Women's Sexuality Is Still Taboo for Tech--at Least at CES

At the tech world's glitziest gala, the massive Consumer Electronics Showcase held in Las Vegas this week, you could find rows of devices only for women: breast pumps, fertility trackers, breast massagers, skin care gizmos. This embrace of women's health as a category for tech innovation is a huge shift from just a few years ago, when it was much easier to find a scantily clad "booth babe" hired to hawk some random fitness tracker than it was to find anything geared toward women as consumers--unless it was a pink version of a mainstream gadget. But while women's skin care, fertility, and general health have come to represent entire categories for gadget makers, women's pleasure is apparently still too taboo. A robotic vibrator, developed in consultation with Oregon State University's robotics department, was initially accepted into the show and given an innovation award, only to later be excluded because it didn't fit into an existing product category, according the Consumer Technology Association, which runs CES. The device was also called "immoral" and "profane," according to statements CTA made to the press.