Oh Joy, Sex Toy creator Erika Moen. Leah Nash
In the vast, digital sea of gadget review blogs, Erika Moen’s website has two things that set it apart. First, since she’s an artist and cartoonist, her reviews aren’t just text—they’re comics. Second, she reviews sex toys.
When Moen launched Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW] in April, 2013, she wanted to do something creative on the subject of sex, with a little help from her personal gadget stockpile. The site has since developed a dedicated readership that visits more than a million times a month, and Moen’s new book of Oh Joy, Sex Toy comics is getting more orders than she can keep up with.
Moen co-writes the comics with her husband, Matt Nolan, with each reviewing toys for the relevant genitals. And since there is, in theory, anyway, a limit to how many sex toys anyone needs, her weekly updates alternate between reviews, how-tos, sex education, and even illustrated interviews with sex workers.
“There’s a lot more to it than just looking for a sex toy. We try to create stories with the comics, to make them self-contained nuggets of entertainment,” Moen says when I visit her Periscope Studio in Portland, Oregon. “I hear from asexuals who say, ‘I have no interest in [sex] personally, but I enjoy the comics so I’m reading it anyway.'”
But what really makes Oh Joy, Sex Toy special—not just in the world of gadgets but the world of sex—is how, well, joyful it is. Rather than the mechanical monotony of most pornography or the clinical detachment of so much sex education, Moen’s comics are funny, charming, even sweet. Everyone she depicts in sexual situations seem to be having a fantastic time—smiling, joking, and sometimes literally high-fiving.
“When I made a comic about butt sex, I put in so many amazing, quality butt puns—as many I could possibly think of,” says Moen. “I think people should laugh about sex. When you make people laugh, you make them feel included and their guard goes down. You can make it friendly and approachable. I want people to feel like they’re part of the conversation.”
Erika Moen
At first, Moen says she was thinking small: She simply wanted to to review her own stockpile of toys. But soon, review models started arriving from sex toy manufacturers, including the expensive erotic gadgets she’d always coveted but never been able to afford.
“When we started getting free ones, I was like, ‘This is going to be the best!’ I thought it would be like Christmas every day,” says Moen. “But really, the toys that worked best for me were the ones I already had.” The key to finding a good sex toy is less about shelling out hundreds for every shiny new gadget, and more about figuring out what you like, says Moen. “You don’t need every brand-new vibrating, gyrating dohickey that syncs up with your iPod.”
Like many people who do what they love for a living, however, she’s discovered the downside to turning your passion into your profession. “It’s gotten to a point where it feels like work when I have to try out a new toy,” says Moen. “[My husband] and I will be in bed and he’ll say, ‘Should I go get the thing?’ And I’ll be like, ‘No, I just want to have sex, I don’t want to review a toy!'”
Although Moen had shared details about her sex life through her autobiographical comic DAR , she says running a sex toy review blog feels far less personal since she’s just the narrator, not the star, of Oh Joy, Sex Toy. Rather than using cartoon images of herself, she draws “masturbateers” to demonstrate the toys. “It creates a bit of distance,” says Moen.
Every comic has new masturbateers, and Moen takes great pains to make sure they’re diverse, representing a wide array of races, shapes, sizes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. In Oh Joy, Sex Toy, much as in real life, all different kinds of people are having sex—not merely those who fit a very specific and conventional idea of beauty.
Erika Moen
“It’s super important to see yourself in the media you consume, especially in the sex world,” says Moen. “I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who saw a figure similar to them in the comic being sexual, and it meant a lot for them to see their body being sexual and it being positive.”
One reader wrote to Moen after Oh Joy, Sex Toy featured a female character who’d had a mastectomy. “The masturbateer had scarring around the chest and no boobs, but it was no big deal. She was just having sex and having a great time,” says Moen. “His wife had just had a mastectomy, and he said that she cried, because she had literally never seen another female figure with a mastectomy enjoying sex.”
Unsurprisingly, she’s gotten her share of negative of feedback, particularly about her sex education comics—and not just from cultural conservatives, but liberals as well. One comic about emergency contraception features a masturbateer who doesn’t think she can take the morning-after pill because she’s pro-life. Moen’s narrator jumps in to explain exactly how emergency contraception works and why it’s fundamentally different from abortion.
“I got pushback that the comic was too pro-life, that it had given a voice to pro-lifers,” says Moen. “I was very surprised by that. To me, the people who most need to know that they can take this are pro-lifers. If they find themselves in a position where they might have an unplanned pregnancy, they should know this is an option for them. It was almost like I humanized them too much. But they’re human too. They deserve to know what their reproductive options are.”
Erika Moen
Moen is particularly concerned with debunking misinformation and dispelling shame around sex, largely because of the terrible sex education she received growing up. Sex was described to her as either rape, or a pleasureless activity women must endure to keep their husbands from leaving. Only later did she discover that sex could—and should—be enjoyable for everyone involved.
That ecstatic relief shines through in every Oh Joy, Sex Toy comic, as though Moen can’t quite hold back her excitement over the revelation that sex can be really, really fun. It’s a comic that feels like it wants to run down the street, tapping everyone on the shoulder and asking if they’ve heard the good news about sex. And in a way, that’s exactly what it does.
“I’m trying to make the comics that I needed when I was learning about sex,” says Moen. “If I can help people think about sex in a healthy, helpful, educational way, that’s awesome. People need to know how their bodies work, that sex should not be painful, and especially if they are women, that they are entitled to pleasure. No one should grow up thinking sex is what I thought it was while I was growing up.”
Although she has a special place in her heart for teen sex education—noting carefully that her comic is for readers 18 and over—she hopes that Oh Joy, Sex Toy’s approachable tone can help dispel some of the guilt, shame, and misinformation that clouds the subject for people young and old. Too often, she notes, even sexually active adults don’t feel comfortable talking about sex, figuring out what they enjoy, or fully understanding how their own bodies work.
Moen admits she didn’t totally grasp the more intricate details of reproduction until she researched it for the comic. “I thought that you ovulated and your egg went through the fallopian tube and met with the sperm in the uterus,” she says. Wait, I interrupt her, it doesn’t? She opens up her copy of Oh Joy, Sex Toy to her comic on pregnancy, and gives me an impromptu sex ed lesson—complete with sound effects—about how conception occurs inside the fallopian tube, not the uterus.
“How did I not know how babies were made?” I muttered when she was done.
“I know,” says Moen, her eyes widening. “Right?”
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