Selling Sexual Products in Sweden: Gender, Disability, and Sex Toys, 1978–1996

Abstract: This study addresses the controversial question of making sexual commodity consumption respectable in the purportedly sexual liberal Sweden. Despite the country’s reputation of the “Swedish sin,” sexual consumption had been severely stigmatized both before and after the legalization of pornography in 1971. Thus, the attempt of the Swedish National Association for Sexual Health (abbreviated RFSU) to try to sanitize “sex aid” usage in the late 1980s is noteworthy, as this consumption was still being repeatedly linked to pornography. In the midst of a heavy mobilization against pornography ongoing from the late 1970s up to the early 1990s, RFSU went from supplying only a single type of vibrator to launching a whole product line of “sexual technical aids” in 1987. In so doing the products were explicitly linked to ongoing discussions of sexual capability and disability, yet still struggled to gain legitimacy both within and outside the RFSU. Thus, this article shows how different narratives of sexual products was used to advocate for or against certain sexual expressions and their desirability. By retracing these narratives of sexual consumption, I do not only provide the reader with an understanding of how ideas of gender, sexuality, and corporeality changed from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but also introduce a hitherto unacknowledged process in the Swedish historiography of sexuality. Through this, I open up for further research both in Sweden and other national contexts, by presenting entanglements of sexual product consumption that have been overlooked in the past.