HER NIGHTSTAND DRAWER, LITERALLY EVERYWHERE (The Daily Whatever Press) — The Atlantic has found the reason so many smart, funny, accomplished women are still single—and it charges via USB.
Sarah Hepola is the author of Blackout and a new memoir, The Only Thing There Is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves, which came out September 29, 2026. This week she published an essay arguing that the golden age of sex toys may be keeping women “cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification.” Her proof is the rabbit, the same buzzing icon Charlotte York got so attached to on Sex and the City that she stopped leaving her apartment. Twenty-five years later, Hepola reports, the rabbit has gone sleek and space-age, with charging cables, multiple speeds, safety locks, and silencers.
Her worry is that vibrators got too good. When the dates were bad and the men weren’t quite right, she could go home, open the nightstand, and skip the part where she lowers her standards. And she says this as if… that’s a bad thing?
My god. Let women have their pleasure and shut the fuck up, Sarah.
I want to give Hepola credit, because she supplied the evidence against her own thesis. She says outright that vibrators didn’t keep her from dating; she dated a ton. The problem, in her words, was a tough dating market and men who were not quite right. After a mediocre evening, it was simply easier to go home and take care of it herself.
The rabbit never spent 40 minutes explaining crypto to her. It never asked, three margaritas in, whether she’d “always been this intense.” It never mentioned his ex-wife so many times that his ex-wife became the third person at the table. It never ghosted her for 11 days and then texted “hey stranger” like a raccoon tapping on a sliding door. The rabbit did one job, did it well, and asked nothing in return except a charging cable. Somehow that makes the rabbit the problem.
That isn’t a crisis of self-gratification. That’s a performance review, and the men flunked it.
Hepola writes that the pop culture of the ’70s and ’80s taught women that pleasing a partner was good and pleasing yourself was embarrassing. Yes! I was there! GenX girls grew up on Cosmo cover lines promising 50 new ways to drive him wild and approximately zero ways to make sure he returned the favor. When Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in a New York deli in 1989, the punchline was that men couldn’t tell the difference, and the whole country laughed instead of asking why that was so relatable.
So it’s strange to watch a woman who lived through that diagnose it correctly and then deliver the same message with a 2026 upgrade. In the ’80s, wanting your own pleasure was embarrassing. Now it’s isolating, a symptom of a culture tilted too far toward the self. Same message, new vocabulary.
There’s a double standard folded inside it, too. When men pull back from relationships, we get a decade of hand-wringing about the male loneliness epidemic and how society let them down. When women pull back, it’s because we bought the wrong appliance and got greedy with it.
Girl, GenX women are not here for your nonsense.
Hepola lives in Dallas, which makes this next part extra delicious. In 2004, a Texas housewife was arrested for selling vibrators to two undercover police officers posing as a dysfunctional couple. Texas was one of a handful of states with laws against selling sex toys at all, laws that the documentary on the subject described as a backlash to the feminist movement.
Twenty-two years ago, her home state was sending cops undercover to stop women from buying these things. Today, one of the most prestigious magazines in America is worried we own too many.
So, progress?
Hepola closes her argument with a question: if you keep scratching a stubborn itch, do you ever deal with the reason you’re itching in the first place?
Sarah, honey, we know exactly why we’re itching.
Women have been naming the reason in group chats, therapy offices, and social media comment sections for years. The itch is men who want a partner to do the emotional labor of a wife without the inconvenience of treating her like one. It’s a dating market where “not quite right” is the high end of the inventory. The itch is midlife women realizing that a quiet house and a good book beat a loud man and a bad night.
But here’s my real fear about this essay. I’m raising two daughters. What I want them to learn, long before anybody hands them a magazine essay about the dangers of self-sufficiency, is that knowing your own body is a life skill, and a damn pleasurable one at that. A woman who knows how to give herself an orgasm is a woman who won’t drag a bad man home just to avoid an empty bed.
If that makes the dating pool smaller, the pool had a problem long before anyone plugged in a charger.
I’ll grant Hepola this much, because I write about this constantly: the longing for real partnership is real. Wanting someone to come home to isn’t weak or retrograde. Loneliness in midlife isn’t imaginary, and the ache she describes, of years piling up with nobody beside you, deserves to be taken seriously.
But guilt about the nightstand isn’t the cure. You don’t fix a famine by shaming people for owning a refrigerator.
Charlotte York left her apartment eventually. She went back out there, kept looking, and ended up with a man who adored her. The rabbit didn’t keep her inside.
It just taught her what to look for.
Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud
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Sarah, dear, let me tell you about the sort of man who could get me to consider leaving the vibrator uncharged. Maybe. No promises, but he would be OK with it in the drawer, so 🤷
This is going back twenty five years I was told how a friend at work knew her husband of twenty years was The One after a disastrous first marriage. When she made a drunken confession to him she had a thing for the guy on the Gorton's frozen fish box. Not him exactly, but a man wearing the yellow rain hat, jacket and boots...and nothing else. He didn't laugh at her. He did show up invited to her apartment one night wearing you guessed it the yellow rain hat, jacket and boots. And then proceeded to give her the best night of her life up to then. And twenty years later he still is. That guy. I want that guy who thinks I deserve a partner not someone to babysit.
Excellent! Delightful! You nailed it!
Thanks for being full of awesomeness, Dana!