Babeland, the name it has used since 2005 after years as Toys in Babeland, is an LGBTQ-owned sex-toy boutique that sells erotic toys, books, and pornographic films. Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning opened the first shop in Seattle in 1993 because the city had no women-friendly sex stores. The point was not a back-room novelty counter. They wanted a boutique that treated information as the product: quality toys, real talk, and encouragement for women who wanted to explore their own sexuality. Mail order followed in 1995, a website in 1996, then New York, Brooklyn, a short-lived Los Angeles room, and eventually a sale to rival Good Vibrations. For kink and adult-video readers this is one of the shops that made buying a dildo or a flogger feel like walking into a bookstore instead of a peep-show alley.
A spoonerism and a women-first shop
The original name Toys in Babeland is a spoonerism of Babes in Toyland — both the feminist riot grrrl punk band and the 1934 Laurel & Hardy picture. Cavanah and Venning were answering a specific gap: Seattle in the early 1990s did not have a sex shop built around women as customers rather than as décor. The store sold toys they were willing to stand behind, in a room that looked like a boutique instead of a fluorescent arcade. That info-first posture is what people still mean when they talk about the Babeland model. You could ask what a toy actually did. You were supposed to.
From Seattle catalog to New York streets
In 1995 Toys in Babeland launched a mail-order business with a small print catalog run out of the Seattle shop. The website went up the next year, 1996, which put the catalog in front of anyone with a modem. In 1998 the owners opened a second store in New York City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A third shop followed in SoHo in 2003. Los Angeles got a fourth location in 2005; that store later closed. In 2008 they opened in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which brought the New York count to three. The current footprint listed for the brand is an online store plus four retail rooms: Seattle, Brooklyn, and two in Manhattan. The company dropped “Toys in” from the name in 2005 and has traded as Babeland since.
Books, a voting giveaway, a union, and a sale
Venning and Cavanah published Sex Toys 101: A Playfully Uninhibited Guide (also cited as Sex Toys 101: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing and Using Sex Toys) with Touchstone in 2003, ISBN 9780743243513. In January 2010, working with Jessica Vitkus, they issued a second book, Moregasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex, from Avery, ISBN 9781583333723. In 2008 the shop ran a promotion that gave a free sex toy to anyone who voted in that November’s election. In May 2016 the New York City stores voted to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, becoming the first U.S. sex shops to unionize. In August 2017 Babeland was sold to rival sex shop Good Vibrations. The name stayed; Babeland still operates as a separate brand.
Staff, awards, and what the rooms actually sell
Queer erotica author Dena Hankins worked at Babeland as Web Operations Manager from 1998 to 2006. Awards piled up over the years: a 2006 Zagat’s Survey award as “the best shopping experience in New York”; “Best Place to Buy Sex Toys” from The Village Voice in 2014; and “Best Sex Shop” in the Best of Seattle 2016 reader poll in Seattle Weekly for both 2016 and 2017. The inventory is still the original mix — toys, books, pornographic films — sold from a women-founded, LGBTQ-owned counter that started because Seattle did not have a shop willing to talk to women about sex as if they were the ones holding the money.
