Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Since the ar­rival of COVID-19 on our shores, there has been a steady rise in the sales of sex toys lo­cal­ly, cul­mi­nat­ing in a mas­sive cli­max last week, sex ther­a­pist Giri­raj “Dr Raj” Ram­nanan has re­vealed.

Ram­nanan said recharge­able vi­bra­tors, pe­nis pumps, and toys that could be en­joyed by cou­ples have been the top sell­ers.

“What I have no­ticed be­cause of this virus and is that a lot of peo­ple have to be by them­selves and of course peo­ple have their needs and wants when it comes to their sex­u­al health,” Ram­nanan said.

But be­cause in this coun­try a “deputy” is con­sid­ered es­sen­tial as per the ca­lyp­so by Seadley “Pen­guin” Joseph, Ram­nanan said things were af­fect­ed when this coun­try record­ed its first pos­i­tive COVID-19 case.

“Re­mem­ber a lot of Trinida­di­ans have what you call a deputy or they have ex­tra sex­u­al ac­tiv­i­ties tak­ing place, for ex­am­ple, vis­it­ing hous­es of ill-re­pute all that has start­ed to cut down about three weeks ago,” Ram­nanan said.

“Peo­ple don’t want to in­ter­act so the on­ly way that they could re­al­ly be sat­is­fied in what­ev­er ex­ploits they may have is to self in­dulge which is mas­tur­ba­tion or in­dulge with their part­ner at home in a par­tic­u­lar way that may spice things up,” he said.

This has re­sult­ed in an in­crease in sales he said.

“So over the last two weeks, there was a steady in­crease in sales with peo­ple com­ing to buy all their en­hancers and their toys and some who are reg­u­lars in buy­ing toys they would look for some­thing new, some­thing more ex­cit­ing,” Ram­nanan said.

“Sales in­creased about 10 to 20 per cent in the first week of this thing hap­pen­ing and with­in the last week there was a tremen­dous spike of about a hun­dred per cent,” he said.

“That goes to show that peo­ple want to take care of their sex­u­al health they want to make sure that they en­joy them­selves while be­ing un­der this lock­down and it is noth­ing to be frowned up­on be­cause sex­u­al health is very im­por­tant to in­di­vid­u­als both psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly,” Ram­nanan said.

Ram­nanan said he be­lieves the call for peo­ple to stay home will help cou­ples cur­rent­ly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing prob­lems in their re­la­tion­ship.

“You have in­di­vid­u­als who will have to spend a lit­tle more time with their part­ner this is go­ing to strength­en a lot of re­la­tion­ships this is go­ing to help per­sons to over­come the lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ties that they may have had in the past with their part­ner in terms of sex­u­al com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and what­not,” he said.

He said the sales fig­ures showed that.

“There were very lit­tle self­ish toys be­ing sold there were more toys that part­ners could work with,” he said.

Ram­nanan said while he per­son­al­ly has no is­sue with stay­ing home he be­lieves he of­fers an “es­sen­tial ser­vice” for hun­dreds.

“I agree with the shut­down I’m just say­ing that some­thing could have been done be­cause of the clients that we have out there who need their sex­u­al health. I am hap­py to stay at home and iso­late my­self and that’s fine be­cause I am abid­ing by the law but I al­so have to think about my clients that I know that are in the hun­dreds who have a prob­lem,” he said.

“It’s like a Catch 22, damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Ram­nanan said.

Ram­nanan said he has been do­ing con­sul­ta­tions via tele­phone and Skype.

He said his clin­ics stepped up their sani­ti­sa­tion mea­sures to help curb the spread of COVID-19.

“Two weeks ago we were san­i­tiz­ing our clin­ics, we were mak­ing sure that every client that came in were sani­tised, we use al­co­hol-based wipes, even the mon­ey hand­ed to us we sprayed go­ing in­to the draw and sprayed com­ing out of the draw so we did a lot of in­ter­nal sani­tis­ing be­cause of the na­ture of the busi­ness al­so be­cause we deal with health, whether it is sex­u­al health or oth­er health we deal with health. So we took it up­on our­selves to be re­spon­si­ble,” he said.