'Bored of the shame': Eva Szombat's joy-filled photos of Hungarian women and their sex toys

Eva Szombat was 29 years old when she bought her first sex toy.

It was 2016, and the Hungarian photographer was in a committed relationship with her now-husband. She finally worked up the courage to walk into a sex shop in Budapest, where she picked up a hot pink vibrator.

When she got home, she set it down on the toilet seat in her bathroom, which had a seat cover featuring a palm tree on a tropical island, and thought, “Wow, this looks amazing!”

“I thought, I want a picture of this, it’s so much fun!” Szombat tells Euronews Culture. “I was really shy and wasn’t so comfortable with my body, my sexuality, these kinds of things. But at that time, something changed.”

She decided to post the picture on her Instagram, just to see what would happen.

Little did she know that post was going to be a launching pad for her award-winning photo project and book, “I want orgasms, not roses.”

The year after she bought that first vibrator, Szombat put out a call on social media, asking for volunteers to let her photograph them with their sex toys.

She was surprised by how many people responded, and even more so by the fact that they were almost exclusively women. Over the next five years, she photographed and interviewed dozens of women of all ages for the project, with diverse backgrounds and sexual orientations.

“It became a girls’ project,” she says. “I was really happy about this because I thought that female sexuality is really repressed. We’re told to be so humble and nice and pretty and everybody says that if you’re really horny or if you like sex, you are a whore.”

Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in Hungary, where the staunchly anti-abortion ruling FIDESZ party has defined childbirth as a woman’s sacred duty, rejected