Zach Lahn put $1 million into a company that, while he sat on its board, published a blog post explaining that cock rings are sex toys. The Republican nominee for governor of Iowa would now prefer a different framing. “What I’ve invested in is not a sex toy,” he told the Des Moines Register. “It’s a grade two medical device.”
The company, FirmTech, whose erection rings include the MaxPR and the Tech Ring, a cock ring with a sensor that logs erections overnight and hands a urologist something to read. Lahn joined the board as one of three directors in 2020 and, in September 2021, paid $1 million through his wholly owned Selah Group LLC for 1,250 shares, making him FirmTech’s second-largest shareholder with a 28.2 percent stake. His campaign says he resigned in September 2023 over concerns about the company’s marketing and direction, and that he left before FirmTech released any “pleasure” products.
The Bulwark went after that last part, and found that “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.’” The same piece reports that FirmTech “marketed these erection rings, also called ‘cock rings’ or ‘c-rings,’ as devices for generating pleasure”, and that the company announced a clitoral vibrator to investors in documents bearing Lahn’s signature.
What FirmTech’s blog used to say
Archived captures of FirmTech’s own website tell their own story, without needing anyone’s characterization. A post from June 2022 opens flatly: “Cock rings are sex toys which are worn by men and people with penises.” It goes on to market the company’s own Performance Ring. In January 2023, FirmTech announced that XBIZ had recognized the Tech Ring as, in the company’s own words, “Most Innovative Sex Toy of the Year”, a shade grander than XBIZ’s winners list, which files the category as Innovative Sex Toy of the Year. A post from June 2023 titled “2023 Sex Toy Trends” calls the Tech Ring “not only a sex-enhancing toy that prolongs erections, but also a valuable personal wellness tool”.
Every one of those posts predates the September 2023 resignation the campaign describes, but none of them load on FirmTech’s site today; all three redirect away. One post, promoting the launch of the Max Performance Ring still uses the sex toy descriptor and is live at the time of writing, having been published in June 2026, long after Lahn says he left the board.
“This unique feature, along with our “hook and loop” design, makes our performance rings easy to put on, either by yourself or with a partner, making them the go-to male sex toy for enhancing sexual performance,” the post says.
‘We will seek correction’
FirmTech treats the label as actionable rather than merely irritating. Co-founder and chief executive Dr. Elliot Justin told Raw Story: “Calling our products ‘toys’ is inaccurate and shallow. If you claim that we are a ‘sex toy’ company, we will seek correction and if necessary take legal action.” Calling the devices toys, he added, “could interfere with men getting diagnostic information and intervention”. The Bulwark’s article now carries a note that it was updated to include the text of a letter from FirmTech’s general counsel.
Justin has a real argument and has put it better elsewhere. “One sector’s toy is also the progressive urologist’s answer to the most common cause of [erectile dysfunction],” he told The Bulwark. FirmTech, which he co-founded with Dr. James Hotaling, does sit closer to clinical medicine than most sextech hardware companies, and the Tech Ring is a genuinely useful piece of kit for anyone tracking nocturnal erections rather than chasing a novelty.
The honesty question
The Bulwark was careful about what it was and was not asking, saying its interest lay not in who buys sextech but in one question: “The issue of interest here is whether Lahn has been honest in how he has described himself to potential voters.”
Sextech has spent a decade arguing it belongs in the wellness aisle as much as the sex shop, and it is mostly right. An XBIZ trophy does not change what the device measures but that argument works as a description, not as a shield, and Lahn wants it to do both jobs at once. A device can be a medical instrument and a sex toy simultaneously, and FirmTech’s marketing department clearly reached that conclusion years before its second-largest shareholder ran for office.
Samantha Niblett, the Labour MP for South Derbyshire, launched a campaign this year calling for lifelong sex education, and will display sex toys and sex education aids in Parliament in the autumn, having first checked with security that they are not on the banned items list. British politicians, it turns out, will say the words out loud. Not all of them approvingly. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch used Prime Minister’s Questions to respond: “They’re promoting sex toys in Parliament. It gives a whole new meaning to ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.”
Lahn faces Democratic state auditor Rob Sand on November 3, and he may well be asked about this again before then, but the archived version of FirmTech’s blog is not going anywhere.
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