Sex Toy Safety

  • The Smitten Kitten in Minneapolis is one of the adult toy retailers which has stopped selling certain kinds of toys because of questions about the chemicals used to make them. (Photo by Lester Graham)

(Listeners should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)


Not everyone uses sex toys. But some people certainly do use them. The American
sex toy industry took-in more than one-and-a-half billion dollars in revenue
last year. But there are growing public health concerns about chemicals used
to manufacture some of the adult toys. No government agency regulates sex
toys because the adult toys are labeled as novelty items. “Novelty” means
these toys are not intended to actually be used. Kyle Norris reports some
retailers want the industry to stop using the potentially harmful materials in
the toys:

Transcript

(Readers should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)


Not everyone uses sex toys. But some people certainly do use them. The American
sex toy industry took-in more than one-and-a-half billion dollars in revenue
last year. But there are growing public health concerns about chemicals used
to manufacture some of the adult toys. No government agency regulates sex
toys because the adult toys are labeled as novelty items. “Novelty” means
these toys are not intended to actually be used. Kyle Norris reports some
retailers want the industry to stop using the potentially harmful materials in
the toys:


(Readers should be aware of the adult nature of this report. It includes
sexually explicit descriptions.)



A couple of years ago, Jennifer Pritchett and Jessica Giordani opened up The
Smitten Kitten, a small sex-toy store. On the day that their first shipment of
adult toys arrived they excitedly gathered around. As they ripped open the
box, a noxious odor permeated the air. It was that new, vinyl shower-curtain
smell:


“And we saw these oil spots. That’s what it looked like oil seeping through
the cardboard boxes. We were a little concerned, obviously, and we opened
them up and each of the toys, almost down to every single one, was beading
some oil-like substance up on the toys, through the product packaging,
through the styrofoam peanuts, and then through the cardboard.”



The entire shipment of adult toys was ruined. Pritchett started asking around
to the folks she knew in the industry. Someone told her that the oils leaching
from the toys are called phthalates.


Cheaper-end sex toys are made with polyvinylchloride, or PVC. PVC is a
synthetic material used in tons of things like building materials, medical
appliances, everyday household items and children’s toys. And much like
the children’s toys, most of the cheaper adult toys are manufactured in
China. There are no regulations on the manufacture of the adult toys in
China, and no regulations on the imports of toys in the United States.


In order to make PVC softer and more flexible – which is a desired effect in
certain adult toys – plasticizers called phthalates are added. And a lot of
phthalates go into jelly toys to make them more jelly-like. In fact, the
leaching toys Jennifer Pritchett had ordered are actually called jelly toys. But
that very un-technical term did not sit well with Pritchett. She sent a few of
the best-selling toys on the market to an independent chemist. To see what
the adult toys were really made of.


For instance one of the most famous sex toys in the country is called “The
Rabbit.” Everybody knows about that. Sex and The City had a big episode
about the rabbit habit. Oprah Winfrey gave away one to every person in her
audience. They’re everywhere. And I sent that particular toy to a lab, and it
came back that 60% of the total weight of that toy, so 60% of the total
volume of material is a chemical called dioctyl phthalatem, which is a
known carcinogen and teratogen.


It turned out the rabbit toy was made with materials from a class of
chemicals that’s linked to cancer and birth defects. It’s not known whether
materials used in some adult toys are dangerous to human health or not.
Because no one is testing them on humans.


In 2006, the Danish Technological Institute did study the health risks of
chemicals in adult toys on lab animals. Researchers found that some
phthalates are harmful to mice and rats in large amounts. Pritchett says that
if the consumer public knew that the materials in their toys might be a risk,
they probably would not use them. She says that the big picture here is about
a lot of things. And one of those things is a culture’s discomfort with
sexuality:


“It’s about a regulatory system that can’t even say the words ‘adult toys’ let
alone regulate it like they do children’s toys. It’s about a market structure
where people can make thousands of percent profit on cheaply made toys
and nobody’s going to do anything about it.”


There’s a lot of money in sex toys. Carol Queen is the staff sexologist at
Good Vibrations, a well-established California sex store. She says that
people have worried about phthalates in the toys that children suck on, like
pacifiers. In fact in Europe, children’s toys with dioctyl phthalate and other
kinds of phthalates have been banned. Once people started worrying about
children’s toys, they soon started to wonder about adult toys.



“In terms of the dildos and the insertable vibrators, at the very least, those
things are going to and on the mucosa, and if somebody’s having fun it’s
staying there for a little while. There’s friction, there’s the possibility of
leaching. And all of those things are potentially correct. The problem with
the discourse is that so far no one has had the opportunity to truly understand
what the implications health wise and otherwise might be for these materials
on human body. Because people don’t test sex toys.”


The big concern here is that sex toys directly touch mucous membranes. And
this contact is not buffered by any layer of skin. So the materials used in an
adult toy can potentially more easily be absorbed into the body.


For this report, I contacted more than twenty medical and health
professionals. They were the heads of research universities that specialize in
sexual studies. Or OB-GYN doctors, or the directors of sexual health clinics.


None of these health professionals were willing to be interviewed about
what can happen to someone’s body when they use adult toys made out of
potentially hazardous materials. They just don’t have the information about
it. Although when I spoke with them, the majority of those health
professionals were curious to hear this report.


We finally spoke with Dr. Susan Ernst. She’s the director of the Gynecology
Clinic at the University of Michigan’s student health services. She confirmed
that this topic is not on the radar for many health professionals:


“It hadn’t come up as a topic with patients. It hadn’t come up in any of the
medical conferences that I had attended. It hadn’t come up in the medical
journals that I have read. So I am embarrassed to say it came up through the
lay press bringing it up as an important issue.”


Dr. Ernst says that if a patient is using an adult toy that is potentially
dangerous, then health care professionals need to be knowledgeable about
this topic.


Jennifer Pritchett of Smitten Kitten says friends sometimes mention rashes
or burning they experience when using adult toys. They’ve been to the
doctor. But physicians often wrongly assume that it’s an STD or a toy that’s
not been cleaned properly. And the problem doesn’t go away.


The doctors don’t think about a connection between the chemicals used to
make the toys and how they might affect the body.


Pritchett says when she mentions that possible connection to a friend, she
can see a light-bulb go on over their head. Now that’s speculation of course,
but she thinks people need to put all of the pieces of the sex-toy puzzle
together. That’s why she stopped selling the jelly toys that were leaching
phthalates:


“We have to say we know the chemicals in these toys are dangerous. We
know they’re dangerous in other respects. We know if children put these in
their mouths, it’s dangerous. I think we’re going to have to extrapolate and
say well if adults put these in mouths or other parts of their body it’s also
dangerous. We’re just going to have to make a little leap there. But the
industry who is invested in keeping toxic toys on the market hides behind
that. They hide behind the novelty use only. The ‘nobody’s proven that this
specific toy causes cancer.’ I think it’s a cheap argument and I hope it doesn’t
stand up for too long.”


Pritchett says it’s not as if people are only buying adult toys as gag gifts. But
because the toys are so controversial, nobody expects the government to test
the safety of them anytime soon. But people are starting to talk about the
issue. A few months ago an adult toy trade magazine did a cover story called
“Attack of the Phthalates.” And one of the biggest adult toy retailers recently
announced it was phasing-out products that contain phthalates. Because
more people who use these toys are becoming concerned about whether
they’re putting themselves at risk.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Fish Detectives

  • The fish detectives (a.k.a. scientists who specialize in fishery genetics) survey the scene. (Photo courtesy of the Lake Erie Center)

On television, the CSI detectives make forensic lab work look glamorous. It’s a cinch for them to track a criminal by the DNA left behind at the scene. In real life, DNA is also a powerful tool for solving environmental crimes and mysteries. Rebecca Williams visits the Fish Detectives:

Transcript

On television, the CSI detectives make forensic lab work look glamorous. It’s a cinch for them to track a criminal by the DNA left behind at the scene. In real life, DNA is also a powerful tool for solving environmental crimes and mysteries. Rebecca Williams visits the Fish Detectives:


(Sound of gulls and reel being cast)


It’s midday, and it’s so hot the gulls are just standing around with their beaks open.


But Joe Al-Sorghali is still trying to get himself a fish dinner:


“Hopefully I can get a good amount of perch today… they’re not that fishy so they’re a really good catch.”


It takes a lot of these little fish to fill up a dinner plate. But that doesn’t stop Al-Sorghali from going after perch and walleye any chance he gets. A lot of people call Lake Erie the Walleye Capital of the World.


Fishing is a really big deal here. So it makes sense that Lake Erie’s also home to the Fish Detectives.


(Dragnet theme music)


The fish detective headquarters is tucked away on the edge of a quiet cove. The investigators at the Lake Erie Center are not wearing trench coats. They’re not even wearing lab coats. This crew of laid-back lab techs and grad students comes to work in jeans and T-shirts.


Carol Stepien heads up the fish detective squad. She says they solve lots of cases of mistaken identity.


Take the Case of the Fried Perch.


Last year the detectives got a call from a TV station in Milwaukee. The news crew was suspicious that the fried local perch on restaurant menus wasn’t really local.


Stepien says she asked the news station to send her some frozen filets.


“So instead they sent their news crew out into restaurants and had their news crew eat the fish and put a little bit of the breaded, cooked fish in a plastic bag and froze those and sent them to me. We were pretty shocked to get those in our laboratory. We didn’t know if we could get DNA from breaded, fried material like that.”


But Stepien says they scraped off the breaded coating… and they actually were able to extract DNA from the little bits of cooked fish.


“And we found that about half of those fish were yellow perch from Europe.”


Stepien says it’s gotten more common for fish brokers to import yellow perch from outside the U.S. because it’s cheaper. She says even though the foreign perch might taste the same when they’re deep-fried… a close look at the DNA of the European yellow perch reveals big differences from Great Lakes yellow perch.


“They probably could be called freshly caught lake perch, but they were certainly frozen and didn’t come from any local lakes, they didn’t come from the Great Lakes. Instead they came from overseas.”


Stepien’s team will tackle any sort of mystery, as long as it involves gills and fins.


Lately they’ve solved cases of home invasion. That is, invasions by exotic species that’ve gotten into the Great Lakes. The scientists can track the invaders by their DNA fingerprints, and find out where they’ve been.


Joshua Brown is a Ph.D student at the lab. He’s been tracking the round goby. It’s a fish native to Europe. Scientists say it caught a ride to the Great Lakes in the ballast tanks of ocean going ships. It’s been crowding out native species.


“We’re going to find somebody to point the finger at, as it were. We’ve found evidence they came from the northern portion of the Black Sea, right around one of the major ports.”


That port is in Ukraine. Even though they’ve found the culprit, Brown says there’s not much governments can do, because everyone’s guilty.


“I don’t think you could really sue a nation for you know, not keeping their species under wraps. If so, we’d be open for a lot of lawsuits too – we export almost as many as we import.”


But Brown says knowing exactly where a foreign species comes from might help keep the door closed to future invaders from that same region.


Whether it’s a case of consumer fish fraud or defending the home turf from invaders, there’s one bottom line for these detectives. They want to find out as much as they can about native fish so they can keep them from going belly up.


For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Mississippi River Initiative

The federal government says a year long effort to crack down onpolluters of the Mississippi River has been a success. Butenvironmentalists say more needs to be done…. The Great Lakes RadioConsortium’s Bill Raack reports: