We Went Viral for Sending Butt Plugs to the Kingdom of Bahrain
For the first time ever, Bonjibon made the news.
Let’s start from the beginning.
In the Spring of 2025, Bonjibon received its first letter from the Department of The Navy of the United States, saying (basically): don’t send sex toys to the Kingdom Bahrain. As a team, we found this very, very funny.
Had we sent products to Bahrain? Actually, no. We receive orders to American military bases, and that’s all we see - they get forwarded on to stations overseas without our knowing where, or that it’s happening at all. Fast forward a couple of months, and we received a second letter from the Department of the Navy. Again, telling us to stop sending sex toys to Bahrain. Again, we couldn’t do anything about it it.
So what did we do? Naturally, we framed the letters in glittery frames and posted videos online about it.
Interviews and Headlines
CTV interviewed Bonjibon co-founder Grace on Jan 31st, 2025. Radio-Canada called. CBC Calgary reached out. The Toronto Star. The New York Post. The story started being picked up by news sources that didn’t even reach out to us. As it kept getting published by different sources, the headlines started getting more inflammatory and less informative. Toronto Star’s original article was “Why a Toronto sex toy store got a letter from the Pentagon,” and ran on opinion piece a week later titled “Canada’s sex toy sops need to band together for world peace.” A distinct change in tone - while we do believe in the value of sexual wellness part of the matrix of the world being a better place, this writer was asserting that we should flood American bases with butt plugs to confound them.
Headlines continued to get more inflammatory - we didn’t reply to the Daily Mail’s interview request, and this is the headline they ran with. “America's war on...sex toys! Pete Hegseth accused of policing troops' private lives with Pentagon crackdown on use of intimate devices.” To be clear - we aren't pro Pete (AT ALL). But that simply isn't what happened.
This made us shudder - we are really committed to getting our products to our customers worldwide and did not want the news cycle changing the story to get in the way of that. Fortunately, it didn't go that far!
Reflections
It was a funny, layered story. The idea that the American government, in the context of its service members, calling butt plugs a “reasonably suspected of posing immediate danger to life or limb or an immediate and substantial danger to property” is objectively hilarious. Butt (pun intended) - what is beneath the surface here?
Sexual health is a human right
According to the WHO, sexual health is a "state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality... Sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality... as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the sexual rights of all persons must be respected, protected and fulfilled."
Sex toys are illegal in many countries in the world, including the Kingdom of Bahrain. Not one news source delved into this fact. What implications does this have for those populations? Why are we more interested when it applies to American soldiers overseas than to the actual population? We we stripped of our ability to ship our products to countries where they are illegal years ago; the fact sex toys remain illegal in some places feels very relevant.
To further and amplify this point from the news' perspective, is human rights access asymmetrically applied to service members overseas? For instance, do they still get access to fair trials but not to their own buttholes? What human rights people have, and not have, access to? And how are those decisions informed by stigma?
Sex toys are harm reduction supplies
Service members, like anyone else, deserve access to safer sex supplies, including body safe products designed to be used for sexual play. As in, using the wrong thing up your butt can do quite a bit of harm.
- Butt plugs have a couple of essential attributes: their flared base and their materials. Without a flared base the object is likely to end up lodged in your intestines. And without the right materials, you are likely to experience tearing and/or irritation and infections.
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Sexualized violence goes up where military bases are. What could treating service people like adults who should have tools to touch themselves with, as opposed to pretending they are all asexual while dealing with sexualized assaults behind the scenes (or not at all) do?
Sex toys as pleasure production supplies
Imagine being born with a body that could feel really, really good. If you touch it in specific ways, it can feel really, really, REALLY good. Like, you could be flooded with feel-good hormones that de-stress you, boosts your immune system, help you sleep, reduce pain, among other things. You figure out how to touch it to feel these ways - that might require prosthetics, things that vibrate, and certainly things with flared bases. This is something you to and with yourself.
How would you feel about your job, or your government, taking said products away, or prohibiting them in the first place?
To sum up...
For us at Bonjibon, it fun and exciting to get the attention of the news. We were also reminded how much nuance is lost in translation (or the desire to sell stories). In an era of the news being incredibly scary, crushing, and seemingly disempowering, this offered a sweet little tale of our business taking something that could have upset us, and framing it with glitter. May more stories with some levity hit the news. And may we use our critical thinking skills when they do.
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