Properly Selling the Improper

Shelly Ronen is a doctoral candidate at New York University in sociology. Her dissertation asks how the sex toy market became moral, and uses archival material, interviews and participant observation to trace how makers navigate the taboos of selling sex and how cultures of sexual normalcy and deviance are inscribed into sex commodities. Shelly’s writing has appeared in academic and non-academic outlets and she has been interviewed for Buzzfeed’s Internet Explorer and Boing Boing’s Flash Forward. Shelly is also one half of object Solution’s “Designing the Future of love,” a design fiction collaboration satirizing technosolutionist inventions for relationships.