The stigma is mostly something we agree to

I was nineteen the first time I told someone I wanted to engineer pleasure products for a living.

I told my friends first, freshman year, on campus. They were supportive in the way friends are when you say something that surprises them but tracks. Of course. That makes sense for you. Then a softer, more uncertain thing underneath it: but is that, like, a career? I understood the question. I wasn't sure either.

Then I got the job at Adam & Eve, and they realized I was serious. The uncertainty went away. Three years later, those same friends still come to me with questions about their bodies and their relationships, and the conversations have only gotten more honest, not less.

That has, more or less, been the pattern for every person I've told.

I was nervous to tell my parents. Both of them went to school for engineering, and I had this whole defense prepared — the research gaps in women's health, the way most products in this category were designed by men until very recently, the fact that the engineering itself was solvable and being skipped. I gave them the speech. They listened. They were curious, then quiet, then on board.

A few weeks later, my dad asked ChatGPT for a clean way to describe what I wanted to do. It came back with something like "engineer adult novelty products for women's sexual health" — a sentence diplomatic enough to use in conversation with his coworkers, formal enough to sit in a greeting card. He started telling people that's what I was doing. He'd mention it casually, and when anyone asked about me, he had his line ready. She knows what she wants to do. I think about that ChatGPT translation a lot. It was a small act of love that doubled as a kind of code-switching lesson: this work is more legible than people think; it just needs the right vocabulary in the room.

My grandparents took it well too. They had their own private reactions, I'm sure. But to my face, every one of them has been supportive.

By now I've told this to a lot of people. Strangers at parties. Boyfriend's parents. Professors. Older relatives. Religious ones, not-religious ones, engineers, retail customers, recruiters. And I've kept waiting for the bad reaction, the one that was supposed to teach me a lesson about what I'd chosen.

It hasn't come.

This is the part of the story I didn't expect to be writing.

How people actually respond

Most reactions follow a predictable arc. There's a half-second of visible processing — I can see it on people's faces, especially with the older demographic. They're deciding whether to shut the conversation down. Then I finish my sentence. I say it's about women's sexual health. I mention how little research has been done. I mention that most products in this space were designed without the people who use them in the room. And whatever was tightening in their face relaxes. They become curious. Sometimes they ask follow-ups. Sometimes they just nod and let it sit. Both are fine.

I've gotten very good at calibrating my opening sentence to the audience. For new friends my age, it's I want to engineer sex toys. For my boyfriend's parents, it's women's sexual health and adult novelty products. For his grandparents and older religious relatives, it becomes women's health — just women's health, full stop. That's not a lie. It's the most general true version of what I'm doing, and it's the version that keeps the conversation open instead of closing it.

There's one professor at UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Fowler, who I'll always be grateful to. I told him what I wanted to do, half-bracing for him to deflect. He asked follow-up questions instead. He pointed me toward other faculty doing adjacent research. He never once treated the topic as outside the scope of an engineering conversation. I was waiting for the professor who'd shut it down on the grounds that it wasn't "school appropriate." That professor never showed up.

What I've come to think

Here's what I've come to think after three years of this.

The stigma is real. I'm not pretending it isn't. There is fear in it, and the fear is what keeps it going.

But the stigma is also, in a strange way, cooperative. It exists because people on both ends of the conversation agree, silently, to keep the conversation closed. The person who wants to talk doesn't, because they're afraid of the reaction. The person who would have listened doesn't get to, because the topic never came up. Everyone agrees that this is something we don't discuss, and so we don't discuss it, and the cycle reinforces itself.

The interesting thing is what happens when one person stops agreeing. When you talk about this work the way you'd talk about any other work — direct, unembarrassed, technically curious — most people meet you there. They're relieved, sometimes. They didn't know they were allowed to be curious. They didn't know the conversation could just be a conversation.

This pattern matters because the stigma has real costs. It costs research funding, because nobody wants to publish on a topic their grant committee will joke about. It costs engineering talent, because people self-select out of a field they're embarrassed to put on a resume. It costs customers, who go home with the cheapest discreet option because they didn't want to look at the higher shelves long enough to ask a question. It costs the people who don't even know they're allowed to ask — the woman who's never had an orgasm at sixty-eight, the woman whose hormones have shifted and who doesn't know what to do about it, the woman who reads three product descriptions online and gives up because nobody talks about what these products actually feel like to use.

People don't read reviews in this category the way they read reviews for other products. They don't ask friends. They don't post. They just buy the smallest, cheapest, most discreet thing and hope. They get some pleasure out of it, but not the pleasure they deserve.

The stigma did that. The silence is what makes the engineering so easy to skip.

What I want you to know

Here is what I want the person reading this to know.

The stigma is mostly something we agree to. Some of it is structural — religion, family, generation, geography — all real, all heavy. But a surprising amount of it lives in the half-second before someone speaks. It lives in the assumption that the other person can't handle the conversation. In my experience, people can handle the conversation, almost always, if you open it without flinching.

I am not the bravest person I know. I'm not crusading. I just talk about my work the way an engineer talks about her work. The stigma starts to dissolve when you do that, because the stigma was never as strong as it seemed. It survives on the assumption that we'll all keep agreeing to it.

I am, increasingly, not agreeing to it. And I'd recommend it.