Electricity for pleasure? Electronic stimulation, or e-stim, is a relatively new product category that is a great way to upsell both vibrator fans and bondage types. With these products, low-strength electrical signals stimulate the nerves, prompting muscle contractions that fool the body into thinking it's being physically stimulated. The resulting sensations can range from orgasmic to sadistic, from slight tingles to strong throbbing.
"These products are based on medical units that doctors call TENS units. They're used to exercise muscles without having to put strain on the bones and tendons around them," says Christophe Pettus, president of Blowfish, retailers of e-stim toys.
No formal statistics on recreational usage exist, but Anna Fay, a marketing executive at Las Vegas-based manufacturer Paradise Electro Stimulations, estimated that maybe 70 percent of the market uses the product to induce orgasm, and the rest aims for some form of pain.
"Today ... at least half a million to a million people play with e-stim. That's based on the number of people on the various e-play mailing lists," says Uncle Abdul, who has been teaching classes on the subject since 1984 and authored the how-to and safety book Juice: Electricity for Pleasure and Pain in 1998. "I've seen e-stim products carried in almost all of the fetish shops, both brick-and-mortar and online. I've also seen it in some of the vanilla stores for adult books and/or sex toys.
"Right now the market for e-stim remains fairly limited simply because of a lack of public awareness. As more people learn about this type of play, demand could really take off, especially among 23- to 30-year-olds," says Abdul.
"The ideal market for e-stim would be young couples that want to try something different. Another market would be older males who might have problems getting to orgasm through normal intercourse. A lot of them go to e-stim products basically as a substitute for orgasms or a supplement to it," Abdul continues.
People getting started with e-stim often opt for the lowest-priced devices, such as electrified paddles originally intended to kill insects. Said items only offer sadistic sensations rather than induce orgasm. Devotees of electrical play opt for the higher-priced gear, which falls into two main categories: the violet wand and the TENS unit.
The former tends to work best for sadism, while the latter has the ability to induce orgasms as well as pain, depending on how it's used.
"If you're doing it vanilla, you want to concentrate on the low intensity, high frequency settings and incorporate a lot of foreplay with it, and generally tend to use the TENS units rather than the violet wands. To use a TENS unit for sadism, then you use the higher intensities and probably the lower frequencies, but then it's the placement of the electrodes that becomes more critical," Abdul explains.
Abdul adds that inducing orgasms with the TENS units involves placing electrical attachments around the genitalia. The attachments are electrodes that plug into the TENs unit on one end and connect with the human body on the other end, ranging from simple pads affixed to electrodes to a wide variety of insertables and devices modeled for specific body parts.
Among the notable manufacturers of e-stim products with prurient marketing in mind are: Folsom Electric, Eros-Tek, MyStim , Rimba , Paradise Electro Stimulations , and Zeus Electrosex . However, numerous medical supply companies sell TENS units without any sexual connotations on the packaging, often for lower prices.
Shrink-wrapped e-stim products are safe and should not be confused with the ill-conceived contraption that killed Kristen Taylor of Lower Windsor Township, Pa., this January. Her husband assembled a set of electrified nipple clamps that sent undiluted wall current across her heart.
"If your heart is in between the two places you're sending current, you die. You could have that amount of current go through your hand or foot, and it will hurt you, but you won't die. Put it through your heart, and you will," says electrical engineer Mark Whitaker, owner of Electronic Systems Solutions in San Francisco.
Furthermore, husband Toby Taylor's construction didn't have anything to dilute the strength of the power coming out of the wall. The weakest outlet available for home use has 150 times the amount of power needed to kill a human when applied to the heart.
Professionally made e-stim products drastically reduce the flow of electricity between the outlet and the product. Electrical gurus call the rate of flow amperage. (Compare electricity to water flowing out of a faucet: Voltage is to the pressure in the pipe, as amperage is to the rate of water flow.)
"The whole goal of e-stim is you want almost no amperage at all, that's the brute force, the bad stuff, but it is a component of an electrical signal. It takes very little of that signal to kill you.
You want to play with the voltage, not the amperage," says Kelly Eberhard, co-owner of Extreme Restraints, LLC, noting that e-stim accounts for 15 percent of her company's sales.
Most countries have laws requiring products that plug into a socket to undergo safety testing and certification. U.S. electric products carry a sticker from Underwriters Labs, indicating the item is safe so long as it's used exactly according to the manufacturer's directions.
U.L.'s sticker provides some legal protection to e-stim manufacturers and retailers, but additional measures are necessary.
"It is important to know that product liability lawsuits can arise from not only a product's advertised or intended use, but also from any reasonably foreseeable use. And the bizarre uses to which consumers put products boggle the mind," says attorney Clyde DeWitt.
De Witt adds that most product liability lawsuits come from consumers who don't follow directions or get careless. And he noted that the Pennsylvania electrocution case doesn't seem like a product liability issue because it involved a home-made item.
"However, if the electrocution was from a commercial e-stim product, a victim of this kind of incident could directly sue the manufacturer and anyone (and everyone) in the chain of distribution, and then collect the judgment from whichever of them has the deepest pockets," he says.
"That is the reason why it is so important to both have appropriate insurance coverage as well as to carefully consider all reasonably foreseeable uses of a product and affix warning labels appropriate to all of those uses," says DeWitt.
It should be noted, the alligator clamps, junction box, and other components used by the Taylors are in no way like commercial e-stim products. For example, specialized applicator pads, not basic hardware items, are what is affixed to skin.
Lawrence, co-founder of San Francisco's Center for Sex and Culture explains:
"The applicator pads must be medical quality carbon and over-use of even these can cause scarring and other neurological problems. Any other applicator other than medical quality can cause the transfer of ions of that material directly into the flesh. So, if there is some aluminum or copper in the applicator pad, it goes into the body, too."
When selling e-stim products, retailers should be informed about the product, how it works, and possible liability issues, and educate the customer accordingly. Such retailers probably reacted to the Taylor case like Richard Hunter, owner of Mr. S Leathers:
"What the fuck was he thinking, plugging the tit clamps into the main electrical current in the house? How stupid. Most of the better stores take the time to educate their customers about what they are buying. I don't think any of our customers would have done what this guy did."
Stocking properly labeled e-stim products from reliable manufacturers coupled with education is how to help your customers explore the wild and wonderful world of new pleasures safely.
