Sex toy injuries surged after ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ was published

The number of Americans requiring emergency room care for injuries involving sex toys has approximately doubled since 2007, according to data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Much of that increase happened in 2012 and 2013, following the release of the wildly popular erotic novels in the Fifty Shades of Grey series. And the overwhelming majority of these injuries -- 83 percent -- require "foreign body removals."

These injuries all involved what we'd think of as sex toys -- the full range you might imagine, and a few you might not. (Follow to the CPSC data and dig into product code 1610 for the full R-rated descriptions.)The figures are estimates from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which is a nationally representative annual survey of hospital emergency room data, with an emphasis on injuries involving consumer products. Patient information is completely anonymized to protect privacy. According to the CPSC, it collects this data "to measure the number of injuries associated with the thousands of different consumer products in the marketplace."

The CPSC has tracked ER visits related to "massage devices and vibrators" going back to 1991. Until the early 2000s, there were a small number of these injuries each year -- hence, the lighter shaded bars in the chart above represent low-confidence estimates. But around 2003, the number of these injuries surpassed the agency's significance threshold, giving a greater degree of confidence in the numbers for the years after 2004.

In analyzing the data, I omitted incidents involving plain old run-of-the mill massage devices -- primarily people getting hurt by massage chairs at the mall, people burning themselves on heated massagers at home, and little kids putting back-scratchers in their mouths and jumping off furniture, injuring themselves in the process. These accounted for about 20 percent of the records in this product category.

The agency shares the demographics of this group of patients. The median sex toy injury victim is a middle-aged man -- 58 percent of the patients are male, and the median age among this group is 44. The women skew younger, with a median age of 30. The oldest man in the dataset is 85, while the oldest women is 67.

Most of the injuries aren't terribly severe, although some are. Seventy one percent of patients are treated and released, while 25 percent require hospitalization or transfer to a different facility. A handful end up refusing treatment. Some good news: none of the cases required assistance from the fire department, and there were zero deaths recorded.