Ev’Yan’s (@evyan.whitney) Story

First, I want to first express the grief I feel that I have to write this callout. When I met and began working with Amy and Nick, I was so hopeful and optimistic that ours would be a friendship that was healthy, supportive, and transparent. After a little more than a year of engaging and working with them, it’s become very clear to me that they are not who they claim themselves to be and now I feel a deep sense of fear and anxiety whenever I think about them because of the harm they’ve caused me.

This is my story.

My relationship with Amy and Nick of Wild Flower Sex started in 2018. I had noticed that Wild Flower was coming up a lot with my friends and colleagues, and I was really intrigued by what they were doing and how they were trying to forge their way as a non-binary digital sex shop that centered pleasure, inclusivity, and education. So, I reached out in March 2018 saying that I appreciated their work and would love to connect.

The response I got back felt like I was being brushed off. As such, I didn’t reach back out again.

Then, in May 2018, Amy reached out to me via email and told me they were interested in my participation in an event they were hosting for WF’s one year anniversary celebration happening in Brooklyn that July. When Amy reached out, I don’t think they remembered that we had had an exchange prior to this, so I reminded them that we had spoken, that I was very familiar with their work, and that I was interested in speaking. When I asked for more information — specifically whether or not travel and lodging would be covered as I was traveling from the west coast — Amy let me know that they only had a budget of $300 for each speaker and couldn’t accommodate my travel. I was so excited about speaking at this event (and the prospect of coming to New York for the first time) that I asked if there was any way we could work something out. Amy then offered to have me stay at their apartment to help with my lodging costs, and we struck a deal where they would pay for my flight if I agreed to do their event for free. We spoke on the phone, got everything all sorted out, and I came to New York in July for their event.

I ended up getting an Airbnb for most of my stay during my visit to New York but the last couple of nights, I stayed with Amy and their partner Nick in Brooklyn. (This was a day or two after I spoke at their anniversary party.) As I was prepping to come to their place, Amy and I texted back and forth, and they mentioned that they and Nick would like to treat me to an exclusive tour of the Google headquarters in Manhattan. At the time, Nick was a technical operations manager at Google and could get us a day pass to visit the headquarters. At their apartment before we went on the tour is when Amy first mentioned their issues with Unbound Babes, a sex toy company and shop that is WF’s competitor. Amy proceeded to make the following allegations to me about Unbound:

That Unbound received $2mil+ dollars in funding from Peter Thiels who is a right-wing conservative who donated a large sum of money in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. I was also told that Peter Thiels was anti-woman, anti-choice, homophobic, and the sole reason why Gawker was taken out of publication. That Unbound has willingly kept this information from the public and have evaded Amy’s attempts to hold them accountable, and that the one potential reason Polly (the CEO and co-founder of Unbound) was able to evade that accountability is because Polly was using her previous cancer diagnosis as a sympathy card to keep folks from critiquing. That as Amy was being vocal about Unbound on their Instagram and Facebook, Amy received a cease and desist letter from Unbound, telling them that if they continued to speak about what they knew, Amy would be sued. That Amy is frustrated that they have been silenced and wishes Unbound would be exposed for who they really were.

All of these allegations were news to me. I of course had heard of Unbound Babes. I had previously done a promotional campaign for them way back in 2015 when they first started as a subscription box service, and since then, I had seen them come up a lot in conversations I was having with my own clients and colleagues about their favorite sex shop. But I didn’t know anything about these allegations before Amy told me, and I was honestly shaken by this news.

At the time, I had no reason to mistrust Amy, so I took them at their word.

Later, when Amy and I met up with Nick at the Google Headquarters, we continued to talk about this over lunch and Nick also chimed in with this disgust and hatred of Unbound. The one thing that I remembered most from these conversations was how much they stressed how much power Peter Thiels had — that he had the power to literally ruin people’s businesses and lives and therefore, everyone knew about Unbound’s funding but were too afraid to say anything. Amy and Nick were terrified that if they spoke up and against that C&D, Wild Flower would be shut down. But, they continued to stress that more people needed to be told about this and that we needed to make sure that we took Unbound down.

While it was never explicitly stated or requested by Amy or Nick that I take on the responsibility of sharing that news with my own friends and peers, hearing Amy and Nick complain about how hard it was for them, a relatively new indie sex toy business, to make it on their own without the mass support of venture capitalists and to hear them express how much integrity and intentionality they were bringing into their business (while also hearing them say that they would speak up about Unbound if they could, they just couldn’t because of the C&D), I chose to take up the fight. After I got back from New York, I started telling everyone I knew what Amy told me about the funding, about Peter Thiels, about the C&D, about how Unbound was evading accountability — all of it. I did this not just to inform people of what was going on, but also in support of WF. Amy had even said to me after I mentioned I was afraid of the backlash I’d receive if I went public with what I knew, “So many people talk to me about how shitty they are. I feel like it’s [sic] take one person to start it and they’re [sic] be a wave.”

Every time I told someone knew about what Amy told me about Unbound, I felt like I was doing right by Wild Flower, and each time I told Amy that I had told another person, there were profuse thank yous and lots of gratitude for putting myself out there.

Over the course of the next year, I proceeded to collaborate and offer support to Amy and Wild Flower Sex in the following ways:

Featured and promoted Amy on an episode on my podcast where I promoted WF and offered my listeners/followers a special discount on their purchase Supported and helped @wildflowersex’s Instagram account be reinstated after being falsely removed in January 2019 Recommended my private clients to patronize WF’s sex shop Promoted their sex shop on my Instagram feed and newsletter, including their campaign in January 2019 for their Love Yourself t-shirts for which I was paid just $75

Throughout my continued support, there were only two times that I can recall that Amy promoted me and my work as a sexuality educator on their growing platform that did not directly result in it benefitting them, and one of those times I explicitly asked that they promote a digital course I had just came out with. It was just this year that I started to question my relationship with Amy and WF; whether they really supported me and my work or if they were purely interested in maintaining a relationship with me because I was gladly doing their dirty work of exposing Unbound and had also been a black face/body they could put on their Instagram to prove their intersectionality, diversity, and inclusiveness. I started to wonder if our relationship was genuine or if I was being used. I also began to realize that even though I had done a lot of promotion and support for them, it was never reciprocated. After I had done the Love Yourself campaign I rarely heard from Amy, save for an occasional response to one of my posts on Instagram.

Fast forward to May 2019 where I returned to New York for an event that was created to bring awareness to and start a conversation about HSDD (hypoactive sexual desire disorder). I had been invited to attend this event because I had just signed on as an influencer for one of their campaigns. Because I am still working with this particular brand, I won’t be mentioning them by name out of respect for our professional working relationship. But I do want to mention in the spirit of transparency that there are two separate campaigns involved with this brand—one that is strictly about promoting and discussing a new drug to address HSDD, and another that is simply about bringing awareness to the fluctuations of sexual desire that can happen throughout our lives and the importance of releasing the stigma about it. As an influencer with this brand, I am apart of the latter campaign and that campaign has no ties to the drug itself (legally, I’m not even allowed to mention it by name). It’s just about bringing awareness to HSDD which is something I’ve not been diagnosed with but I have had my own fluctuations of my own sexual desire throughout my life.

A day after the event, after I had published a series of stories on Instagram about my experience at the event, I received a DM from Nick (Amy’s partner). For context, I had not spoken to or had any contact with Nick since I had lunch with them at the Google Headquarters in July 2018, so receiving this message from them was surprising, to say the least. Their message was brisk and to the point: “Hey it’s Nick. Heads up, [pharmaceutical company] is a super evil company.” Nick went on to tell me more information about this company and essentially that, by proxy, I am doing something bad by working with them. I didn’t know how to respond to this. While at first glance it would appear that Nick was giving me a friendly “heads up”, being that I hadn’t spoken to Nick in a year (or Amy in a few months) and the fact that they immediately pounced on my Instagram story about the event made me feel like they were passive aggressively judging my decision to work with them. I completely understand being concerned about my choice to work on a campaign with ties to a pharmaceutical company and I had my own concerns as well. What bothered me was that Nick’s message didn’t come off as concern, it came off as judgmental.

I was also insulted that either of them would think that before deciding to work on a campaign with this company that I wouldn’t have done my research, when in fact, I was very intentional about this decision and even had my manager on the phone with the creative team four separate times to ensure that our collaboration would be aligned within my ethics and values.

It would have been totally different if Amy or Nick had approached me with more consideration and rather than talk at me with facts about this brand, they asked me explicitly why it was I chose to work on this campaign. If they had, I would’ve given them information and answered any questions they had so that they knew I was considering all angles of this and felt confident that I could participate without going against my integrity. Instead, I felt like I was being reprimanded and treated as though I made this decision without thinking.

The other question that I kept asking myself when I received this message: Why have you made it any of your business who I choose to work with, and what gives you the right to judge me for working with an “evil company” when, as of this writing, Nick still works for a tech giant, Google, (which has more than its fair share of unethical business practices)?

I felt like I was being asked to justify my decision to work with this brand to someone who only seemed to care about me when they wanted something. In that moment, as I was feeling disrespected and untrusted, it became really clear to me that our relationship had never been reciprocal and because of that, I didn’t own them an explanation for my decision.

I didn’t really know how to process this information or what to do. I chose not to respond to Nick’s messages right away and instead waited until I could center myself for an intentional response. In the meantime, while I waited, I chose to unfollow WF’s Instagram account and unsubscribe from their newsletter. Shortly after, I received a direct message WF saying:

“Hey. We saw that you unsubscribes [sic] from our mailing list and unfollowed us. We didn’t mean to offend you — we just wanted to help inform you if you weren’t aware. We value you as a friend and an amazing sexual resource. Let us know if you want to chat.”

I was admittedly happy that I heard back from them and to have received such a thoughtful response, and I was ready to engage in a dialogue with them to reassure them that I had made my decision to work in this campaign from a place of total awareness and understanding of what I was getting into. But before that, I wanted to address what they had said at the end about valuing me as a friend and sexual resource because the fact that I had been feeling unsupported by them was really bothering me. So first, I told them why I unsubscribed/unfollowed (“I’m just trying to have more poc/black faces on my feed and I was getting too much email in my inbox. I didn’t mean any offense.”) and then I ended it with: “I will say it’s nice to know you value me as a friend; I don’t hear from you guys that often and haven’t always felt that love, so thanks for saying so.”

Shortly after I sent it, Instagram let me know that the message had been “seen” by Amy and/or Nick. I waited for a response so that we could continue to talk about what happened, but I never heard from either of them again. A few weeks later, I happened to see that they had unfollowed me on Instagram too, so I just took that to mean that they were done with my friendship. Honestly, what it felt like was that because I wasn’t willing to grovel at their feet for my decision to unfollow them or continue to work with a company they deemed “evil”, they threw me away.

I literally felt like they had used me and discarded me when I could be of no more use to them.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I came back to New York to speak on a panel about the censorship those in the sexuality industry face on social media. After the panel ended, one of the organizers of the panel took me aside and l told me that they had received a very troubling message from someone that they had asked to sponsor the event. After they approached this company and suggested they become a sponsor, the company responded and said that due to the fact that “several of the panelists had recently done paid advertising for companies we consider to be ethically compromised” they didn’t “want [their] brand associated with these individuals.” When the panel organizer asked for more information and why, the company wrote back and named me specifically and said that, “Ev’Yan recently promoted a large pharmaceutical company”. Two other individuals were mentioned by name, one of those being Ashleigh (@ashelighchubbybunny).

This company who deemed us as being “ethically compromised” is Wild Flower Sex.

I was deeply bothered by this and disappointed that folks who were once considered friends would intentionally cause me to lose a job, harm an existing business relationship, and interfere with potential future opportunities because of my decision to work on a particular campaign. I now worry if my other jobs or paid opportunities are going to be jeopardized because the sexuality education and industry are very small, so the chances of me and WF crossing paths again are not a matter of if but when. What was most interesting about this is while Amy was naming me as being “ethically compromised” to folks who hired me to speak, WF was still using my image to promote their brand on their Instagram feed. It was only after my manager reached out to Amy and Nick the day after the panel and demanded they discontinue using my image that the photo was taken down.

I do not understand why I am the target of WF’s anger about my choice to work on this particular campaign. Why aren’t they directing that anger at this pharmaceutical company? Don’t they understand how incredibly hard it is to make a decent living in the sexuality education industry? Perhaps they don’t as two able-bodied, femme- and masculine-presenting white folks with a lot of resources and privilege.

WF has no right to pass judgment on me for trying to make an honest living doing the work that I do, especially when, in the two times I’ve worked for them, my compensation from them was way lower than what I am worth. As part of my efforts to live a life where I am paid what I’m worth, I have made it my mission to give some of the funds I receive for my work back to black femmes. In the spirit of transparency, I have donated more than $7700 to underfunded black trans organizations in 2019 alone, and the reason I’ve been able to donate as much as I have has to do with the fact that I am being paid adequately for my labor. I wonder how much money WF has donated to black femmes this year?

I view Wild Flower Sex as highly hypocritical for deeming me as being ethically compromised while their co-founder, Nick, continues to work at Google, one of the largest and most unethical companies in the world — something that I don’t know if they’ve been fully transparent with their own community about. It’s puzzling that two people who seem to position themselves as being on the top of the moral high ground can have such cognitive dissonance about their complex and complicated relationship to capitalism.

I have felt used, exploited, and manipulated by Wild Flower Sex. I feel that they used me as a pawn to help take down their competition with Unbound and did it in such a way where they would not have their hands dirtied. (And consequently, I have learned after a personal conversation with Polly and her team that much of what Amy relayed to me last year was absolutely false.) I feel that they used me as an object as a Black queer femme to give themselves clout and validate themselves as intersectional and inclusive.

If they were so intersectional, wouldn’t they consider the nuances and complexities of a Black femme trying to get paid for their labor within capitalism?

For a platform that claims to be so inclusive, Amy and Nick (two white, cis-passing people) take up a lot of space within their own social media. I have yet to see any posts from them highlighting other sexuality educators of color and their expertise on their platform — unless it’s to use their image on WF’s Instagram feed as objects to prove their diversity. As a Black femme who was once featured on WF’s Instagram feed, it has felt more so connected to their brand and company and not my own personhood or humanity. When I look back on our friendship, I realize that I’ve never felt seen by them as a human, and that was clear the moment they discarded me when I called into question their value and support of me. Ours was a relationship that was one-sided and with ulterior motives.

I cannot tell you how to spend your money or which companies to support. However, I ask that folks who follow or buy from Wild Flower Sex examine their decision to support a company that shows such little respect or regard for Black femmes specifically, and only cares about us when they can use us as objects to prove their intersectionality or as pawns to help them take down their competition. I also ask that folks question the ethics of a company that blacklists Black femmes for their decision to make living wages in an industry that is still working hard to be taken seriously and be respected.