In 2016, I got my first big-girl sex Toy as a birthday present.
It was also the year I made my first lube in the lab for my friends. It was cinnamon flavoured. 2016 was the year that everyone seemed to be comfortable talking about sex.
2016 wasn’t just a year of heavy matte make-up and highly curated brows. It was also a year when a certain kind of “clean,” natural beauty began to surface. It was a shift that, I realise in hindsight, reads less like an aesthetic preference and more like a cultural reorientation toward wellness. And wellness, like all dominant cultural logics, has a way of traveling. It moves from food to skincare to fitness and, almost inevitably, into sex.
This era was an important time for sexual wellness.
1) By the mid-2010s, sexual wellness began appearing in global reports and forecasts. That is a boring detail with a big meaning. A market only gets named once it is big enough to matter. Millennials were in their sexy twenties and finally had spending power, and they were spending it on sex toys. Brands and investors could feel it.
2) In late 2016 Kickstarter featured their first sex toy, Dame's Fin vibrator. It raised 700% more than their goal. That was not just a product win, indicating not only consumer interest but investor appetite into a traditionally risky industry.
3) The mid-2010s also carried a distinct feminist current which helped frame pleasure as health instead of indulgence. The pleasure gap started to gain public legitimacy. Around the same time, adult sex education began to expand beyond mechanics and risk reduction toward the emotional architecture of sex. Resources like OMGYes, a resource that focused on female pleasure, launched in late 2015, made that learning feel normal.
4) In 2016, French schools began using a 3D model of the clitoris in sex education, teaching its full anatomy rather than the simplified, partial version so many people inherit.
We might think of these occurrences as unremarkable or even absurd about how it didn't happen earlier, but all these things shape what sexual wellness is like today. And unlike the current cultural sentiment of nostalgia, I am pretty sure that most of our sex lives are better today than they were 10 years ago.
