In fact, the sex toy site, Healthy and Active (which claims it sells more than 1 million items per year), says the South Beach zip code 33139 is its top-selling area in the United States. The folks compiling the data labeled Miami Beach's sexual proclivities "quite an achievement."
The best-selling item for discerning Beach residents? If you guessed something vanilla like one of those Sex and the City rabbit vibrators that people giggle about at bridal showers, you're way out of your depth. According to Healthy and Active, SoBe residents go straight for "ball stretchers."
"While ball stretchers topped the list of the products we shipped most frequently, the boxes going to South Beach are full of bondage gear and toys for anal play," the retailer says.
Sure, people buying sex toys online tend to feel uninhibited when it comes to testing new kinks anonymously via the web. A few areas, such as the suburbs outside Phoenix and Charlotte, are into "handcuffs," while people living in Wake Forest, North Carolina (just outside Raleigh), are simply into "large dildos." (We wish the website elaborated more on these details.) But "ball stretchers," which clamp down on the, ahem, testicular area, seem to be in a bondage class all their own.
It's worth noting this isn't the first time someone has brought up this subject: In 2011, Amazon named Miami the nation's "sexist" city after the website tallied the number of romance novels, Barry White albums, and adult toys sold in each major city.
Still, the results appear to have flabbergasted the website's own analysts, who actually emailed New Times to ask us why we thought the beach town is so into sex gear. (No idea why we seem
"While I was doing some research for one of my clients, a large online sexual health retailer, I noticed that our most shipped-to zip code in the U.S. was
At best, we have a few guesses: Most obvious is that sex is sort of South Beach's thing. As long as you can afford to live there, you can be whoever you want — straight, gay, bi, poly, pansexual, whatever. We're cool with it. Plus, it's a neighborhood where lots of homeowners either vacation or live part time, so it stands to reason that part-time residents might pair their geographic getaway with some added sexual adventures. Either that or rich, married CEOs are just flying here to cheat with dominatrixes.
Also, Miami also regularly ranks as one of the most stressed-out places in the nation. Sure, people get into bondage for tons of valid reasons, but there's certainly a subset of the population who can't really decompress unless they're screaming the alphabet
How else are you supposed to forget that the $300,000 condo you just bought floods twice a year?