The owners of a Toronto-based sex toy shop made a bizarre discovery after opening two returned items that were sent back from a US naval base in Bahrain.
As CTV News reports, cofounder Grace Bennett recalled discovering two letters from the Pentagon, which effectively told her business to — in her words — “stop sending butt plugs to Bahrain.”
And while it may sound like the Pentagon was acting out of sexual shame, the issue instead stemmed from “pornographic materials or devices” not being “allowed into the Kingdom of Bahrain.”
Most puzzlingly of all, Bennett’s business, a sex toy store called Bonjibon, doesn’t even send its products to Bahrain due to local laws and regulations. She suspects somebody had forwarded the packages to Navy personnel stationed in Bahrain from abroad roughly a month apart.
“We didn’t even know it (the product) was going to Bahrain until it came back to us months later, and it just kind of unraveled this whole… hilarious moment,” she told CTV News.
“We got a huge kick out of it,” Bennett said. “I mean, we don’t judge, we want everyone to order whatever they want and we want everyone to feel confident and start shopping for whatever they want.”
“But, there is a juxtaposition of a military person in a foreign country ordering butt plugs and having no understanding that those items are illegal in the country that they’re in,” she added.
Bennett took issue with the letter’s accusatory tone, arguing that “this sounds like a you problem.”
“The call was coming from inside the house,” she added.
Whoever ordered the sex toys — and possibly arranged to have the packages forwarded to the Navy base in Bahrain — clearly didn’t follow the Pentagon’s Transportation Command, which provides the Department of Defense with air, land, and sea transportation. In its 2024 instructions specifically for Bahrain, it lists a number of “prohibited items,” including “pornographic material” such as “sex toys, handcuffs, nudity magazines, DVDs, etc.”
In a “Bahrain Moving Tips” leaflet, the Navy’s Naval Supply Systems Command advises that “no pornographic material” should be brought or shipped into the conservative Gulf nation. Alcohol, pork foodstuffs, poker chips, and any Israeli-made products are also on the list.
The leaflet also warns that “100 percent of all shipments are x-rayed by Bahrain customs” and that any confiscated items will be “destroyed.”
While these particular packages appear to have been in violation of local laws of a conservative Middle Eastern country, sex is a major taboo in the US military as well. Sexual violence remains a serious problem, and other topics like gender identity and sexuality remain major points of contention.
At the end of the day, Bennett was saddened that her customer (or customers) didn’t get what they had ordered.
“There’s many layers of hilarity to this that we can all just poke fun (at) and the situation is quite funny, while at the same time, I genuinely want everyone — I’m sad that they didn’t get their order,” she told CTV News.
More on sex toys: Google’s AI Caught Recommending Use of Sex Toys on Children
The post Pentagon Begs Shop to Stop Sending Butt Plugs to Military Personnel appeared first on Futurism.
