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Sex Toys and Obesity?
Trevor Butterworth, April 18, 2007
Willamette Week jumps on environmentally unfriendly adult toys – and falls hard for hype.

Thanks to Greenpeace, phthalate-ophobia has become a journalistically transmissible disease, popping up wherever publications like their reporters to talk about sex toys. While there is nothing wrong with endorsing high-quality, environmentally-friendly products, as the Willamette Week does, it shouldn’t be for reasons that are tantamount to scientific fraud:

“For use in sex toys, PVC has to be softened with chemicals called phthalates, which the European Union has already banned from children's toys. Phthalates have been linked to a laundry list of health problems, from obesity to kidney disease to abnormal estrogen production and prenatal genital development. Not exactly stuff suited for your body's most sensitive, absorbent areas.”

First, let’s point out that pre-natal genital development is a good thing, as if not then, when? Presumably, the writer means to say abnormal prenatal genital development, which would make sense, even though such a claim isn’t true.

As for the other “problems,” the evidence is less robust than Willamette Week seems to think it is. The mere fact that a cross-sectional study found a correlation between some phthalate metabolites and obesity in men tells us nothing about causation. A vibrator – even a cheap one – isn’t going to make you fat. Or give you kidney disease. Most of our phthalate exposure, alas, is through decidedly unsexy exposure to food and dust.

To ingest phthalates from an adult toy, one would have to – and there’s no way of putting this delicately – masticate on a toy for several hours a day on a daily basis; even then, there is no evidence that this would be toxic to your health. Such behavior would, however, suggest that you have other, more significant, problems.

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