And while several of the dozen companies who will be present at the show are founded and run by women, they say that despite this year’s breakthrough, the technology industry still has a considerable way to go when it comes to embracing female sexual wellness technology.
“Things are better, but there's just still this genuine fear of female sexuality more broadly within the institutional side of technology,” said Polly Rodriguez, quited in a report by The Associated Press on the new presence of female sex-tech startups at CES this year.
Rodriguez is the CEO of Unbound, a sexual wellness company that makes a variety of high-end sex toys, including a $129 vibrator so compact that it can be worn as a ring.
Sex tech entrepreneur Cindy Gallop, founder of the site MakeLoveNotPorn, offered to give a talk at the 2020 CES, according to the AP report. But the show organizers turned her down, saying that sex tech was not part of its programming agenda.
In fact, the sex tech companies that exhibiting at CES this year are confined to the Sands Expo, a second-tier exhibition space mainly reserved for smaller startups.
CES has long had a reputation as a “boys club,” according to the AP report, one that it did little to dispel with an almost exclusively male speaker lineup—not to mention the bikini-clad “booth babes” who enticed conventioneers into exhibits.
Last year, when the show gave an “innovation” award to the Lora DiCarlo Osé “blended orgasm” vibrator and then took it back because it determined that the product was “immoral,” female sex tech entrepreneurs said enough is enough. After a public outcry, CES reinstated the award, and revamped its policies to allow the new mini-influx of sex tech firms in 2020.
“Sexual health and wellness is health and wellness,” Lora DiCarlo CEO Lora Haddock told the AP. “It does way more than just pleasure. It's immediately connected to stress relief, to better sleep, to empowerment and confidence.”
Haddock’s CES award-winning Osé is now available to be ordered and in just over one month has racked up about $3 million in advance sales for the $290 “massager.”
Photo By LGEPR / Wikimedia Commons
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