Girl on the Net

So far I’ve been silent on the horrorshow that is Goop – Gwyneth Paltrow’s bullshit-engine which advocates wellness ‘treatments’ designed to cure you of your money. She recommends anything from vaginal steaming (argh) to jade eggs, making ludicrous claims about how these things can help you ‘detox’ and generally improve your life. I haven’t bothered with it until now, but my Twitter feed is currently packed with news and snark about ‘Goop Lab’ – her new show where she demonstrates some of the pseudoscience she’s trying to flog you – so I’d feel negligent if I didn’t write something. What’s more, I recently realised this problem isn’t limited to Goop: a sex toy website that I otherwise have a lot of time for has started peddling weird bullshit along with its jade eggs, and it breaks my fucking heart. Let’s start by tackling jade eggs and other cuntstones, and why the dodgy claims about their magical powers aren’t just ‘harmless fun’. I’ll save vaginal steaming for another angry day.

What are cuntstones?

‘Cuntstone’ is not a technical term: I made it up. But fuck it, the companies selling these things get to make up outlandish claims about the effects of inanimate rock, so I can make up my own terms if I like. Broadly cuntstones are crystals, gems and other stones that have been shaped and designed for use as sex toys. You’ll probably already be familiar with ‘yoni eggs’ – egg-shaped crystals that you stick in your fanny – and perhaps also stone/crystal dildos. You can also get crystal/stone butt plugs, and cock rings if you know where to look.

I have no issue with stones as sex toys. Although the stones used to make them are not always non-porous (definitely avoid porous stone, because it can put you at risk of BV), some is safe, and can give you sexy sensations. The difference between stone sex toys and ‘cuntstones’ (as I’m going to continue to call them) is that the latter make outlandish bullshit claims about the magical properties of said stone in order to get you to buy them. I have had a go at using love eggs before, with hilarious and terrifying results, but when I tried them I thought their sole purpose was to get my rocks off. If someone had told me they’d also ‘detoxify’ my body or ‘revolutionise my relationships’ I’d have laughed them out of the bedroom.

There are plenty of these sex toys on the market, not just on specialist sites: a few otherwise decent sex toy companies have now started flogging them. Unfortunately they don’t just flog you the toys, they also sell you a steaming heap of bullshit.

Jade eggs and dodgy sales patter

Here’s a selection of claims made on a sex toy website (not Goop) which sells jade eggs. The eggs are apparently great at:

• Releasing negative thoughts and irritability and soothing the mind
• Improving dream recollection and gaining access to the spiritual world
• Healing feelings of guilt
• Cleansing the body and removing toxic energy
• Enhancing self-confidence and self-reliance
• Harmonizing dysfunctional relationships
• Attracting and recognizing abundance in all forms
• Dispelling criticisms to help see one as they are

The beauty of these statements is that they are broad/vague enough that you could never possibly know if they were true. So if you feel like the jade eggs work (hey! I remembered so many dreams last night!) you’ll likely attribute that success to the stone, but if you feel like they don’t work (boo! I have been feeling so guilty lately and I thought these feelings were meant to be healed!) true believers can tell you that you simply haven’t been using the product often enough/for long enough/in the correct manner.

This is why woo peddlers rarely offer direct and specific information about what their bollocks is meant to do. If they said ‘this jade egg will cure you of the flu after two uses of 15 minutes or more’ that would be easily disprovable, and you’d see through it really easily. Oh, and also they’d probably get sued for it, which is what happened to Goop when it tried to make more specific health claims about the magical abilities of jade eggs. Health claims that can be tested can be proved false, and therefore sued for. But how do you go about proving your ‘enhanced self-confidence’?

[Note: Goop said it disagreed with the prosecutor’s position in this case and that it did no wrong, but paid out $145,000 to settle the matter quickly]

If you’re worried about getting sued, there are a couple of tactics you can use to make your sales copy even vaguer. This quote is from a different sex toy website (which I am also not going to name) selling the same jade eggs:

“Believed to attract good luck and friendship, jade is used by many to heal dysfunctional relationships. Additionally, many folks use this stone to assist with fertility and childbirth.” [emphasis mine]

I call this ‘covering one’s arse’: the vague claims are softened by the addition of copy that says jade eggs are ‘believed to’ do something (which means they don’t), as well as ‘many folks use this for…’ (which could be true of almost anything: a mate of mine once used banana skins to roll a joint – doesn’t mean he actually got high). These statements are more truthful than the above, of course, but they’re still toss. I’d question whether a company which does this might not be better off going the whole hog and just… not including the ‘healing dysfunctional relationships’ bullshit at all?

Jade eggs will not get you friends

If you want to claim that your revolutionary new sex toy will give me Earth-shattering orgasms, I’d expect, at the very least, for you to be able to show me some users for whom it’s done exactly that. That doesn’t mean orgasms have to be ‘guaranteed’, because every body is different and there’s no one sex toy that’ll work for all of us, but I’d at least expect a little bit of evidence that it can induce strong orgasms for some. Failing that, at the absolute bare minimum, I’d expect to be able to test the claim ‘you will have an Earth-shattering orgasm’ by trying out the sex toy and seeing what happened to me.

Let’s look at one of the jade eggs claims in more detail, shall we?

“It calms the nervous system and provides energy when feeling defeated or drained. Use this stone to attract good luck and authentic friendship.”

I can stretch to ‘calms the nervous system’ perhaps, if you’re using it as an orgasm-enhancer – masturbation is good for you, after all, and can have a calming effect for many of us. ‘Provides energy’ is also at least a provable hypothesis: show me the trials you’ve done with users who are wearing jade eggs, placebo eggs made from a different substance, and no eggs at all, with statistically significant results about energy levels/activity levels during and after wear, and you’ve got my attention. The final point, however, is an entirely unfalsifiable claim. Who determines what’s ‘good luck’ or ‘authentic friendship’? How can you prove that those things were attracted to you by the egg you popped in your fanny and not, you know, your winning personality and openness to new opportunities?

More pertinent question: if I try your magical cuntstones and don’t make any new friends, can I have my fucking money back? I’m serious. If you bought a new vibrator from a sex toy company which claimed to be waterproof, and it died the second you brought it into the shower with you, you’d demand your cash back, right? So why would any company think it’s acceptable to make claims about any other sex toys which they know for a fact are impossible to prove?

If I gave some bad relationship advice which claimed that, for instance, wanking in your partner’s sock drawer once a week would help to ‘harmonise your dysfunctional relationship’, I’d quite rightly be told to STFU. If a sex toy company claimed this, they’d be immediately leapt on by an army of justifiably angry educators, pointing out that they’re being irresponsible. If that same company was selling erection medication, or contraceptives, we’d be demanding evidence to back up their claims.

Could someone please explain to me where we draw the line? Why are companies which have high standards when it comes to other claims (such as toxicity or porousness of various types of sex toy material) happy to peddle this bullshit when the toys in question are made from pretty crystals? At what point do we decide that these lies are entirely harmless?

I’ve bought this stuff, are you saying I’m an idiot?

NO. Hell no. Absolutely, 100%, totally fucking not.

There is a massive, profitable, slick and sexy industry whose entire purpose is to sell you this stuff. This industry makes a tonne of money and hires skilled people, many of whom genuinely believe this bullshit themselves. The industry’s success is down to the fact that they are very good at what they do: in the face of people who are great at selling, why the hell wouldn’t you buy their shit?

If you have been sucked in by the stories of cuntstones which will revolutionise your life, you are not alone. You are also categorically not a bad or ‘stupid’ person. A long time ago Martin Lewis (famous here in the UK for helping people save money and championing consumer rights) wrote a fantastic piece about people who say they ‘wish they’d been stupid enough to take out PPI.’ PPI was an insurance product that was widely mis-sold: salespeople were trained to push push push this product even onto those for whom it would provide absolutely no benefit whatsoever. Years later, when the scale of mis-selling was revealed, banks had to pay out enormous sums of money to rectify their initial mistake and compensate consumers who’d been left out of pocket. Many who had never had PPI smugly declared that they’d ‘never be so stupid’ as to take out the insurance in the first place.

Martin Lewis responded with this blog post, which is still my go-to guide on any consumer issue where people may be being deceived. Please read it. I promise I am not telling you that you are a bad person if you have previously bought into these things. You are not stupid, you have been misled. The reason I don’t tend to use the word ‘stupid’ here on this blog is because I think it’s usually a catch-all term for ‘people who aren’t in the same position as I am’ – that may mean education levels, it may just mean people who are desperate and so will look anywhere for solutions to the problems life has thrown at them. People who have mental health issues that make them more susceptible to deceptive sales patter. People who are poor and working two jobs so they don’t have as much time to read the small print. People who can afford financial planners and other experts to advise them on the ‘right’ decision to make. Whatever. I’ve fallen for some serious bullshit in my lifetime – remind me one day to tell you how I used to swear by homeopathy as a migraine cure – and it’s not because I was ‘stupid’, but because I was ‘absolutely fucked and desperate for something that would work’ plus ‘entirely unaware of what homeopathy actually is.’

Bottom line: you are not ‘stupid’ for buying products that skilled people were paid to sell to you.

The problem of ‘wellness woo’, as packaged and sold by Gwyneth Paltrow and her ilk, lies partly I think in how easy it is to write it off as something silly middle-class women with too much money might buy. Cos who cares, right? If they want to spend their money on bullshit, let them. Except it isn’t just silly middle-class women (who, incidentally, also deserve consumer protection), it’s often also people who are vulnerable, who are struggling, who genuinely believe the things they are being told.

What’s our responsibility here? As bloggers, as educators, and as sex-positive people? It’s not to shout ‘haha you wasted your money, you twat!’, it’s to inform consumers about what’s true and not true, and hold companies to account when they publish dodgy claims about their products. I’m not annoyed at the people who’ve spent their money, but at those who rake it in.

Cuntstones: what’s the harm?

You know me, I do love a good old rant, so maybe I’m just overreacting here and there’s actually no harm in popping a cuntstone or two up your minge. Right?

Well… sort of. Getting people to stop misleading consumers over the magical properties of crystals (or, as we’ve learned, the lack thereof) is not the most important battle in the world – as I’m sure tedious bellends will be happy to point out to me on Twitter. But these products genuinely can cause a fair bit of harm.

For a start, as I mentioned above, some of the crystals used to produce sex toys can be porous. That means that even if you clean them really thoroughly you can still risk things like bacterial vaginosis – especially from long-term use like, say, if you stick a crystal egg up there then pop to Sainsbury’s and forget to take it out until bedtime.

There’s also the fact that crystals are a finite resource, and as such competition for them can be fierce, with the crystal trade littered with murky supply chains, exploitative practices, and human rights violations a-plenty.

“The truth is, many retailers have no idea where their crystals come from. Many, like tourmaline, amethyst, quartz and citrine (used to “manifest abundance and prosperity”) are found in gold, copper or cobalt mines, but even publicly traded industrial mines aren’t required to disclose profits from byproducts. And rather than directly from mines, or even the factories where the stones are cut and polished, retailers like the Crystal Geode buy from go-betweens, independent traders who sell at touring shows, who, even if they have documentation to prove their supply chain, are disinclined to share it, in part for fear of doing themselves out of a job.”

A company may be buying crystals from ‘ethical sources’, and customers may well see it as ‘a bit of harmless fun’, which is why I’m not suggesting we ban this stuff outright or raid everyone’s houses and hurl their crystals out onto the street. But even if someone’s doing it in as ethical and harmless a way as possible, they’re still propping up an industry that exploits resources and hoodwinks real people. The crystal, astrology and other woo businesses are booming right now. Maybe it’s because the planet’s on fire and we need some sand to bury our heads in for comfort. Maybe it’s because the internet makes it easier to sell overpriced rocks to vulnerable people who desperately want to improve their lives. Whatever.

Cuntstones can harm the planet as well as people’s bodies. The industry takes people’s money on false (and unfalsifiable) promises. I have no issue with anyone who knows all the above choosing to use cuntstones anyway. Even if it’s dreadful and damaging, it’s still your vagina, do what thou wilt. But what I’m not happy about is companies who would otherwise care about good sex education chucking all those principles out of the window where crystals and jade eggs are concerned. Are we really OK with sex toy companies publishing unproven claims about health on their websites? If we’re OK with it here, why not also let them lie to sell libido supplements and fake Viagra? How about when they sell vaginal tightening creams?

Yeah, I know. Loads of them do that too. It’s fucking awful. I hate the very concept of ‘vaginal tightening creams’ (basically a form of acidic lubey stuff which damages the skin on the inside of your cunt, thus making you feel more in pain and… therefore… tighter… oh God I lost the will to live as I was writing that sentence) and frankly it’s a disgrace that I haven’t written about them yet. But I promise I will soon, if you promise that whenever you see a company claiming its dildos can ‘remove toxic energy’ or ‘heal feelings of guilt’ you tell them exactly where they can shove it.

This article is my opinion. Although I have occasionally referred to these claims as ‘lies’, I am happy to accept that there are many people who sell and promote this stuff who genuinely believe them to be true. I have deliberately avoided naming the sex toy companies from whose websites I got those quotes, please do not name any companies in the comments on this post.