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.

It is categorically none of my business what you stick in your cunt. As long as it is a) not going to cause you (or anyone else) damage and b) not something which you have stolen from my house, then I wish you the best of luck and happy wanking.

However, I have a minor personal gripe with the sex toy industry, and it goes a little something like this:

WHY IS SO MUCH OF YOUR STUFF SO FUCKING CUTE?

Sorry, correction: why is so much of your girl stuff so fucking cute?

I’m not saying no one likes it, or that it should be banned – I’m sure there are plenty of women who are happy to stuff bright pink menageries up their vaginas. And to be honest, I’ll do the same if there’s nothing else to hand and I fancy an executive wank.

But I resent it, deep down. Because my usual method of shopping online, no matter what I’m buying, is to sort it into colours and then pick the least sparkly. I’m with Henry Ford: it should come in any colour, so long as it’s black. And at least 7 inches. And powerful enough to bruise my cervix.

I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote.

No, I do not want a face on it

Pink things aside (because I know I am in a minority in my general hatred of colour) could we at least stop pretending that in order to get a woman to insert something into herself, it needs to have some sort of animal on?

It’s as if, when Ann Summers invented the never-bettered Rampant Rabbit, the head of their marketing team (let’s call him Dave) said “hey, it looks like women like rabbits. And cute things. Let’s give them more animals to fuck!” and everyone shifted awkwardly in their seats and didn’t say anything because Dave was the boss and they didn’t want to embarrass him. Well they should have embarrassed him. Someone should have stood up and said:

“Look, Dave, I don’t want to make things awkward for you, but women don’t like fucking rabbits, OK? I mean, maybe one or two women like fucking rabbits, but the majority of women don’t like fucking rabbits.”

“So,” Dave retorts, with a smug ‘you’re almost fired’ smirk on his face “if they don’t like fucking rabbits why are they buying the Rampant Rabbit, Trevor?”

At which point Trevor leaps to his feet and shouts “BECAUSE IT DOES GOOD THINGS TO THEIR CLIT, DAVE. WOMEN LIKE IT WHEN WE DO GOOD THINGS TO THEIR CLITS.”

And there you have it. The Rampant Rabbit is awesome because it has a bit that goes inside and is all swirly, and makes your cunt feel good, and a simultaneous bit that goes on the outside and buzzes against your throbbing clit. The fact that the outsidey bit looks like rabbit ears is no more relevant to your orgasm than whether the box it came in is made from recycled cardboard.

Does cute do it for you?

There’s a movement recently towards more abstract sex toys: shapely things that could just as easily be an ornament as a fucktoy – I wholeheartedly approve of these. I also approve strongly of the ones that look like plain, old-fashioned cock. These are excellent.

But I don’t understand why there are still so many that have been Disneyfied. Whether it’s making them vaguely dolphin-shaped, branding them with Hello Kitty, or giving them the face of a creepy mutant smurf.

As with everything I write this comes with a gigantic flashing neon caveat that says ‘some people will disagree with me.’ Because there is no single sexy thing on which all humans can agree, there may well be people who are more aroused by a sex toy if it comes with a grinning face.

But these people – and I don’t think I am going out on a particularly shaky limb here – are almost definitely in the minority. How often have you heard someone say ‘that’s hot, but it’d be totally hotter if it had a tail like a chinchilla’? It’s just not that common. What’s more, if these products really are catering to a significant group that gets aroused by cute things, surely we’d see a slight overspill into the male section of the market. And yet, as far as I know, no sex toy manufacturer has captalised on this particular opportunity by sticking googly eyes on a Fleshlight.

It’s marketing, yeah?

No one at Lovehoney has yet offered me a lucrative blogging contract, so I do not have access to amazing data on what people do and don’t want in terms of sex toys. It is possible that the reason they are making these products is because there is huge demand for them. When they send people out to accost women on the street and ask them what they would like to stick in their vaginas, many of those women might say:

“I don’t mind, as long as it looks like a furry rodent.”

And their market research people rush back to the office to get Dave all excited about the Clit Squirrel.

So, it’s possible. But again, if cute fucks are so popular, why is this phenomenon mostly limited to female-solo toys? After all, we don’t paint smiley faces on strapon belts, or market sex swings as ‘cuddle harnesses’.

If women are genuinely more likely to buy things because they’re cute, that suggests toys need to be made unsexy before girls will feel confident about clicking the ‘buy’ button. Is this because women are naturally more squeamish about sex? Or is it because women are constantly told that we should be more squeamish about sex? That we should be virtuous and innocent, and the only possible reason why we might buy something that is sex-related is not because it makes our cunt throb with a need to be fucked, but our ovaries squeal in appreciation of how adorable this particular sea horse is.

I’m not going to say I know either way, because I’m just speculating. But I’m speculating pretty fucking hard that it’s the latter.

How do we solve a problem like a sparkly dolphin dildo?

As ever, I’m not calling for a ban, because the inside of your vagina is no business of mine. However, I am going to publicly and loudly state that the only things I care about with sex toys are:

• safety
• price
• whether it does good things to my sticky bits

I not only don’t care if it’s cute, I’ll be actively turned off if it is. I don’t want people to stop making them, or those that genuinely like them to stop buying them. I just want Dave in marketing to have a think, when deciding whether to shape a new vibrator like a creepy smurf thing, why exactly he feels he needs to.

As for the women who prefer our sex toys without My Little Pony-style packaging, who get annoyed when something that provides a genuinely nice wanking experience (i.e. the Rabbit) has to look like a Happy Meal toy – I’d like us to be louder and more honest in our feedback. We need to send a message to manufacturers that, for many of us, this cuteness is not only unnecessary but – if their goal is to make us come like a freight train – actively unhelpful.

I don’t want to rub my clit with a gerbil, I just want to rub my clit.

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, so if you buy toys from the companies I get a small cut of the money which helps me keep this site running.

Sex isn’t always hearts, flowers, champagne and sky-high orgasms. To be honest sometimes it’s not even hot fumbling, high fives and a faceful of spunk. Often what might have been an excellent fuck is ruined by one of the two things that our race is miserably prone to:

• the laws of physics
• biological incompetence

To celebrate those fucks that go wrong, here are three true stories of bad things that have happened to me during sex:

1. Unbalanced

When people think of university they might think of dissertations, hippie students, or excessive masturbation in the library. I, on the other hand, am reminded of the exceptionally narrow beds in my first year halls of residence.

During my first year, I conscripted an eager boy to join me in testing just how much we could get up to on one of these beds, as a rebellion against the miserable cunt who designed them to deter any sex whatsoever.

We were only foiled once, during our first drunken attempt at buttsex. At the moment of climax my boy slapped my arse, slammed his dick home nice and hard and declared in a sexy, ecstatic moan: “I’m going to come in your ass.”

The good news is that he sort of did. The bad news: as my leg slipped from the side of the bed, the rest of his jizz sprayed elsewhere as he tumbled onto the bedroom floor, chipping a tooth on the way down.

Moral of the story: even during climax, concentrate.

2. Sex toys

I love sex toys – give me something new and shiny and I’m more than happy to stick it in my cunt to see how it feels. Once a guy bought some ben wa balls. Not normal balls – these were rubber-coated, and textured with short, soft spikes. Interesting.

At least, they were interesting for the first five minutes or so until he pulled on the string holding them together. Instead of cooing with delight, I was left on the bed screaming ‘what the fuck?!’ as I realised that only one of the balls had come out with the string – the other was left inside me.

Luckily for me, I didn’t have to go to hospital to have it removed. It’s surprising what you can fish out of a vagina if you happen to have a teaspoon to hand.

Moral of this story: Don’t buy cheap sex toys off the internet.

3. Dark alleys

Fairly recently, I met an incredibly young-looking gentleman with whom I got quite pissed. After the initial pleasantries and gin, we retired to a nearby alleyway where I gave him an enthusiastic and fairly sloppy blow job. After a pleasant – if frantic – five minutes I picked up my bag, squeezed out of the narrow alley, and we went our separate ways.

No sooner had I parted from him than I smelt something horrible. Awful. I had no idea where it might have come from, but it seemed to be following me. After thoroughly checking the bottom of my shoes, my jeans, and any other conceivable area, I eventually realised that the smell was dog shit. Not just a bit – a lot. A Great Dane’s worth – all over my fucking bag.

After ditching the bag in the nearest bin, I sat miserably on the train home, wanting to vomit over the lingering scent in my nostrils. But above all I was praying desperately that the guy I’d just sucked off hadn’t noticed, and mistakenly thought the excitement of giving him head had led me to shit myself.

Moral of this story: Clean up after your fucking dog.