Our Philosophy

At Terrible Toyshop, we believe that inclusivity is the fabric that binds us together as human beings. In order to operate as an ethical and humane business, we endeavour to embed our values in all of our products, content, interactions and thinking. In saying that, we take a broad interpretation of inclusivity. Here, we outline the ways that this thinking impacts our operations.

Accessibility

We believe that everyone, irrespective of ability, should be able to enjoy our brand of awfulness. If you require an accommodation to use our products due to a disability, please contact us. Let us know how we can meet your need, and we will do our best to make it happen.

Although we can’t anticipate every possibility when we design a crazy new product, we are eager to learn, and we will use that knowledge to incorporate accessible design features into new and existing products. We have already delivered a number of custom orders to accommodate specialized requirements, and we continually think about how to make our stock products as accessible as possible to a wide audience.

Identities

Sex and Gender

As a sex toy store, sex and gender are always close to our thoughts. After a lot of consideration, we decided to make the entire organizational principle behind this website anatomical, not gendered. We work hard to avoid potentially exclusionary references to gender on sexed products (i.e., you don’t need to be a man to have a penis) and we take the extra step of editing manufacturer product descriptions for the third-party products that we carry.

The only exception to this policy is where we use relevant keywords for search engine optimization (SEO). We rely on organic search results to drive traffic to our website, so you may see some commonly searched gendered terms (like ‘femdom’ and ‘DDLG’) used as unobtrusively as possible in some of our product descriptions. We try to balance these references with a list of related (but usually not SEO-motivated) identities when we feel that pandering to Google is starting to wear us down.

Sexuality and BDSM

Terrible Toyshop is proudly kink positive, and we think there are at least some aspects of kink and BDSM that can appeal to virtually anyone with an open mind. Below, we outline some concepts we consider regularly when writing content and developing products for this business.

  • Risk & Consent: Most things in life involve some level of risk from a physical and/or emotional perspective, and you cannot consent to a risk you don't understand. Please practice Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK).
  • Kinks: After a few years in this game, we've heard it all, and we don't judge. That said, if you request a custom order, we reserve the right to assess your understanding of risks before we agree to indulge a request.
  • Experience: We all start somewhere, and trying new things is one of life's sweetest joys. That said, do your homework and practice your ass off when you're exploring risky and challenging new activities (RACK!).
  • Sexuality: Sexual preferences vary from person to person, and this is one area where we celebrate diversity. Whether you're homo-, hetero-, a-, pan-, or some other type of sexual, we're happy to service your needs. 😉
  • Monogamy & Polyamory: Some people like one partner; others prefer two or more; sometimes, the two types entwine. For practical purposes, we try to avoid exclusionary language presuming the reader is monogamous.

With respect to making our little corner of the universe as inclusive as possible, we recognize that sexuality and BDSM are far more complicated than we will ever presume to fully understand. Though both concepts can mean many things to different people, we do our best to tread the line between tantalizing our customers’ imagination while maintaining inclusive, responsible, and safety-conscious language.

Age, Body Types, Race, and Ethnicity

We believe that age, body types, race, and ethnicity should not be a barrier to enjoying and participating in all manner of fun. We do our best to keep the language around this website neutral with respect to these physical attributes and attempt to showcase diversity when opportunity knocks. In particular, we prioritize diversity in any illustrated character art we commission for the website and other branded materials. We highly encourage submissions of review photos and gallery contributions from everyone who wants to bare their skin on our wall of shame!

For the time being, our marketing budget only affords stock images (rather than our choice of diverse models) to keep our social media feed animated. We do our best to present a diverse representation of our audience in these DIY marketing materials, however, we are drawing from a decidedly non-diverse pool of pre-made images, so we are the first to admit that this effort often comes up short. We’re keeping our eyes open for ways to improve.

Living Wages

Terrible Toyshop products are wholly produced in and shipped from Toronto, Canada. As you may be aware, Toronto has among of the highest costs of living in all North American cities. In that context, it makes us sad that the legal minimum wage is so brutally low.

In recognition that socioeconomic factors are extremely exclusionary by nature, we do our part (small though it may be) by ensuring that anyone paid hourly by Terrible Toyshop is making a good cut more than the legal minimum. Terrible Toyshop is not a giant corporation with a gratuitous bonus pool, but we’re also not pursuing our modest profits at the expense of the terrible team that is making it all happen.

Abusive Behaviour

Niche sex toys are a highly reputation-based business and we work hard to deliver top-notch, transparent, and totally reasonable customer service. That said, having been through the ringer at least a few times (at the time of writing, we’ve shipped over 3,000 products worldwide!), we need to draw a line somewhere. As a general rule of thumb, we’ll disengage from customer interactions at about the same threshold of bullshit as a call centre agent at a bank would be authorized to hang up on someone.

Any emails containing personal insults, threats, and/or needless aggression will be promptly moved to the trash folder and potentially added to our spam blacklist if it persists. That said, we will 100% not be offended if you happen to overshare or need to tell us about legitimate issues with a product. As long as you’re not being a jerk, don’t be shy… we’ve heard it all. 😉

Did We Overlook Something?

This page is a collection of the ways in which inclusivity has been relevant to our business and decision making to date. If you spot an instance on this website where we failed to live up to this philosophy, or you would like to let us know about something else we should be thinking about, please feel welcome to open a conversation! You can reach us through our contact form, or send us an email to ballgagbear@terribletoyshop.com.

Everybody makes mistakes, and we’re certainly not perfect. We learn from life experience and try to continuously improve in every successive life choice. The bottom line is that we have established clear guidelines, they evolve as we have new experiences, and this document exists to remind us (and anyone who is interested) where our thinking stands today.