Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Enrollment for the 2017 Explore More Summit is OFFICIALLY open. The summit is free, runs for ten days, and features interviews with SOO many incredible thought-leaders. You can sign-up at exploremoresummit.com. It’s been incredible creating these talks, so I hope you’ll check it out. It all starts March 8th, 2017.
This week, I’m so excited that Matie Fricker and Hunter Riley from Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center are here. We talk about community sex education, sex toy testing fatigue, and how they make their sex store welcoming and empowering.
Matie goes deep into toxic toys and what happened when they gave customers a choice between toxic and non-toxic toys. Plus, their testers have to fill out an 8-page survey about each and every product the store carries.
We also dive into bad sex toy design, the ONE product that Matie has been searching for for 10 years and has not found a decent one, orgasm stuckness and toy loyalty and why that can inhibit pleasure, and my frustration with sex classes… why do blowjob classes consistently sell out at stores across the country but not cunnilingus classes? Yeah. Let’s name it.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Matie, Hunter, and I talk about:
- Self-Serve Sexuality Resource Center – what it is, what they do, and who it’s for.
- The importance of community when it comes to sex, sex education, and the ways our communities address and talk about sex. Especially the ways we experience cultural and community level shame around even needing sex education.
- Self-Serve’s training program and how they focus on meeting people where they’re at when they walk in the door of their sex shop. It’s taken 10 years to develop, and their goal to empower people in a way that accommodates their personal comfort level.
- Some of the common reasons and questions that people come into Self Serve for. From medical referrals to questions about sex toys, working in a sex shop is never dull. Hunter shares some reasons it’s very common for people to require dilators.
- Do sex shop employees watch what people gravitate towards and judge them? Matie shares a really cool story about what it’s really like to work in a sex shop day in and day out.
- Reviewer fatigue and how sometimes it’s really exhausting testing sex toys all the time. Yes. It’s a thing…
- A lot of sex toy design is very very bad, so Self Serve has a rigorous testing process for testing all products they carry to try and ensure that they offer good investments for a variety of bodies.
- Why toys aren’t one size fits all and how important it is to find toys and products that fit YOUR body and not someone else’s. We also talk about the shame that people feel when they buy a toy and it doesn’t work for them – as if it’s a personal failure and not a product failure.
- Annie Sprinkle’s theory on orgasms. WHICH I LOVE.
- Why it’s so difficult to fill certain kinds of sex classes, which is something I find SO frustrating. What fills up, what doesn’t, and why won’t people take classes that could REALLY change their lives?
- Masculinity bullshit and why that can make it so hard to fill classes about cunnilingus and pleasuring a pussy.
- Backlash Self Serve has experienced at the University of New Mexico for organizing sex week on campus and the dangerous information that anti-sex folks want to teach.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Hunter’s blog post all about the drama at UNM’s sex week
That Travel & Leisure article on hotel sex that I mentioned in the intro.
About Matie Fricker
Matie Fricker is a smut peddling sweetheart with a deep love for the odd and tender. She owns Albuquerque’s best sex shop, Self Serve Toys. Self Serve is a shiny bubble of love and safety for those seeking pleasure and joy in their lives. One of her proudest accomplishments was causing Rush Limbaugh to say “female orgasm” on-air multiple times.
Matie has been awarded the 2008 Tough Cookie Award from the National Association for Women Business Owners, Best Sexy Shop in ABQ’s Alibi Weekly Newspaper for 9 years and Albuquerque Pride’s Outstanding Retail Store Award.
About Hunter Riley
Hunter Riley is the manager of operations and outreach at Self Serve, a sex educator, speaker and social media maven. She helps young adults find their voice and comfort level around conversations about sex and sexuality. After earning degrees in psychology, Spanish and journalism, she moved on to teaching classes in English and Spanish about pleasure, sex toys, communication, safer sex, consent, oral sex, kink, non-monogamy, birth control and more! She has authored several sex columns for newspapers and online media outlets in New Mexico including the Daily Lobo, the Santa Fe Reporter and Albuquerque Free Press. She has partnered with organizations like Planned Parenthood, the University of New Mexico, UNM Hospital, Enlace Comunitario, Santa Fe Care Center and more. Anyone interested in hiring Hunter or learning more about the services she provides can contact Hunter via email: hunter@selfservetoys.com for more information.
Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
- Listen and subscribe on iTunes
- Check us out on Stitcher
- Don’t forget about I Heart Radio’s Spreaker
- Pop over to Google Play
- Use the player at the top of this page.
- Now available on Spotify. Search for “sex gets real”.
- Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.
Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Of course, this is Sex Gets Real, and I am Dawn Serra. Oh, my god. Literally, where do I start? Enrollment for the 2017 Explore More Summit is officially open. I have finished editing all of the interviews. Let me tell you, the content in these interviews is profound. The more that Alex and I dig into the content as we work on extracting quotes and creating trailers, the more that we are finding whole new ways of thinking about relationships and sex and emotions. We’ve had some of the most profound conversations just getting excited about talking more about the things that we’ve heard in these talks than we’ve had in a while. I am really excited for everyone to hear it.
Dawn Serra: But I’m also worried that if you attend the summit – which of course, is free and online, and entirely created by me – if you really like to roll around in these talks, and you really take some of these messages to examine some of your own beliefs, it might be foundation shaking. There might be some major discomfort in changing how you think about shame, in changing how you approach kink, in completely changing the way that you talk about pleasure and what you feel in your body. And I cannot wait.
It starts on March 8. All you have to do is go to exploremoresummit.com, and it’s free. Each day, three talks will be released. They’ll be available for 24 hours. You can watch them as many times in that 24 hours as you’d like. Then those talks come down and the next set comes up. We do that for ten days. There’s details, a private Facebook group, where we’re going to be super geeking out.
Dawn Serra: Last year was awesome, but there’s something really special about this year that, in fact, is actually going to be changing the way that I do advice on this show. Because I’m changing my ideas of what it means to explore sex and talk about relationships and communication at such a deep level. So, I hope you’ll check that out, if you like geeking out. But just be prepared. There’s some really awesome, interesting, fascinating stuff. Of course, some really fun stuff like Sunny Megatron and Ken Melvoin-Berg talk about fucking people with balloon dildos as part of their clown sex. There’s a little something for everybody.
Also, thank you to everybody who has been supporting me over on Patreon. If you love the show and you want to help me make it even bigger, even better, keep it going, and you want to be involved in the show in a new way, all you have to do is go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. You can pledge anywhere from $1 a month, all the way up to, I think, $20 a month.
Dawn Serra: In fact, the episode that you’re about to hear, which is with Matie Fricker and Hunter Riley from Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had such an amazing time digging into some of these topics that our talk ran over an hour and 20 minutes. So I had to cut a good chunk of our conversation. I am going to be releasing the part that didn’t make it into this episode to my Patreon supporters who pledge at $3 or more. You’re going to get extra content that nobody else in the world is going to be able to hear. My plan is, as I have extra content from other episodes, to continue to do that – sharing with you some of the stuff that doesn’t make it on the air, from behind the scenes to just tidbits that were long and and really fascinating. But I try to keep the show around an hour if I can.
So please check that out. I would love your support. I love the feedback. I’ve asked people who they want to hear on the show. People are already weighing in. That’s all over on patreon.com/sgrpodcast.
Dawn Serra: Then, of course, hotelsbyday.com is sponsoring this episode so generously. I was just reading this really funny article in Travel and Leisure. I will link to it for this episode if you want to check it out. But there’s this guy whose job it is to travel around the world, and he was talking about the different types of sex that he overhears as a traveler at different hotels. He was talking about how different hotel chains seem to elicit different kinds of sex. Like W Hotels, despite being super boutique, seem to be for people who like having sex a little bit earlier in the evening and who like to laugh. Then he was saying that the lustiest hotel chain is consistently Hyatt. When he travels around the world and stays in at Hyatt, he says he tends to hear the most absurd, loud, raucous sex. It just made me so happy.
Then I started wondering, if you need a super sexy place to have sex during the day, because, of course, Hotels by Day is for days days, what kind of a hotel would you book, and then what kind of sex would you have? Would it be slow and lovemaking? Would it be animalistic and wild, where you’re shaking the bed and practically breaking it? Would it be super kinky with somebody bent over in front of a window getting spanked? I want to know.
Dawn Serra: Of course, if you’re looking for a place for a super hot rendezvous in the middle of a day with a lover or your partner or you just want a nice place to go whack off on your own because you need a break from everyone in your life, then check out hotelsbyday.com. They’re generously sponsoring this episode, and listeners get 5% off with code SGR5off for Sex Gets Real – SGR5off. All the details are on the website, dawnserra.com. You can sign up for the summit and feel lots of things about lots of topics. You can go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. Support the show! I love it. I will also link to this cheeky little article in Travel and Leisure about hotel sex. Maybe that will inspire you to check out Hotels by Day for your own day stay. Let’s jump into this episode.
Matie and Hunter are from Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center. You’ll hear all about what that offers and why they’re so special. They are a feminist-owned sex toy shop. They also do a lot of community outreach and education of medical professionals and education-based training. They’re sex positive. They’re health-based. They have some amazing things that they do at the shop. They talk about these really rigorous product testing that they do, including sex toy fatigue, which is a thing. We talk about how difficult it is to fill classes, specifically how nationwide, if you talk to any sex toy store, their blowjob classes tend to always fill up. But classes about cunnilingus or having sex with a vulva tend to be very difficult to fill. So we roll around in some of the masculinity issues that come with sex education and some of the the problems that sex educators have around filling different types of classes. We talk all about toxic toys and safe toys. It’s a really rich conversation that’ll give you a lot of insight into what it’s like to work with a sex toy store.
Dawn Serra: Then we talked about a big scandal that happened at the University of New Mexico around sex week, which Self Serve helped to create and run a few years ago, and the big huge backlash that happened and the resulting air around teaching sex to consenting adults and how completely controversial that continues to be. So I hope you will enjoy this of course if you want to hear there is a wonderful section that I had to cut all about dressing up vulvas and penises. Yeah, it’s a really funny chunk, and I’m sad that I had to cut it. But, of course, Patreon folks, if you’re $3 or more, you’ll get to hear that part that I cut. Let’s jump into this week’s episode.
Welcome to the show Matie and Hunter. I am so excited to have you here.
Hunter Riley: Thank you.
Matie Fricker: Thanks. We’re so excited.
Dawn Serra: Yay! OK. I want to start off by just introducing everybody to Self Serve. I know that you call Self Serve a sexuality resource center. In addition to being a feminist-owned and run sex store, where you can buy toys and lubes and things like that, you also call it a Resource Center, which I think is so important. I’d love if you could just share with everybody a little bit about what it is that you do.
Matie Fricker: Hunter, you’re the Director of Outreach and Education. Do you want to chat about that?
Hunter Riley: Sure, sure. Beyond selling sex toys and condoms and lube and date night idea, games, stuff like that, we do a lot of education. We have sex educators on staff at all times. These are employees who’ve gone through extensive, two months plus of training on products, on relationship challenges. Basically, we just try and be a resource for people to get the sex education that they never got in school. We do classes and events, pretty much every week, We do medical outreach training with clinical offices – anything from physical therapists, occupational therapists to mental health care providers.
Basically, what we are trying to do is help train and educate our community, so that it’s not only us who’s providing this sex positive education. It’s also, when you go to your doctor, they don’t shame you for being kinky. It may be inadvertently. We do a lot of trainings with medical offices, with schools. We get hired pretty much every semester to go into UNM, the University of New Mexico, and do presentations on what is sex positivity, sex toys, things like that. So we really try to make sure that not only are we providing an incredible product, as in the products the retail business sells, but we also provide incredible customer service and education to our broader community to make sure that we are doing as much as we possibly can to help, like I said, get the sex education that most of us got or didn’t get in school.
Hunter Riley: Because most people you talk to, they really feel like it was lacking and didn’t actually meet their needs as far as how to have sex that feels good and that you enjoy. Also, how to figure out what kinds of sex you might want to have. Or, if you even want to have sex at all. And helping people figure out their identities and their behaviors because most of us didn’t get accurate information. We also didn’t get information that was LGBTQ inclusive. We didn’t get information that talks about kink or non-monogamy. So most of us are playing catch up.
Self Serve is just around to help shorten that learning curve, so that we can really provide impeccable customer service to customers in the store, but also through our education and outreach in the community.
Dawn Serra: That’s something that I think is so wonderful and needed, and also that’s really, really overlooked by so many people when they think about sex and education and relationships is the community aspect, of it’s one thing for each of us to realize, “Hey, maybe I don’t have the information that I need,” or “Maybe the stories I’ve been fed aren’t accurate. Maybe they aren’t for me, so maybe I can start telling myself a different story.” What a revolutionary thing it is, on a personal level, to start asking those questions.
But then the importance of also having safety in a community, of being able to see a doctor and have a conversation about your sexual pleasure, and having a therapist who understands what it means that you’re curious about kink, and having a place where you can go to take classes and have these conversations. I think that’s something that really gets overlooked a lot of. I think we get so hyperfocused on individualism because sometimes we forget about just the power of including all of the aspects of our community also in our sexual conversation.
Hunter Riley: Right. I think you’re absolutely correct, that it’s a multifaceted, complex issue of peeling back different layers of shame. For some people, for a lot of people, there’s just the shame around the idea that we are sexual beings, and that is OK. That’s one level of shame. There’s another level of shame of feeling like you have to ask questions. A lot of people are like, “Oh, well, it’s sex. We just know about it.” That always strikes me as funny. I’m like, “Oh, yeah. How? Movies?” Because most people don’t just softly and gently glide on to the pillow, and then 30 seconds later, they’re having an orgasm. But that’s what you see on movies. I’m like, “There’s no lube. Nobody used lube in that sex scene. What is wrong with this?” That’s the messages we’re getting. People are like, “Oh, well, we know it’s sex.” I’m like, “Do we? Are you sure?” There’s shame about feeling like you need information, like you need education. So that’s another level of shame.
Then there’s shame of “OK.” But then when something comes up, when there’s a challenge or a problem that we’re dealing with, how do we talk about that with the right person? Then what happens if that person you talk to, either inadvertently or knowingly shames your lifestyle choices and shames you because of your identities?
Hunter Riley: There’s so many complex levels of shame that go into sex and sexuality that it is, I think, really important to have a place like Self Serve that is a sex toy shop. We’re a retail center, and we are a sex shop. People are like, ”Oh, but you aren’t like the other sex shops.” I’m like, “True. We’re not, and we are.” We offer what some some sex shops offer and a lot more as well. It’s just meeting people where they’re at and trying to break down some of those layers of shame, so that we can actually really help people in meaningful ways. And that they can feel seen and heard and accepted just as they are.
Matie Fricker: I think one of the things, it’s taken us about ten years to really develop and understand, is the product of Self Serve is really the experience that people have when they walk in the door. We developed a training system called Seeps. Whenever anybody walks in the door, our very first job is to support them no matter where they’re at. We meet them where they are at, and we offer them support because almost everybody feels like they lack that. Then we educate them. It could be something as simple as somebody saying, “I’m interested in anal sex.” So say, “That’s great. That’s a really exciting thing to be interested in. It’s really popular. I didn’t know a lot about that before spending some time at a store like this. So how can I help?” Then we educate them about the anus and how to have anal sex safely, and that they need relaxation, communication, lubrication, and frontal stimulation. Then we empower them to make choices that they feel good about, whatever that looks like. If somebody’s interested in anal play, it might be empower them to take things slow, to get to know their body, to not be goal-oriented. Or to jump in, if that’s what they’re excited about. Or to check out a toy.
Then we plant seeds about things that they could be interested in in the future. It might be like further education or another class. And big picture. Whatever someone walks in the door with, that’s where we meet them, is we support, educate, empower, and plant seeds. So if it’s somebody who is transitioning and they’re looking for community, it’s connecting them to our local Transgender Resource Center, and empowering them to reach out for community and support and planting the seed that they’re not alone. In whatever ways people walk in the door, we hope to seep into them in a positive way, so that they are experienced, there is something that they feel supported in, and that they feel like they can find connections and support. That they’re not alone. So many folks feel so alone in that. So even if somebody is coming in for something very practical, like, “I need a lube,” we are constantly telling them, “This is very common. This is something many people experience and we’re here to help around that.” Even if somebody’s not coming in for a community resource, they then feel community in their desires.
Dawn Serra: I love that theme of “Not alone.” I think that’s so valuable and important. Even the most sex positive, sexually educated folks, I think we all reach places where we feel alone about certain things or we feel that imposter syndrome coming up or our body changes. So we start feeling different feelings about our body because something new has happened to it. The theme of “Not alone” feels really wonderful.
And it also feels rare. I don’t think that there’s very many places in the world other than feminist sex toy shops, where you can go in and actually be surrounded by people whose whole job and mission is, “I’m here with you, and how can I support you?” You can have these really wonderful, vulnerable conversations with someone who actually wants to be in that space with you.
Matie Fricker: I think that my slice of life in doing this work is so generous. Because I see people all day long, being so vulnerable and so brave and so open. It pushes me to try to be those things every day. It pushes me to try to lead with my vulnerability. And it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s a lot easier to tell somebody, “Oh, I can help you.” The big joke in the last couple of years at Self Serve has been, we named the store Self Serve and I’m just learning how to finally take care of myself. To me, really interesting that that is something that both as helpers and helpese, we actually have an interconnected circle of support. And Self Serve brings me that as much as we bring it to other people.
Dawn Serra: What are some of the common themes that you see from people who are coming in who… I’ve noticed that when I’m in sex toy shops, and I’m teaching classes or attending classes that there are the people who have clearly been in this space before and/or they’re clearly comfortable with the products that they want to buy or that they’re interested in. So they come into the shop just like, “I know this is what I’m shopping for. I know these products. I’ve had these conversations.”
Then I’ve also noticed that there’s a different kind of community or a type of individual who comes in, and there’s a timidness or a shyness or even some shame, maybe. To me, I’m always so drawn to those people because you can tell that they have so much curiosity, and they want to be able to ask the questions, but it’s never been safe for them to ask the questions before. So finding that voice can feel like you’re going over the edge of a cliff. I’d love to know, in the work that you two do, for people who are really coming in and confronting that space for the first time, what are some of the themes that you see that people are coming in for asking about?
Hunter Riley: I would say we get a ton of medical referrals. Oftentimes, I find that the folks who come in as being referred by a doctor, oftentimes to fit into that persona of somebody who’s maybe feeling a little bit of shame or maybe they’re just feeling shy or embarrassed. But oftentimes, I can almost spot them when they walk in just based on their body language. I mean, I think for a lot of people… We get a lot of people saying, or I get a lot of people saying, “I’m the Catholic in recovery,” sort of thing. For some people, just peeling back these messages that they’ve been told, whether it be through religion or just anything – it doesn’t have to be religion – just dealing with this idea that, “Oh, it’s OK to have sex. It’s OK to enjoy sex.”
One of the things that I try to say to everybody who walks in the door for the first time is that what we believe at Self Serve or one of our definitions of sex positivity is that as long as you’re being safe and consensual with yourself and with your partners, you can have as much or as little sex as you want. You can have different kinds of sex and not feel shame or fear or guilt. Just something like that, a little sentence or two can do a lot to just help people have an aha moment, that they don’t have to feel shame just because they’re in there. That they can feel really excited about sex, and that’s fine. They can feel shame about sex, and that’s fine too. They can feel like they don’t ever want to have sex, and that’s fine too. Just as long as you’re being safe and consensual, and as upfront and honest as you can be, that’s a really good place to start. Just really meeting people where they’re at, that I think helps a lot as far as helping those people feel comfortable.
Hunter Riley: Then when we get people, a lot of the referrals that we get are for things like dilation. A lot of folks are getting a referral from a doctor because they need to do vaginal dilation for myriad reasons. It could be they just haven’t received penetration in a long time. It could be they had chemotherapy treatments, pelvic floor challenges. There’s lots of reasons why people might need dilation. But honestly, a good lube and a dilator are a significant portion of the customers that I help who are coming in and like, “Oh, this is a new experience for me.” But oftentimes, I’m like, “If we can find a good lube for you, I feel good.” It’s a really good first step.
Matie Fricker: When somebody comes into Self Serve for the first time, we also “midwife” that process for them. We know when you first walk into a sex store, it’s nervous making. I can literally feel in my body what it felt like the very first time I walked into a sex store. And it wasn’t easy. Then even when I was going to sex stores all over the country and really excited to learn about the process of sex stores, I still was nervous walking into sex stores and felt like this weird thing that maybe staff was overly invested in what I was looking at or paying attention to or touching. Like if I looked at harnesses for too long, then they would think things about me or think I didn’t know about something.
That’s one thing I just would love to share with listeners is that is not the experience of working at a sex store every day. Our investment is in helping, but our judgment doesn’t exist around your choices while we’re there. We’re like, “Oh, have fun. We’re here all day. We’re here to help.” “Cool. Good for you.” We’ve even had customers who’d come in and they’re like, “I’m so embarrassed. I’m here all the time.” We’re like, “We’re jealous,” or “We’re experiencing compersion for you right now that you’re in here all the time. We wish we were having as much sex as you were having. Good job.”
Matie Fricker: The feeling that I always felt walking into a sex store and the feeling of working in a sex store is vastly, vastly different. I always try to remember that feeling, and remember that other people are probably having that when they walk in the door. So when you first walk in to Self Serve, we give you a minute, but then a staffer welcomes you and asks if you’ve been to our store before, asks if we can tell you a few quick things about us, gives you a little tour of the store and what to expect, and a little bit about our philosophy. Then asks if you’re on a mission or if you just want some time to look around. That, I think, gives people permission at every level to take a deep breath, understand that it’s OK to absorb what’s there. But also gives people a container to hold it in. I think the experience of walking into Self Serve and having that moment works really well for people.
Then when you come back and we say, “Oh, have you been here before?” they know what to expect. That tends to, in that first conversation with people, an educator has a minute to heck in with folks and figure out why they’re there and how we can help them. So there’s not that awkward moment where somebody is like, “I’m about to ask a question about something that’s super scary, that I don’t know if it’s OK for me to ask.” Because we’ve already said over and over, “We’re here to help. We’re here for you. Here are all the ways we can help.” So that by the time somebody says, “Well, OK, I need a dilator,” or “I’m interested in buying my first harness,” or “I’m getting a packer,” or, “I want to tie my partner up,” we’ve already negotiated with them that that’s what we’re there for. So there’s not that awkward feeling of, “Is this OK?”
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Well, speaking of your products, way back in the early 2000s, I was doing those in-home sex toy parties. It was back when all the toys were still jelly. My house smelled like a shower curtain because I had 5000 inventory. But I remember there was this excitement in me about trying certain toys, but then there was also other toys that I just was like, “Oh, fuck! I guess I have to try this thing and see what it’s like, so I could talk about it.” It’s like I think a lot of people are, “Oh, you could just try all these sex toys.” There’s a certain level of awesomeness about that. But there’s also a certain level of, “Oh, OK. I guess I’ll do this thing.” But I know that you have a really unique way of reviewing your toys and deciding what you’re going to carry in the shop. So I’d love to hear more about that.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. We joke – and that is our truth – that we have bad sex, so you don’t have to. And that is legit. That feeling, Dawn, that you’re talking about, we get reviewer fatigue, especially around the holidays or Valentine’s, we’ll do a big push for testing. Our partners are like, “Can we just fuck without testing something?” We’re like, “No, no! We have three more butt plugs before next week.” That doesn’t come from Self Serve. That comes from our co-workers going home. I’m never like, “You must review this butt plug.” But that’s something that we take on. We take one for the team.
Hunter Riley: Literally.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. We take a lot for the team. But basically, a lot of sex toy design is shit. Embarrassingly bad like, “What the fuck were they thinking?” bad. By the time you invest in something, and you bring it home and you’re excited about it, and you put it on or in your body, and then you go, “Oh, god! Oh, god! Oh, god! This is terrible.” That experience is so awful. We don’t want people to have that from our store. So what we do is every single product we carry has been tested or reviewed personally by somebody that we know. That usually is somebody who uses toys like that on the regular. Not only do we make sure that, “Oh, this vibrator’s unique,” or is good enough to put on the shelves, when we add something to the shelf it is because it is exceptional, and it has really rocked somebody’s world. If they’re like, “This is an inexpensive jelly rubber vibrator,” the person who tested it actually uses toys like that on the regular, and that’s their favorite thing to use. They compared it to the other ones on the market, decided it was a good value, decided they really liked it, used it three or four times at least, and kept going back to it. So that by the time something ends up on our shelf, we really feel like it’s a good value. But we can also share a lot of what we learned in that review process.
The process will be, we will try to find the very best of what’s available on the sex toy market. The cool thing is, compared to the days of the past, it’s gotten to be a lot easier. I really want to commend the folks at Smitten Kitten and a few other places like Early to Bed, Sugar, folks that decided a long time ago that they were going to go toxin free. That they were going to say, “We can sell sex toys in a way that isn’t going to harm people.”
Matie Fricker: The very first thing we do is we make sure toys are body safe. We make sure that toys are not full toxins that will cause people harm, and that jelly rubber smell, bad shower curtain smell that you smelled in your house, it’s actually the products outgassing. It’s the gas itself that is toxic, and it’s an endocrine disruptor. It’s not good for your body. It’s called phalates. The concentrations in sex toys are some of the highest concentrations of toxins in any product that exists in the human world.
Hunter Riley: They’re illegal to use in baby and dog toys. They’re outlawed in other industries, but the ones that you’re putting inside your body on your delicate mucous membranes, those aren’t regulated.
Matie Fricker: And it really got me… We were doing the research for the store. What really got me too was not only they are endocrine disruptors, they’re literally drawn to fats. They outgas more when they heat up. So if you put it in a human body, a 98.6 degree oven, they’re literally going to be drawn to the parts of our bodies that are most tender. They’re going to hang out in our bodies and not leave. We decided, initially, ten years ago, we were like, “Well, we’ll just let people know, and they can make their choice.” What was so cool is when we started to let people know, “This is really great design…” This was ten years ago, too. There were some designs that were not available toxin-free that were amazing. So we’re like, “OK. Well, we’ll carry this one, but we’ll recommend people put a condom on it, and let them know that this toy could possibly contain a toxin.”
Within six months, we pulled them all off the shelf because we learned that when people were actually given a choice, nobody wanted to fuck a toxic sex toy. Even though they were less expensive, even though you could maybe use a condom on them, even though they were unique designs and shapes, that people did not want to buy things that could cause them harm. And we didn’t want to sell things that could cause them harm. So within six months of opening, we pulled anything that could have phalates off the shelf, and we haven’t had them since.
Matie Fricker: So one, we make sure toys are body safe, and that they come from a good company, and we think they’re good design. Then we purchase or get demos of the product, and then it goes out for review to us or somebody in the community. Then they fill out an eight-page survey. In terms of review fatigue, that’s a whole other process of being like, “How many ways can I say this butt plug filled my ass in a delicious way?” But we ask questions like, “What did you wish you knew about this toy before you touched it? What is the price point that you think this toy should be? Was this way easy to operate? Did the directions make sense? Did this toy help give you orgasms, why or why not?”
We ended up with a really extensive review of every product we test. Then I sit down with our store manager about once a month, and we go through the reviews. And we decide what to carry. We really only carry the things that are exceptional, that are reasonable price point for the value that they’re giving people, and toys that are unique to what we’ve carried in the past. I think that there are a handful of stores that run on that ethic. But I think it’s really a handful. That it really helps us feel confident in our toys. We actually rename our toys. By the time something is a Self Serve toy, it generally has a name of our own too. Our names are charming and sweet, and they’re our own. So that when it’s ours, you know that it’s earned a Self Serve name.
Dawn Serra: That’s awesome.
Matie Fricker: Hunter, how about you? What do you think about the review process? Do you want to share the parts that are silly? Because there are many.
Hunter Riley: There are many. I believe this is Ducky Doolittle who said this a little while ago. It was so good that I lifted it and talked about it. But basically, our goal is to make it so that the box of shit you don’t fuck is very small. I think most people have had this experience where they go into a sex shop, they’re excited, they’re nervous, they’re scared, they’re embarrassed. So they just pick something, and they look at it. They’re like, “Maybe that works. I don’t know. It vibrates or maybe it doesn’t.” It’s kind of this frantic, dash to get something, go home and try it. Then oftentimes, what happens is people don’t get to take the time in the store to ask, “Is this a good toy for g-spot stimulation?” I’ve definitely had people come in and be like, “Oh, they told me down the road at Walmart or sex toys that this g-spot cream will make my girlfriend squirt.” I’m like, “Oh, no.”
See, here’s the thing. When you just take five minutes and grab something off the shelf, go home, and then you fuck it, and you’re like, “Huh? That didn’t work,” then there’s all the shame that starts to happen about, “Well, did it not work because of me? Am I the broken one? Is it my fault? Or shame of like, “I didn’t make a good purchase. My partner didn’t like it, so now everything’s ruined.”
Hunter Riley: If we can take time in the store and in the review process to make sure that, one, we know what products we’re carrying, and we know why people like them. Then, two, we create a space where people feel comfortable asking questions, and if they want to, telling us what they’re looking for, what kind of experience they want. Then it helps us have tools in our tool belt to apply or to supply them with the very best product. Like Ducky Dolittle says, we don’t want to have a big box of shit we don’t fuck. We want that to be a little box.
Just making sure that in the moment, we can give people the best possible customer service and information based on what they’re looking for, so that we can send them home with something that actually works for them. I’m not going to send somebody home, if they’re looking for a clit vibe, I’m not going to send them home with an Njoy Pure Wand, which is a stainless steel dildo. It’s just knowing our products well enough because they go through the review process, to know what to recommend when somebody has questions when they come in. That I think is is something that–
Hunter Riley: Of course, I would be very surprised if there was somebody who told me, “I’ve liked every single sex toy I’ve ever bought.” Sometimes your body is just like, “No, that’s not it.” Or sometimes it works for two years, and then you’re like, “Oh, I’m not into that anymore.” It’s not like every purchase is going to be perfect. It’s not like you’re never going to buy something that you don’t like very much. But the idea is to try and reduce the likelihood of that happening. And I think our review process allows us to do that in a very effective way.
Matie Fricker: Then the really terrible things that could happen, we take care of that for you. Reading the reviews of bad toys is just one of my favorite parts of my job because it’s like, “Oh, that ceramic dildo feels like fucking sandpaper. I tried it for one second and I want to throw it away and burn it in a fire, but it can’t because it’s ceramic. So can I break this?” Understanding our review process and supporting it, even the bad toys gives me better insight into what we should be looking for in good ones.
We’ve been looking for a body paint for ten years, and we have not found a single one we like – if somebody out there has found one they like, please send it our way – because they’re toxic. They stain your skin. They don’t actually use any color. They look or taste terrible. Body paint is like this place where you’re like, “Oh, do you have body paints?” I’m like, “I’ve literally tried every one that’s available and we just can’t find one.” If we can’t find one that is good enough for us, we’re just not going to put it on the shelf. It also shows us the areas where things are terrible in the industry, that we’re not willing to make money on selling bad shit. Like edible panties. Has anybody ever tried a pair of edible panties?
Dawn Serra: Yes. In fact, I sampled it on-air a couple of years ago, and we were scarred.
Matie Fricker: Then you’re supposed to put that against your genitals, and then lick them off, and be like, “This is a hot night.” Which makes no sense whatsoever. Sometimes when we don’t carry something, having a very clear reason why also helps people not make bad investments in their pleasure.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. When I had my sex toy little party business that I was doing, it was right when Sex and the City and Charlotte had her rabbit vibrator. So everyone who came to the parties wanted Charlotte’s rabbit vibrator. I had the pearl rabbit. It was one of the highest priced items that I sold. I mean, it was well over $100, and that was back in 2000. I just remember, it took me a while to start to figure out because I got no education through this franchise company. At first, I was just excited that all these vibrators were just like flying out the door as soon as I said, “This was the Charlotte vibrator from Sex and the City.” Everybody wanted one. People just assumed that because Charlotte, on a television show, had locked herself in her bedroom and didn’t want a boyfriend, that it would work for them.
I remember a couple of months in, I had started talking to people and hearing disappointment, and being ashamed of the disappointment. Like, “Well, I mean, it’s OK, but I don’t know if I’m going to use it all the time.” Or, “I guess it kind of works for me.” Just hearing this ambivalence when I revisited customers. And that’s when it really started occurring to me that we all have such different experiences of our bodies and the way we experience pleasure. A toy can’t be one size fits all.
Dawn Serra: That’s why I love that you have this super extensive review process with this eight-page questionnaire, so that you have all this information. Because I think it’s so easy to just assume that because this toy is popular and it works for my friends, that it’s going to work for me. That disappointment is just crushing.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. That’s one of the things that is challenging for me in the store is when a group of people comes in, and there’s a friend that is like, “This is what you need. I know what you need.” I’m like, “You don’t fuck the same people. You don’t wear the same shoes. You don’t order the same thing for dinner. And that just goes in your mouth.” There’s literally no way that you know what your friend wants on their clitoris. Yet, we feel so qualified and in a healthy way to tell people that.
That’s one of the things that we really, really try to do is just let everybody know there’s no such thing as a one size fits all approach to your sexuality. You don’t have to fuck one sex toy forever. You don’t have to be monogamous with your sex toys. They’re not going to be mad, They’re not going to go to bed angry, and that you can have as much pleasure as you can possibly delight in. I think that’s what also happens is people, they get very emotionally attached to one sex toy. Sometimes it’s hard because that sex toy, they’ll stop being in production. We have to break people’s hearts and be like, “Yes, that vibrator was popular nine years ago. We don’t carry it anymore.” They’re just crushed because they’re emotionally attached to the things that gave us orgasms.
Matie Fricker: I really like that Annie Sprinkle talks about that there are thousands of different kinds of orgasms. We can have as many different kinds of orgasms as we can have sensations in our body or snowflakes in the sky. That orgasms can be abundant and that we don’t have to get stuck in one way. Sex toys can be a really positive way for people to channel that. But that can also be a place where people get stuck, like, “This is the way I come.”
And that’s pretty common too in the store. That’s a very, very common theme that people have is, “If I use this will I not be able to come any other way?” That’s a really, really common question. I probably deal with that question at least once a day if I’m there for an eight-hour shift. What we tell people is that muscle memory is legit. If I trained to become a sprinter and I show up to race and somebody shoots the gun, I’m going to run. Instead of using a sex toy to have an orgasm in the exact same way every single time, if I’m tired at the end of the day and I use the original magic wand to come in two minutes and then fall asleep, I might want to do that with a partner. Or I might do that with a partner, and then fall asleep and be like, “Oh, this has never happened before. I’m just so excited to be there.” But my body has developed muscle memory through practice. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.
Matie Fricker: So it’s pretty common for people to be like, “Oh, this vibrator did this to me,” when really, it’s like, “No, dude, you got lazy.” I got lazy, too. I’m not throwing rocks. We get into ruts in our behaviors. It’s healthy and good to look at that and decide to get out of them. But I think the best answer for that is having an abundance of sex toys, an abundance of options, an abundance of ways to touch my body. Instead of being like, “Well, this vibrator broke me.” I’m like, “No, dude. Just use it in a different way.” Blindfold yourself. Romance yourself. Get off standing up.
Dawn Serra: Yup. Yeah, I love that. I want to talk a little bit about… We were geeking out a little bit before we went on air about classes and teaching. I know that a lot of what you do at Self Serve includes offering education out to the community, including sex classes. Matie, you posted something really wonderful and interesting to me that I would love for us to dig into, where you were talking about how your blowjob workshops, they regularly fill up and they get filled. That’s an easy class for the most part to fill, which was also true of the sex shop that I was teaching at in DC. The blowjob classes, just for some reason, always sold out. But you’ve been struggling to get attendance into vulva classes, classes around vulvas.
Last night, you did a g-spot and a squirting class that was actually filled. You were so delighted and excited by that. One, I just want to congratulate you and celebrate that because yay for vulva classes and vulva knowledge. But I’m also just really curious, from a sociological perspective and the ways that we, in our different genders, move through the world, what has been your observation around the types of classes that you find are easier to fill and who attends those, and the types of classes that you still want to teach But it’s harder to get people into? What have been some of your experiences and observations around that as educators?
Hunter Riley: Well, since I do most of the class planning and the promotion… OK. A couple years ago, we figured out that we had to figure something else out because our classes weren’t doing as well as we wanted them to. We also knew, people had told us several times, again and again, that they loved the classes and it was one of the favorite things that we did. So I took on the class process of how do we schedule classes, what classes work well. And there’s a few things that we have learned that are very interesting and valuable.
Basically, people want skills. They want to feel like they have a skill that they can learn in the class and go home that night and feel like they are a different person than they were when they walked in the shop. Unfortunately, that means oftentimes that the theory-based classes don’t go as well. The theoretical, discussion-focused classes don’t go as well as the, “I’m getting a practical skill here that I can use in the bedroom when I go home.”
Hunter Riley: One thing that we’ve found very, very strongly was that people aren’t showing up as much to the more theoretical classes, which was hard for us to– That was a hard pill to swallow, but also probably a good one to swallow in the end because it turned out that people really like to feel they can practice something. Our bondage class, for example, that class goes over really, really well because people actually get to come in with a partner and some rope, and they tie a couple of knots. The instructor will walk around and help them, troubleshoot anything that’s going on. But they actually get to try out what it’s like. In the blowjob class, we let people practice on dildos. In the lap dance class, people actually get to practice lap dances.
It’s basically just trying to find a way that people feel comfortable even walking in in the first place. Because that’s another big thing is that a lot of people, they don’t want to go to a sex shop to learn about oral sex with a roomful of strangers. So we try really hard to just acknowledge that and congratulate people for being brave because it is a brave thing to do. What we found is that people, they’re feeling uncomfortable when they come in, so we have to make a very concerted effort to make them feel comfortable as soon as we can. So that can be just acknowledging that it’s OK to feel awkward, and it’s OK to feel shame. It can be acknowledging that you can participate at whatever level feels right for you. You’re never going to be forced to do anything. I oftentimes get cis men who come to my blowjob class may be with their cis female partner, and they’re like, “I don’t want to practice on a dildo.” I’m like, “That’s OK. No one’s going to be here forcing you to put a dildo in your mouth.”
Hunter Riley: The funny thing is that oftentimes, they might end up practicing in the end because the way we present the information, they’re like, “Oh, this actually is interesting.” I’ve had feedback from cis guys who take the class who were like, “I didn’t know deepthroating was so hard.” It is hard. It’s hard work. It really is nice when your partner understands some of the challenges that you take on and some of the feats that you accept to do sex with a fun friend. So letting people be wherever they’re at. If they don’t want to practice on the dildo, if they don’t want to get tied up, that’s fine. They don’t have to do anything they don’t want to.
Another thing that we’ve taken on is doing classes online. We offer the blowjob class. You can either rent or buy individual segments or the entire class on Vimeo. It’s really cool where you can just go to Vimeo. It’s an on-demand page. You can search for Self Serve or you can search through the on-demand videos and find us. You can actually access the class online. So that’s really cool. You can have it for rent or for buy. That also allows people who are like, “I don’t care what any of my friends say. I’m not going to the sex shop to go to the class.” They’re like, “I’m not going to go do it in person.” Also, it makes the information more accessible to lots of different people – people who aren’t in the state. Whatever the reason might be that you’re not coming into the store to take the class, we want to recognize that there’s tons of people out there who still want this information, so how can we do our best to make it as accessible as possible.
Hunter Riley: But it is an interesting look to see what it is that people want to learn about. Since I do teach the blowjob class, what I found is a lot of my blowjob class is not as much about blowjobs as you might think it would be. A lot of it is about talking about how to advocate for yourself and how to communicate with a partner. So a big thing that I talk about in my class is, one of the reasons that people don’t feel comfortable giving blowjobs is because they don’t feel confident. They feel like they aren’t good at it. So then it’s not fun for them. If you can get to a place where you know what your partner likes and what feels good for them, then you will start to feel more confident, and blowjobs will become more fun for you. If you feel like what you’re doing is good and you’re good at it, it’s going to be more fun. How do we get past this idea of–
We have this loop of non-communication and sex, where your partner might be doing something to you and it feels OK, but maybe it’s a little bit uncomfortable or maybe they need to move a little to the left. Or, maybe they need to grip harder or maybe they need to grip softer. But we don’t want to hurt our partner’s feelings, so we don’t say anything. Then you’re like, “OK. Well, I guess I’ll keep doing this thing that I’m doing.” But it doesn’t feel good for them. Then it’s this loop of non-communication.
Hunter Riley: A huge component of what I teach in my blowjob class is how to open that loop of communication, so that your partner feels comfortable giving you feedback. They know that you are excited to receive the feedback so that you can be better. You can feel more confident in what you’re doing. So a lot of the blowjob class honestly, is like a communication class. But we also get to suck on dildos too, so that’s fun.
Matie Fricker: I definitely have nerded out over the years on how challenging it is to commodify, to sell sexuality. How do we sell it or sell education about sexuality? But really, if we were like, “Communication for lovers,” – that happens to be a blowjob component – that class would not sell out.
It was really hard in the first few years of the store to feel like we were creating classes, that we’re meeting people where they were at and helping them with what they needed. What we actually had eventually got to was a model of sneaky feminism, which is challenging. Sneakiness around sexuality? Yeah. Is that problematic? But what we realized was, they’re not going to come. They’re not going to come and pay $20 and come sit down and listen to a class about communication. But everybody needs a class about communication.
Matie Fricker: So if we package it in a way that is a skills-based class, that we know people are looking for, that they need help in, that they actively are saying, “This is what I want to learn,” then it’s not bait and switch because we are meeting that need. But we’re also giving them a little bit, a fiber with the frosting.
One of the things that Hunter really teaches people is, if you’re not enjoying yourself, other people are not going to enjoy their time with you. So you have to figure out how to have an authentic experience around your embodiment. That’s a way to take the model of sexuality that’s performative, “I want to give a good blow job. I’m here for you. I’m here to be the best cocksucker you’ve ever had,” and says the way that you do that is through embodiment of your own pleasure and owning that in a way. We sneak that in.
Matie Fricker: Along the way, what we figured out is we have to Cosmo-fy the titles of our classes. That if I was like, “Oh. We need to do a class of releasing pain through massage,” I’m like, “I want to take that class. I have chronic pain, I want to release pain in my body through massage, and that’ll be great. I talked to our smarty pants Hunter lady who was like, “Yes, and I think we could sell that–” What is the class title we ended up with, Hunter, on that one?
Hunter Riley: Yeah, it was “How to Use Massage for Better Sex.” Something like that.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. It incorporates better sex and massage, but in that class, you will also learn about releasing pain and connecting through touch in a way that’s really powerful. But we had to put it… We say Cosmo-fy. Like something that would be on the cover of Cosmo that would make you buy the magazine. Something that you will see as a class title that will make you sign up for class. We also realized, and we do– I think this is very fascinating, that across the board, at every sex shop that is like us, almost all of them have sold out blowjob classes. What does that say? Let’s just name it like. Why does that exist?
A big part of it, I think, is because maybe a lot of cis females who are giving blowjobs feel OK asking for directions. If we learn about the way to do something, we feel successful. Whereas the cunnilingus class, one of the things that happens is when people are at the front counter, and they’re looking at the class titles, there’s a cunnilingus class, there’s going down on somebody with a V class, the response for a lot of partners who are interested in taking the blowjob class, they are like “Oh, look. There’s this other class you could go to.” The response is frequently, “Do you think I need that?”
Dawn Serra: Yes, yes.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. “Do you think I need that?” Then who wants to say that to their partner? “Yes. You clearly need a class on going down on me because you’re so terrible at it.” No, that’s not the response. Maybe there are some people in this world who feel like failures when they have to ask for directions. Maybe there’s some people in this world around masculinity that feel like their job is to be the provider of everything, including pleasure and be assertive, but not too assertive, and know how to do everything without asking for any help. In the “How to act like a man box,” that’s what you’re supposed to do.
So we figured out a sneaky way to get them to sign up for the class, which is, what we’ll do is we have the blowjob class. We actually have two penis classes right now that are skills-based. We will put the cunnlingus class in the middle. The reason for that is partners won’t sign up… “Oh. Do you think I need that?” and people are like, “Yes, I think you need it.” That’s not a fun conversation. But if a partner is already signed up for the blowjob class, it’s only fair if you sign up for the cunillingus class. People who maybe wouldn’t sign up because they think they need it or if signing up for class feels like an admission of failure, that they will show up to a class for an ethic of fairness – “It’s only fair. My partner went to this class, I’m showing up for my partner.” That was something that we realized will help with attendance.
Matie Fricker: But I mean, it also makes sense. There’s not a lot of focus on pleasure for people with vulvas. Even the g-spot class selling out is fascinating because it’s a focus on internal orgasm. And that’s not the way I teach it. Like, “Haha. We don’t have to chop up our bodies and they’re all connected and every orgasm is clitoral. If it is genital-focused, then they’re all connected. Hahaha. Sneaky, sneaky.” But even that class being the one that sold out versus the cunnilingus class is fascinating because it’s, “Can we teach people how to have orgasms the right way?” The way that I teach that class really focuses on all the different kinds of orgasms, and that’s just one of them. And it can be delightful. Here’s some tools and techniques that could help.
But really, big picture, I think some of the people who were there last night were trying to fix their bodies because they weren’t having internal orgasms. I hope they left with the belief that their bodies are perfect just the way they are. All bodies are good bodies deserving of love exactly as they are is one of my strong themes. I hope it helped. But it is fascinating, and I think it is of note. That it says a lot about gender and sexuality, and what we’re allowed to ask for and where we’re supposed to be. The numbers don’t lie. We’ve just figured out some sneaky ways to connect with people where they’re at, instead of saying, “You should feel like this.” Because none of us are in a vacuum. We all live in this world. We’re all survivors of this culture.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I could just geek out about all of this forever. I have all these thoughts about socialization and hypermasculinity and just like, “OK.” But I think we only have time for one more chat. One of the things that I really want to roll around in with you is, Hunter, at the beginning, you mentioned that in addition to the medical outreach you do and the classes and events at Self Serve, you also speak at schools. I know that one of the things you’ve done is Self Serve has gone to UNM and participated in Sex Week in the past. And that there’s also been some backlash to that from abstinence groups and anti-choice groups. So I would love to hear a little bit more about your experience of being really sex positive and open on a college campus, and then what it’s like when people push back against that and offer some pretty dangerous information.
Hunter Riley: Oh, yeah. Gosh. Back in 2013-2014 – I think this is the third year we’ve done Sex Week – I approached the Women’s Resource Center at UNM and asked if they wanted to do Sex Week. I wanted to co-create this event because Sex Week is becoming more and more popular around college campuses. They were really excited. We were all super excited for this. We’re onboard. We specifically wanted to reach out to Greek Life and fraternities, and specifically also wanted to have conversations with men. Knowing this, I was like, “OK. Well, I think that Reid Mihalko might be a good person because he does a great presentation called ‘How to be a Gentleman and Still Get Laid.’” So we were very specific about what we wanted to do and who we wanted to talk to and what message we wanted to give.
A couple of days before the event, we did some media interviews. I think it was an interview with one of the local radio stations here. Basically, the day before it started, there’s a student group on campus called Students for Life, and they’re an anti-choice, anti-abortion student group. They, basically, got wind of it and reacted pretty strongly. There was almost immediately some backlash media coverage. They spoke out very publicly about how these titles were so offensive, and we’re further objectifying women. We’re further promoting sexism by offering workshops that talk about how to have pleasurable sex. Someone, at some point, vandalized the Women’s Resource Center and spray painted “Baby Killers,” I think on one of their parking signs. Students for Life also, I think, organized, to get a handful of parents or people to call the university saying that they are parents to complain.
Hunter Riley: Basically, what happened was the university got some complaints from parents, and then we also got a lot of media coverage – national media coverage, local media coverage. Then the university issued an apology. That’s really what I think when it got dirty. The university felt the need to apologize for offering adults, people over the age of 18, comprehensive, medically accurate, pleasure-focused sex education. The whole goal of all of this being to combat sexual assault and sexual violence on campus. Because guess what, UNM? UNM just finished an investigation by the Department of Justice into the way that we handle sexual assaults on UNM campus.
It’s not like this is just out of nowhere. We specifically asked for this issue to be addressed because we know that UNM students don’t feel safe coming forward. Because of the way UNM has handled very, high profile sexual assault cases, students don’t feel supported. Students don’t feel like they can come forward and talk about the sexual assault they are experiencing. So we said, “OK. Let’s try and do some prevention and talk about how to avoid situations where you might sexually assault somebody and not know it.”
Hunter Riley: We took a very multifaceted approach, and the university was not having any of it. They issued a public apology. Then it got very unfortunate for the Women’s Resource Center. A lot of pressure was put on them. It was really incredibly unfair the way that they were treated in this. It was just really hard because Self Serve was very strong in all of this. We’re lucky that we don’t rely on the university for any sort of funding or anything like that. So we were able to speak out against it and really talk about how it’s so messed up that a university that is being investigated for mishandling allegations of sexual assault is apologizing for an event that offers information about how not to rape people, basically.
We offered a lot of other events as well. But it was specifically focused around preventing sexual assault. So to have the university come back and apologize for our efforts was embarrassing. It also was like, “Oh, there’s the problem.” For me, it was a very obvious moment of, “What’s the problem here? Oh, right.” The university administration isn’t even willing to do something courageous and say, “You know what? Maybe the content–” They didn’t even come to any of the presentations, yet we’re making apologies for them. It was totally bonkers.
Matie Fricker: I think one thing that really struck a chord for me was the amount of complaints that happened towards the administration. I think we heard there were 16 parents, potentially. I’m like, “Who called and said they were parents. But 16 parents complained about this, and they felt the need to publicly apologize. Self Serve, because we weren’t connected with the university, we were able to create a petition called “In Defense of Sex Week.” We had over 1,500 people sign it within 24 hours. So there was this huge amount of public support for the work that Sex Week was doing, and no response at all from the administration except for that apology. I think that that says a lot about the university being in discord with the community.
I’m so excited that Self Serve exists because a lot of people had a lot on the line in terms of funding and their jobs, and what they could and couldn’t say. So we were able to be the voice in the community that said, “Hey, this is actually a problem.” We were able to let that community of people who were really… They were putting their jobs on the line. To bring this information to students, and we were able to offer them support at a time when they were really, across the board, feeling like they couldn’t get it right.
Matie Fricker: This challenge that UNM had with Sex Week is not an independent incident. It’s not an isolated incident. There’s this thing that is happening across the nation. I’m very interested to see how it shapes up in the next four years. But there’s this move to create adult-olescence to say that people who are 18 plus years old in an academic institution of learning should not have access to information about sexuality.
This has happened at, I think, almost every school that’s done a Sex Week. There’s been a major problem with that. There was just some major center of a woman in Southern California named Olga Cox, who is a human sexuality teacher. She’d be fascinated to have on your show. But she, right after the election, said some things in support of her students who were queer in a very conservative part of the country. She’s literally had death threats as a result of her trying to stand up for the safety and security of her students’ sexuality.
Matie Fricker: There’s this move that is happening around sexuality that, not only are we not giving pleasure-based, medically accurate education to teenagers, we’re now not even allowed to give it to adults. What’s happening that’s really concerning to me is, if they are allowed to do it, it’s almost certainly not funded. So what’s happening, Hunter and I teach for free all the time. And that’s OK. There are people who are like, “Don’t teach for free,” and we’re like, “Well, it’s complicated.”
We have a business model that community engagement is a powerful way to bring people into our store. In some ways, we can monetize that on a long term level. But over and over again, within the university systems, the work that used to be paid for is no longer being paid for. That, for a lot of sex educators, it’s harder and harder to get a paid gig. And I think that’s a merit. I think that’s relevant. That if they cut off our funding sources, how can any of us afford to do what we’re doing?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, it’s really sad. I was brought on to the George Mason University campus last year. I was invited to speak on a radio program that two female students ran called Dictation. We had a very frank, hour-long conversation about sex. We talked about why people are into anal sex. We talked about those weird feelings you get after you go to a party, and you drink a lot and you have sex with someone. You’re not quite sure if you were OK with it. So we got into this nuanced conversations about consent and about safer sex and STIs and making good choices for yourself. So it’s three of us women on the air.
Afterwards, the station manager, who of course is a cis male, freaked out that we had had these conversations about consent and pleasure and sex, and wanted to force them to do an apology and was bullying them out of the radio station. The student paper picked it up, and the student paper was actually forced to rescind the article. The two women ended up having to leave the radio station because of the bullying. It just really frustrated me that even in a pretty–
Dawn Serra: I mean, George Mason is in Northern Virginia, but it’s also just outside Washington, DC. So to me, when you think of the landscape of the United States of America and where universities are, that’s a pretty liberal place to go to school. For even on a campus like that, for an open sexual dialogue to be so vilified and to lead to this kind of action, it’s just really disappointing as a sex educator to run into that over and over and over again.
Matie Fricker: Yeah. I mean, this moment that we’re in, where literally these conversations about consent and pleasure and finding your yes and finding your no are are finally starting to be interconnected. Where it’s not the message of, “Don’t get raped,” but it’s but it’s a message of, “This is actually a really big deal. And it’s very nuanced. We should all figure out what we want and what we don’t want, and how to communicate about it and how to get there.” That concept is one that literally, we’re being censored and people are being threatened around. And that’s rape culture.
I mean, there’s no problem with… Let’s see. How do I put this? There’s an awareness that people in college have sex. But try to actually talk about it in a way that holds compassion and concern for people’s experiences, and we’re vilified. I just think that that just reinforces rape culture over and over again. It just would be so nice if administrators would actually stand up for students in this moment, as opposed to fighting back.
Matie Fricker: I think you know Hunter has been working on Sex Week for the last several years. Overwhelmingly, the response is positive and yet every year, it’s steeped in controversy as though a handful of people saying people shouldn’t have access to this information should be the lead on the story.
Dawn Serra: Right. Matie and Hunter, I would love it if you could share with our listeners how they can stay in touch with you and learn more about Self Serve.
Hunter Riley: Go for it, Matie.
Matie Fricker: OK. For me, I’m pretty active on Self Serve social media. I’m matie@selfservetoys.com, if you want to shoot me an email. I don’t really do a whole lot of Twitter. But I have been doing some Facebook live videos that are public, and they’re really about the challenges of running a sex store right now in this unique time. So if you’re interested in that, check out my Facebook live videos. They’re also deeply vulnerable, and I talk about my feelings. Maybe cry in the bathtub sometimes. They are a good time. They’re really good times.
Hunter Riley: Yes. You can follow me on Twitter. It’s @HunterORiley. That’s HUNTER O RILEY. My Facebook page is very public and you can find me and send me a friend request. I accept most sent friend requests. But if you’re mean and shitty, I’ll block you. But most people aren’t. But I do have to say that because occasionally, I’m like, “What are you doing on here? Why are you like this?” But, yeah. It’s just Hunter Riley on Facebook. Then I also do have a website. It’s hunterrileysexeducation.com. So you can find me there.
Dawn Serra: Awesome.
Matie Fricker: Can I do a shameless plug?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah.
Matie Fricker: Our website, at shameless very large butt plug. It’s beautiful, and I’m wearing it right now. But selfservetoys.com is our website. We’ve just recently completely redone our website. We’re very proud of it. You can shop on your phone. We will maybe create a coupon code for folks to shop with us. But we’re real people. You can call us. We’re there seven days a week. We’re happy to help. We’d love to start a relationship with y’all.
Dawn Serra: Yay! Well, I will have links to Self Serve and to your classes and to the blog posts that you mentioned, Hunter, and to all of your social media so people can find you nice and easy.
Hunter Riley: All right, thank you so much.
Matie Fricker: Thank you.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. You’re welcome. Thanks for being on the show. To everyone who listened this week, thank you so much for tuning in. If you have any questions about anything that you heard today or if you have questions for a future show, just go to dawnserra.com. There’s a contact form there. Also, don’t forget listener confessions, you can go to dawnserra.com and get the guidelines for how to submit your own confession. Until next week. This is Dawn Serra. Bye!