Sexuality

The Other Global Sex Trade

There’s an article about the global sex toy market in Counterpunch this weekend written by David Rosen. The piece is interesting in its effort to bring together the various guesses (some more educated than others) about the size and economic value of the sex toy industry, although it suffers somewhat from not distinguishing reliable sources from self serving ones (e.g. the $10 billion porn industry figure that just won't go away).

I was particularly interested to read that according to Professor Tong Chuanliang of the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, the primary users of sex toys are people living with disabilities. I find that somewhat hard to believe, and it seems more likely that this is a poorly translated quote taken out of context, but it was great to have it in there just as I'm recovering from the International Disability Day celebrations.

Because sex toys are manufactured by private companies, and retailers are too paranoid, competitive, and small minded to ever work together, we'll probably never get a clear idea of how large the industry is, or how many sex toys are sold in North America each year. Rosen's article offers a statistic for China, which looks like it was taken from a 2005 article in The Indian Express, stating that in 2003 annual sales of sex products in mainland China was almost $13 billion dollars. It would be interesting to know how carefully government agencies regulate and keep track of sex toy sales.