CES will allow sex toys at next year’s show

The Consumer Electronics Show will allow sex toys to win awards and be presented on the show floor next year, a year after the convention was mired in controversy when an award was revoked from a largely woman-run and woman-focused sex toy company.

Sex toys will be eligible for inclusion under the show’s health and wellness section. The Consumer Technology Association, which runs the show, says they’re being included on a “one-year trial basis,” meant to assess how they fit into the category.

In order to be included, sex toys will have to be “innovative and include new or emerging tech.” “We don’t want to see rows and rows of just standard vibrators,” said Karen Chupka, who oversees CES.

Lora DiCarlo, the sex toy company that had its award revoked last year, said in a statement that it was “pleased to hear ... that the CTA took our recommendations for inclusion and language updates that we drafted.” The company will be on the show floor in 2020 and says it’s “optimistic that this is a step in the right direction.”

The CTA is also updating the dress code policy for CES in an attempt to further crack down on companies hiring models to wear revealing clothing as a way to bring visitors to their booths. This kind of behavior has generally been banned already, but the CTA is now adding a punishment for violators: they risk losing rank in a tenure system that helps them attain a good position on the show floor. The new rules say that companies can get in trouble for outfits that are “sexually revealing or that could be interpreted as undergarments.” If clothing reveals “an excess of bare skin” or “hugs genitalia,” it will be banned as well. The guidelines apply to all staff.

Pornography will remain banned on the show floor. The CTA says the ban will now be “strictly enforced with no exceptions,” whereas some has slipped through in previous years.

CES has maintained confusing policies around sex tech for years, and those rules have never seemed to be evenly enforced. Some companies, like the sex toy company OhMiBod, have been able to find a place on the show floor for years; others, like the porn studio Naughty America, have been able to show VR demoes in private booths. But the show’s policies have seemingly prohibited all of this, and it’s meant that other companies interested in showing their sex-related products have been unable to present at the enormous annual convention.

This led to the bizarre situation earlier this year, in which the CTA initially awarded Lora DiCarlo with a CES Innovation Award in robotics for its debut sex toy, the Osé Robotic Massager, only to later revoke the award because the convention’s rules prohibited sex toys from being considered in the first place. There was widespread backlash against the CTA for its decision to ban the company, particularly at a time when it’s trying to increase representation of women at the show.

Months later, in May, the CTA backtracked and announced that it was reinstating the award for Lora DiCarlo. At the time, it declined to announce new policies around sex toys at CES, but said that upcoming rule changes would address “some inconsistency ... in our handling and our policies” around sex tech. The new rules mean that Lora DiCarlo will be able to present at the show, the CTA said.

CES has had a long history of being unwelcoming to women. The show took decades to limit the hiring of “booth babes,” and in recent years it’s failed to highlight women in the industry as featured speakers. Men remain the predominant attendees of the show, too. Chupka says CES is “a reflection of the industry” at large, and that the CTA’s job is to use its position as a representative for tech companies to help reshape the industry.

Updating its sex toy policies only does so much to fix all of that, but it does start to address at least one of the practices that has — as recently as this year — kept women and products designed for women out of the show.

The CTA previously announced that it would spend $10 million on venture capital funds focused on supporting businesses from women and people of color. Its first two partners are being announced today: SoGal Ventures and Harlem Capital Partners.