Girl on the Net

Some people enjoy sex tech because they like nerding out over the technical possibilities. Others are sex toy collectors – equally intrigued by the latest smart vibrator as they are by a beautiful dildo. Some, like me, are keen on sex tech for both the reasons above, but with a side-order of ‘this kicked off a filthy fantasy.’ So, as inspired by the sex tech session at the latest Eroticon, I want to run you through a few sexy fantasies inspired by interesting kit.

In the run up to Eroticon I asked co-organisers Molly and Michael if we could arrange a sex tech hands-on. Basically getting a bunch of interesting products in a room and then letting people stroke them, and go ‘oooh.’ Then, the lovely Dan Cooper of Engadget agreed to host it – after putting his nob in a Kiiroo Onyx to try and bring sex to a mainstream tech website, he was clearly the right person for the job. But it occurred to me while Dan – and the fabulous Horny Geek Girl – were setting up the equipment for the session, that what I actually bring to the sex tech party is fairly limited in terms of expertise.

I do not have a huge collection of techy toys in my bedside drawer. I don’t even know, often, how to install the apps. I do not instinctively pick up a new smart vibrator and know where the wireless charging port is. If tech experts explain how things work, and toy companies come up with the new ideas, what exactly does a sex blogger bring to the party?

One word: perving.

App-enabled sex toys – Hush and Lush

At the Eroticon sex tech session, we had a few smart sex toys controlled by apps. I’m not going to go into the detail of how – you can check out the websites for Lovense Hush (a smart butt plug) and Lush (a smart vaginal vibrator). Bottom line, though, is that they go inside you, and you (or a friend/loved-one/volunteer) controls them via an app.

Those are the basics, and if I were being commissioned by a magazine to explain those basics I might go into a little more detail about how you can use them over a distance – getting your partner to log on to a smart sex toy and control it from another country. I might talk about long distance relationships, or cam performers who use toys like this to gamify getting tips. It’s clever, and fascinating.

But this is my sex blog, so what I’ll tell you here is different: when I held the Hush in one hand and the Lush in the other, my immediate question was: can I control both of these toys from the same app? Can I have a pulsing butt plug in my ass, and a pulsing … whatever that thing is … in my cunt, and feel the vibrating sensations pushing through my flesh from two internal places?

Yes. The answer is yes. And when we managed to hook them both up to the app, and I could draw a finger over the app screen to control the intensity of the vibration, I realised that I needed to get me one of these. I pictured lying on my back with my hands and feet restrained, naked save for a pair of soaking-wet knickers and an expression of aching desperation, as my partner sat fully-clothes in the corner of the room, whispering ‘good girl’ as he stroked his phone. The power that can sit at his fingertips, and my own writhing anger as he used it to torture rather than relieve me.

The fact that the toys can be controlled by your phone is – to me – kind of incidental. It’s a nice feature, but it is not the headline story: the headline story is that you can get them both to respond to the same stimulation. Two of you could wear a toy each, and both get exactly the same sensations. Hot? Fucking smoking. Seriously. Picture it. I am picturing it right now.

Imagine if you could do this with all your toys – if I could hook my Doxy up to the same control pack as my ElectraStim Jack Socket, and combine tingly pleasure/pain electric sensations with rumbling vibrations. Imagine if all of this could be done not with buttons you have to physically press, but with gestures and movement? Or sound. The pulse of your favourite dance track setting the beat to everything you do.

Yeah, I’m pretty excited about the future.

Autoblow 2+ and PULSE

These toys are two very different upgrades to squishy masturbation sleeves. Where once there was a soft Fleshlight-style thing that you slipped over your dick and rubbed for a bit, now there is vibration and stroking. Automated wank machines, essentially.

What excites me most about these toys is the hands-free possibility, more than anything else. Yes, PULSE is cool because it takes something that was originally just used for clit stim (vibration) and delivers it in a way that works pretty damn nicely on the head of your cock. But the most important aspect for me is the fact that I could use them on a guy without actually touching him … even if he had his hands tied behind his back. I’m not naturally dominant but I can definitely lean that way if there’s a submissive dude willing to submit to some forced spunk-milking.

If you asked me to pick one of the two – PULSE or Autoblow – to give to someone I loved, I would probably pick the PULSE. It’s really cool-looking, and it works beautifully, and it’s just so damn sexy to look at.

However, while I know Autoblow gets a bad rep because it’s a little bit noisy, and because the mouth at one end is a little too reminiscent of sex dolls I’ve seen in the past, when it comes to the spunk-milking idea these things are ticks in the ‘pro’ column, for me. Autoblow 2 is a little robotic. It’s a little extreme. It makes a noise like an actual milking machine if you’re standing beside it while it’s turned on. But if I’m watching from the sidelines while a guy is blindfolded – biting his lip and tensing his muscles and trying to fight off the orgasm that I’m dragging from his eager, trembling body – well at that point it could be the star in one hell of a filthy sex show.

VR porn – Light Southern

Confession: even though I adore VR porn I didn’t get the chance to play with the Samsung Gear headsets we had at Eroticon, because there was such a clamour for them that I felt it would be cheeky of me – as one of the organisers – to stamp in and say ‘GIMME.’ But they were showing incredible porn courtesy of Light Southern – who you should check out, especially if you are into VR porn but unsure about some of the ethical practices of larger studios. Light Southern is an ethical porn production company based in Australia, and they produce truly beautiful films. Check ’em out. Their videos were the most popular part of the sex tech demo.

Onto the fantasy part: I’ve told you my favourite VR porn fantasy here before, but there’s more to virtual reality than just watching dudes wank over it. Virtual reality gives us the opportunity to inhabit different bodies in a more intimate, intense way. Through VR porn, I can have sex through the eyes of a guy, or a different girl – one with a different body shape to me, one who focuses on different things when she’s fucking. I can get a perspective that I would never be able to conjure just from watching standard HD video of a group going at it. Virtual reality porn puts you in the centre of the action, and not just visually – one of the things I love about it is the way sound can take your breath away. Whispered words or moans in my ear, which take me by surprise – out of the real world of my messy office, and into a bedroom where hot people are doing things to a body that isn’t mine.

VR porn is the closest I can come to pure porn escapism, and that’s why I love it so much.

BKK masturbator

Brace yourselves: this one’s weird. As I was scrounging for toys that we could show people in the sex tech session, I asked one of my contacts at SexToys.co.uk if they had anything that might fit the bill. Enter the BKK masturbator: a masturbation sleeve with a sensor inside it that hooks up to your VR porn.

Most ‘smart’ masturbators work in one direction: the connected porn dictates the speed and pressure and the toy apes that. Kiiroo’s Onyx works like this: as the person in the porn film slides their mouth down a performer’s cock, so the linked masturbator squeezes your cock in real life. Got it?

OK, so BKK works the other way round. You watch VR porn through the headset, and it gives you instructions that you’re supposed to follow as you masturbate. “Slowly,” explains the actress on the video. “I don’t want you coming too soon.”

I think I was one of the few people at Eroticon who genuinely loved this idea. Most of the people in the room thought it was a bit odd or niche – only really useful to those who want to edge, or ‘train’ themselves to last a bit longer before they come. And ‘train’ really is the operative word – if the lady on the video tells you to slow down but you keep going at it like you’re aching for the last drops of ketchup, the video lady actually fucks off and leaves you to it. No shit.

Sure, it may be niche, but as a fan of masturbation games like Cock Hero, I am totally down for this sort of control. By which I mean ‘I am down to watch men trying desperately to control themselves, but eventually giving up and just rubbing themselves to a vigorous, splattering climax.’ What can I say? Everyone’s got their kinks.

We Vibe Sync

I’ll be brief with this one, for reasons that will be obvious to those of you that read the news. We Vibe has recently settled a huge lawsuit to owners of its sex toys who weren’t aware of the data that was transmitted over the sex toy app. I have some thoughts on this, which I will blog in a bit more detail soon. For now, though, I’m going to tell you two things:

1. I understand why some people are shocked to discover that this data is available (although to help ease people’s fears I want to stress that it hasn’t been ‘hacked’ or ‘released’ – there is no Ashley Madison style database where people can find out how often you wank or shag). Though I would be absolutely gutted if this news prevented people from using We Vibe (and other seriously cool smart toys) in future.
2. There is something inherently fascinating, and potentially thrilling to me, about sex toys which will log time/intensity of masturbation, and the kinky potential of sharing that data with my partner.

Yes, my brain goes to weird places. But the point of this blog post is to talk about the kinky possibilities of sex tech. Sharing sex toy use data – graphs, times, intensities, settings – is an intimate thing that can, if done with consent, be hugely arousing. Imagine the use of smart cock-rings or cages in orgasm denial and chastity play. Dominant guys loading up my most recent wanks on a phone app and ordering me to come for them using exactly the same settings and patterns I used earlier that day. Making me talk them through orgasm charts and graphs, explaining my darkest wank fantasies as I reach peaks of smart sex-toy activity.

Data – like all tech – is a neutral thing. It isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on its own – it’s all about the ways in which you collect and use it, with consent and understanding and care and all that stuff. It can be useful, and it can be dangerous. It can be insightful or it can be nonsense. And it can also be very, very hot.

That – in a nutshell – is what I hope pervs like me can bring to the discussion on sex tech. Not analysis of what something is or how it works, but inspiration on how it can work if you’ve a filthy mind like mine, and one or two itches to scratch.