Zach Lahn: Please Stop Calling the Award-Winning Sex Toy a Sex Toy

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

AFTER BEATING TRUMP-ENDORSED congressman Randy Feenstra in Iowa’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Zach Lahn—a political newcomer—will face Democratic nominee Rob Sand in November. Lahn presents himself as a farmer first and foremost. His campaign website opens with an aerial shot of Iowa corn. “Our fields, our families, our future,” it promises. But if Lahn’s investments are anything to go by, corn isn’t the only thing he’s interested in sprouting. Lahn’s business record has faced scrutiny, including over his ties to FirmTech Inc., a company that sells “innovative wearable erection rings” that allow users to “Track [their] sexual health and keep it up,” which has raised, ahem, eyebrows.

Lahn has insisted that his interest in the company was confined to its therapeutic work, and disavowed any involvement in its products intended for anything other than wellness, telling the Des Moines Register that, “What I’ve invested in is not a sex toy. It’s a grade two medical device.” His campaign told the Register that Lahn invested early in the company but, after expressing concerns about the company’s marketing and direction, resigned from the board of directors in September 2023, after more than two years’ involvement—before any of FirmTech’s “pleasure” products were released. According to the company’s 2025 annual report, Lahn retains a 25 percent ownership stake in FirmTech via a limited liability company he owns.

But in the sex-products marketplace, there is—and always has been—significant overlap between those products intended as medical devices or therapeutic tools and those intended as “toys” or for pleasure. These loosely defined terms are at times used in tandem or interchangeably, and are sometimes used to describe the same object in different contexts. As FirmTech CEO Elliot Justin told The Bulwark in an email, “One sector’s toy is also the progressive urologist’s answer to the most common cause of [erectile dysfunction].”

And this semantic and conceptual haziness is reflected in an extensive review of FirmTech’s products, marketing, legal and financial documents signed by Lahn, and porn-industry awards: Even if some of FirmTech’s devices do monitor vitals like heart rate and blood pressure and are intended to combat erectile dysfunction, the company also leaned into claims about the devices’ pleasurable effects throughout Lahn’s involvement. The claim that Lahn left FirmTech before it turned to pleasure devices is impossible to maintain.

According to financial documents filed with the SEC and signed by Lahn, the Republican joined the board of FirmTech as one of three directors in 2020. The same document shows that on September 8, 2021, he paid $1 million to FirmTech via Selah Group LLC, a company owned entirely by Lahn, to purchase 1,250 FirmTech shares, making him the company’s second-largest shareholder with a 28.2 percent stake.

Despite Lahn’s emphasis on the items being “grade two medical devices,” the erection rings that FirmTech sold during the time Lahn served as a director on the company’s board were often described by the company as “sex toys.” FirmTech marketed these erection rings, also called “cock rings” or “c-rings,” as devices for generating pleasure. The company also announced a “clitoral vibrator” to investors in documents bearing Lahn’s signature.

Two quick notes at this point: First, for squeamish readers, apologies in advance to those of you about to follow me on this weird and somewhat graphic investigation of sex toys, sexual marketing, porn-industry awards, and investor pitch documents. And second, more generally, none of what follows is intended to denigrate the customers who seek out sex-related devices for whatever reason, medical or otherwise. The issue of interest here is whether Lahn has been honest in how he has described himself to potential voters.

It is difficult to give credence to Lahn’s claims that he only ever saw the company as a provider of medical devices. Pleasure was