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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "sex toys"
July 3rd, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Do you spend too much time hanging out in sex toy stores? Here’s a chance to test your mad brand identification skillz:
Name That Sex Toy
Alas, every now and then the pictures have lame and inconsistent censoring on them. What kind of weak sister writes a sex toy quiz but doesn’t have the strength of conviction to show pictures…15% of the time? Sorry if this sounds harsh, but censoring pictures of sex toys strikes me as actively bad, like censoring safe sex information so that sexual newbies can’t see exactly where the condom goes. What are we doing, protecting sensitive eyes from pictures of…plastic? Pegs my Lame-O-Meter.
Oh yeah…I missed two.
December 24th, 2002 -- by Bacchus
“Merry Christmas to All, and To All, a Good Night!”
February 18th, 2026 -- by Bacchus
I’m reluctant to share this story at all, because the woman who put it on the internet framed it on both ends with misandrist generalizations about male hygiene. More on that, below. But first the story, which comes from clinical sexologist Danielle Kramer, talking about a time when she was under contract to provide sexual health clinical services for the military:
The base I was associated with…had barracks full of 18 to 24 year olds. A young enlisted guy comes in, tested positive for gonorrhea and chlamydia. Classic combo. Easy enough, we treat it, safe sex talk, you’re done. But the next day, two more guys came in with the same combo. And the day after that, three more guys. At this point, I’m like, okay, there’s either one very busy person on this base or something else is going on.
Then this one guy comes in, he tests positive, but he swears he is not sexually active. And I hear this all the time. So I’m like, hey, no judgment. I don’t care who you’re having sex with, but we gotta talk about this. And he’s like, no, there is no way. I’m not having sex with anybody.
Where do you live? The barracks? Who do you hang out with? And slowly, slowly, the truth comes out.
Turns out, a not small group of men in the barracks were sharing a Fleshlight. Two of them, to be exact. And none of them had been washing it for weeks. They were literally passing around a communal petri dish of gonorrhea and chlamydia like it was a Nintendo Switch.
Yes, I had to tell their commanding officer. Yes, I had to do an emergency Powerpoint about this. Yes, every single one of them had to get treated.
Not quoted are several sex-negative generalizations about men and cleanliness and safe sex, none of which are supported by the facts of the anecdote. I don’t prefer to share misandrist propaganda, especially when young men under military discipline in barracks are by no means a fair sampling from which to extrapolate general male behavior.
So why share the story at all? Because it ties in, conceptually, with the public Fleshlight art installation at Burning Man that’s gone viral in a hundred internet places over the years. Everybody who sees that installation or hears about it or talks about it feels a certain kind of way about public masturbation and/or shared sex toys, and a lot of those conversations include phrases like “nobody would” or “that’s too disgusting for anybody to…” or… you see where I’m going with this. The anecdote about young men under authoritarian control, in a sex-segregated barracks with very little privacy, establishes a sort of outlier of human behavior that I think is useful to that conversation.
That’s why, even though the story came wrapped up in sex-negative “men-are-filthy-beasts” packaging where I found it, I thought it was worth scraping it clean (as best I could) to bring it here.
Update: While curating the list of similar posts to appear beneath this one, I was amused to discover a prescient post from the very first year of ErosBlog’s publication, all the way back in 2003. (Am I allowed to call my own posts “prescient”?) In responding to a conversation outside the sex blog community (which was then very small) about why sex toys for men (male masturbators, pocket pussies, Fleshlights, and such) were considered much more taboo and icky than sex toys for women such as dildos and vibrators, I pointed out that men don’t have any sort of hygiene problems at all when it comes to cleaning things they care about, like, say, guns and military equipment:
[I]n objective terms the hygienic concern is arrant nonsense. Men have mastered cleaning tasks of a far more intricate nature, and will even voluntarily indulge when the object of their cleaning affections is, say, a much-beloved rifle. Nor is it implausible that a truly decent technology for assisted orgasm would command every bit as much gadgeteering enthusiasm as gun guys lavish on the contents of their gun safes.
So there! You can be sure that the very same military guys who supposedly passed around these dirty Fleshlights have been taught to field strip and clean a complicated rifle under challenging conditions, when given supportive social conditions for that cleaning task. The problem in that barracks was the social conditions, not the filthy-beastliness of the men.
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January 25th, 2026 -- by Bacchus
Many many MANY years ago, before the internet became king, I had a paper mail-order sex toys catalog from a store in Minnesota called Smitten Kitten. Apparently they are still going strong, because word comes of some activists who bought a whole box of clearance dildos there recently to throw at ICE agents and their police protection.
We were standing inside Smitten Kitten like lunatics planning the world’s dumbest coup. The place glowed like a queer cathedral built by horny anarchists. … We explained that we were bulk-buying dozens of dildos because we intended to psychologically dismantle a federal law enforcement agency at a hotel protest.
Fast forward:
The first dildo flew through the air like a rubber prophecy and skidded to a stop directly at the boots of a state trooper.
And that’s when the United States government lost its entire fucking mind.
Before anyone could even laugh properly, before a second dildo could achieve liftoff, before reality had time to process the absurdity of what had just happened, the cops panicked like Victorian men seeing an ankle.
Tear gas.
Pepper balls.
Instant chaos.
The very first rubber dick to touch government-issued leather boots triggered a full-blown chemical weapons response. That is not metaphor. That is not exaggeration. That is a literal sentence that happened in America in 2026.
The story continues:
Through my tear-blurred vision, I saw them.
The dildos.
Just sitting there.
Mocking them.
The cops stood there, choking us, shooting pepper balls at people holding noise makers and rubber penises, desperately trying to reassert dominance over pieces of silicone that had emotionally defeated them in under sixty seconds. They couldn’t pick them up. They couldn’t leave them there. They couldn’t kick them away without becoming a meme. So they did what every insecure authoritarian does when confronted with humiliation.
They escalated.
There’s more in this vein, and more photos:
But you have at least a sense of the piece. A dildo action, and a clever bit of memetic engineering. Praxis!
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July 20th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
What’s more fun than a porn star who puts on a schoolgirl outfit and pretends to play with anal sex toys (a long glass dildo with lots of bloopy bumps, and a jeweled butt plug) as if it were her first time?
Not much is more fun than that, honestly. Photos are from Hazel’s Anal Experiment at Collective Corruption.
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July 5th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I have argued that the pornocalypse began with Meg Whitman’s eBay, back in the last century:
Then Meg Whitman happened. It’s too many years ago now for me to recall how many successive waves of anti-porn activism swept the eBay auction platform, but it was many.
The adult items got their own section, it got put behind an age self-verification button, the adult items vanished from the general search, the adult section itself got removed from the category listing making it very hard to find, and then there was wave after wave of auction removals based on listing policies that were vague and erratically enforced. There were rules about how much nudity could show on magazine covers, there were wide-ranging keyword bans that meant you could not list (or show an uncensored photo of) the true titles of many porn items, there was a ton of selective enforcement, and there was an enormous chilling effect because seller accounts were often banned or limited based on first-offense violations of these deeply-murky rules.
It eventually became clear to everyone that Ebay under Meg Whitman (the former Disney exec) was now officially hostile to porn, where once it had been the leading sales platform for vintage porn especially. The market dried up, market offerings became bland and boring, and everybody who was on eBay for that reason had left. The suits, having stricken off the member that so offended them, declared victory and moved on. They broke it, but they like broken better. Broken is what they wanted, broken is what they got.
History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it echoes. Last week we got the news of a pornocalyptic crackdown on Etsy, which used to be a sort of “eBay for handicrafts” but which is under enormous pressure from the suits to become a sort of anodyne reseller of cheap Chinese crap. Some of the handicrafts that latterly gave Etsy its charm were kinky or erotic, but that’s all over now. Per Anna Iovine at Mashable:
Etsy to ban sale of most sex toys, explicit content, and more; Policy changes go into effect next month.
Online retailer Etsy will prohibit sales of most sex toys, content that depicts sex acts and genitalia, and more starting July 29.
The indie seller published its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy yesterday, which states that sales of adult toys that are insertable, “applied to the genitalia,” or “designed for genitals to be inserted into them” will be prohibited. That pretty much runs the gamut — dildos, vibrators, rings, plugs, and the like will be banned. “Non-insertable and non-penetrable adult toys and sexual accessories,” such as BDSM wear, will be allowed as long as listings follow Etsy’s guidelines around mature content, also updated yesterday.
That’s just the beginning of the anti-adult rules in the new sexual content policy and the updated mature content guidelines. But fans of Tumblr’s infamous ban on “female-presenting nipples” will be delighted to learn that Etsy has jumped on that with both feet and is valiantly trying to claim its own share of that delicious infamy:
Etsy is also banning nudity for human models, including “gluteal clefts and female nipples/areolas.” If you’re selling a sexy item of clothing, for example, you must censor body parts, use a mannequin, or opt for just photographing the clothing.
Remember that my theory of pornocalypse focuses on financial inflection points — when a company is trying to go public or negotiate a new funding round or navigate an IPO or a merger/acquisition, that’s when we most often see formerly-welcome porn evicted from a platform.
There isn’t any news (as far as I know) of Etsy facing any major financial events, but a few quick minutes searching the financial press reveals many stories of Etsy having a bad first quarter in 2024 and facing a lot of investor pressure to improve profits. If they do have a massive financial event in 2024, tell all your friends you knew about it in advance because you saw the leading indicators on ErosBlog!
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May 10th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
It matters a whole lot less than it used to, because who searches for “sex blog” in 2024? But a long time ago, being at the top of Google for that phrase brought in enough traffic to fund my rather-less-modest-than-it-has-subsequently-become lifestyle. Affiliate money was easy money, search traffic was king, and top search results for popular phrases were a guarantee of traffic and income.
It’s been more than fifteen years since any of those things were true. Moreover, for most of the last two decades, Google search has prioritized lifestyle columnists and sexual wellness/health sites (which is to say, people selling sex toys in a soft-pitch deniable way) in sex blog searches over any of the sex blogs like mine (or Girl On The Net’s, for example) that publish actual content intended to arouse. You know, porn.
That’s why I don’t much care any more if ErosBlog ranks well in a pornocalypse search engine. It doesn’t matter financially the way it did in, say, 2003. Nor is it any longer much of a competitive feel-good prize, now that sex blogging has outlasted its cultural moment. The only sex bloggers left are stubborn diehards like me. Why we still do it is a complex question with diverse complex answers, but “for bragging rights with each other about our Google search placement” isn’t even close to being on the list.
All of which is to say that that I haven’t seen a sight like this in a very long time:
I know what changed, too. A 22-year-old site is guaranteed to have a lot of technical debt, especially when operated by a tech-numbskull like myself. I freely confess dragging my feet for way too long about upgrading to secure browsing. For a long time, certificates were expensive and fixing big volumes of legacy content was a complex problem. Then, eventually, certificates became free (although still dangerously centralized) and WordPress plugins solved most of the legacy-content problems (old posts prone to breakage). But the biggest problem with technical debt is never the technology, it’s always the stubborn old butthead in charge of the site who balks at the necessary investment to fix it. Especially when the investment is mostly his own time and energy. It’s me. I’m the butthead.
Google has, of course, been downgrading insecure sites in the search results for years. See above for why I didn’t care very much. Over time, browser software, including Google’s, has also gotten more aggressive about warning surfers to stay away from insecure sites, with frighteners like scary colors, harsh symbols, and stern warnings.
A few days ago, I finally got my https:// shit together here on ErosBlog. Sure enough, traffic is up about 40% (albeit from a low base). Moreover, as the above screenshot reflects, I’ve got my #1 search position back for “sex blog”. Should have done it years ago, of course. But at least it’s done now. Onward!
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