My Dearest Perverts,

Matt and I have some pretty big news to share. Through the sponsorship of Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette and The Magic Wand, Oh Joy Sex Toy is now ad free.

I know, right?!

So what brought this about?

At the start of 2017 we had a bit of a realization. Oh Joy Sex Toy turned 4 years old and what had started as a bit of a fun sex education and sex toy reviewing experiment has since grown into something bigger. I guess we were too busy making comics to really notice it happening, but in a blink of an eye our sex education comics numbered in the 100s and our humble experiment had become something of a real community resource.

With this revelation, we knew we had to update the face of our site. All these years we’ve used NSFW ads to help pay for what we do. We’ve always been fond of our naughty ads and felt they matched what we were doing early on. But it doesn’t fit anymore.

Nowadays Planned Parenthood coordinators send their volunteers to our site for sex ed crash courses, our monthly page views are in the multi-millions, we’re being used in doctors’ and gynecologists’ offices as a first glance resource, freshers at universities are being directed to our site and given print outs of our comics, our books are in libraries, and our comics have even shown up in the Tate Modern.

It’s time the face of Oh Joy Sex Toy reflects the fact that we now are a public education resource and one of the ways we are doing that is by removing ads to make the site feel friendlier and more accessible – something we can’t do without the help of sponsors.

On a personal note, getting both Planned Parenthood and The Magic Wand as our inaugural sponsors is honestly really meaningful to me because these two entities have done so much good in my life as a human being who was learning about my body and how to take care of it.

Planned Parenthood kept me safe and healthy when I had no health insurance in my early 20s by giving me a subsidized IUD. Their generosity and care enabled me to pursue my career and passions. I’ve volunteered for them and I’ve raised thousands of dollars for them through art fundraisers my friends and I have held online. And, of course, both Matt and I use their website as an indispensable resource when we’re researching information for our sex education comics. Haha, so it’s pretty fitting they’re sponsoring us, since we’re just illustrating their educational information anyway!

And The Magic Wand, oh my gosh. Our very first review on the site was of the Magic Wand because it was such a life changing toy for me. And I mean that! The Magic Wand taught me so much about my body and what it’s capable of. There’s a reason why it’s a revered classic of the sex toy world for since the 1970s! This guy, and its subsequent upgraded versions, have brought so much joy into Matt’s and my life.

To have both of these folks be our initial sponsors supporting the site when they’ve already supported and done so much for me as an individual person, well, it’s just pretty special for me. Haha, I know we all hear about “sponsorship” in the media and it sounds so corporate and impersonal, but for me this is very personal and very meaningful because of the role they’ve both actively played in my life before this point. I’m grateful for the support they’ve given me as a person learning how my body works and how to take care of it and how to bring it joy, and now Matt and I are honored to have their support of our work so we can help others learn about their bodies too.

Enjoy your new ad-free site, friends! And you can learn more about our sponsorship here.
—Erika