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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "sex toys"
February 5th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This is web journalism headlining at its worst: the breathless headline trumpeting link-bait-y news that is, it turns out when you read the article, 100% not true:
Cheap 3D printers fuel home-printed sex toy “phenomenon”
Yeah. Only, not. It turns out that home-grade 3D printers don’t fuel anything of the kind — not yet — because none of the materials available for home 3D printing are sex-toy safe. From the article:
Nardone…says the rapidly falling cost of 3D printers is driving fetishists to experiment with the technology. “When printers dropped to $2,000, I bought one,” he says, although he adds that “surface finish and materials” are the major drawbacks of current technology.
“The issue is that consumer grade 3D printers can’t print in body-safe materials yet,” agrees Chelsea Downs of New York Toy Collective. “People can design their own toys and share the digital files online, but you still need someone to be able to take the printed prototype and turn it into a toy in a body-safe texture and material.”
Even Dongiverse warns on its blog that home-printed items are not safe to use in the bedroom. “The prints are not water-tight,” it advises, adding: “it’s damn near impossible to clean them.” Instead, it recommends that printouts are used as moulds to cast toys in appropriate materials.
So. Home-printed sex toys are not (yet) a phenomenon. But it seems self-evident they will be, one day, and the article offers a nice roundup of some entrepreneurs who are trying to get situated in the space so that they’ll be there when it becomes a thing.
So, why am I blogging about this? Because, buried in the story I found the unsurprising (but disappointing) news that the 800-lb-gorilla of online sites for sharing 3D design files is hostile to the sharing of sex toy designs. If it’s true — and it’s possible to imagine reasons why an account by someone with business ambition in this space might not turn out to be — it’s rather a disappointment, like the Steve Jobs Memorial Walled Garden Of Pleasurelessness:
Nardone set up [his] site after his attempts to upload his designs to popular 3D filesharing site Thingiverse were rebuffed. “I had a conversation with their attorney,” Nardone says. “He said ‘we want to be open-source but we have to draw the line. You can’t post that stuff here’.”
Thingiverse, remember, purports to be
a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them.
There’s nothing in their TOS specifically against sex toys, but they don’t allow the posting of anything “pornographic” or “obscene”, nor do they allow uploading of user content that is “vulgar”, “pornographic”, “sexually explicit”, “obscene”, or “harmful to minors”. I suspect many of my readers would agree with me that a CAD file for a dildo is none of those things, yet that constellation of adjectives makes it pretty clear, I think, that such a file would indeed probably be unwelcome. I always hate it when entrepreneurs in a cool and economically-important space turn out to be sex-negative or sex-cowardly, but surprised? Never.
If you’ve read this far, you probably don’t need an explanation of precisely why home 3D printing is going to be important with respect to sex toys. Indeed, you may already have an idea for a sex toy that you’d like to print yourself, because nobody else in the world makes just what you want in the precise dimensions that you want. For me, it all became clear when I saw online a toy for men called the Trailer Hitch:
It’s a butt plug hooked to a cock ring, and it’s clear at a glance that, at least in theory, it’s more than the sum of its parts. If you’re a man and you put something up your butt, you’ve got to hold onto it if you want to move it, and you’ll want to move it if you’re after prostate stimulation. If you’re a man and you wear a cock ring (which can just feel good, or it can help maintain an unreliable erection) it can slide off your cock (if you wear it in front of the balls) or it can shove your balls forward with painful results (if you wear it behind the balls). So the concept of this toy is doubly brilliant; the anal plug hooks to the cock ring and holds it back against your body, while your normal fucking or wanking motion gives you a little bit of prostate stimulation.
But for it to work… just look at all the things that have to be sized properly! The ring has to be absolutely as small as it can be while still allowing you to put it on, the curved arm that attaches to the ring has to curve correctly and be the right length for your body size, the straight probe that goes into your butt has to be the proper length to reach your prostate, and then the ball on the end has to be a size large enough to do the stimulation job yet small enough you’re comfortable inserting it.
If you order one of these off the internet, you’ve got to pick (intelligently — but none of the things you need to measure are easy to measure with precision) from quite a lot of different options representing different combinations of these variables. You might get it wrong. Your expensive sex toy is non-returnable (for obvious reasons). If you’re rich and/or highly motivated, you might try again. How many people who get it wrong a second time are ever going to try a third time?
And yet, the idea seems good. We’re probably a long way from home printers that print in lovely solid stainless steel, but the Trailer Hitch would be fine in any sufficiently strong, smooth, non-porous plastic. With cheap enough feedstock, you could vary the design millimeter by millimeter, making iterative attempts until you had the perfect hitch for your trailer.
That’s the promise of home 3D sex toy printing. Infinite customization and personalization in perfect privacy. It’s not here yet. But it’s coming.
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January 15th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
I have in my hand a curious book called The Stimulators: Swinging Set’s Newest Rage, by Roger Blake, Ph.D. Published in 1968 by Century Books (CB 052), it has semi-abstract cover art medallions (groovy!) and purports to reveal “how sex gadgets of every type are now being peddled openly…and how they are used!”
Psuedo-interviews and “case studies” with anonymized interviewees about taboo sexual topics are a sexual literary genre in their own right, and it’s often imprudent to mistake them for non-fiction. But even a suspected fiction can shed light on historical views and attitudes. In that spirit, I offer this brief anecdote from one “Jim”, described as “an interviewee who volunteered to give information for my research” and as “a fifty-one year old sales who has patronized the better class of professional prostitutes in cities of the South, Southwest, and East Coast for more than 30 years.” So the first anecdote in this account would date from approximately 1938, with the second one presumably later:
The first time I saw one of these [vibrator massagers] I was about twenty-one or so. In Dallas, when I went down to Ma’s the first time and took a client to get some girls. They were Mexicans. And you talk about some beautiful Mexican girls, they were outstanding! Eighteen, nineteen years old and great! We had three of them up in the room, and this one pulls off her blouse and digs out this thing like a barber uses. She went to town on her breasts. She went nuts! Man, they were jumping up and down. The other girls were jumping up and down. They got in a fight to get that vibrator, and the little gal on the left, soon as she got it, she pushed it right in that black forest and it was bzzzzing it up great!
The senoritas were putting on a show. Maybe they were getting their rocks off, maybe not. I think about every other whore I ever had, had a vibrator of some kind. The New York whores are the experts, the real pros with a vibro. They pull the things out of the drawer to the night table like it was as natural as screwing. They know you want a little something extra.
I’ll tell you about Dina Rae, the one I went back to three times, she was so great. Stacked like a brick outhouse with 38Cs for boobs. She straddled me about the chest so her black forest parted to show the crater of that hot volcano. The boobs were dragging my belly. So she puts the vibro to work on my legs and comes up to my rod and it goes right up … up, up, up.
Dina Rae had this gimmick that she was famous for. She lifts up a little bit and puts the vibrator to work along the bottom side of the rod, all up and down the shaft real easy. There’s a rhythm to it finally. She goes down to the base, then starts up slow. I just about come and she pulls it away and starts at the base again. After about three times, I know I’m gonna go off the next one. This final time, she starts up the shaft, then goes back to the base and keeps it bzz-zzing there while she runs her finger all the way up to that big vein on the bottom.
When it shoots off, it’s like a geyser or a volcano erupting. She keeps her mouth about an inch or two away, and she catches about two of the shots and swallows them. The rest of it goes flying all over the boobs and everyplace. So she sits up then and acts sexy rubbing it around her boobs and then working the vibrator all around her boobs until her great big fat nipples are sticking out like two hard nuts.
If you’re still in the mood, she works it down to her twat to get her jollies. She does it sometimes even if you’re not in the mood, all of which leads me to believe that Dina Rae is sincere and does get her jollies that way, and it’s no act.
The Mexican gals were all show. They acted it out, and they’d break up laughing sometimes. It was sexy for the customers, but I think it was a big game for them. Ever since that time way back when, I’ve been hooked on the things. Every pro I’m with, I ask if she’s got a vibro, and I can tell you I think I could count the ones on the fingers of one hand who said they didn’t.
I’m so taken by the groovy cover art medallions, I’ve got to include a higher-res view of them, as found on the back cover of the book (click for larger):
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June 15th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
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:
- Vibrating Silver Bullet. Inexpensive ($9), classic, functional. 72 “almost” purchases over four years. Nice price/utility ratio.
- Hitachi Magic Wand. Famous. Capable. Legions of fans. $39.95. 67 “almost” purchases.
- Bend Over Boyfriend DVD. The classic instructional video for hetero strap-on fun. $38.00. 63 “almost” purchases.
- 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.
- 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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June 14th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
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.
September 14th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
An alert reader, who remembered this post about vintage sex toys, found the following image on the most amazingly horrendous Russian hijacking-pop-ups image-sharing site you can imagine:
(A beautiful large version is also available.) The artwork looks Japanese to me, but if the lettering proves me wrong, I’ve got no way of knowing it.
One feature in common with the photos previously blogged is the rigid shaft-stiffening-cage thingy shown in this detail:
Sadly, I don’t have any idea how old this artwork is, although it certainly doesn’t appear to be at all recent.
December 14th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
It’s true! True at my house, anyway. I try hard not to junk up this blog with commercial messages, but when holiday deadlines loom, making a sex toys order is too much fun to pass up.
Coal and Switches: For lumps of coal, you’re on your own. But if she (or he) has been naughty, and it’s too much trouble to go out and cut some switches, how about letting them find the festive red handle of a short red riding crop sticking out of their Christmas morning stocking?
Get a Grip: In extreme cases, where naughtiness is not yet accompanied by contrition, you may find that you also need the matching red leather leash and collar:
Christmas Crackdown: Unfortunately, the leather riding crop may prove too gentle (and fun!) to deal with the sort of serious Christmas trouble you’ve got. If it’s just not stern enough to meet your needs, there’s a more severe, but still festive, alternative: the candy-red silicone Lolly Crop ought to fix you right up.
Exeunt: My work here is done. Ho ho ho!
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February 5th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
Remember this antique set of penis sheaths?
While, here’s another slightly different set, including cock rings and maybe even one-half of a set of ben-wa balls:
I’m not sure if these are made of carved horn, ivory, or Bakelite, but it’s obvious that they were carefully crafted and expensive sex toy sets.
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