Getting (Too) Dirty in Bed

By Emily Gertz, Grist.org. Posted December 9, 2005.

So you're an Enlightened Green Consumer. You buy organic food and carry it home from the local market in string bags. Your coffee is shade-grown and fair-trade, your water's solar-heated, and your car is a hybrid. But what about the playthings you're using for grown-up fun between those organic cotton sheets -- how healthy and environmentally sensitive are they?

Few eco-conscious shoppers consider the chemicals used to create their intimate devices. Yes, those things -- from vibrators resembling long-eared bunny rabbits to sleeves and rings in shapes ranging from faux female to flower power. If these seem like unmentionables, that's part of the problem: while some are made with unsafe materials, it's tough to talk about that like, well, adults.

But it's necessary. Unlike other plastic items that humans put to biologically intimate use -- like medical devices or chew-friendly children's toys -- sex toys go largely unregulated and untested. And some in the industry say it's time for that to change.

Love Stinks

Many popular erotic toys are made of polyvinyl chlorides (PVC) -- plastics long decried by eco-activists for the toxins released during their manufacture and disposal -- and softened with phthalates, a controversial family of chemicals. These include invitingly soft "jelly" or "cyberskin" items, which have grown popular in the last decade or so, says Carol Queen, Ph.D., "staff sexologist" for the San Francisco-based adult toy boutique Good Vibrations. "It's actually difficult for a store today to carry plenty of items and yet avoid PVC," Queen says. "Its use has gotten pretty ubiquitous among the large purveyors, because it's cheap and easy to work with."

In recent years, testing has revealed the potentially serious health impacts of phthalates. Studies on rats and mice suggest that exposure could cause cancer and damage the reproductive system. Minute levels of some phthalates have been linked to sperm damage in men, and this year, two published studies linked phthalate exposure in the womb and through breast milk to male reproductive issues.

A study in 2000 by German chemist Hans Ulrich Krieg found that 10 dangerous chemicals gassed out of some sex toys available in Europe, including diethylhexyl phthalates. Some had phthalate concentrations as high as 243,000 parts per million -- a number characterized as "off the charts" by Davis Baltz of the health advocacy group Commonweal. "We were really shocked," Krieg told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Marketplace in a 2001 report on the sex-toy industry. "I have been doing this analysis of consumer goods for more than 10 years, and I've never seen such high results."

The danger, says Baltz, is that heat, agitation, and extended shelf life can accelerate the leaching of phthalates. "In addition, [phthalates are] lipophilic, meaning they are drawn to fat," he says. "If they come into contact with solutions or substances that have lipid content, the fat could actually help draw the phthalates out of the plastic." Janice Cripe, a former buyer for Blowfish -- a Bay Area-based online company whose motto is "Good Products for Great Sex" -- confirms the instability of jelly toys: "They would leak," she says. "They'd leach this sort of oily stuff. They would turn milky" and had a "kind of plasticky, rubbery odor." She stopped ordering many jelly toys during her time at Blowfish, even though their lower prices made them popular.

So what's being done to protect consumers? Well, nothing. While the U.S., Japan, Canada, and the European Union have undertaken various restrictions regarding phthalates in children's toys, no such rules exist for adult toys. In order to be regulated in the U.S. under current law, sex toys would have to present what the federal government's Consumer Product Safety Commission calls a "substantial product hazard" -- essentially, a danger from materials or design that, in the course of using the product as it's made to be used, could cause major injury or death. But if you look at the packaging of your average mock penis or ersatz vagina, it's probably been labeled as a "novelty," a gag gift not intended for actual use. That's an important semantic dodge that allows less scrupulous manufacturers to elude responsibility for potentially harmful materials, and to evade government regulation. If you stick it somewhere it wasn't meant to go, well -- caveat emptor, baby!

Emily Gertz has written on environmental politics, business, and culture for Grist, BushGreenwatch, and other independent publications. She is a regular contributor to WorldChanging.

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