Trinidad therapist happy with lifted ban on sex toys

 (Trinidad Guardian) Sex ther­a­pist Giri­raj “Dr Raj” Ram­nanan says a High Court rul­ing that pre­vents Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion of­fi­cers from ban­ning the im­por­ta­tion of sex toys has the abil­i­ty to change the na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion on sex.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia short­ly af­ter Jus­tice Ricky Rahim ruled that Cus­toms of­fi­cers ban­ning sex toys is un­law­ful, Ram­nanan said he be­lieves cit­i­zens will al­so be less prone to in­volv­ing in crim­i­nal be­hav­iour, once they are free to ful­fil their per­son­al fan­tasies us­ing sex toys.

“I am hop­ing it changes in the pos­i­tive be­cause there are a lot of is­sues that need to be ad­dressed if a per­son wants to buy a doll for in­stance and spend time with that doll at home, do­ing what­ev­er he or she wants to do with the doll, don’t you think that takes away from the neg­a­tiv­i­ty in so­ci­ety where that per­son could go out, have an al­co­holic bev­er­age and look to do some­thing that is a crim­i­nal act?” Ram­nanan asked.

Ram­nanan has long been a pub­lic ad­vo­cate for sex ed­u­ca­tion. He sells sex toys and has of­ten had his im­ports seized by Cus­toms of­fi­cers. In 2019, he won a case against the Di­vi­sion and the of­fi­cers were or­dered to re­turn a box of seized items to him.

Ram­nanan said he hopes this judge­ment can be a cat­a­lyst for change in the na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion.

“Peo­ple will start think­ing along dif­fer­ent lines, they will un­der­stand it is a per­son­al choice when you de­cide to buy an item and it is all up to the in­di­vid­ual, it should be very open, where a per­son has the choice, they can go out and buy what­ev­er they want for their sat­is­fac­tion and this is not harm­ing any­one, you are not forc­ing any­one to do any­thing il­le­gal, you are not do­ing it to an­oth­er per­son, you are do­ing it to your­self with some­thing you are com­fort­able with.”

But while he is en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to ex­per­i­ment with this new­found free­dom, Ram­nanan is al­so urg­ing cau­tion as he says con­sumers should be very par­tic­u­lar about what type of sex toys they buy.

“Of the nov­el­ties that are on the mar­ket right now, you’ve got to buy the brand­ed prod­ucts, the ones that are re­al­ly good be­cause these are things are in­ti­mate items that go in­to your body or on top of your body or wher­ev­er you want it- you don’t want to buy some­thing that is cheap or made cheap­ly,” he said.

He said those who are in­ter­est­ed in pur­chas­ing sex toys for the first time should re­search their op­tions be­fore their buy.