Well, for the Waitrose classes, it seems you can get all the accessories for middle class eroticism at John Lewis. The store has started selling sex merchandise and the good news is that there’s been a restock this week for Valentine’s Day, which used to be sacred to roses, Charbonnel et Walker chocolates and scent – though excitingly, I was sent an offer of 30 per cent off a subscription to the Economist, billed as the perfect Valentine’s gift (funny people at that magazine).
Ann Summers is entering a partnership with Deliveroo: can you think of anything more grim?
Anyway, at the John Lewis website, ready to be put in your basket with the 200-thread sheets and the Joseph Joseph nest sets of plastic kitchen containers, there’s a Divine Aqua Glow lubricant for £30 and a Pure Delight Orgasmic balm for £25 and a range of expensive sounding sex toys – I mean, £165 for a G-spot massager? You can get a couple of tickets to Paris for less.
I’m afraid what it all goes to demonstrate is not just that the taboos have been lifted on stuff that you’d once have to go to dodgy dives in Soho to pick up, but the grimly un-erotic quality of the sex merchandise industry. It happened long before Fifty Shades of Grey was on sale in supermarkets (I saw several instalments of that terrible book in the Arklow branch of Supervalu) and on mainstream television (a friend of mine slept all the way through it at the cinema). And before the success of the brand had been translated into a range of products from throws (as in rugs) to pyjamas to horrid masks to bad wine.
Kelly Wright, the retailer’s spokeswoman, said, inevitably, that sexual wellness – the sanitised description – ‘is a much more mainstream market. The outdated stigma has been broken, and it’s very much about prioritising wellness and pleasure’. Actually, the John Lewis brand of eroticism demonstrates that it is simply not possible to combine the notionally subversive, and would-be pervy with the ethos of a ‘never knowingly undersold’ retail outlet. Whatever may have been the transgressive qualities of masks, they will not easily survive being billed as Everyday Essentials. But really, the commodification of eroticism… it’s a bit grim in general. It looks either redundant, tacky or mildly ridiculous or uncomfortable. Sometimes all the above. I write as an outside observer, but I’d say, all the kit and paraphernalia doesn’t actually translate into a rush of pheromones; what it suggests is tired libido.
And I’m not sure that the democratisation of the products is preferable to Coco de Mer’s reassuringly expensive sex toys in John Lewis. It seems Ann Summers is entering a partnership with Deliveroo: can you think of anything more grim than a Domino’s pizza with a side order of that really hideous underwear? It’s five years since Sainsbury’s announced that it would begin stocking a range of budget sex toys and Tesco entering the market for ‘adult devices’, including lubricant and vibrators. Adult? I may be way out here but my guess is that the more punters are having to buy stuff to make sex satisfactory, the less sex is actually taking place. I feel sorry for young men, if they feel they have to navigate a whole retail product category as well as the intimidating business of making overtures to girls – and that at a time when, not joking, first years at universities have to sit through a class on consent before they start lectures. No wonder lots of them back away from the minefield.
Certainly there’s way less procreation going on. This week we found that one in three teenagers doesn’t want to have children. Fear of childbirth, fear of environmental catastrophe plus, I surmise, the atomising effects of online pornography. All this translates into a dystopian scenario of women turning into what Julie Burchill once called ‘sterile little sex dolls’ who may be able to satisfy their solitary sexual needs courtesy of the merch, but who are less and less up for the natural purpose of at least heterosexual sex, viz, children. The more we spend on sex toys – and the global market is worth billions – the worse the outcome of all that sexual wellness for society in terms of actual babies.
Obviously, this is a view from the outside, but my advice is, pass on the Pure Delight Orgasmic Balm. For £25 you can get a decent bottle of Montrachet. I bet that would work better.
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