‘Synced as a couple’: Responsibility, control and connection in accounts of using wireless sex devices during heterosex

Abstract

While most research on digital sex toys to date has focussed on their affordances and marketing, or issues of data governance and privacy, research on user experience is limited. This article centres the accounts of 11 interviewees who used digital sex devices within mostly heterosexual relations, and often for remote partnered sex. We demonstrate how digital sex toys offer creative potential and possibilities for sexual pleasure and connection, and explore to what extent this challenges normative gendered dynamics and expectations of heterosex. We conclude that digital sex devices operate as allies with which users navigate and continually re-make heterosexual sex.