Girl on the Net

“You can’t ‘win’ at fucking, that’s not how it works,” my partner explains to me sternly, as he flips through settings on the Mysteryvibe Crescendo app. “It’s about how well we play together.” I’m temporarily sheepish in the face of his gentle chastisement, until he adds under his breath: “Besides, I’ll win.”

We don’t usually compete in the bedroom. Unless we’re play-fighting and I’ve specifically requested that he wrestle with me like we’re playful teenagers coming up with excuses to frot each other, there is rarely a ‘winner.’ One winner implies the other has ‘lost’, and I’m a bad enough loser as it is – you should see my sad face when he beats me at Magic: The Gathering.

But this time is a bit special. Because this time we’re not just fucking, we’re road-testing our own sex toy patterns.

Most sex toys come with a few pre-set vibration patterns: instead of just a steady rumble, they’ll use patterns that tap out a beat, or build then drop off, or just roll through intensities from gentle to ‘holy fuck I think I’m gonna come wait stop this is just too soon!’ But the thing we’re playing with today is the Mysteryvibe Crescendo, and one of the things it lets you do is program your own patterns.

What is the Mysteryvibe Crescendo?

I’ve chatted a little about Crescendo before, when I used it for an hour-long wanking challenge. It’s a smart vibrator, which means that as well as just having buttons on the side that you can use to scroll through settings and patterns, it’s also connected to an app, which connects to the internet, which allows you to do a whole bunch of other stuff. Controlling the toy remotely? Check. Downloading a range of different patterns from the Mysteryvibe library? Check. Designing your very own patterns to upload to the toy? Hell yes. It’s this last one that my dude and I were interested in.

I’ll be straight with you here: my partner and I are both nerds. We are also both very horny, and keen not only to fuck in a variety of interesting ways, but to do science experiments on our own horn where possible: from wanking tests with different strokers to challenges involving eye-contact or synching to porn while we’re shagging. We are experimental people, and we are nerdy people. And even for nerds like us, it takes time to set up and learn to use this toy. When you first take it out of the box, chances are that the Crescendo will need to run some updates. Once you’ve run the updates, you need to play around with the app – which takes some getting used to – and then you’ll need to spend a little time working out how best to control the toy while you’re shagging. What I’m saying, really, is that even two super-horny, super-eager nerds took a little bit of time getting used to this sex toy, so don’t expect to whip it out of the box and be ready to go in an instant. At £129 the Crescendo is a financial investment, and it’ll also require an investment of your time before you’ve mastered the smart features it comes with.

But I don’t think that’s necessarily a down side. While it might be a bit confusing to start off with, one of the things both of us noted – with surprise – about the Crescendo is that it prompted discussions about pleasure that even two horny sex nerds hadn’t previously had.

Point to where it feels good on your dick

“I’m going to do mine first, then you can do yours, then we’ll test and see whose is best, yeah?”

“OK, deal,” he replies, hiding his phone screen from my field of view and hunkering down with the vibe in his lap. We’re sitting in front of the TV, in a very un-horny situation, while he works out how to program the Crescendo so it feels really good on his dick. Then it’ll be my turn to program a vibration pattern, before we test out each one and see whose gets the most orgasmic results.

Screengrab of what the patterns look like on your phone screen – in this one the top motor is vibrating.

For the pattern test, we’ve agreed that the best way to use Crescendo is curved into a ‘U’ shape. The toy itself looks like a cute purple worm with ears, which can be bent on six different axes – you can use it straight as a vaginally insertable toy, or curved so the ‘ears’ rest against your clit, or curved to wrap round someone’s penis or… well, any way you’d like to use it really. But for us the way it works best is as a ‘U’ shaped toy, with the slimmer end inserted into my vagina and the heavier, more powerful end with the ‘ears’ resting up against my clit.

So both he and I are designing patterns for using the toy like this. As well as being able to bend this thing every which way, you can also individually program each of the 6 motors inside it. On the Mysteryvibe app, you get a diagram of what the toy looks like, with a spot for each motor, so you can select which motors you want on at which time, and also edit the intensity of the vibrations.

Screengrab of creating/editing patterns + adding them to the toy

I’m not too fussed about the patterns that come out of the box. They’re fun to play with, of course, and I should say for the sake of full disclosure that the first time we fucked with the toy, using out-of-the-box patterns, my partner came so quickly we couldn’t really count the session as a proper test. So they are clearly good. But for me the real fun is in designing our own patterns.

Him versus me

The pattern he goes for is very focused on the most sensitive spots: right at the top and bottom of the vibrator. Strong, regular pulses that – when the toy is inserted and used while fucking – will stimulate my clit and the head of his cock at the same time. I can see what he’s aiming for with this: a kind of synchronisation in the parts of our body which should feel vaguely similar. If we can time our fuck (in… pause while vibration swells… out slowly as it starts to fade out… in again… pause while vibration swells… repeat ad orgasmium) to the patterns then we should get a nice, steady rhythm that unites us in pleasure.

Mine is slightly different: I want ripples that run all the way up the shaft of the toy and back down again. It starts with a gentle vibration in the motor at the end which will press against my clit, and then this gentle vibration gets more intense. As it gains intensity, it also ‘passes’ vibrations to the next motor along, which gains intensity and passes, causing a chain reaction of vibrations all the way ‘up’ the toy, along his shaft, towards the head of his dick and my g-spot, then when it reaches the end it changes direction and passes right back down the length of the toy again.

Whose sex pattern won? The fuck test

The short answer is: me. The long answer, now that I’ve taken a short break from writing to do a victory dance around my desk, is that we actually both enjoyed each other’s patterns, but while his was subtle and intriguing, mine was much more effective for a really guttural, grinding fuck. It works best for us when I’m on top: the Crescendo is thicker than other ‘couples’ vibes we’ve used before, so stuffing that plus my partner’s cock inside me at the same time is as initially challenging as it is eventually satisfying, and once it’s in there he has to keep thrusting to a minimum in case my eyes roll all the way back in my head.

So. I suck him for a bit till he’s hard, lube up the Crescendo (OK so I actually just spit on it but lube is probably better if you’re not a lazy fuck like me) and then slide it in so the tip of it presses against my G-spot and the thicker end rests against my clit. Then I straddle him, holding the Crescendo in place, and slide down until his cock is nestled right up against it. Then we turn it on and his eyes grow wide, because holy fuck he really likes it when my cunt vibrates around him, and I start grinding gently so we can feel every single vibration as our patterns do their stuff.

His pattern was nice. Nice like a walk in the park on a sunny day, or a surprise trip to the pub with a friend who happens to be in town. My pattern was great. Great like a walk in the park while eating a free ice cream, or a surprise trip to the pub with a friend who’s in town where you join a random pub quiz team on a whim and end up winning. Great enough that he spaffed with great force and great volume, and afterwards gave me a fistbump.

What I’m saying, team, is that I’m excellent at making sex patterns.

We did both note afterwards that patterns from the Mysteryvibe library would have had a similar effect – we probably didn’t need to create our own. BUT if we’d done that, we’d have missed out on what both of us thought was the best thing about this sex toy…

Fucking sex nerds

Features-wise, the Crescendo either met or exceeded my eager-sex-nerd expectations: I’d expected to be pleased by the ‘smart’ capabilities, and its potential as a flexible, customisable thing: it met both those expectations brilliantly. I’d expected to be a little disappointed in terms of power (because I’m used to jet-powered wank machines like Doxy, and I thought the smaller motors in Crescendo wouldn’t be enough), but it smashed those expectations, being both more powerful than I expected for wanking, and also – on first use – capable of making my partner spaff himself so quickly that we had to pause and wait for a second chance. The thing which actually surprised me was that it opened up a whole new category of sexual discovery, that I hadn’t previously explored.

I’m obsessed with asking my partner weird questions about the specific details of his sexual pleasure: what feels better, spunking with force or volume? Could you, blindfolded, identify each of your ex-lovers purely by the sensation of their cunt around your cock? Is it nice if I keep sucking for a bit even after you’ve come? Etcetera. I like these questions so much that sometimes I’ll find us having the same old conversation again, because I’ve run out of new stuff to ask and I just want to replay the classics. But with the Crescendo I found loads of new topics for us to explore. It was like the Microsoft Paperclip of sex questions – at every stage encouraging us to chat about what might work best for us.

When people hear about ‘customisable’ sex toys, they often say ‘well why would I even WANT to do that? I’ve never fancied doing it before! Who exactly is asking for toys you can program yourself?’ I think they are entirely missing the point. The point is not that everyone’s clamouring to make their own patterns, it’s that making the patterns is part of the fun of using the toy. It prompts conversations and ideas and discussions like:

• Is it better if the vibes ripple up your cock or down?
• Can you feel rumbles more intensely at this part of your vagina or another part?
• Do vibrations make much difference on your G-spot or is it mostly pressure, and vibes should go on the clit?

We talked about the shape and angles at which we bent the toy – which allowed to give my partner some fairly detailed info on pressure and positioning of G-spot stimulation. Had discussions about preferences for gentle vibrations versus intense pulsing, and the amount of build-up required so as not to shock my clit with an initial burst of power. Decisions about which patterns to choose from the MysteryVibe library got us chatting about the best ‘spots’ on his dick – the upper and lower curve of the shaft, whether one side of the underside of his head was more sensitive than the other, and tonnes more.

The point is not that people have been crying out for customisable patterns for years, and MysteryVibe’s just been the first company to really do it well: the point is that toys like Crescendo encourage you to learn things you may not even have realised you didn’t know. Get you thinking in nerdy and exciting detail about exactly what your body likes. Tune in to what you want and what might be possible.

I don’t think the Crescendo is a casual toy. It’s not one you buy on a whim thinking ‘ooh, I’ll use that tonight!’ It’s one that requires a little bit of work – from you and anyone you’re planning to use it with. You need to take time to explore the features (and run updates!), consider how you’d like to use it from a practical perspective (it can be used purely as a ‘dumb’ toy if you’re worried about sex toys that connect to the internet – there’s info on the MysteryVibe site about how they handle data), as well as a sexy perspective. So if you treat it as a tool to use not just to get you off but to help kickstart those conversations about pleasure, I think it’s incredibly cool. And it does something that very few other toys have done, which is capture my and my partner’s attention even when we’re not horny – as we ask questions, explore and discover new things, in the process of designing our optimum fuck.

Like sex itself, really: you get out what you put in.

As I mentioned above, MysteryVibe sponsor my website and they gave me the Crescendo for free so I could try it out. If you’d like to buy one, head to the MysteryVibe site to pick one up for £129. You should also keep an eye on their next product – Tenuto – which offers similarly fascinating customisable, smart, tech for your dick.