Set 1 - Quarter 4

Sex Toys: What's in Your Closet?

Hello ladies :)))

This is once again our Gen Z representative writing to you today and we have a lot to get through bc we love spreading knowledge here at SapphicSavvy.

It also seems that the NIH likes to spread knowledge again too! The rumors are true, we got our grant back. Super exciting for you and for us, but there are some practical matters that we need to talk about. We had anticipated building out this app more before we launched it, and then we had the rug ripped out from under us and we decided to sail forward anyways. With the rug semi-neatly back in place, we can once again get our footing and make this app even better for our lovely sapphics! However, this means that we will be suspending the competition for a little while as we continue development and figure out what exactly the restored funding means on our end—to say the details we got were vague at best would be putting it nicely.

What does this mean for you? You’ll still be able to use SapphicSavvy, you can ask and vote on questions, you can use the chat feature (that will be upgraded in our shiny new build), and you can browse through our articles the same as usual! However, we won’t be having any more rounds for the time being. Which means you won’t be getting my little data dumps for awhile :( this is goodnight and not goodbye.

So with that being said, please sit back and enjoy my tea-fueled commentary on what y’all had to report last week.

A Rose By Any Other Name

I would like to start with talking about sex toys (Things I Never Thought I Would Say at My Academic Job for 300). We all have them. Or 93% of us do. I feel like this makes sense, right? They’re pretty popular and I can imagine why!

When I was first going through the results, I thought this would be pretty cut and dry in terms of results. Maybe we would see some small differences by age and sexuality, maybe we would have some outliers here and there, you know, the standard stuff.

I could not have been more wrong.

The differences, while admittedly not huge, were really fascinating to me. Lesbians owned the fewest number of sex toys (with an average of 3.6), followed by queer users (who averaged 4.4). Bisexuals led with an average of 5.2 sex toys. As I googled trying to figure out why this might be, I found that there’s actually been sex toy research that has demonstrated similar findings (there’s also academic research in this area but sadly not on sapphic women specifically, womp womp). I guess multiple kinds of partners can lead to multiple kinds of fun, and thus more sex toys! This is all speculation on my end btw.

Never did I ever think that we would see such a profound age effect on sex toys for millennials and millennials alone. The common thought seems to be that each generation is more sex-positive and faces less stigma about getting something like a sex toy, right? Which would mean that sapphics in their late teens to 20s would have similarly high numbers, right? Wrong! Gen Z showed comparable, but ultimately still lower, levels of sex toy ownership as Gen X and substantially lower than millennial ownership. Maybe it skips a generation. Maybe it’s the popularity of romance novels among millennial women. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

But actually though, why might this be? If you read our data dump from last week, I think we might come to a similar time-is-against-us conclusion—young people have trends of having sex much less and much later than previous generations, which I think could plausibly translate into having sex toys as well (and simply that people who are adults for longer have had more opportunity to purchase sex toys). But there’s a wrench thrown into this little hypothesis by the understanding that Gen Z masturbate more in the absence of sexual partners. So, wouldn’t this increase sex toy ownership?

This leads us my absolute reach of a conclusion that there’s an argument to be made about it being a financial thing. Masturbation is free. Masturbation with a toy can be very expensive. Anyone who has balked at the checkout of good quality, um, hardware, knows the pain. Especially when you’re making less money. I know, I know, there’s plenty of articles complaining about Gen Z complaining about money. Many people argue that Gen Z makes more than any previous generations even when adjusting for inflation (though not all financial entities agree about this btw). But what those articles usually fail to take into account is the purchasing power of the dollar and where we have defined poverty lines over time. When we take that along with the current job market into account, Gen Z doesn’t look as rich as many of the obligatory generational blame-the-youth articles would have you believe. But I digress. Young people also tend to live with roommates more than previous generations (with some of those “roommates” being parents). And you know what mixes super well with roommates and thin walls? It’s not sex toys, I can tell you that. But whatever the reason, what matters is that we all have fun :)

List of Lovers

And for our final bit of analysis this week we have how many times everyone has been in love. Now I know that there’s plenty of jokes about wlw saying “I love you” two weeks in, and I also know that I don’t have to explain to y’all just how intense sapphic relationships can feel. But those are ultimately stereotypes, and idk about y’all but I’m trying to find out how much of basis they’re rooted in. So with that being said, let’s see what the numbers have to say for themselves.

All sexual orientation groups fell right around the 2.5 times mark. This was a lot lower than I think any of us were expecting, given that the average guesses were all almost 1 unit higher than the truth. But this was cool data to unpack I’m ngl. The fact that we saw essentially the same number being reported across sexuality I think bespeaks to the unifying power of love no matter our individual characteristics. And I think that’s beautiful :,)

What was really neat though was looking across age groups. The averages seem to go up by 1 for each cohort, and maybe I’m befouling the statistics here but I think a cool takeaway from this would be that love comes around about once a decade. Not to get too serious with y’all here, but when I first saw that I found it to be very profound and touching. And maybe a little anxiety-inducing. But ultimately, I think it’s important to appreciate the love we do encounter in our lives and take what we can from those experiences as we wait 10 years to recover from our most recent breakup. All jokes aside, everyone’s subjective experiences with love are complex and it comes in our own time, so just because this is an average doesn’t mean you’re weird or broken if you don’t map onto these numbers exactly.

Also, I want to take a second and say that romantic love, while amazing, isn’t the only kind of love that is worth experiencing in life! I actually read a really great book by Marisa Franco (a psychologist and professor) a couple years ago called Platonic, and it is a really great reminder of how overlooked friendships can be and why they’re just as important as maintaining as your romantic relationships. I would highly recommend it, it’s a pretty insightful about the importance of community. And I know this isn’t the commentary you asked for but this is the commentary you’re getting. Let us know if you do read it and what you think, I actually wanna know.

And that’s all she wrote! See y’all again soon.

XOXO SapphicSavvy

P.s. here's some links to additional readings if you're so inclined.

Sex Toys:

Camping:

Grew Up Religious:

Times in Love:

‹ Set 1 - Quarter 3

›