Elizabeth Dell, the founder of the romance and intimacy app Amorus, didn’t expect friction over her “sextech” mixer at the upcoming Tech Week in San Francisco.
Dell hosted similar mixers at last year’s Tech Weeks in New York and Los Angeles—gatherings of industry professionals composed of individually organized events. Dell said she wanted to create a space at the gatherings for investors and entrepreneurs interested in the emerging world of sextech, or the technology surrounding sexual health and pleasure. (Think: STI screenings, sex education, and remote control vibrators.)
And according to Dell, the events last year went swimmingly; about 150 people attended the event in New York, and DotLA called her Los Angeles event “intimate, loud, and energetic,” noting that the number of attendees overwhelmed the small bar where the event was held.
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But last month, when the organizers sent out a list of the confirmed events for this year, Dell saw that hers were billed as “Healthtech Mixers.” The change in wording troubled her, she said, because the point of the mixers was to destigmatize the industry and give founders legitimacy and face time with investors.
“There has long been this incredible stigma—and one that is very gendered—around sexual wellness, around sexual health, [and] around that being a legitimate place for business and investment,” she told The Daily Beast.
“Products can’t magically appear in front of consumers, there has to be a whole chain behind them,” she added. “And a huge part of that is having a place in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, and that includes also having a place in our Tech Weeks.”
In emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, Dell asked organizers if they could change the name back to SexTech Mixers. A representative informed her that there was a compliance issue with having the word “sex” on the website, so they could either change the name or remove it entirely.
Dell asked for details about the compliance issue, but the representative declined to explain. Eventually, the two settled on calling the event a “RomanceTech Mixer.”
Frustrated, Dell took to LinkedIn to share her experience.
“Apparently #SexTech is too scary, even for TechWeek,” she wrote, in a post summarizing the incident with the Tech Week organizers. “So on the TechWeek website, the events are now RomanceTech Mixers.”
“To be clear, these are legal, legitimate businesses, many with VC and tech funding, distributed in the largest stores like Walmart, Sephora, and CVS,” she added. “And yet our options are to code-switch or be invisible.”
Dell’s post urged people to attend the Tech Week events and even posted the RSVP links in the comments. (The external RSVP page still bills the events as SexTech mixers.) But when she checked the website the next week, she said, the listings for all of her events had been taken down.
Dell asked the organizers about the change but got no response. As of Tuesday, the “RomanceTech” mixers are still not listed on the site. Representatives for Tech Week did not respond to a request for comment.
Dell said she can’t help but feel like she was punished for speaking up. And she is still frustrated by the event’s refusal to use the word “sex” in her event title, which she felt was an insult to the entire industry.
“There is no way to refuse to acknowledge a thing and not be creating a system of judgment around it, to not be saying, ‘We don’t want it here,’” she said.
“I’m not asking them to profile us, or put us front and center, or to say, ‘We love you so much,” she said. “We just want to be on the playing field. we just want to be part of the mix.”
