Asking Dirty Questions

Over the last week we have been going through all the research questionnaires that we have collected since WSS started.  We managed to acquire about 700 up until the end of 2010.  In fact we acquired so many that we found it difficult to analyse them properly given that each one has 4 pages of handwritten opinion. Not all of them are detailed but many of the later ones carry a lot of material – especially after WSS got a lot of press coverage.

Our initial interest was to establish whether or not there was a clear connection between what women can buy and enhancements to their sexual lives. That was obvious fairly quickly when we first started to gather up the first sets of answers  - but not always as we had expected. Pornography and fetish goods played a bigger part than we were expecting.  Now we are looking at the responses again to get a better understanding of the retail environment that women want and how all sorts of linked goods should be sold in the future.

Shuffling the hundreds of answer sets (each of which has a tag saying where it came from) we were struck by the diversity of sources.  About half come from sex shops or boutiques of various kinds and the main contributors there were Sh! in London, She Said in Brighton, Aphrodite Gifts in Bolton and Sinsins in Norwich. It seems more natural that we should have got such dedicated and lengthy responses from their customers but the ones we got from women we approached randomly in public seem amazing in retrospect.  Looking at the ‘encounter’ locations we could see pubs, universities, railway stations, Starbucks, exhibitions, parties – all sorts.  WSS might be quite famous now but it wasn’t at the start.  It’s amazing that we had the bottle, even more amazing that we weren’t locked up.