Is It Just Me Or… Has Anyone Else Stopped Hiding Their Sex Toys?

(Warning: TMI inside, do not open this email Dad.)

It was an unsuspectingly warm day in 2010 when my mother first found my sex toys.

I had devised what I believed was the perfect hiding place: inside a hand-decorated shoebox that I glued to the wall above my bed (can’t tell me that summer arts and crafts camp went to waste). The inner part of the shoebox would slide out to the side, and voila! A treasure chest of a few questionably cheap sex toys, which is what I could afford at 17. I think two of the three were joke gifts from friends who were brave enough to enter Ann Summers alone after school.

That day, I came home to find my inconspicuous shoebox removed from the wall and sat, terrifyingly, on my bed. The realisation slowly dawned on me that my mother was now aware of her daughter becoming a sexual being (although if I’m being honest the whole house probably became aware four times a week at 11pm, since these were £6 sex toys and my walls weren’t soundproof).

You might be suspecting that next came the motherlode of all awkward sit-down over-dinner conversations, but that just wasn’t my mum’s style. Instead, she said nothing. I said nothing. Time moved forwards. I found a new hiding place. Life progressed. Everything was going just fine. Until one day 17-year-old Megan got pissy about someone eating her favourite cheese from the fridge, and made a throw-away comment about hiding some so that it wouldn’t happen again. To which my mum replied:

“Oh, I’ve seen the kind of things you keep hidden in that room”.

The ground swallowed me whole, and that’s how Regina George died.

Fast forward a decade and several years’ worth of unlearning sexual shame, I’m now a grown woman who has a ceramic dildo displayed in the entry room of her home. I like the idea of people knowing they’re entering sex positive territory.

Over the last year, with the guarantee that nobody would be coming in and out of the house, my bedroom floor has started to look more and more like a sex toy graveyard. And I almost… don’t want to go back to hiding them? Mainly because:

1.      I don’t have any shame left and I’m not a very private person.

2.      I’m just going to wonder where they are four times a week at 11pm.

3.      They were fucking expensive so why shouldn’t they be displayed?

I might even become one of those people who add shelving to their room just for their toys; no more arts and crafts shoeboxes for me! And yes, I’m aware that this isn’t exactly burning down the patriarchy in any meaningful way, but it sure did take a lot of work to give few enough fucks to get here.

Cheers to unlearning shame around our sexual pleasure, whether it’s out on display or not.

Questions for the comments: are you an out on display or hidden in the drawer kind of person? Did you get any bolder with your sex toy exploration this year? Is there any shame around sexual pleasure that you’re working on unlearning? 💜