Tue, 2010-11-30 00:13

Paradox of Paper Cuts and Plastic finds a great off-label use for a male-masturbation product. It relates to a widely-experienced but little-mentioned hassle with a legendary sex toy used mainly by women.

I got a Tenga Egg from Good Vibrations!

You might be asking yourself why I would choose a male masturbator as my first toy to review. You might be thinking that I do not have a bio cock (although I do have a few less-sensate ones in my drawer at home) and therefore might not be able to write a detailed review of this kind of product. You might then conclude that I’ve used it with one of my male partners, but you’d actually be wrong!

Source: Paper Cuts and Plastic

The legendary sex toy, of course, is the Hitachi Magic Wand
. It’s been around for years. They were the primary learning tool in Betty Dodson’s masturbation workshops for decades. Genuinely countless women say the Magic Wand gave them their first orgasms, sometimes when nothing else from hands to partners to prayer had worked before.

The widely-experienced but little-mentioned hassle, though, is that while it’s well designed and of course perfectly, perfectly safe, they’re made with the same electric motor Hitachi puts in its consumer-grade electric sanders! (Hitachi being better known around the world for its construction tools and kitchen appliances than its one-and-only sex aid.) Consequently their vibrations are very intense.

Intense enough that, like Paradox, most of the women I know who use them at least started out using them through clothes (don’t ask how I know tight jeans work well) or folded towels or, when even that’s too intense, folded pillows!

Turns out that Tenga Eggs (a very stretchy plastic-gel single-use penis stimulator I probably ought to try some day) can be stretched over the vibrating end of a Magic Wand. Once in place the very soft, jiggly egg material buffers the vibrations enough to permit direct clitoral contact.

The downside for most people would be the Egg’s single-use construction and relatively high price ($7-$10 each.) And since there are a number of after-market attachments for the Magic Wand I’m guessing you might find a more permanent but still impact-buffering solution at Babeland or other quality sex-toy shops.

But worth a try.

Quick questions: What’s been your experience with Hitachi-style wand vibrators? Do you go for direct contact? (I know some people can handle it right away and many more work up to it.) Do you use padding? How about turning it around and “riding” the relatively less-intense handle (as one person I know does)? Did you have your first orgasm with one? Is it still the only one that works for you?

Fri, 2009-05-22 14:27

I just gotta pass this along. Em & Lo of Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. say

Photo from Em & Lo’s site. Link takes you to Amazon Tingler page with their associate code.

The turn-of-the-century enthusiasm over the Tingler may have faded, but don’t forget this ridiculous-looking repurposed kitchen whisker for pre-sex relaxation and nerve-stimulation. In fact, experiencing the Tingler is the closest you can get to sheer ecstasy without taking MDMH or having an orgasm. This cheap metal scalp-massaging tool is so simple — but then most ingenious ideas are: It gently touches acupressure points to send shivers throughout your entire body. And that’s not just regurgitated marketing copy — that’s for reals.

Read the quote in context here.

Whether they are, as Em & Lo suggest, one of the best foreplay tools ever, I gotta say they can feel celestially supernal. Leave a comment if you’ve ever tried it.

Tue, 2008-10-14 14:29

Photo by Flickr user bcmacsac1. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Coy Pink of No need to be coy says

I’ve always been slightly annoyed about a certain segment of sex toys out there.
Image from Babeland.com. Click for
(non-affiliate) product info.Animal-themed sex toys, to be precise.  What genius decided that women need or want their sex toys to be modeled after animals?  Do the powers-that-be think if a sex toy is shaped like a bunny or a dolphin it will be more appealing to women?  Do they think it’s easier for a shy lady to purchase a dildo with a face on it rather than one that is more life-like?  Even if that is true, how insulting is that?  All of us silly, giggling girls couldn’t POSSIBLY purchase a realistic looking vibrator, NOOOO...  it must be cute looking! </sarcasm>  I, for one, am not a fan of any toy that resembles an animal.  Apparently, I’m not alone…

She said it here.

Oh, and meanwhile TBK of The Beautiful Kind has remarks along the same lines in her review of a different sex toy. (Emphasis mine.)

I’ve never had anything like this up there before, just normal size dicks and smaller butt plugs. It measures in at 6.5 inches in length, which you wouldn’t think is too bad, but it’s bulky, and I was intimidated. It’s like a tapeworm for Paul Bunyan!

AND it even has a FACE – someone in Germany has a sense of humor…this is a product of Fun Factory, an innovative European sex toy company. I am GROOVING on their funky toy line, let me tell you.

Read her review here.

My cached version of photo from TBK’s post.Here’s how I think vibrators and similar devices got those cutesy animal looks and faces. I remember reading years ago, from something by, I think, Susie Bright, that animal shapes and/or those unnerving little smiley faces were originally intended to get around laws against “marital aids” in the country they were first manufactured and/or first became popular.

Back when vibrators first started getting popular in America there were basically two kinds, smooth candle-shaped and “Swedish” ones that strapped to your hand. They worked… ok but they really were adapted from tools for old-fashioned body massage.

Oh yeah, and the candle-style ones were available mainly through mall-based “Spencer Gift” type novelty toy stores which, I’m guessing, meant they had to be indirect about their intended use.

Anyway, when the new ones, specifically the highly-iconic Rabbit, from Japan showed up in the early progressive toy stores (the then-independent Good Vibrations had them very early on) it was a revelation for a lot of people. Sure, Japanese modesty standards are very strong but also very different from our so, for instance, they weren’t particularly shy to design tools specifically for actual masturbation… but they still put bunny ears and little smileys on them.

And naturally when those non-toy “toys” took off here other manufacturers imitated the designs, bunny-ears or dolphin heads and all, without, I think, wondering why. Once manufacturers stopped imitating and started doing their own thing we started getting really specific toys like the Rock Chick (not for everyone but very effective for some people) or the NJoy and Lelo design lines of vibrators and insertables that are beautiful, very functional, well-crafted and… neither toy nor “realistic imitation” of any kind of anatomy whether it’s animal, vegetable, genital, or… toddler toys.**

Anyway, that’s where I think the little animal effects on a lot of toys came from.

—-

A not-irrelevant nerd note: along the same lines of rote imitation of features like bunny ears on popular products, you know how a lot of old “hot rod” race cars were always really jacked up in the back? I grew up in old bootlegger country — the original “Thunder Road” of ballad and movie fame went through both the town I was born in and the one where I grew up! More than one old-timer car mechanic told me they were jacked up not to improve performance but so that they’d look normal when driven with sometimes hundreds of gallons of illegal booze in the back. And yeah, on days off when the drivers would unload and race them those cars won… but it was the size of engines and skill of the drivers, not the height of the (unloaded) trunks that mattered. Nevertheless, 50 years later the misperception about functionality lingers… as does, evidently, the impulse to keep putting cartoon eyes on Coy’s and TBK’s sex toys “marital aids” sex and/or masturbation tools.

[** I added that last clause to make it more clear that “cute” and “anatomically correct” aren’t the only alternatives. —fl]

Sat, 2008-03-01 14:42

So the other day we had dinner with friends at their house and at one point while standing by in the family room to help the kids settle back down after a mid-game frackass I started thumbing through a book about working out with those big pump-up Pilates exercise balls.

This afternoon, sort of on a whim, I decided to try one of the recommended “subtle core-building” exercises on the biggest of several balls my partner used to use as a chair when she had a sore back. And the exercise really is a simple, subtle one. You sit square on the ball, your knees at roughly 90 degrees, and then bounce with a sort of elbows-bent, marching-band arm movement. The instructions had been to do the exercise for a while, five minutes or more, and to pay attention to what core muscles were engaged or flexed.

And it really is a subtle exercise. At first it was all about finding balance, and then rhythm, but once I found my center of gravity and a good pace I started noticing, sure enough, all sorts of muscles I generally don’t pay any attention to gently engaging and taking on more of a central role. The first big sensations were in my core muscles near my solar plexus — not my usual abdominals or obliques but something a little deeper.

So that was cool, but the other thing I really started to notice after my mid-torso muscles was my pelvic-floor muscles. After just a few minutes the slow, steady pulsing and flexing — too gentle by far to be anything like clenching… really no effort at all — just started reaching deeper, engaging not just my PC muscles but lots of other ones as well, leg muscles, girdle muscles, muscles around my perineum, and even muscles I think maybe I notice only when I’m ejaculating.

Anyway, it was just a slow, sensual not-quite-erotic feeling, and — me being me after all — I began to wonder how it would work with more direct stimulation like a smaller bump or ball near my prostate. And then, me being me with my little lint-trap memory, I remembered someone mentioning a gag/novelty sex toy that was basically just a Pilates ball with an attached dildo.

A little bit of Googling turned up a couple of products along those lines (or at least a couple of repackagings of the same product — as if that never happens.) You can see one from the first randomly Googled vendor that included a photo of the actual product here.

I obviously couldn’t say if the product would work for anyone else, male or female — especially since I haven’t even tried one yet — but I can say that I think it might not be the big joke it was often presented when it was first introduced. I happen to think you could probably get the same benefit from a regular ball and a regular insertable of your choice. Anyway, if anyone else has tried one of those things, or if you’ve noticed the sort of inner/erotic sensations I was trying to describe (with or without insertables) I’d love to hear about it.

[Note: Today’s photo is a bit less work safe than usual. But, again, only a bit. —fl]