“Self-touch can be a love language.” This is the nonsensical thesis declared in the copy for Harry Styles’ company, Pleasing, and its new vibrator. It’s an attempt to sound, I presume, New Age or feminist or sensual or all three. I love vibrators. I love masturbation. I love the vulgar vernacular surrounding them– “jerking off”, say. Or “jacking off”. I love some grit and skank in my personal sexual expression, just as others love silk sheets and deep purples and a made-up advertising-friendly phrase like “self-touch”. (When I Google self-touch to check if I’m out of the loop, what comes up is a therapy website’s suggestion to self-massage the body, some Reddit questions about the nervous system, and an article on the normalcy of children exploring their own bodies published by Alberta’s health system.)
I don’t want to be a sexual aesthetics yum-yucker. And I’m a deprogrammed ex-Styles zealot, so I am empathetic to the titillation this would have provided me just a few years ago. From thirteen to twenty-one, my love for Harry Styles swung through incredible peaks and barely-repressed valleys. When he took the solo path, he was “just” a pop star, not yet selling any wares except (admittedly) sturdy tour merch. My feelings didn’t sour at first. They just waned. But then, maybe due to his mediocre third album, or to my burgeoning lesbianism, in the last couple of years I was struck with the ick. By the time he was selling baubley nail polish and “high-quality”skincare, I had left Harry behind..
His latest foray into sex toys — the aforementioned vibrator and some lube — felt grotesque to me from the jump. But I couldn’t immediately place my finger on why. Maybe part of it is my personal dislike of romance-novel sexual aesthetics, as well as my distaste for what I sometimes read from Harry as Wal-Mart Prince cosplay, what with all the velvets and the dark jewel tones. I also think the design of the sex toy itself is tacky. The vibrator is “double-sided” (I first read this as “double-ended” and thought that he was selling some sort of ill-conceived lesbian tool), with a wand attachment for external use on one end and a handle that can be inserted on the other. The hedonist in me recoils at the pre-enforced limitations of the design. For a tool “designed with exploration in mind”, it feels stupidly restrictive that you may only explore one of two options at a time. All that burgundy-tinted royal indulgence talk and I can’t even indulge simultaneously? What have I ever done to Harry to earn such sexual curbing?
What matters to me more than the toy’s flawed design is the very existence of this rollout in the first place. Do I want to buy my sexual wellness products from the same person — specifically a person who is supposed to be making music and thrusting onstage — who now also sells hoodies, nail polish, tote bags, and the song “Music For A Sushi Restaurant”? Spencer’s but make it GOOP, or GOOP but make it Spencer’s. “Self-love can be a love language” is more thoughtfully crafted as a tagline than the toy itself; which is unfortunate, as it’s not thoughtfully crafted at all.
On a girl’s trip this past weekend I was tasked with muddling some peaches. The kitchen was unfamiliar to me and a little sparse, so I had to make do by using the dull handle of the knife I also was using to cut the fruit. It technically worked. but it was sticky and ungainly and I wished for a better designed tool, maybe something even a little sleek and indulgent. I don’t need a muddler, but having one built by someone invested in the craft would be nice. I found myself thinking of Harry.
