I’ve been posting affiliate links to sex toys since approximately April of 2006. Today I was looking at some aggregate statistics about orders not completed — items that potential customers following my links put into a virtual shopping cart, but never checked out. In more than four years, what are the most popular “almost purchased” items?

It’s actually a rather fun little list:

1. Vibrating Silver Bullet. Inexpensive ($9), classic, functional. 72 “almost” purchases over four years. Nice price/utility ratio.
2. Hitachi Magic Wand. Famous. Capable. Legions of fans. $39.95. 67 “almost” purchases.
3. Bend Over Boyfriend DVD. The classic instructional video for hetero strap-on fun. $38.00. 63 “almost” purchases.
4. Fleshlight Male Masturbator. Another famous toy with a lot of marketing behind it. The spendiest item on the list at $65.00. 44 “almost” purchases.
5. 18″ Black Paddle. Your basic wooden spanking paddle, big enough to be evil. $42.00. 36 “almost” purchases.

I don’t know whether this list is a proxy for overall item popularity, or whether it’s a special list of items that people consider buying before “chickening out” or deciding to be kind to their credit cards. But it’s interesting, either way.

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This detail from a kinky and fantastical salon scene at Kinky Delight delights me in its sheer perversity. The device with a zillion little pubic-hair clips looks quite evil. Do you suppose it’s intended to straighten curly pubes, or just to remove them as slowly and painfully as possible?

I keep hearing the voice of Jeff Foxworthy in my head as I think about this. “If your sex toy company washes returned dildos in the office sink, you might be a redneck…” But the thing is, I know some rednecks. Hell, I have rednecks in my family. They don’t vote, but they do buy sex toys…and not used ones, either. That would be tacky.

I’m talking about a paragraph from Always Aroused Girl’s blogpost titled Email From a Former EF Employee. Yeah, disgruntled former employee. Yeah, I saw it on the internet so it must be true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like any other internet account, you get to decide whether you believe it, based on whether the account feels true to you and whether it matches other data you have. Meanwhile: Ew.

I worked for Eden Fantasys for approximately eight months.

…

One day I arrived at the office early. Most people were not in yet, but the product manager was there. She was at the sink washing things. I set my computer up, went back to say hi, and noticed that she was washing dildos. And drying them, and bringing them to the warehouse (directly attached to the office). She said something about returns that hadn’t even been opened. Some companies package their toys in simple plastic bags stapled at the top, which is easy to reproduce. At least one other person can attest to this practice. Enough said.

Remember the Naked Warrior post? Well, I just discovered a Frank Frazetta version of what is clearly the same scene. I’ve cropped it similarly:

Unfortunately the original “Naked Warrior” post linked to a now-dead Tumblr. And I never had an artist name for that version. I wonder who was painting in homage to whom?

At first glance and low resolution, this could pass as an unremarkable piece of “newlyweds getting jiggy” erotic art:

Except, of course, that it came from Spanking Blog, which has it at a much higher resolution that shows in loving detail the heavy set of cane marks on the bride’s bottom and breasts:

Spanking Blog spins the fantasy thusly:

Here we have a bride who refused her new husband when he attempted to take certain “liberties”. Her refusal, to her tearful surprise, didn’t work out quite as well as she hoped it would…

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One of the perils of playing MMORPGs as a grownup is that they’ll let any random 14-year-old riff-raff into those things. And sure, you can choose your associations, but eventually you’ll wind up in a guild or corp or whatever with some too-young boys who are annoying as fuck. They typically don’t last — not if you’ve chosen a good band of brothers to run with — but they do come before they go.

My latest cross to bear in my favored internet spaceship game is a guy who is so young, he still thinks “gay” is the cool all-purpose negative adjective. He loses a fight? Gay. The other guy runs from a fight? Gay. They patch the game in a way he doesn’t like? Gay. A game item doesn’t have the stats he thinks it should? Gay.

Gay. Gay. Gay. Every third sentence. Gay.

Last night I told gay-fixated-boy “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” Classical movie reference. Totally before his time. Went right over his head. Gay.

So I found myself totally wanting to rickroll him with some real gayness. I didn’t do it though; I’m not sure if he’s a legal adult or not, and the players are expected to support this particular game’s “T for Teen” rating even if it is boldly disclaimed that “Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB.”

But I figured, you know, something from Bound Gods. Maybe something like this:

Gay. Totally. 100% organically-grown San-Francisco-certified pure gay. But not, I think, what this boy has in mind.

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No, not the girl! The image is an old friend:

It’s from a book called Rapture: 13 Erotic Fantasies by Raffaelli. The book dates to 1975, but I got my hands on it when I was about age 14. I obtained it by ordering it, on the strength of the title alone (well, that and the “must be 18 to order” legend), out of a thick remaindered-books mail-order Publisher’s Central Bureau catalog that listed titles by name only in tiny print on cheap pulpy newsprint pages. It was quite literally the best $6.95 I ever spent in my life (plus shipping).

I became, shall we say, somewhat familiar with the images in Rapture. I’d seen Playboy, and I’d seen cheap harder-core porn, but Rapture was the first time I ever saw genuine delight portrayed in an explicit photograph. I shouldn’t be surprised if this very image is primarily responsible for my quasi-fetish for joyous smiles.

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