Health and wellness once used to mean eating right and exercising, but its definition has drastically expanded in recent years. Sleep, stress, skincare, and sex all fall under the umbrella of health and wellness, following decades of research showing how these factors impact our bodies and minds. This has led to topics that were once strictly taboo, like female pleasure, becoming seen as natural and healthy activities.
This cultural shift has given implicit permission for technology to cater to female intimacy, and now the pleasure tech industry is booming. This, in turn, is helping more women to explore and discover new benefits, shaping how society thinks about female well-being and identity in the process. Here’s how it’s happening.
Sensuality Meets Technology
Modern intimate toys are not crude mechanical tools designed to cater to all women. The eradication of stigma around the topic has made it possible for experts in neuroscience and psychology to study it seriously, and for banks and investors to back products designed using their scientific insights. The result has been a new, high-tech era for intimate devices, where technology and sensuality meet to deliver heightened experiences.
New, soft materials and devices that adapt to haptic feedback are just some of the technologies you can find in modern female sex toys. You’ll also find intuitive controls that give women power over every detail of their experience, or let them pass that control to someone else in the case of remote devices. Some AI-powered devices can even store their preferences for a repeat performance.
The Rise of Mental Health Awareness
Pleasure for both sexes has been mistakenly seen as a simple mechanical process in the past; doing activity X releases chemical Y. It feels good at the moment, but unlike eating or drinking, which provides us with nutrients, it doesn’t provide any lasting benefits. However, modern research has shown this not to be true. Arousal promotes the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin, all of which have lasting effects on the body and brain.
These chemicals reduce stress, contribute to better sleep, and result in a heightened mood long after we’ve stopped releasing them. In short, they’re great for mental health, which is now widely considered to be as important as physical health. Viewing female intimacy devices as wellness tools has affected not only how they function, as we discussed earlier, but also how they look.
Aesthetic Intimacy
As well as incorporating modern technology, women’s toys today also incorporate modern design principles. Vulgar shapes are no longer in vogue, having been swapped out for discreet, minimalist designs that wouldn’t look out of place in a spa or clinic. This demonstrates how they’re now seen as personal wellness tools, but it also shows how they’ve become much more normalised. They blend in with the surroundings, almost like a good piece of furniture.
This creates the impression that they are something that belongs in the home, as opposed to something that sticks out like a sore thumb. Removing the latter from its hiding place can feel awkward and embarrassing, even when alone, while removing the former feels natural. The elegant design of these products also invokes a feeling of luxury and indulgence rather than something bad and shameful.
Conclusion
Modern research into health and wellness has led to intimacy being properly understood as a natural and important component of a healthy lifestyle. This has led to the women’s toy industry catching up with other lifestyle products in terms of technology and design. Tech is leading to increasingly personalised experiences, while the form these tools take has become just as important as their function.