ABSTRACT
Sexual wellness has not only become a global cultural, sociopolitical, and economic concern but also a key aspect of contemporary on and offline identity politics. Despite the ostensibly progressive “post-woke” ideology seemingly at the nexus of our zeitgeist, sex sells in late capital. Sexual wellness – a concept that gestures to self-care, self-management, and/or self-work – is also inextricable from the $3.7 trillion global wellness industrial complex. This chapter seeks to explore how online brands, spaces, and cultures self-identified as allies of progressive interests in the reality market against not only gender but also race. It will critique the case of the online sex-toy company Wildflowersex and the recent exposure of the company’s exploitative dealings with specifically Black Femmes. First, it will explore how Wildflowersex reverse-engineered the concerns of sexual wellness to suit the goals of capitalist enterprise by parsing the company’s marketing and branding approach to themes of sexual wellness through traditional mid-20th-century marketing and business methods elaborated most clearly, if not controversially, by Edward Bernays in “The Engineering of Consent” (1947). The goal here is to offer a critique of how the company’s ostensibly progressive and inclusive image is essentially predicated on Bernayean strategies of engineered consent. It will then explore the following consequences of the company’s recent exposure: (1) the company’s manipulation of sexual wellness through capitalist ideology, (2) its cozening of an entire online space and community of consumers, (3) its influence on their ostensibly progressive ethical understandings of contemporary identity politics, sex, sexuality, their commodification, and consumption. Lastly, this chapter will emphasize how Wildflowersex’s engineering of self-care, self-management, and work in the frame of sexual wellness has led to, perhaps even required, the clandestine economic, sociopolitical, and cultural exploitation of Black Femmes to achieve its underlying goal: profit.
