problem and solve it, right? They were wrong.

After much research, their conclusion was that there were indeed thousands of websites and even more sex toys,  but no way of figuring out which ones were any good. Time for a pivot. 

By the end of 2020 Bedbible had only around 100 visitors a month, which is hilarious when you think about how fast websites can grow. But by 2022 things had changed. It had accumulated more than 500 reviews of sex toys and 250 pieces of educational content, and it had also started a podcast and moved into YouTube. In other words it has gone into the big time during the pandemic. Playing with sex was like playing with dolls, and safer.

Bedbible now has a team of people who offer roundup reviews, educational content and sex related statistical research. It uses freelancers to augment its internal reviews.  Just to sample its writing I read a review of the six best life size sex dolls, but I won’t spoil it for you.  Hint: they make my body pillow seem pathetic.

Two people on the site’s team have the titles of “sexologist”. One is even a PhD sexologist. I ponder for a moment about where one gets this degree outside of Scandinavia? Is it bizarre that America is banning books in libraries while people are forging careers as sex toy reviewers and sexologists in Europe.

I also have a feeling that everyone who works for this site must get paid in sex toys. Or perhaps it’s one of those new-fangled gamified jobs, where each person goes out and finds a toy, does a review and publishes it.

That would be a nice freelance job, especially since you can work from home-- or perhaps you should work from home. The good thing about a sex worker testing job is that it cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. Or would  the reader know the difference between a review written by an actual toy tester, and a review written by ChatGPT?

I only know that since I got this piece of mail offering me the opportunity to become a sex toy tester I have been captivated by it. I have been trying to figure out whether to pass it around to younger people that I know, or hog it for myself. BedBible thinks it’s important that anyone can come and read a product review written by someone just like them, I need to shoulder this responsibility.  I should write a review so they have at least one review by an 82-year-old in case another 82 year old stumbles on the site  looking for peer reviews.