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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "sex toys"
August 23rd, 2024 -- by Bacchus
[Publishing note: I wrote this article in 2017 for the onsite blog of an erotic stories site called NovelTrove, which stopped updating in 2022 and went offline a few months ago. This version is as submitted to NovelTrove, with subsequent editorial changes not reflected. An archive of the as-published article is here. The instant republication was prompted by yesterday’s thread on Mastodon that evolved out of this ErosBlog comment.]
Let’s talk about the early days of sex blogs. It’s not easy, though, because what exactly is a sex blog?
As the proprietor of ErosBlog in the early days, I was there — I lived that history. I think I was the first person to call my blog a sex blog. Having that experience, though, doesn’t make the history of sex blogging seem any less complicated.
Everybody knows a “sex blog” is a blog about sex. But what do you mean by “blog”? There are many definitions, but here’s the one I was using in 2002, when I started ErosBlog. A blog to me was a personal website where people would post regularly, their posts would be dated, their newest posts would be at the top of the page, and they would also have a link list or “blogroll” pointing to other blogs. Were you doing all that while talking about sex? Congratulations, you had a sex blog!
It’s different now that social networking sites are so big, but back then, if the site wasn’t personal in some way, it wasn’t a blog to me. Blogs (“web logs”) evolved from the online journaling/diarist tradition that had grown up at sites like LiveJournal, and they were distinct from news sites or “web magazines” because those sites didn’t speak with a human voice. If you didn’t have a human-sounding authorial voice, you didn’t have a blog.
Similarly, if you didn’t have a list of outbound links, you weren’t a blog because you weren’t part of an ongoing conversation. In the early days, bloggers talked to each other in the comments. Blogging was a true social network back then, in a way that it no longer usually is.
Finally, your posts had to be dated. Lots of people had “web pages” where they would edit the HTML by hand from time to time to make updates, but if you couldn’t see at a glance when a thing was posted and how that thing related to other posts, you didn’t have a blog.
What did early sex bloggers post about on their blogs? Well, they posted about sex, of course! But it was different back then, because most sex blogs were almost porn-free, at least in a visual sense. Dirty pictures were quite rare on sex blogs, because in the mainstream blogging world, there were still a lot of taboos. “Internet porn” was a big thing, but many people reading blogs would not dream of viewing a “porn site”, and many more were reading blogs at work, which is why “NSFW” (not safe for work) became the obligatory adult warning tag among bloggers generally. It’s difficult to describe just how delicately a sex blog had to treat erotic images back then. It was incredibly easy to be “too” graphic, with the resulting loss of links and traffic from the blogging community at large.
Still, there was plenty for the early sex blogs to talk about. Many bloggers talked frankly about their own sex life and kinks. Posting erotic stories was also common. People would post their own stories, or they would post short excerpts from another blogger’s dirty stories and then link readers to the author’s web page to see the full story. There were occasional reviews of porn videos, and there was a lot of commentary on the sex writing that existed in the mainstream print press and on the mainstream websites of the day. In those days, print magazines were publishing such terrible sex articles that making fun of them quickly became an overused trope for sex bloggers. (Mocking the sex tips in Cosmo is probably the most famous example of this; some bloggers did it as a regular monthly feature.)
In the early days, though, it’s probably fair to say that we had sex blogs in fact before the idea of sex blogs ever existed. People were sex blogging but not thinking of it as sex blogging; and then for awhile they were thinking of it as “sex blogging” but not calling their blogs “sex blogs.”
I believe I’m the first person to ever start a site and call it a “sex blog” from day one. This was ErosBlog’s header in early October of 2002:
The day I started sex blogging, I only knew of one other blog I considered a sex blog, and that was Susannah Breslin’s The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog. She didn’t exactly call it a sex blog, but it totally was one:
Breslin concurs; she wrote in 2014 that she “would consider” Reverse Cowgirl to have been a sex blog.
Breslin volunteers Daze Reader as her nominee for the first sex blog, and I have to agree that it was a very early one. Daze got his start almost two years before Breslin and me; in September of 2002 Daze said his site was “nearing its second anniversary”. The oldest archive I can find (October 2000) confirms that. Even in 2000, Daze Reader was a sex blog by any reasonable measure, linking mostly to sex stories in the mainstream press, but with editorial comment and the blog subheading “All about sex, technology, culture, news, art, gossip, politics, ideas, drugs, rock & roll…but mostly sex.”
Another early “sex blog” that didn’t use the name was Debrah Hyde’s Pursed Lips, which had its origins in an even earlier web diary and by August of 2000 was using “Sexuality News” as a header over content that’s indisputably sexblog-like:
One of my biggest influences in my earliest sex-blogging days was the website Tiny Nibbles run by Violet Blue, dating back to 2001 at least. Violet wrote about sex toys and sex education and sex in general, all with an open and unabashed sex-positive authorial tone that was extremely rare at the time. Her site, and especially her editorial voice, impressed me hugely. But it never crossed my mind that she was doing a blog, because her articles were undated until the early months of 2003, when she began including a “Tiny Log” on her pages, and putting dates on her articles:
Beginning in 2003, sex blogs started to take off as a category and as a community. They completely exploded in number, sophistication, and popularity. Over the next five years, sex blogs got better connected into mutually-supporting networks, while becoming more honest, more raw, more explicit, more pornographic, and more commercial. Sex toy reviews moved from an occasional oddity to a supporting industry, and explicit imagery (whether amateur, artistic, or commercial) became much more common. It would be a daunting task to even briefly summarize the sex blog world during those years. For an article that serves as a good place to start, I recommend Dangerous Lilly’s A Brief History Of Sex Blogging.
2008 marked a sort of “beginning of the end” for the sex blogging community, although the actual “end” never came, and probably won’t. The US economic crisis in 2008 had a big negative impact on the affiliate sales that supported so many sex bloggers, and the rise of social media sites (most of them hostile to adult content) sucked a lot of the traffic, readership, and community out of the blogging world in general. What’s more, the explosive rise in people using mobile devices (and spending all their time within specific apps instead of browsing the web) began to sharply diminish the amount of general web traffic to blogs of all kinds.
It was roughly then, too, that Google started filtering adult sites and deprecating them so they stopped appearing in the most prominent search results. That meant people doing general searches for adult topics mostly stopped landing on sex blogs at all. That was a big negative change for sex bloggers, who were used to appearing quite high in search results for sexual keyword searches of all kinds.
Despite such challenges, we sex bloggers are resilient. We won’t be going away any time soon. If the last fifteen years of sex blogging were a wild roller-coaster ride (and they were) I can’t wait to see the next fifteen!
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July 30th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
There’s no labor shortage in the refining/hab wheel that rotates above the mining colonies on Cylon IV. Compared to life in the mines, the big wheel is Elysium. Everybody wants to live there. That’s why, in the fancier sex toy boutiques, “display model” has become an actual job description for several different biospecies and no few autonomous gynoids:
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July 20th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
I promised myself that I wouldn’t let my new generative porn hobby become a blogging obsession. Especially because, for the last few days, I’ve been exploring “alien sex toys” prompt spaces that, Rule 34 notwithstanding, aren’t even associated with any common fetish. It’s just a weird notion that’s been kicking around in my pervert-brain for years with no outlet, since I’ve never been a visual-arts creative. Thus, I honestly was planning to exercise restraint in the posting of this stuff.
That good resolution flew all the way out the window when the ghosts in my machine served us up this super-buff humanoid-pattern absolutely terrifying (but possibly in a good way) sexbot. Currently equipped with a robust penetrative attachment that may or may not be “for display purposes only”. Autonomy rating and sexual-aggression settings are probably available in the manual, but I don’t read Rigelian tradecopy, so… be extra polite, I guess?
I know it’s really old fashioned for a blogger to ask for feedback, but at some point I’m going to have to ask: is this generative art stuff an annoyance, just “meh”, or something y’all want to see on a continuing basis? I mean, I haven’t been posting quite daily, so there’s plenty of room for throwaway “art” posts in between the regular ones, but if it’s too weird and creepy, at some point I’ll need to trust my regular readers to tell me so.
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August 19th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
There are two highly separate developmental tracks, I think, that advance in parallel as we all wait for the sexbots of the future. Highly-functional gynoid sex toys are coming, so to speak; of this there can be no doubt. It’s just a matter of time and development. A sufficient sexbot will combine visual attractiveness, pleasantly tactile materials, and enough complicated robotics, backed up by algorithmic competence, to operate the “pleasure interfaces”. (Yeah, that’s mostly a fancy way of saying “holes”. Sorry not sorry.)
Right now, the components of a sexbot comprise two separate market categories. There are sex dolls, which mostly don’t move, and which feature (again, mostly) what we might call “dumb holes” — not much animatronics, not much action, not really all that advanced from rubber dolls of the distant past. In the sex doll business, most innovation seems to be in durability and appearance and materials and in cost-cutting and in improving realism while avoiding the uncanny valley.
Meanwhile, the other track of developmental innovation is the sex toy category usually (but not very attractively) called “male masturbators”. Artificial vaginas, if you’re feeling clinical; pocket pussies, if you’re selling rubber toys in the back of a 1980s porn magazine. For too long, they were not so very different from the relevant amenity you might find in a sex doll, just trimmed down to “that portion that appeals to man’s depravity”, as the poets say.
I suppose I should confess that I am not genuinely an expert in the most hypermodern and futuristic sex toys on the market in 2022. I never abandoned the editorial stance that ErosBlog adopted in 2002, which was in turn patterned after the print magazines of the time: I am willing to accept review merchandise that’s sent to me, but I don’t promise to actually publish a review unless the merch is interesting and strikes me as good. Long ago, sex toy manufacturers began to expect (and then to demand) more assurances than that; and thus ErosBlog stopped getting review materials.
With that disclaimer, I am free to say that I think the male masturbator category has enjoyed a recent ferment of development that strikes me as almost futuristic. Plenty of already on-the-market sex toys (like the Leten 708 3RD Masturbator for example) ship with functions that would have seemed like purest science fiction, even just a few years ago. Features like electric warming, pre-programmed erotic audio tracks that moan at you via Bluetooth, and wireless charging, are all pretty amazing.
It’s my expectation that sometime soon, these parallel developmental tracks will converge, as sex dolls become something more like fully-functional gynoid sexbots, complete with total-body animatronic motion and mechanically-complex “pleasure interfaces” that exceed the sophistication and pleasure of today’s most advanced hand-held sex toys. We’re not there yet, but it’s not far off.
Image credits, top to bottom: The clanky gynoid sexbot is by the artist Double Deck. The coin-operated handjob machine is by Tatsuro Karma. The fembot giving a blowjob is from Studio FOW. The simple sleeve masturbator with a couple of buttons is by Yoban. The fancy masturbator sleeve with many LED lights, buttons, and indicators, being deployed by an intent busty woman, is by Butcha-u. And the gynoid-on-top sex animation is by Sumiran.
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December 28th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
If you’re like most people, 2020 has been a year for mostly staying home. If you’re especially lucky, you spent it with someone sweet and sexy and so good in bed that you can get away with calling them your “big ol’ sex machine” as an endearment, without sounding too hopelessly corny. After all, what better way to pass the time, when you can’t face one more Zoom-mediated social contact and you’ve already watched everything on Netflix?
But I am a very modern blogger who reads a social media at least once a day. And friends, some of you are on there with me. So I hear and see your many woes. I know that not everybody got lucky in their sexy-pod formation process. Some of you are caregiving, some of you are single-parenting, some of you were just standing in the wrong metaphorical place when your game of “companionship musical chairs” was interrupted. It’s a grand misfortune to have been between hot sexy lovers when the merry music of face-to-face dating and seduction came to its abrupt end.
In 2020 we have all been forced to acknowledge (sadly) that the inevitable future of fully-functional androids and gynoids is not yet here. We still crave a human touch to feed the skin hunger that’s baked into our biological makeup. (Though having furry pets to snuggle helps… some.) Dildos, vibrators, and those fine-feeling squeeze-and-yank slippery mouth and pussy toys made from new miracle materials — none of them help the skin hunger, but they’re great and fun for scratching itchy libidos. You know what, though? A bunch of what makes sex fun in the moment is the sensation of somebody else moving against you, doing the sexy work so that, in the moment at least, you don’t have to. I guess what I’m saying is, we may not have sex robots quite yet, but sometimes we still want something with a motor in it, a big one that does more than just buzz.
No, we may not have the sex robots we need, not this year and maybe not this decade. But there’s no reason we can’t get occasionally get pushed, pulled, kneaded, sucked, and penetrated by a device powerful enough to call itself a fucking machine. If your politely-vibrating dildo isn’t quite filling your lonely voids, Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor knows the solution: “So I rewired it. Gave it more power!”
The variety of sex machine options available these days is astonishing. This fucking machines list from Extreme Restraints is a great sampling of what’s out there. I’m not saying everybody needs one of these, but I am saying that if you’re feeling like the familiar and faithful sex toys in your toybox aren’t moving you as much as you need right now, well, we’re deep in the 21st Century. We have options! This may not be the flying-cars future we we promised, but eight thick inches of tireless mechanical thrusting is not entirely to be scoffed at. Nor is a powerful auto-stroker that handles your crank so you don’t have to. I say we work (or play) with what we can get.
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October 23rd, 2018 -- by Bacchus
I don’t mind saying that when I first landed on this web page with “doctor” in the domain name and a sexy nurse for a logo, I felt a sense of dread. Too often when medical iconography gets yoked to the wheel of sexual pleasure, something important breaks with an unpleasant crunching noise, and we get a mendacious brochure for bogus penis pills or do-nothing arousal creams. I was prepared for the worst, I tell you! Thus it was a quite a pleasant surprise to land instead at Dr. Climax and discover the entirely sincere middle-aged sex therapist Angela Watson (who is careful to say she is not an actual doctor) and her husband Don, blogging away in an industrious fashion on sexual health topics and writing honest-looking sex toy reviews:
As will be apparent from the screenshot, Doctor Climax is emphatically not a site that has abandoned the offensive-to-some division of sex toys into “for men” and “for women” categories. In part I think this may reflect their own relationship story, which they are not shy about sharing in the posts and reviews on the site. Don Watson is a truck driver, and as a high-libido monogamous heterosexual married couple for more than twenty years, the Watsons enjoy sex toys when their relationship is intermittently long-distance. In this context, I think the “for men” and “for women” categories on their site reflect their experiences of the toys. There’s no hint that they deliberately intend to exclude or dismiss people whose gender doesn’t fit neatly into the binary categories.
Their real-world experience of long-distance loving made me dive with interest into their in-depth Lovense review, with its promise of a report on their extensive testing of the remote capabilities that are built into so many of the Lovense toys. It sounds from their reviews (they have more-detailed individual toy reviews linked from the in-depth one) as if they actually use the toys on a regular basis. This is rare to see, especially in the realm of “gadgety” toys with remote-control and teledildonics features.
Of course you’ll want to read the review yourself if you have an interest in these things. A few facts and impressions were takeaways for me that I did not know or had not heard before:
- The Lovense line has a powerful wand-style vibrator called the Domi that has a bluetooth connection for remote control functionality from across the room or around the internet. To me this immediately suggests kinky applications. Keep busy fingers inside bondage mittens, and if she wants to change the programming, she can ask…
- The Lovense entry — the Lush — in the “remote controlled vaginal egg vibrator” category is apparently rather more powerful with better remote control range than the usual barely-functional products you may have played with before. Fun!
- The Lovense effort at a true paired teledildonics set of toys — the Nora and the Max — appear to be toys that Angela and Don appreciate individually and have enjoyed in remote internet linkage, but their reviews indicate that internet lag makes synching the toys properly pretty difficult unless both parties have a really super internet connection.
There are lots more articles at DoctorClimax.com about a wide variety of sex toys and sexual health topics. Readers, you all know me for a weary cynic. I kept clicking post titles expecting to find bullshit (because that’s who I am), and “all” I found was sane, compassionate, informational prose — about an equal mix of sex toy stuff and other sex-related topics. We need more sites like this.
October 17th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
These past months on the internet there was a spate of sensationalist summer silly-season web-journalism stories about so-called “sex doll brothels”. Friends, I spurned those stories, because the concept is risible. A brothel is a workplace for sex workers, not a collection of jack-off booths with sex-toy rentals. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the latter notion, it’s disrespectful and dehumanizing to sex workers to borrow their terminology for your no-humans-involved business concept.
Wait, did I say there was nothing inherently wrong with the notion of a public jack-off booth with sex-toy rentals? Yeah, but I meant “wrong” in a moral sense. Practically speaking, I think it’s dumb. Some things make more sense at home. You don’t trust a minimum-wage employee to wash your sex toys after a stranger has used them. Moreover, given the inherent stigma that sex toys in general and sex dolls in particular still carry in our repressive societies, you don’t queue up to use them in a public place. From these axioms, it follows: you don’t rent. You buy. This is the same logic that doomed the coin-op video-booth in sleazy downtown sex shops, as soon as everyone could buy their own VCR and porn tapes to take home. So too with sex dolls: You take discreet truck delivery, you play with them in your own house, you handle your own cleanup. It’s just a better situation that way.
Which is where a slick sex doll shopping site like SexDolls.com comes in. I’ve posted about sites like this before, although never about one quite so pretty as this one:
There seem to be more than sixty different doll-models on offer at SexDolls.com, and that’s before the customization options kick in. We’re talking — and I can’t swear that all these options exist on every doll, but extensive spot-checking suggests most of them are available for most dolls — sixteen different hair styles, eight eye colors, twelve different fingernails colors, three different nipple sizes, four different nipple colors, four different vagina hair styles including “none”, and your choice of removable “easier to clean” or built-in vagina. Whew! That, my friends, is a metric fuck-ton of choices to make before they can build out your sex doll and put her in the crate to send her on the truck toward your address.
Although perhaps I should not be so hasty to assume that “her”. Indeed, what about male sex dolls for women? As you can see, there’s a category for that, although sadly at the moment of my writing there’s only one sex doll on offer in the category. Curiously, his description calls him “one of our top rated gay male sex dolls.” I won’t open the can of worms that is gender and orientation when ascribed to sex toys, but I can’t help wondering why the lone male doll in a category labelled “sex dolls for women” is described as gay. I also noticed that he’s better described for the convenience of penetrators than penetratees. He’s provisioned with numerical statistics for things like his anal depth and oral depth, but his description is oddly silent about whatever genital arsenal he may come equipped with. The category description assures us that all of the male sex dolls offered “are packing some serious heat below the belt” and “come with detachable penises” but in specific terms, customers wanting to be penetrated are left to wonder “by what?” Customers intending to penetrate, by contrast, get specific numerical answers for every doll.
I want to close by observing that somebody has put an almost obsessive amount of skill and energy and heart into dressing, posing, lighting, and photographing the dolls for sale on SexDolls.com. I realize that making the female form look attractive in photographs is a highly developed profession, but it must be an added challenge when your model is made out of assorted plastics. There is some truly lovely photography on display here!
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