Cleaning Up the Dildo Department

On a recent afternoon at her eponymous erotic emporium, the woman known as Raven begins a rant on one of her favorite topics: bad sex toys.

"I love how these companies say they make these for women, by women, tested by women," she says. "Yeah, right. A woman would never make something that looks like a spider and put it on her pussy." Excuse Raven if she's a bit of a snob when it comes to vibrators. The owner of Raven's Gallery Erotica near South Lake Union spent seven years designing and marketing adult toys before opening her own shop in April.

She runs upstairs and returns with a poorly conceived version of the industry's most popular toy, the rabbit. "There are at least 100 knockoffs," she says. "Most of them are crap." She keeps this model around expressly to demonstrate ergonomics gone wrong. "Women's vaginas aren't this long, and the beads are positioned way too far up to stimulate anything," she explains.

But what concerns her most is the material. Though the toy is more than four years old, it feels overly tacky, like a lint brush, and still gives off a noxious new car smell. According to Raven, the scent and the stickiness are from phthalates, a family of chemicals commonly used to soften PVC plastic—an inexpensive material from which the vast majority of sex toys are made.

Phthalates tend to leach or gas out of their substrates, which is not a good thing. The Centers for Disease Control has reported that phthalate exposure in laboratory animals has been linked to certain cancers, as well as abnormal prenatal male sexual development. Yet the multi-billion-dollar sex toy industry continues to use phthalates in its products, and thanks to largely unrestricted labeling practices, consumers are often none the wiser.

"This has been the sex industry's dirty little secret," Raven says. "They're creating a toxic time bomb for people's reproductive systems and then giving it a direct path to the very organs it damages."

First it was saccharin in sodas, then parabens in deodorants, and, recently, bovine growth hormone in milk. It was only a matter of time before the all-natural, organic marketing machine descended on adult toys. Earlier this year, a frenzy of media coverage on the hazards of phthalates compelled two major companies, including megadistributor Adam and Eve, to pull phthalate-containing products from their catalogs. Another company voluntarily began listing product ingredients on its packaging.

On the grassroots level, phthalate-free, "body friendly" sex toy stores like Raven's are sprouting up—quasi-public-health endeavors that also fill a market niche. The stores offer nontoxic toys and peace of mind, often at a sizable premium. Some of Raven's safest toys are medical-grade silicone dildos that can cost three times as much as their PVC counterparts.

"My rule of thumb is, if you wouldn't put it in your mouth, don't put it in your woo hoo," she says. "The public needs to be educated that personal items you're going to use in an intimate way should be as high quality as the vitamin supplements you take or the organic food you eat."

Seattle's resident woman-focused sex toy institution, Babeland, still carries phthalates in its inventory. "They're inexpensive, and we want to give people that option," says Audrey McManus, education coordinator for the Seattle Babeland store. "Some stores out there are totally phthalate-free, and they're really adamant about it, but I don't know. I guess we just want to educate people so they can make their own decision. We usually recommend people use condoms with them."

"That's like telling people to smoke a 'light' cigarette," Raven responds.

"Right now, your dog's toy is safer than your sex toy," says Jeff Meusse, spokesperson for Chula Vista, Calif.-based Tantus, maker of those silicone dildos.

Babeland co-founder Rachel Venning says less than 5 percent of its offerings currently contain phthalates, and the company is actively phasing them out. "There's this long tradition of thinking chemicals are innocent until proven guilty, but I'm not inclined to take that point of view," says Venning. "We're basically phthalate haters."

Yet research on the dangers of phthalates to humans is far from conclusive. Proponents of phthalate-free toys usually cite the same three pieces of evidence. One is a 2006 study commissioned by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency that confirmed the presence of phthalates in 16 popular adult toys and their tendency to leach out. Though the study states that massive quantities of phthalates were harmful to laboratory animals, it found no conclusive evidence that phthalates in the sex toys posed any health hazards to humans over the course of normal use, defined (perhaps not so realistically) as 15 minutes per week.

Another is a study conducted by Greenpeace Netherlands, which merely tested the composition of several popular sex toys (conclusion: most contained phthalates). The study didn't research the health implications of the chemicals, but when Greenpeace UK posted the results on its Web site along with its own editorializing in 2006, suddenly a toxic scare was fanned.