Why Roddick’s s*x shops are a sell out

Today the neo-liberal ideology of Big Porn has colonised just about everything, including what passes for feminism in corporate culture. Yesterday’s sexual transgression is today’s fast food advert. Big Pharma spams everyone with sexed up drugs. Girls and women are expected to be hot and up for it while also being subjected to new waves of misogyny they are forbidden to name for fear of being slandered as a frigid feminist. It’s pretty clear what is going on politically. We’re not just living with a depthless simulated women’s sexual liberation, there is also a big cultural insult at work here: reducing hundreds of years of rigorous and ground-breaking thinking and activism to the right to be hot and have more sex is insulting. It’s like reducing the civil rights movement to an Ice Cub rap about sex and drugs.

What would happen if a woman really took the slick ideological con of Coco de Mer seriously and decided to sex up her feminism with these hot new products? To avoid being sexually rejected for defending your rights, you can transform yourself thanks to the new “up yours!” feminism of Coco de Mer. Inevitably, the products converge into an image of the post-feminist consumer on her knees, with various expensive items inserted into various parts of her body, wearing a dog mask, with a strap on dildo, being spanked, whipped and flogged with another woman’s hair, looking into a mirror. All of this would cost, oh say, £4000. That’s the price of the pornification of post-feminist sexual self-empowerment.

A more realistic description would be that this expensive sex shop chain is about gentrifying the sex industry with the help of a bit of consumer friendly post-feminist gibberish. Sorry Sam, but it’s all Coco de Merde* to me.

*Merde is “shit” in French