The Consumer Entertainment Show gave a digital sex toy an award. Then it rescinded the award because sex toys are "immoral, obscene, indecent [or] profane" and banned it from the trade show floor. Katie Notopoulos reports, however, that they've given such toys awards in the past.
It’s unclear why the CTA made the Osé an honoree in the first place, before backtracking on its decision to include an adult product. The trade show gave a sex toy a similar award three years ago, and other companies have exhibited sex toys and adult products at the show over the years.
A representative from CTA told BuzzFeed News, “[Osé] does not qualify because it does not fit in to any of our existing CES 2019 categories.” Asked to clarify if this is because it didn’t meet the standards of being a robot or drone, they replied, “it’s an adult product so not eligible.”
Those dead-eyed, life-size sex dolls are another feature of CES that are fine by it:
Perhaps the answer to all this is that CES's executives are old-school sexist twerps and there's simply no unraveling what's going on under their skin. In 2012, the BBC reported that CES chief Gary Shapiro mocked complaints about the "booth babes" that were then still a pervasive feature at the exhibition.
"Well, sometimes it is a little old school, but it does work," Shapiro tells the BBC. "People naturally want to go towards what they consider pretty. So your effort to try to get a story based on booth babes, which is decreasing rather rapidly in the industry, and say that it's somehow sexism imbalancing, it's cute but it's frankly irrelevant in my view."
This man is the head of America's main tech industry trade group. The founder of the company behind the Osé vibrator is, as I'm sure you've guessed, a woman.
