If I Should Die Before I Wake, Hide My Sex Toys!

What Happens to Vibrators When Their People Die?

“I always cry at weddings.” “I always laugh at funerals.”

August and September were busy months. Record heat in a city famous for rain. The one-year anniversary of a friend’s death, then the death of my mother, then the death of another friend. After a storied decade of business, I have handed over my kink club to a non-profit. Lots of endings. It’s put me in a morbid state of mind, which is not to say that I am feeling humorless. In fact, quite the opposite.

While going through endless boxes of documentation once belonging to now-dead family members, I have been overwhelmed with memories. Some of them make me smile, most of them do not. Oddly enough, one of my favorite memories of a dead family member is also one of my favorite, if more than a little twisted, memories about sex toys.

My brother, who I found was a strip club regular while I was a strip club magazine editor-in-chief, passed away two weeks after his 30^th birthday due to complications from diabetes. The disease had robbed him of a toe and his ability to ejaculate in the traditional manner. Instead, he experienced what is called “retrograde ejaculation.” This is when, during the process of orgasm, semen is released into the bladder instead of moving through the urethra of the penis. It’s a treatable condition, but in my brother’s case was accompanied by an assortment of other sex-related inconveniences.

Fortunately for my younger male sibling, in addition to his appreciation of naked women with exceptional pole dancing skills, he had an open mind about men and their use of sex toys. We talked about his struggles once before he died, so I knew that they existed and why he was using them. What I didn’t know was where he kept them. I found out. While our mother, ever-virgin, was standing next to me. It was a special moment, lemme tell you.

My brother possibly from another father had a lot of his belongings stored at our mom’s house because of a lot of reasons I’ll probably write about someday in a tell-all book. In the meantime, the important thing to know is that as I was sorting and boxing up his stuff post-death with my now-also-dead mother standing next to me, I unearthed the aforementioned sex toys. Rubbery cock rings and penis pumps, mostly.

As I stood mesmerized by the pump in my hands, my mother understandably asked me what it was. For the briefest of moments, I was mute, unsure how to break the horrible truth to our mother that her only begotten son had been, yes, sexually active, at very least with himself.

When you grow up in a household with adults who have fucked up ideas about sex, relationships, and communication, you learn to have a nimble mind. Or maybe it’s just that those of us with nimble minds are more likely to survive. Either way, I did not remain transfixed by the tube, plunger, and mental vision of my brother using them for long. Mom was standing there waiting for an answer and I knew the longer I took, the more pruriently insistent her demands for an answer would become. So, I lied. I don’t do it often, but it seemed warranted in this case.

“It’s a sports drink mixer,” I said with a straight face.

Her curiosity satisfied because she had no idea what a penis pump or a sports drink mixer looked like, I tossed the assortment of very intimate menswear into a box and we spoke of it no more. I’ve never forgotten about it, though. Not just because it was my brother or because it was a delicate moment between me and my likely sexually traumatized mother but because it made me realize that while it’s fun to joke about leaving scandalous items behind for our survivors, it may not be as amusing in reality. Of course, we won’t be around to find out, so it’s really a personal decision based on how much we like our survivors, trust them, or want to shock them.

What are the options for those of us who don’t want to leave a sibling, friend, spouse, partner, parent, offspring, or total stranger feeling deeply awkward, uncomfortable, or freaked out? Alas, the choices are not as plentiful as they would be in an ideal, eco-sexual, sex-positive world. But they are not non-existent.

Depending on our circumstances, there may be a way around the potential ruining of our reputation when it’s discovered by someone who doesn’t need to know that we (gasp) used sex toys. First off, of course, is placing them in a secure box, perhaps with a note, whose whereabouts are known or can be revealed after death to a representative. You know, just leave the damn box of vibrators to someone in the Will. Problem solved!

People can be squeamish about using other people’s invasive sex toys, although many can be adequately cleaned enough to be used by more than one person. If the lucky recipient of our sex toy empire doesn’t want the bounty so generously bestowed upon them, they can try to sell them online or during vendor fairs, etc., at a reasonable price.

If that doesn’t work or what we leave behind isn’t in usable condition, there are a few places where toys can be recycled. In 2007, adult toy mega-retailer Lovehoney introduced “Rabbit Amnesty,” a tip of the hat to the insanely popular vibrator shape. The program provided a place for users faced with the tragic passing of their sex toys to send them and know they would not become part of the environmental mess that is the 21^st century. Similar services are said to have spread through the United Kingdom and Australia.

But what about the eco-conscious colonists? What do we do when Vinnie the Vibrator shudders for the last time? I was raised half-Catholic. I die a thousand times when I throw anything away that can be reused or recycled. For us, there’s Portland, Oregon’s Scarletgirl.com. Send them a broken or unloved toy and earn a $10 credit toward a replacement, not that any of them can really be replaced, right? They’re all individuals and we love them very much.

Another site that welcomes your tired, poor, huddled, wretched sex toys is Sex Toy Recycling. The company uses a special process to recycle materials into new products that is not unlike that used to turn sneakers into rubber basketball court surfaces. As Sex Toy Recycling points out, by not throwing toys in the trash, we can cut down on dangerous metals, harmful chemicals, petroleum products, and more in our landfills. The company also hires American labor and boasts that the workforce receives “competitive wages and excellent working conditions.”

It's not that sex toys can’t be recycled. It’s that there’s little to no profit in it. And we all know that nothing gets done if it doesn’t make someone a profit. Plus, many recyclers are weirded out by the idea of handling anything that’s been touched by sexual fluids. This is unfortunate because so many things related to sex are considered off-limits, taboo, or unclean. This doesn’t just contribute to the financial well-being of therapists; it actively harms humans and the planet in its entirety.

So, when doing our estate planning, as strange as it may sound, we should consider where we want our unmentionable entertainment devices to wind up and who wants to deal with them. Those of us whose social circle is populated with horndogs and perverts will have less trouble with this, but those of us who are more closeted or have more delicate family or friends should think carefully about what we want to reveal to them once we’re not here to explain ourselves.