Inside Pakistan's Thriving Black Market for Dildos, Butt Plugs
It's illegal but online sellers say Pakistanis across the country turn to them to buy sex toys, some of which are... made in Pakistan.

By
Rimal Farrukh
ISLAMABAD, PK
24 May 2021, 8:11am
Ehtisham Qamar was in college when he decided to set up a small business with his friends manufacturing and exporting steel butt plugs from his hometown in Sialkot, Pakistan.
“We arrived in this industry relatively early and quickly started making good money,” Qamar told VICE World News.
“We never could have imagined that this type of work could take place in Sialkot,” the business owner said. “We used to do this work very secretively. If you ask most manufacturers they say they produce surgical products.”
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In Pakistan, conversations on sex are taboo, and manufacturing and selling toys for sexual pleasure is illegal. Local authorities regulate the sex toy industry in Pakistan through the country’s old colonial-era laws, which prohibit “
obscene material and objects.”
Qamar says he has since stopped manufacturing and selling sex toys, adding he was young when he set the business up nine years ago and no longer wants to be part of the industry.
Sialkot, the city where most sex toy manufacturing takes place, is known to produce and export steel surgical instruments and is the world’s leading manufacturer of leather footballs.
It is that leather and steel production expertise that has apparently
paved the way for Pakistan to become, ironically, an underground exporter and online seller of steel sex toys and leather fetish gear to consumers in the U.S., Australia and the UK.
News
GAVIN BUTLER
05.20.21
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgxyqw/sex-crazed-cicadas-psychedelic-orgies-fungus
Under Pakistan’s obscene objects law, buying, selling, advertising or manufacturing of sex toys is punishable by a fine and a jail term of three months or more.
However, the law does not seem to be a deterrent for importers, exporters, or local suppliers of sex toys, who skip physical stores and completely rely on online sales in Pakistan.
“This industry is so huge that you can pay off a year’s worth of debt from your profit
. It is like bitcoin or cryptocurrency,” said Karachi-based sex toy supplier Nasir Qureshi, who requested anonymity to protect themselves from legal repercussions.
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Qureshi receives more than 100 local orders a month. They didn’t share their revenue, but based on prices, Qureshi could earn profits that are 5-10 times the average monthly income in Pakistan. “There is a problem in selling locally. Due to Pakistan's internet policies we aren't allowed to post ads on Google or Facebook,” Qureshi added.
But that doesn’t stop some individual sellers in Pakistan from selling sex toys through social media sites. One of the more popular accounts has about 9,000 followers on Instagram with unboxing videos of sex toys that are sold for $100 to $300 - apparently in Islamabad - with a prominent note in the videos that has a contact number and business name for interested
buyers. The account turned down a VICE World News interview request.
It's illegal but online sellers say Pakistanis across the country turn to them to buy sex toys, some of which are... made in Pakistan.
www.vice.com
Asia | From the land of the pure
Inside Pakistan’s sex-toy industry
Did I say that out loud? I meant makers of leather and metal goods
Jul 1st 2017
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INSIDE a small, gloomy factory in a provincial city in Pakistan, two young men huddle over a grinding wheel. They believe they are making surgical instruments. But like many of the small, local firms manufacturing steel and leather goods for export, their employer has a new sideline. The nine-inch steel tubes whose tips the men are diligently smoothing are, in fact, dildos. “It’s just another piece of metal for them,” says the firm’s owner, who picks one up to show how his worldlier customers—all of them abroad—can easily grip the gleaming device.
This surreptitious set-up is inevitable. That a country as conservative as Pakistan exports anal beads, gimp masks and padlockable penis cages, among other kinky wares, would shock locals as much as the Westerners whose hands (and other parts) the finished products end up in. Fearing the response of religious hardliners, many of the companies involved do not advertise their wares on their own websites. Instead, they list the saucy stuff through Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant that acts as a middleman for many businesses in the developing world. Some officials demand bribes to allow the exports to flow. Others are simply unaware of the potential for mischief in, for example, a Wartenberg Pinwheel—a spiked disc that can be run across the skin.
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Did I say that out loud? I meant makers of leather and metal goods
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