Girl on the Net

The first sex toy I ever owned was a rabbit vibrator. I started getting sexual soon after Sex and the City had made rabbit vibrators cool, and my boyfriend bought me my first one in the days before you could properly shop on the internet. I’m sure I’m not the only person of my generation whose first sex toy experience involved running into Ann Summers, grabbing The One That Everyone Said Was The Best, and then rushing home to try it out.

I kept that rabbit for years – YEARS. Way longer than I should realistically have kept it. Long after I’d stopped using it, it sat in my dressing table: a monument to masturbation. A nostalgic knick-knack that I couldn’t bear to throw away.

I adored that fucking rabbit. I loved it for what it represented as well as what it was. Looking at it reminded me of my first experience of a simultaneous clitoral and g-spot orgasm, and reminded me of the look on my then-boyfriend’s face as he marvelled at the way it made me squirm and cover my mouth with my hand to avoid squealing too loud and disturbing my in-laws. It was my favourite sex toy – my pride and joy – for years. It travelled with me too, taking holidays in at least four countries and a couple of years on secondment when I lived and worked overseas.

That rabbit vibrator meant more to me than any of the toys and books I still hoarded from childhood. It even outlasted my longest relationship to date.

And yet it was shit.

I didn’t know it was shit when I had it: I thought it was miraculous and fun. But after a couple of years of sex blogging, I started finding out more about sex toys, and in the process I learned that the rabbit vibrator which had been my pride and joy was made of some pretty bad stuff. Not silicone, like my favourite dildo, or medical-grade stuff like the head of my beloved Doxy: some sort of jelly that I learned with horror could have ended up actually melting.

Not ideal.

I won’t go into detail about sex toy materials here, for two reasons. Firstly, other people know far more about sex toys than I do, so you’re best off visiting the experts. Dangerous Lilly is always my go-to person on sex toy materials, so check out her blog for a tonne of helpful info. The second reason is because… well… I’m not a particularly fastidious person when it comes to my health. I smoke, I drink a lot, and the closest I come to exercise is having a stand-up wank. Taking health advice from me is like taking tax advice from a convicted fraudster. I know I should care what’s in my sex toys, as I should probably care about the ingredients in some of the shite I eat. The problem is, it’s hard to care when pizza’s so delicious and salad tastes like arse.

For some people, the solution to is purely in knowing: if you know you need vegetables, you’ll pick a salad over pizza. If you know a toy is made from terrible jelly shit, you’ll stop using it. For me, the temptation of that delicious pizza is sometimes too much to bear, and I’ll end up using toys which are made from crap materials just because they feel so damn good. And they’re cheap. And I can’t see further into the future than where my next wank is coming from.

Naturally, the solution that’ll work for even lazy, unhealthy pricks like me is to find sex toys that are both made from good stuff and also feel nice in my vagina. To continue the health analogy, it’s about creating a salad so excellent that it tastes as good as pizza.

Rabbit vibrators: a wanker’s quest

So the mission: find a rabbit vibrator that does all the things my old rampant rabbit used to do, but that is made from more modern materials.

After myriad fuck-ups (which included the Lelo Ina Wave [weird], at least two rabbits that turned out to not be silicone as I thought [my bad]), the closest one I found that looked reasonably suitable was this – a silicone rechargeable one from Bondara. At the time, they sponsored my website, so they were the obvious people to go to for cheap yet decent sex toys. And it was fine as far as rabbits go: it had the dual-action fun that was the whole point of the thing, with an internal vibrator and an external clitoral thing.

The down-side? It was missing the beads that whirled in the middle. Which is weird, because if you’d asked a younger version of me whether the beads made the slightest bit of difference, I’d have told you no. I thought all that mattered was that the hungry cavern of my aching vagina was filled with something solid, and my clit was being addled like a raspberry mojito. Two things: job done.

But it turns out the beads were important. And the material was important. And – thanks to recent developments in my orgasm biology (most notably the fact that it’s harder for me to have one) – power was pretty important too. I basically gave up on my hunt for a rabbit and relied solely on my beloved Doxy.

And a glass dildo.

Oh, and an Ambit.

And ElectraStim kit.

And a ceramic dildo from Ceramic Pleasure that I haven’t written about yet but I will soon because holy shit it’s brilliant.

The point is that I have a bunch of sex toys now, and for a long time I’d given up on my rabbit quest. I figured maybe I just wasn’t a rabbit kind of person any more. Maybe modern rabbits just couldn’t give me the same kick.

Except … I managed to swipe one of the Rabbit Company rabbits that were on display at Eroticon (perks of being an organiser, gang). It was this one:

Beaded rabbit vibrator from The Rabbit Company

And it was genuinely brilliant.

There’s a reason I hand over to people like Lilly (or Epiphora, TBGR, Emmeline, Cara etc etc) to do proper sex toy reviews, because when I like something I struggle to say more than simply ‘brilliant’ or ‘great.’

But I wanted to write about rabbit vibrators because I’m sure I’m not the only person who went from ‘yay rabbits!’ to ‘meh’ and then got tempted back. There must be others in my generation who had the same rabbit experience as me: a youthful dalliance followed by a long-term love that gradually petered out when you realised most rabbit vibrators were made from jelly or been bought new ones that just didn’t have the features you remembered from your youth. People who have filed them away in that place in their brains reserved for sexy nostalgia – alongside wet dreams, Eurotrash and snogging at the back of the bus.

I may know jack shit about sex toys, but I know that nostalgia like the back of my hand. And while sadly no rabbit vibrator can make me nineteen again, the right one can send me on a trip down memory lane. If anything I’m glad I spent so long without a rabbit, so I could enjoy the experience of rediscovering that sensation again. Just as the smell of Joop aftershave reminds me of teenage snogs, so the sensation of beads swirling inside a rabbit vibrator zips me back in time to that one afternoon with my ex-boyfriend, when he first introduced me to sex toys.

It was vivid enough that I almost covered my mouth with my hand, to avoid squealing and disturbing the in-laws