Certified Pre-Owned Dildo

And, No, I'm Not Talking About the Texas Judge

For those who like a good Valentine’s Day present, I hope you got the bouquet of flowers/box of chocolate/teddy bear/lingerie/sparkly jewelry/used sex toy you always wanted. What, a certified pre-owned butt plug was not on your Cupid wish list? How about a gently loved clit-sucker? A magic wand with 100,000 miles on the odometer but a lot of life left in it?

With a growing concern in sustainability and the rise of “buy nothing” groups on social media, it should come as no surprise that someone thought to apply the “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” mentality to sex toys.

Meet Dan and Lisa, the husband-and-wife team (who have decided not to release their surnames) behind Squeaky Clean, a website that lets users buy, sell, and exchange sex toys. The couple explained to Vice that they got the idea after a friend wanted to purge $400 worth of high-end vibrators and dildos. There was nowhere for the goods to go—no Facebook swap group or Goodwill pick up, no thrift store or RealReal site that wanted them—they were destined to end up in a landfill.

To fix this, the pair (who happen to be web designers) launched Squeaky Clean. If you have toys you are finished with—whether you’ve traded up a model or decided that a particular sensation was not for you—you can try to sell them or trade them on the site. As the URL suggests, however, you must clean them first. The site requires sellers to follow a three-step sanitization process and send pictures as proof.  

Lisa explains that a lot of what is on their site is the back-end (pun entirely intended) machinery for powerful sex toys like Sybians (sometimes called a Sybian Saddle) for which a new owner could buy replacement dildos. Other items for sale may still be in the box, have never made it out of the night table drawer, or were only used once or twice. Apparently, however, there’s even a market for old favorites that saw a lot of action. For many of the site’s users, price is the motivation as they can get high-end products (those that sell for $100+ to even over $1,000) at a steep discount.

It's highly unlikely that a used sex toy one buys online—which means it hasn’t been used recently—poses a risk for STIs. Moreover, I suppose that using a toy that has been on or in somebody else’s vagina/penis/anus is not all that much different than sleeping with a partner who’s not a virgin as their vagina/penis/anus has been on or in somebody else’s. 

Still, I find myself relieved that no one surprised me with pre-owned anal beads yesterday.

Meet the Texas Judge Who Ruled Against Birth Control for Teens & Holds the Fate of Medication Abortion in His Hands

Matthew Kacsmaryk was a religious liberty lawyer before being appointed to the federal court by Donald Trump in 2019. His brand of religious liberty, however, falls firmly in the “my right to force my religious beliefs on others” camp rather than the right to practice religion free from government interference as our nation’s founders suggested.

This view clearly played into his December ruling that Title X clinics violated parents’ rights and Texas law by providing contraception to teenagers without parental consent. That case was brought by a Christian father who admitted his daughters never so much as visited one of these clinics. The big fear now is that this brand of religious freedom—which is ever-present in the abortion debate—will also be behind a soon-to-be delivered decision that could pull Mifepristone from the market and possibly end medication abortions.   

Taking Birth Control & Bodily Autonomy from Teens

The Title X program launched in 1970 to provide contraceptive access to low-income women, including teenagers, to help prevent unintended pregnancy. Title X program serves about four million women each year in 4,000 clinics across the country and has been a success that should truly be supported by abortion opponents. One research study estimated that in the 20 years between 1981 and 2001, Title X prevented 20 million pregnancies about 9 million of which would have ended in abortion. The program and the access to contraception it provides are also seen as one of the reasons for the decreasing teen pregnancy rate in this country.

Title X enjoyed bipartisan support for decades—the original legislation creating the program was co-sponsored by then-Representative George H. W. Bush. In recent years, however, it became a political football. The Trump Administration instituted a domestic gag rule that, among other things, prevented Title X clinics from counseling pregnant women about abortion. Trump’s rules also required clinics to have physical separation between the Title X services they offered and any abortion-related services they provided. This was an impossible standard for many clinics to meet. The rule was designed to force some providers (read Planned Parenthood) out of the program, and it worked. In 2020, Guttmacher estimated that Title X’s patient capacity was cut in half by these rules.

The Biden Administration has since reversed all Trump era rules and tried to shore up the program with new requirements that clinics be gender-inclusive, non-discriminatory, and culturally appropriate. These new rules also tightened confidentiality for all patients, especially those under 18.

But maybe not in Texas.

The Title X case—Deanda vs Becerra—was orchestrated by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who shares Kacsmaryk’s vision of religious dominance. Mitchell was the designer of the Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks and sets neighbors up as snitches. He was also behind the lawsuit against the ACA’s prevention coverage in the name of someone who didn’t want to pay for HIV prevention since his religion already told him not to have risky sex.

His client in this case is Alexander Deanda, the father of three daughters who said in the complaint that he is “… raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” Deanda does not want his daughters to be able to access contraception or family planning services without his permission. He argued that the very existence of a federally funded place that would do such a thing violates the Texas Family Code which gives parents the right to consent to medical and dental care.

Many legal scholars and judges would likely rule that Deanda doesn’t have any standing in this case since he admits that none of his daughters were given or even tried to access birth control at a Title X clinic. He just says that someday they could. The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that plaintiffs in federal lawsuits must show they’ve been injured by a law or that injury is imminent. It is not enough for such injury to be “conjectural” or “hypothetical.”Unfortunately, it enough for Kacsmaryk who seems to have no trouble bending the law to make sure the religious right comes out on top.

It’s not a coincidence, by the way, that so many of these so-called religious freedom cases end up on his desk. The rules in Texas mean that 95% of cases filed in Amarillo, Texas will end up be heard by him. If you’re Jonathan Mitchell or anyone else that would like to infringe on the freedom of others in the name of not letting them infringe on you, all you have to do is file your complaint in Amarillo.

Taking Medication Abortion & Bodily Autonomy from Women

This brings us to the next powerful case Kacsmaryk will rule on—Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA. They argue that the FDA approval process for the medication abortion protocol was unlawful and therefore the court should “withdraw mifepristone and misoprostol as FDA-approved chemical abortion drugs.” Mind you this approval process took place 20 years ago.

We discussed these two drugs recently, but essentially Mifepristone ends a pregnancy by blocking progesterone and Misoprostol causes uterine contractions to expel it. Misoprostol was FDA approved as an ulcer medication in 1988 and continues to have other use. Mifepristone was approved in 2000 and this is all that it’s used for. A decision to pull the two-decade old approval would essentially take that drug off the market and put the company that produces it (which only has one product) out of business. What would happen to Misoprostol and the FDA’s authority to regulate medication abortion is less clear. What is clear is that abortion will become even harder to get, which is, of course, the whole f**king point.

A lawsuit like this is entirely unprecedented and, according to the FDA, could completely undermine the nation’s process for assuring drug safety. In its response to the lawsuit the agency said, “A preliminary injunction would interfere with Congress’s decision to entrust FDA with responsibility to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs.” It went on to say, “More generally, if longstanding FDA drug approvals were so easily enjoined, even decades after being issued, pharmaceutical companies would be unable to confidently rely on FDA approval decisions to develop the pharmaceutical-drug infrastructure that Americans depend on to treat a variety of health conditions.”  

Kacsmaryk was expected to rule on this last week but the decision is now expected later this month. A ruling for the plaintiffs in this case will leave abortion providers across the country scrambling to figure out what is and isn’t legal while they wait for an appeal to wend its way through the courts. Despite his frequently faulty logic, Kacmaryk’s rulings often stay in place longer than other judges’ because the appeals process puts his cases in front of the equally nutty Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.   

While we wait for his medication abortion decision and HHS tries to appeal his Title X decision, teens in Texas have already lost. The organization responsible for distributing Title X funds to 156 clinics in Texas has said that out of an abundance of caution it will now require providers to get parental consent before giving contraceptives to minors.