In 2018, the sex toy company Dame decided to advertise in the New York City subway, run by the MTA. 

In September, the MTA's ad agency, Outfront Media, began working with Dame on a campaign that would run in subway cars, showcasing sex toys against neutral backgrounds and featuring slogans that read, “Toys, for sex” and customer reviews.

By late November of that year, however—after Dame says it spent significant money revising and developing ads in an attempt to meet the ad agency's suggestions for approval—the MTA completely and abruptly changed course on Dame's campaign, as well as all other sex toy ads on public transit. The MTA rejected Dame's ad campaign, and publicly published guidelines on advertising that prohibited any “sexually oriented business" from advertising on MTA property.

Meanwhile, ads for viagra and other erectile dysfunction products continued to grace the eyes of countless New York commuters, with no questions asked. So in 2019, Dame sued the MTA for the arbitrary censorship they had experienced. 

This story demonstrates the countless hurdles and discrimination companies within the sex industry face in trying to market and discuss their products.  Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok or billboards, talking about sex and pleasure in a frank and open way on the internet, and in the real world, is extremely difficult.

Alexandra Fine, the Founder of Dame, has navigated these challenges in many creative ways. After graduating with her master's in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University in New York, Alexandra founded Dame Products alongside engineer Janet Lieberman in 2014 with a line of vibrators aimed at closing the "pleasure gap."

Since then, Dame has raised upwards of $11 million and run a number of successful crowdfunding campaigns, leveraging platforms such as Indigogo and Kickstarter. At the company's helm, Alexandra possesses the resilience and energy required to bring light to an industry that many are attempting to hide. 

In this episode, Alexandra and Caroline discuss the various hurdles sex companies face, particularly when it comes to marketing and fundraising. Alexandra shares her experience suing the MTA and advocating for change within the industry. 

Learn more about here Dame here.

Follow Alexandra here. 

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Today’s guest is Dr Avgi Skatepolou, author of “Sexuality Beyond Consent; Risk, Race and Traumatophilia”. 

Avgi maintains that society has become overly focused on healing trauma and needs to reroute its attention to what subjects do with their trauma. She calls attention to a series of challenging questions: Why is sexuality beyond consent worth risking, and how does risk become a way of engaging with the opaque parts of ourselves? And in what ways does eliminating risk remove the potential for erotic transformation?  

Agvi draws unexpected links between ideas that are so often seen at odd within one another; cruelty and care, sadism and ethics, trauma and expansion, and perversion and purity. Avgi writes about ideas typically relegated to the morbid, dark and unspeakable and sheds light on their potentially transformative powers, something she refers to as ‘erotic astonishment.’   

Blending philosophy, queer theory, and race theory with her extensive experience in practice as an analyst, she proposes that accepting the strange within, not to master trauma but to rub against it, may open people up to encounters with the enigmatic, astounding and unique forms of care.  

Buy ‘Sexuality Beyond Consent’ here. 

Follow Avgi here. 

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Back in March, we hosted our first live event with Australia's leading architecture commission, MPavilion. This week, we're releasing the recording with you all.

This conversation explores how design impacts our most intimate moments and how technology can be designed as a catalyst for connection. To help investigate, Caroline invited three panellists; RMIT professor and sex toy designer Judith Glover, founder of sexual wellness brand Normal, Lucy Wark, and author and sex-tech researcher, Jenney Kennedy.

The panel explores questions such as, how should we design technologies related to human sexuality and intimacy? Which sexual dilemmas can be solved using technology and which can’t? Why do technological solutions so often feel like a bandaid for more profound issues of connection and intimacy?

Learn more about MPavilion

Learn more about Judith Glover

Learn more about Lucy Wark

Learn more about Jenny Kennedy

Connect with us:

Becuming.me 

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Host and producer: Caroline Moreau-Hammond 

Editor and composer: Zoltan Fecso

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