Hi! I’m Kit! I started The Toymaker Project as a place to think about technological empowerment with respect to sexuality, gender and pleasure. How can we make, hack or adapt technology to serve our wants and needs?
I started out doing sex blogging and making hilarious sex toys, realized I’d love to manufacture a sex toy, discovered that crowdfunding it would be impossible on most extant platforms, and launched a startup, which began a quest that ended up with my falling in love with the yak I was shaving. I realized that my career goals are really much broader than just manufacturing a toy, and I relaunched my startup as a nonprofit — the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity.
I’m a maker, and I work to learn how to build the kinds of toys that I want to play with. I enjoy learning from other geeks, makers and hackers (regardless of whether they identify as kinky) and from other sex-positive and kink-positive people (regardless of whether they identify as makers or geeks). I have a Ph.D. in robotics, but I’ve spent more time trying to understand people than I have building stuff.
The goal of The Toymaker Project is to empower other people to find out more about themselves and become toy makers and hackers, too.
Bio
Dr. Kit Stubbs is a queer/trans/non-binary maker and entrepreneur who’s more interested in people than in technology. Kit earned their Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Their light-up dildo prototype “The Hammer” has been named the #1 Geekiest Sex Toy by Cracked.com. Kit blogs about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure, including their own experiences and creations, at toymakerproject.com. They also organize teasecraft-boston, a meetup group for sex/kink-positive makers. Kit is the Founder and Executive Director of the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, a nonprofit whose mission is to reduce sexual shame by fostering sex-positive art and education. Since 2017, the Effing Foundation has awarded over $180,000 in grants to sex-positive artists and educators across the United States.
Contact Kit
A note on my name: I was given the name “Kristen” at birth (so “Kristen N. Stubbs, Ph.D.” does refer to me), but since coming out as non-binary my name is now Kit and my pronouns are they/them. Thank you for respecting this change!
Feel free to get in touch with me: