Harry Styles is selling sex — Even when Wall Street won’t

It began as a whisper, rippling through social media: Harry Styles is coming back. After spending more than two years largely off the grid — running marathons in Tokyo and Berlin, witnessing the Pope’s ascent to power in Rome — he returned this winter with a new album titled Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally and a world tour.

But lost in the press frenzy surrounding his new music was another release: a Valentine’s Day restock of the highly coveted vibrator and lube from Styles’ beauty and wellness brand, Pleasing.

When both products debuted last summer, they sold out within minutes online. Some shoppers turned to eBay, where the vibrators — originally priced at $US68 ($96) — resold for north of $US300. Others signed up for Pleasing’s waitlist.

Scarcity alone doesn’t explain the fervour. Styles, through his music and his brand, is providing his fans with something intangible: a reason to talk about sex without embarrassment. In his opening monologue for Saturday Night Live, he told the audience, “I finished my last tour in 2023, and after that I took a bunch of time off. I realised I’d spent half my life in music, touring, creating albums and making songs about fruit that people think are about sex,” he said. “I just really like fruit, guys. I like sex, too.”

For a cohort that’s come of age in the post-MeToo, Roe and COVID landscape, it’s an important message — and one drawn from an enduring playbook. Styles and his sex-positive contemporaries are the latest in a long, and necessary, line of cultural figures who have pushed to destigmatise desire, pleasure and curiosity during times of social upheaval.

What’s different about this moment, though, is the speed and scale at which fandoms — particularly female-driven ones — can mobilise demand.

Hollywood stars are voicing romance novels on the audio erotica app, Quinn. Lily Allen released her album on sex toy-shaped USB drives.

TikTok edits of the hockey romance Heated Rivalry have spawned in-person dance nights and lookalike contests across the country.

Adam & Eve, a pioneer in sex toys that started as a mail-order condom business in the 1970s, has seen an upsurge of celebrity interest.

“There’s never been this much inbound opportunity coming in the door,” says Lewis Broadnax, the chief executive officer of Adam & Eve’s parent company PHE, Inc.

“It’s just one data point that suggests we’ve reached an inflection point.”

This proliferation of sex-adjacent products speaks to a deep-seated hunger for more candid conversations about sex. According to McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness survey, gen Zers and millennials prioritise sexual health more than older generations in the US. Yet despite these manifestations of a generational shift, and a domestic sex toy market valued at $US10.62 billion in 2024, many US companies and financial institutions are still more likely to treat sexual wellness products as a subset, not of health care but of explicit adult entertainment, with all the baggage that characterisation carries.

Enter celebrities. On their own, cultural figures such as Styles can’t bring the business of sex entirely out of the shadows. But decades of history show how they can accelerate acceptance by introducing the conversation to audiences who might otherwise avoid it.

Sex has always mainstreamed through culture

“The essence of sexual freedom is the unashamed ability to use sex as play.”

It reads like something lifted from Pleasing’s marketing materials. But those words were not written by Styles’s team. They appeared in 1972 in a New York Times bestselling book that once sat on family coffee tables across America: The Joy Of Sex.

Some of its practical relevance has aged out, but the cultural impact of Dr Alex Comfort’s words have not. According to Comfort’s biographer, Eric Laursen, Pleasing’s unscripted, disarming approach to sex mirrors what The Joy Of Sex offered middle-class couples half a century ago. “If you want to treat sex seriously, you have to get people to think unseriously about it,” Laursen explains.

Comfort took something that was discussed behind closed doors and made it visible in bookstores and homes around the world. His illustrated “gourmet guide to love making,” which sold more than five million copies in the US alone, didn’t just explain pleasure; it gave readers permission to acknowledge it, fantasise about it and explore it openly.

That license was powerful — and quickly commodified. Within a few years, Laursen says, a flood of imitative sex manuals hit the market, including versions written by evangelical Christian authors eager to proselytise the message. Normalisation, it turned out, was good for business.

Comfort’s book was positioned as a corrective to the crude pictorials and misogynistic humor associated with Playboy, yet Hugh Hefner, too, wanted to create something suitable for broader consumption. Beneath the centerfolds and silk robes, Playboy was a lifestyle publication, home to Q&As with history-defining figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter and Steve Jobs. Those interviews, plus a slew of notable bylines, helped position the magazine not purely as pornography but as a part of the cultural conversation.

Debates over where liberation ended and indecency began raged all the same. Across generations, it’s a cycle that repeats: once-private topics break into the mainstream and draw public ire, then each generation inherits what shocked the last and reframes it until it becomes ordinary.

Little Richard’s lyrics and persona, Elvis Presley’s swaying hips and Marilyn Monroe’s white dress billowing above a subway grate were deemed worthy of pearl-clutching in the 1950s. But by the time gen X came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Madonna had turned sexual provocation into a global business model, triggering censorship campaigns and political hand-wringing alongside record music sales. During the AIDS epidemic, the R&B girl group TLC attached condoms to their clothes to signal to fans — especially young women — that choosing safe sex was something to feel empowered about, even as critics complained the gesture promoted promiscuity.

Millennials then inherited an even more commercialised landscape, where Sex And The City and other shows treated intimacy topics with candour. Soon after, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop reframed pleasure as luxurious.

Even hokey items like its “libido-enhancing” jade egg served to mainstream discussions that were once considered taboo.

Gen Z entered adulthood amid overlapping cultural upheavals, including a reckoning over sexual violence, the rollback of reproductive rights and the isolation of a global pandemic.

Online, they face a new reality as well: OnlyFans has grown to have its own economy, social media now rewards explicit trends and relationship expectations have been warped by excessive screen time and dating-app fatigue.

Social media’s toxicity may be new, but the institutional backlash of today isn’t. For decades, lawmakers, religious leaders and school boards have rushed to redraw the lines of what’s “appropriate.” In Texas, lawmakers are hoping to further restrict online sales of sex toys.

In Ohio, if the “Baby Olivia Act” passes, middle school students will soon be forced to watch what Planned Parenthood and other critics have called a scientifically inaccurate video of an animated fetus in a disembodied womb. All across the country, the footprint of reproductive clinics is shrinking, and public school classrooms are under siege, with only 37 per cent of states requiring medically accurate sex-ed lessons.

This void has created a window for new kinds of cultural intermediaries. Sophie Kerr-Dineen, Pleasing’s senior vice president of marketing, sees the company as part of a broader ecosystem helping younger consumers navigate intimacy.

“Our role is to be a vessel for education,” Ms Kerr-Dineen says, pointing to the brand’s ongoing partnership with Planned Parenthood.

Styles is not alone in that mission; his peers are also advocating in their own ways. Sabrina Carpenter puts desire centre stage, using sensual imagery during her performances. Doja Cat makes unabashedly sex-positive music, with titles such as Down Low and Cyber Sex. Olivia Rodrigo, meanwhile, takes a more institutional approach, partnering directly with organisations to promote reproductive rights and sexual health. These artists are not a monolith, but they send a similar message to their fans: Sex can be safe, as well as playful and shame-free. That candor is a breath of fresh air for younger generations.

“I want people to see sex toys as tools,” Zoë Ligon, the sex educator and adult boutique owner who collaborated with Pleasing on its vibrator, explains to me. In her eyes, they are no different from the fork you use to eat dinner or the toothbrush you use for oral hygiene. Objects that help meet a basic need, she argues, are nothing to be ashamed about.

Even with that mindset, it’s still hard for people — including those within a fandom — to agree on what’s acceptable.

“For every appreciation of Watermelon Sugar and its celebration of female pleasure, there’s discourse about Harry’s own sexuality. For every nod to Sabrina’s endlessly creative innuendos, there’s someone accusing her of setting feminism back centuries just for openly wanting a man,” Alissa, a fan in her 20s who requested partial anonymity because she runs a Harry Styles fan account on X, tells me.

We’re obsessed with sex, but we can’t seem to make up our minds about what shape it should or is even allowed to take.

The same thing could have been said decades ago.

The difficulty in meeting the demand

Pleasing’s latest campaign, “Please Come Again,” features real customers recounting awkward, funny and deeply human moments of intimacy on camera. The stories include details of cramping legs, misplaced limbs, errant strands of hair, tales that seem more like rom-com bloopers than aspirational fantasy. But that’s the point.

Young people, accustomed to seeing the hypersexualised images and conservative rage fests that divide the internet, are eager to figure out what pleasure actually looks like — including its messy and mundane parts.

Businesses willing to feed that appetite are profiting. Leah Koch, co-owner of The Ripped Bodice, the first romance-only bookstore in the US, sees young people turning to the “spicy” genre — which sold 51 million units between June 2024 and June 2025 - as both a comfort and a tool.

“The internet can be fast, loud and transactional — a lot of exposure but not a lot of context. We try to offer the opposite,” says Koch of her bookstore. “It gives people the chance to see sex as part of a whole emotional arc, not just a moment.” That turn toward slower, more grounded conversations isn’t limited to what people read; it shows up in how they talk, too.

Birna Gustafsson, a New York City-based sex educator who’s spoken at Harvard Sex Week — an annual series of student-organised conversations about sex, sexuality and intimacy — for the past three years, says many gen Zers feel safer asking about sex in person because there’s no paper trail.

“They grew up knowing anything they say online can be screenshotted forever, so speaking face-to-face actually feels less vulnerable and allows them to ask the questions they’d never ask online.”

As the cultural stigma around pleasure dissipates, sexual wellness products — everything from lube to toys to intimate hygiene — are projected to grow in popularity. In a less risqué space (say, prebiotic sodas), months-long waitlists would signal a major investment opportunity for Wall Street. Yet Amboy Street Ventures, a firm focused on women’s health, describes the sex sector as a “ghost market” with little institutional support.

Gustafsson, who uses social media as a part of her personal brand, says online roadblocks — like the inability to rely on ads because of algorithmic censorship- can prevent a business from scaling properly.

“Even educational content gets flagged,” she says, noting that she often can’t monetise sex-positive videos on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok because they’re automatically categorised as adult content.

Restrictions extend beyond internet platforms. When Ligon was opening her retail space, Spectrum Boutique, she says she faced financial discrimination from banking institutions that were wary of adult content. In 2016, Bloomberg News chronicled similar experiences with the owners of Babeland and Dame.

In a moment where sex is more palatable in music, TV and books than ever before, venture capitalists won’t invest in sexual wellness because institutions treat it like a vice instead of a form of health care. Part of the problem is how sexual wellness is defined. Depending on where you look, sex toys are categorised as “novelty” items or “therapeutic” devices, stranding them in a regulatory gray zone that allows states, banks and companies to decide their own rules.

Adam & Eve’s Broadnax argues that until lawmakers and platforms work to eliminate the grey zones, the industry will remain hamstrung.

“There’s really no clarity at the regulation level of what’s considered explicit material versus what’s considered sexual wellness and education,” he tells me. The result, as he explains it, is similar to Gustafsson’s experience. Products designed for health and pleasure are often swept into the same category as adult entertainment — limiting advertising, retail access and financing.

“Sexual health is part of human health,” Broadnax says. “And part of that includes pleasure products and education. They need to be identified separately.”

This is where celebrities can partly change the calculus. Styles doesn’t have to fight for cultural legitimacy in the same way a lesser-known founder does. Pleasing’s 1.3 million Instagram followers act as an organic marketing engine and a reputational shield. The company can introduce a vibrator almost like tour merch by sidestepping some of the institutional friction that stymies smaller players. Still, the brand’s careful rollout underscores how fraught the category remains.

Despite its name, Pleasing is not a sex company; it’s a lifestyle brand. When it launched in 2021, gender-neutral nail polish and face powders led the way. Sexual wellness came years later.

“We always knew it was a category we wanted to explore, but also one that we wanted to take our time with,” Kerr-Dineen notes. She tells me that the brand’s vibrator and lube took longer to develop than any previous product, an intentional move in a space that affords little room for error.

Chipping away at the stigma around sex

When Pleasing first unveiled its sexual wellness line during the summer, it hosted a pop-up in SoHo. The first customer in line, 23-year-old Dayanara Ambrosi, waited three hours to get through the door.

At first, she was hesitant to tell her friends and family that she was waking up at 5:30 a.m. to stand in line for a sex toy. “I felt kind of strange saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going to a pop-up for a vibrator,’” she recalls. “But once I was there and saw how no one really cared, it shifted. It felt more empowering than awkward.”

In the centre of the room, a circle of vibrators sat on a podium, almost like iPhones in an Apple store. For nearly 10 minutes, the initial group of customers didn’t dare touch them. Only after an employee stated that the vibrators were functional and interactive did shoppers begin to explore.

Soon enough, Ms Ambrosi was posing for a photo holding two vibrators. “My mom would die if she ever saw these pics,” she joked with her friend before heading to the register.

Half a year later, Ms Ambrosi says her initial embarrassment about her purchase now feels distant.

Eventually, she posted the photo anyway. She told her parents. She showed her sister — and her sister’s boyfriend. The discomfort dissolved into something closer to pride. That tonal shift mattered. Even Ms Ambrosi’s boyfriend, initially confused about why she would line up in public for an item normally shoved underneath the bed, came around.

“He realised it wasn’t weird,” she says. “It’s just life. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

For decades, that shame has shaped not just private conversations, but public policy, determining which companies get funded, which products can be advertised and which forms of education, if any, are deemed acceptable. Cultural figures can chip away at that stigma, but lasting change will require banks, regulators, retailers and tech platforms to treat sexual wellness not as a vice like gambling or alcohol, but as a basic component of health.

The radical act is no longer simply buying a vibrator. It’s refusing to treat desire as something shameful in the first place.