News — adultification

Kandi Burruss was growing restless. She’d already scored a platinum album, won a Grammy, and starred on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. But no matter her accomplishments, in 2011, nobody wanted her to be the face of an ad campaign.

“There were only very few Black women who were being chosen to represent brands, and there were maybe three [women] constantly being used over and over again for all the major brands,” Burruss tells Marie Claire. “One day I just said to my team, ‘I don't even care. I'm tired of even asking how to be the face of somebody else's brand. I'm gonna build my own brand.’”

So Burruss started Bedroom Kandi, a line of sex toys that grew into a home-party plan company (also known as a direct sales company, like Avon). Her goal was to “help make sex a more comfortable conversation for Black women to have,” she says. “I was one of the very first well-known Black women who was very unapologetically open in speaking about sex and relationships to sell products.”

Burruss has to deal not only with the hardships of being a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry, but also with being a Black business owner in a white-led world. While statistics on the racial make-up of sex-toy company executives and customers are not currently available, Scott Watkins, the vice president of sales for the Doc Johnson company, confirms that most major sex-toy companies were founded by white people. Additionally, a 2012 study of home sex toy party attendees found that less than 4 percent of attendees were Black.

“There is a very strong tokenism in the industry,” says Tracy Felder, a brand ambassador for sex-toy company Children of the Revolution. “It just makes it feel like at times you have to work twice as hard.” She says while the company she works for is great, when she attends trade shows, white men assume she is a model—even though she wears a badge explaining her role. “As Black women, we’re fetishized,” she adds.

The racial biases that Felder and Burruss have felt has deep roots in the sex toy business. The modern industry was founded in the 1960s and 1970s by white men who packaged and sold their devices at "adult bookstores" to appeal to other white men, the predominant shoppers at the time. Historically, “flesh” dildos and vibrators were the color of Caucasian skin, while African-American sex toys were intentionally oversized and stark, crayon black. It wasn’t until Grenadian immigrant Gosnell Duncan came onto the scene in the 1970s and created the first silicone dildo, in a wide variety of Black and Brown skin tones, that things slowly began to change.

While women like Hart have been trying to change the sex toy industry for years, the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has more people-in-charge finally starting to take notice of the systemic racism within their own companies.

In June, industry publication Xbiz held a roundtable discussion on race, out of which participants created an action plan for pleasure products companies. The plan included such initiatives as hiring more Black people and people of color in management positions and adding more images of Black people to packaging. Other companies, like Unbound Babes and Dame Products, made sure to double down on their public statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Unbound Babes made Juneteenth an official company holiday and vowed to match donations to the Mutual Aid Fund for Sex Workers of Color, while Dame Products made donations to a number of organizations, including the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

Yet one of the companies that released a similar statement, Pipedream Products, still has a male masturbation sleeve for sale on Amazon that uses racist language: The packaging reads “Flip a Sista Over” and “Jizzle in My Nizzle for Shizzle.” Hart called out Pipedream’s hypocrisy on social media, and after seeing her post, an executive for Pipedream reached out to her. In the conversation, Hart says she encouraged the exec to hire more Black employees and to change its packaging in consultation with Black consumers.

For Tamara P. Bell, founder of the Home Party Plan Association, an organization that helps home party companies select sex toys directly from the manufacturers, the strides forward are welcome, though a long time coming. She recalls seeing more products directed to the Black community at sex toy trade shows about a decade ago, but “they were doing it in a very derogatory way, [featuring outdated stereotypes], and so I had to call a couple of manufacturers out.” In April 2010, she formed a group of industry CEOs which has met every six months to talk about race “behind closed doors.” (They plan to resume the forums in the fall, or as soon as COVID-19 restrictions allow.)

While hiring more Black people, specifically in decision-making roles, will help create noticeable change in the industry, it’s become clear that simply being a Black female sex toy entrepreneur is helping pave the path forward and make room for others. For instance, Burruss says that almost 90 percent of her company’s consultants are Black and the majority of her customers are too. And one of her Black female contemporaries, Nenna Joiner, founder of Feelmore in Oakland, says she made sure to keep her sex-toy store open during Oakland’s BLM protests, providing goggles and band-aids for the protestors.

“Being open as a Black business is a form of activism,” Joiner says. “You’ve got to be out there protesting, but my protest is also a pleasure activism and making sure that my business, a Black business, stays open, stays available to the community.”

In Todays video we are talking about the Adultification of Black Girls & how to Stop the Sexualization of Black Girls I know this topic can be really heavy, so I've added a Trigger Waring because I do talk about sexual abuse. The Adultification of black girls was studied by Georgetown Law Center & Poverty and Inequality and found that black girls girls were seen as more adult-like than their white white counterparts. Now being a black girl, I have experienced this. Blacks girls start getting treated like they're older and are given more adult like responsibilities at a younger age than black boys and white boys and girls. This study also shows that because black girls are perceived older, they begin to get sexualized at extremely early ages. Black women have been made to feel ashamed of their bodies because our very bodies were seen as sexual objects. Why cant blacks girls be given the space to be that GIRLS ... CHILDREN ! We need to do the work to Stop Sexualizing Black Girls. All of this leads feeds into r*pe culture and victim blaming, especially towards black women. I will always shine a light on tough topics that affect our community as women, as black women and also as a christian. Its important to talk about it to become aware and to bring this to an end. Let me know in the comments down below what you think about this topic or how adultification has affected you growing up.