The Sex Toy Revolution
Marie Claire - US|November 2016

Women are crashing through glass ceilings, making big-boy bank, even making a run for the White House—but there’s one gender gap we could still use some help closing: sexual satisfaction. Meet the two women doing just that, one crowdsourced vibrator at a time.

Vivian Giang
The Sex Toy Revolution

Late one spring night in May 2013, Janet Lieberman, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer, and her then-boyfriend, also an engineer, were at a bar in Brooklyn trying to operate a sex toy they’d purchased to celebrate his birthday. She’d worn the vibrator around all day to mark the special occasion—her boyfriend had planned to use its remote control to pleasure her whenever he pleased—but their plan failed when neither of them could determine how to turn the thing on. “I felt so dumb because there were such simple instructions, but we just couldn’t figure it out,” Lieberman says. They finally gave up and threw the toy away. “If two engineers who design products for a living couldn’t figure out how to operate a vibrator that cost $160, what’s happening to other people who are buying these products?” says Lieberman, 31. “I thought to myself, I can make better vibrators.”

By the end of the following year, she’d done just that, cofounding Dame Products, a company that bills itself as “smart women” who make “phenomenal sex toys.” In December 2014, Lieberman and her business partner, Alexandra Fine, proved they had the goods to back up that motto when their debut product, Eva—marketed as “the first truly wearable couple’s vibrator”—made crowd funding history, raising $575,000 in less than two months on Indiegogo, more than 10 times their initial goal of $50,000.

Eva’s design—two flexible wings that tuck under a woman’s labia, stimulating the clitoris during penetration—was unlike anything on the market and was honed to perfection specifically with women in mind. “We make products for women,” says Lieberman, Dame’s chief technology officer. “Men buy our products, too, but they do so because they think women are going to like them.”

This story is from the November 2016 edition of Marie Claire - US.

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This story is from the November 2016 edition of Marie Claire - US.

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