I am becoming a little bit uncomfortable with my apparent lack of sexual accessories.
There are some things you can’t really do without the equipment: pegging is tricky without the strap-on, you’d either end up humping lacklustrely at a rather bored gentleman or doing him an injury with something homemade and as unsexy as it is unsafe. But the vast majority of filth can be improvised – why spend £100 on a hand-cut leather tawse when you could just beat your loved-one with a flip-flop? You can buy them from the pound shop, and the sound is eminently more satisfying.
What’s more (and I feel I might have to hand in my sex blogger membership card at this point) the toys I do have spend far more time at the back of a cupboard than up against my cervix.
Reviewing sex toys
I’ve held off on doing it for this long, and every time a company approaches me asking me to review something or put an affiliate link on my site I’ve said no. Not because I’m a snob (if you can make money by slapping ads on your blog then you have my blessing and a fair bit of my envy as well) but because I can’t work out how to do it in a way that would be even vaguely entertaining for either my readers or, quite frankly, myself.
First someone has to send me a sex toy (which requires me to either give them my address or have a designated friend who is willing to accept daily dildos through the post), then I have to put it in my cunt, then I have to write approximately 600 words about it. No matter how skilled I am, I’m not sure I could muster 600 words about what is essentially just a wank. Most of my sex toy reviews would end up something along these lines:
“I put it in my cunt for a bit and it made me come. Would have been better if it wasn’t pink. 6/10”
Alternatively, I have to persuade a boy that rather than pull my knickers down and fuck me up against the mirror in the hallway, he instead has to ravish me with something provided by a friendly PR company, and dissect the whole experience ten minutes later. There might be giggly fun involved if it’s a particularly crap review, but I think the very act of reviewing something would give it a disadvantage: just as jokes stop being funny when they’re explained, being fucked with a ten-inch dildo would be far less sexy if you have to take mental notes.
What’s in your sex toy cupboard?
But when people ask me what my favourite sex toy is, or the sort of sex toys I’m drawn to, I have to admit to feeling a bit ashamed. A bit inadequate. Like I’m not a proper pervert because I don’t have drawers full of the things just waiting to be jizzed on at a moment’s notice.
I have a fairly decent box of tricks: buttplugs, sheaths, a couple of vibrators, a few hitting things, a strap-on, an amazing pair of nipple clamps with a heavy chain running between the two, an assortment of tools such as pliers that I leave in my toy drawer purely to scare the shit out of people. But the fact that I own these things proves nothing other than that at some point I bought them. I’m far less likely to use even my favourite toys than I am to just sit on a guy’s dick.
And yet people ask – how many do you have? Or ‘what do you have?’ Or ‘why don’t you do reviews?’ and I feel embarrassed. Like I’m not a real pervert unless my letterbox is clogged with suspiciously-shaped parcels. Some perverts like the parcels. Some people are more excited by a shag when they can use their kit and experiment with new ways to beat, whip, shock or fuck someone. And that is both admirable and hot. It’s just not me.
A tiny cynical part of my brain wonders if one of the driving forces behind the fact that we’re becoming more open about sex (which I think we are, hooray!) is that there are now far more ways to make money out of it. From making and selling sex toys to writing a dirty book or throwing wild parties which, for the bargain price of fifty quid, you can attend dressed only in your pants.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Making money is good, sex is good, giving people a way to make money by providing things people can insert into themselves is good. But it, like everything else sexual, isn’t universal. For every toy-hungry pervert with a drawer full of wonders there’s someone like me looking blankly at my pitiful collection of underused dildos and wondering just what, exactly, I’m doing wrong.
So for those of you who are like me, who haven’t got a great collection and don’t crave the latest things, here’s the answer: you’re doing nothing wrong. You’re just doing something differently.
11 Comments
I love this post.
Good on you for being able to say no, I don’t want to review that.
I think it’s always hilarious reviewing toys with a partner, mostly because they’re just that little bit scared of them! Always good for another point of view.
Some toys are really hard to write about though, you’re right on that.
If it’s a shit toy also, that is basically your payment for your time and review. You think, why am I wasting my time doing this again?!
Hooray for being more open about sex :-)
It’s probably quite a positive indication of how far we’ve come(*) in terms of being more relaxed about sex that -not- using toys can now be described as “doing things differently.”
(* – quiet at the back)
I love this post! I get asked to do reviews, too, and feel identically. It’s bullshit. “Too soft, didn’t get off,” would be my go to critique on half the things I’ve seen out there.
Also, and most importantly, I don’t want some random grunt sending me a box of sex toys to Hyacinth Jones, address: xxxxxxxxxxxx. His bosses may promise to protect my location/identity, but what does he care? Anyway, it just skeeves me out and I’d prefer to be “Somewhere in America” until some hacker finds me out. And the only friends I have who could intercept a box for me would have some serious explaining to do to their spouses.
But I digress. Excellent post!
Very good point. Especially given that in the States you (As far as I am aware) do not have such robust data protection laws. I’m pretty sure that if I have a company my address confidentially and they leaked it I would have some recourse under the Data Protection Act, but that would be a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. In the US, I have no idea what recourse you would have, but again it’d probably be too late by the time someone worked out who you were and/or had posted your address. *shudder*
All hail people who can keep a secret =)
As someone who finds both fucking against the hallway mirror, and the analytical toy lab experience to be equally as sexy I have to say… only one of those tends to translate into a sexy blog post.
Those sextoy reviews are a real snore, and frankly, I find them almost entirely useless. You can rarely decipher an unanimous opinion, and the descriptions tend towards the materials, and power, which all blurs together unless you’re another sextoy reviewer with a full line of toys in front of you. The two most celebrated sextoy shops in the States don’t carry the majority of gadgets reviewers are listing as their top favorites, so that leaves mail order, where there are yet more reviews on those sites, from actual paying customers (we presume?).
Oh, and maybe I’m alone here, but sexblogs were much more fun before people started writing them to get free toys. The Ebooks also put a damper on the amount of proper wank material, but that’s another story.
I would take the attitude that if someone wants to send me free stuff, more power to them. Moreover, I’m not obligated to write a review, let alone a good one.
Here’s what you could do:
1) Get a mail forwarder (or simply a PO Box) and then you don’t have to give out your home address.
2) Say to companies that want to send you stuff to agree to a document that says basically “Girl on the Net accepts donations and gifts sent via the mail. However, GotN accepts no obligation to provide a review of anything received, let alone a good or long review. Moreover, links will not be provided to Company Website unless GotN feels like it (and she probably won’t).”
3) Accept stuff, and then sell/give away without using.
4) Profit!
I congratulate you on another fun and interesting post. You are quickly cementing yourself as one of my favorite bloggers. I applaud your stance with regard to reviewing toys. Personally I avoid blogs that are one large sex toy commercial and prefer those like yours. Still there is a place for toys. Evidently you get so much sex you don’t have need of toys but I suspect not all girls are in the same boat. Also, in the cases like that and my girl, she has to travel a great deal on business and so toys add a great deal of interest to our Skype sex sessions when she is out of town. She likes things too involving restraints when at home so of course we get good use from toys designed for that purpose. Each to their own I say. This is all pretty much à la carte so however you choose to kink it isn’t wrong. Just because you prefer flesh and blood to silicone doesn’t make you a bad person. Ha-ha You seem plenty pervy to me, so no worries. :-)
“A tiny cynical part of my brain wonders if one of the driving forces behind the fact that we’re becoming more open about sex (which I think we are, hooray!) is that there are now far more ways to make money out of it.”
It’s not just your brain. Sexuality scholars have been writing about this since the sexual revolution of the 60s, which was not so much about making sex more *open*, but the realisation that sex is a huge market, which capitalism had not yet got its grubby mitts on. The ‘invention’ of endless — often very expensive — new sex toys (most of which are nothing new at all) is, for me, nothing but yet another incentive to make people buy. Sexual liberation for women, in particular, has become bound up in the act of endless purchasing ‘sexy’ and that, as a woman staunchly on the left, is no liberation to me at all.
Don’t get me wrong — I love my vibrator more than most of my acquaintances, and I love my strap on and my dildos (none of which, by the way are anything new. The Victorians used strap ons and dildos too!) and our various pervy accoutrements, most of which are not ‘designer’ or ‘branded’ but simply Do The Job. But I applaud you for writing this and refusing to become yet another sex blogger whose sexual liberation and disclosure is bound up in purchase (even if you are offered them for free!). Because I think it’s a temptation too many writers submit to, and it particularly galls me when it’s those who claim to be anti-capitalists.
Just touch me. Yeah, like that. This scentense is funny, And for me .i agree with you, according to your reviews sex toys, i got your mind-you’re doing nothing wrong. You’re just doing something differently.
I’m so glad to have found this website. so i would liketo try anal sex, but i’m scared anything coming out while we are doing it and don’t know how to prepare myself for it, can you give me your advice?
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