Every woman remembers, with an appropriate level of comic horror, the moment in Sex and the City when Miranda’s Ukranian housekeeper, Magda, stumbled upon her “goody drawer.” What followed next was a series of judgmental blessings and lectures about how “no man will want you as long as you have that,” culminating in Miranda’s dildo being unceremoniously replaced with a statue of the Virgin Mary. It was an episode that most women could relate to and a situation that every woman feared, as we stuffed our pleasure treasures into smelly socks, hid them under dusty mattresses, buried them under old shirts, all the while living in fear that our secrets would one day be revealed and, like Pandora’s box, unleash all of life’s evils into the world.
It was precisely this type of scenario that led Lidia Bonilla, a design innovator, to create a pleasure products organizer called MUA. While in the process of decorating her home, Bonilla’s interior decorator was opening drawers, and before Bonilla had a chance to yell “Fire!” or “Snake!” had already opened that drawer. Embarrassed, Bonilla asked where most of her clients kept their items of erotic interest, to which the decorating guru had no reply. After a particularly bad day at work, Bonilla went over to sex toy purveyor Babeland, and asked if they had some sort of storage box that was both discreet and sophisticated in which to keep her new purchases. “Nope,” the salesperson, responded, “but that’s one of our most commonly asked questions.”