Sex toy, your new best friend

People lug a 15kg oxygen tank on our backs and jump into the ocean or climb up to mountain tops to slide down its slopes on a snowboard, just to experience a new thrill. Such ‘adventures into the wild outdoors’ are lauded as great hobbies for cool people.

But ‘adventures into our own bodies’ are neglected and even treated as taboo.

Sexual preferences and experiments on finding orgasm give invaluable insight on who we truly are, but they are put on the back burner, aside and out of consideration. Korea’s social norms have come to embrace the issue of sex more openly than before, but they still do not allow us to be free from a certain amount of guilt or shame when we try to find pleasure through masturbation or intercourse.

Pleasure Lab is an adult sex toy boutique that was launched to change our society’s perspectives on the pursuit of sexual arousal and pleasure. At Pleasure Lab, we suggest, recommend, and sell various sex toys that help customers find their pleasure zones. 90 percent of the products are for female pleasure, to focus on the sexual needs felt by women – an area that has faced greater neglect in Korean society.

The two of us also, before we met each other and founded Pleasure Lab, discovered sex toys by chance and fell in love them. From our personal experiences, we want to change how people think about sexual pleasure – that seeking sexual pleasure is not lewd or dirty but a positive activity that helps to make you feel more confident. As regular Korean women ourselves, we want to keep putting ourselves on the frontline to emphasize that sex toys are not just for ‘those women who use those kinds of things’ but for everyone.

Because there were no sex toy vendors for females in Korea up to now, we received quite a lot of attention from the start. From a group of university students wearing school jackets to a middle-aged lady in a classic Hollywood-style 1950s outfit and local residents in their 70s with their hands clasped behind their backs, a diverse range of customers walk through the doors of our Pleasure Lab.

The women who enter Pleasure Lab tell us that the experience is like meeting a ‘new world,’ because they had never imagined there to be such a variety of products specifically made for women’s sexual pleasure.

After the initial laughter, exclamation, and applause, these women hold the toys in their hands and start their journey to seek their pleasure in all seriousness. With careful attention, they weigh the toys in their hands and check the feel of the vibrations on the back of their hands. Among them, some ask for assistance, confiding that they don’t know where their clitoris is or that they have never masturbated in their whole life so they don’t know where to begin.

A majority of our products are vibrators, which are tools made for stimulating the clitoris or inner vaginal areas to assist in reaching orgasm with more ease. Vibrators are great tools to achieve extreme sexual pleasure in a short period of time, alone or with a partner. There are thousands of different vibrators currently available in the market, with different vibrating qualities, shapes, sizes, and textures by brand. Each vibrator has its unique feel on the skin. They are basically very delicate personal massagers that help create the special sensation that is the female orgasm.

There are women who are overwhelmed and scared by the feelings that envelop them when they use sex toys for the first time. This is natural.

Any new adventure into an unknown world comes with a certain level of fear. Taking in new experiences require flexibility of the mind and body, and this goes the same for using sex toys. But by starting slowly with a soft vibration and exploring your body and genitals little by little, you will find hints to greater pleasure.

Some customers ask if people can get addicted to sex toys or become aversive to ‘regular sex’ with a partner. There are no definite answers for this, because there certainly are those who do become addicted as well as those who prefer masturbation over having sex with a partner. We recommend sex toys to be used to the extent that they don’t affect your regular lifestyle or health.

Just as the ocean contains greater mysteries and secrets deeper you go, orgasms also reveal new joys as you explore into its deeper layers one by one.

If you are not yet familiar with your pleasure zones, try giving your body your full attention with a sex toy. Touch your body, listen to your breathing, feel your body react with greater intensity, sink into the fantasies that come to your mind, and let yourself go in the breathtaking energy and the thrilling trembles that flow throughout your body.

And the orgasm that finally visits will feel like a cracker to some, fireworks to others, or even make you feel like you’re thrown out into the universe. This is an experience that does not stop as a momentary moan, but continues throughout your day like a soft joyful hum

We invite you to jump into the open sea that is your body, to take control and explore its depths. What you will discover there is solely up to you.

(Written by the co-founders of Pleasure Lab, Translated by Transdemics)