Why we need research about women sex and shopping

There’s quite a simple answer to this – there isn’t a lot of it about. Yes, of course, there are any number of online sex surveys and we can even see MRI scans of women’s orgasms these days. But when we get into Hewson Group’s area of interest - which is how women consider the many things that they can buy that might enhance or improve their sexual lives we are into uncharted waters. The same applies to the other side of the coin – how do women’s sexual behaviours and the things they would like to do - influence what they might buy.

This is all pretty peculiar. For a start, it’s peculiar from a commercial perspective – Women’s Pleasure Goods are already a sector worth maybe $6-8 billion. We at Hewson Group agonise on a daily basis as to actually what the current value is and there is certainly very little industry information to go on. What we include and don’t include is a matter for some debate and there was a sort of doh! moment a few weeks ago when we realized that we had not included the battery market. With a minimum of 60 million sex toys in regular use it doesn’t take a lot of mathematical ability to see that the replacement battery value is upwards of a billion dollars a year.

Women Sex and Shopping has been in the press a lot recently and a lot of the reporting (whilst very welcome) has been somewhat inaccurate. Many articles suggested that the sex toy market would be worth $60 billion in about a decade. Of course, we never suggested any such thing although we speculated that the whole Pleasure Goods sector might be. The articles also tended to lack a little in nuance and missed out most of the caveats and conditions we set out for growth. If there is going to be a market as big as we think it should be then it won’t happen without the things that underpin other major sectors like Beauty or Lingerie. Brands, merchandising, advertising and customer analysis – all of these things are in short supply right now and that will need to change. In other words, Women’s Pleasure Goods is a really important sector but it has to mature into its potential and address important parts of the market such as the over 50s which it almost ignores right now.

The second and perhaps more peculiar aspect is the almost complete lack of research into the effects of the interaction between ‘goods’ and sex as far as women are concerned. The WSS work to date is fairly conclusive that there is a very clear causal enhancement from sex toys, lubricants and pornography. This enhancement is of course, clothed in complexity and many women will benefit from items in the Pleasure Goods pantheon without any affection for say sex toys or pornography. We need to expand our understanding of all aspects of the interconnection and that is a fundamental aim of Women Sex and Shopping. There is another important observation in that women may enjoy sex toys, porn and lubricants, to name just three items, but are these are probably not in the form that they would most like – premium sex toy ownership is very much in the minority at the moment and pornographic content may be effective but its presentation is still a trifle male aligned.

It’s also no good us talking about sexual goods and women as if there was a free market in such things. There is not. In many parts of the world it is illegal to buy many of the items we are discussing and very big issues regarding women’s sexual emancipation – or of liberty and human rights are going to emerge in the next decade. This is particularly so in the BRIC countries which we think are commercially very important but even in the UK and the USA there are still laws and attitudes which are an affront to the freedom of women to shop for what they want where they want.