Why More Men Are Buying Sex Toys Than Ever
The female-focused segment of this market is still larger in raw dollar terms, but the male-focused segment is growing faster — ReAnIn’s research puts its growth rate at roughly 8% a year, ahead of the female segment’s already-strong pace. That gap is worth paying attention to, because it points to something that’s actually changed, not just a market catching up to where it already should have been.
Why the stigma was worse for men in the first place
For a long time, the cultural assumption ran in an odd direction: needing or wanting a toy got quietly read as a statement about masculinity or performance, in a way that was never applied the same way to women. Marketing didn’t help — for years, most products aimed at men leaned into embarrassment as a selling point (jokey packaging, discretion framed around shame rather than just privacy) instead of treating the category like any other consumer product.
What’s actually shifted
- Health framing. Prostate massagers in particular have moved into more mainstream health conversations, with some healthcare providers discussing them in the context of prostate health rather than purely as a novelty — which reframes the entire category for a lot of people.
- Straightforward marketing. Brands like Hot Octopuss and The Handy market their products the way any consumer electronics company would — feature specs, direct comparisons, no shame angle — which changes how the product feels to buy.
- More product variety. The category used to be dominated by one narrow stereotype. It now spans everything from disposable pocket options to prostate massagers to app-connected devices, which means there’s more room for it to just be a normal purchase decision rather than a singular loaded one.
- The same online-privacy shift covered in buying online discreetly applies here too, and probably mattered more for men specifically, given how much of the historical hesitation was about being seen rather than about the product itself.
If this is new territory for you
None of this requires figuring it all out at once. Best Male Strokers: A Buying Guide covers the practical side — types, materials, how to pick a starting point — and the Top 10 Best-Selling Sex Toys for Men list shows what’s actually popular across categories right now. The bigger point of this page is simpler: if you’ve hesitated because it felt like an unusual thing to be curious about, the market data says you’re part of one of the fastest-growing groups of buyers there are right now, not an outlier.