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The Sex Blog Of Record
Thursday, November 4th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
Your finger, your tongue, your dick if that’s how you dangle — I’m sure they are all very fine. You deploy them with cleverness and skill. You have, proverbially, not had any complaints.
But you should be honest with yourself. Female sexual pleasure can be a tricky business. Orgasms can be elusive for anybody. And they are not all created equal. There’s a spectrum from quick convulsion to wracking full-body exaltation. In extreme cases, she squirts so much she requires urgent rehydration. And that’s where the honesty comes in: how many of the most extreme orgasms you’ve witnessed had a sex toy involved somewhere in the process of production? I think, when you tally your sums, you’ll acknowledge that the right sex toy is your orgasmic ally and not, as a few of the most foolish men believe, some sort of plastic competitor.
I’m a big believer in the idea that men should buy, have, and deploy sex toys, for the maximization of their own and their partners’ pleasure. It’s not exactly an ordeal; online shopping is a thing these days, and you’ve got a huge choice of sex toy offerings at sites like Mega Pleasure. I mean, why would you not?
In the many years I’ve been sex blogging, squirting orgasms (female ejaculation, if you’re stuffy) has been mentioned, discussed, and analyzed from a number of different perspectives. From various anecdotes, it has become clear that the question “how much stimulation is too much?” is usually answered from a gendered perspective. Men — we lazy beasts — have often spoken up with the opinion that powerful vibrating toys are like comedian Tim Allen’s legendary power tools — no matter how good they are, they’d be better with a little more power. Women are more likely to view this attitude as sadistic — which to be fair it sometimes literally is.
“If a little bit’s good, a whole lot’s better” is all fun and games until it’s your tender membranes getting wildly vibrated. At that point, like all good sex, it becomes highly situational. Variations in anatomy, mood, preference, and for all I know, barometric pressure? All these variables make it impossible to generalize. But at the end of the day, I am a man. I’ve possessed and enjoyed the use of many sex toys that seemed underpowered to me, and no small few powerful ones too. Given the choice, I’m convinced more genuinely is better.
Image credits from top to bottom: The face-down ass-up rabbit-vibe squirting orgasm is from the adult game Jikage Rising by Smiling Dog. The lesbian squirt session featuring fingers and a strap-on dildo is by Mavoly. The post-orgasmic bullet vibe user lying exhaustedly in a pool of her own squirt is by Diamond_Arrow. The notably-flexible blonde who is eagerly watching herself squirt is by Daz-Da-Way. The woman screaming through a vibrator-forced orgasm is by Kaiota. And the woman pleasuring herself with a powerful vibrator is by Momono Mushroom.
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Friday, January 25th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I do not write smut. Instead, I write about smut — a subtle but very real distinction. Still, like everybody who does not write a particular thing but who sees a lot of it and fancies themselves an educated consumer of it, I flatter myself that I could write that stuff, and maybe I even might do it one day soon, who knows? (Breath: never hold it in this situation, you will turn blue. Pro tip.)
Still, I thought Steve Almond’s Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto sounded relevant to my interests. And sure enough, it’s a fast and worthy read. My personal favorite of his fifteen reasons is #7:
Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?
On the other hand, I wish I could change Steve Almond’s mind about #13 by challenging all his wrong-headed assumptions about pornography that are buried in this densely misguided paragraph:
Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.
But I can’t change his mind — and it would take a whole long ranty blog post just to try — so I’ll content myself with observing that accusing porn stars of “self-exploitation” is condescending and dismissive of their agency, which is not something that nice people do, even in the privacy of their own heads and sure as hell not out loud as part of an otherwise-intriguing literary manifesto.
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Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
As I write these words, one respectable estimate puts the number of Internet users at two billion globally. That’s a lot of people, and if you make art, some of them will find you,. With numbers like that, there’s philanthropic magic in the math.
About anything you might create, you might think, “Well, it’s a strange thing and maybe not that many people are into it, and of those, not that many people will find it.” And maybe both of those propositions are true. Suppose your thing will only appeal to or give pleasure to one person out of a hundred. And suppose you’re not that easy to find, even if you optimize search terms for people who want to see the sort of thing you’re into, so only one person in 500 who wants to find your art will find it over the entire life of your site or posting or whatever where you present it.
Well, if you assume two billion Internet users worldwide and do the math, what do you find? That there are 40,000 people in the world whose day you’ll brighten up, at least a little. You could almost fill Wrigley Field with smiling folks (which is more than can be said for the baseball team that plays there these days).
Suppose that creating a single work of art costs $200.00, whether in artist’s commission fees, the monetized opportunity cost of your time, or what have you. (And you can do something pretty nice for $200, in my experience.) Divide that $200 by 40,000 people and it works out to half a cent per person. How many other forms of pleasure can you buy for that little? In philanthropic terms that sounds like a tremendous bargain to me.
And it’s yours for the taking…
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Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Just as Sister Y hits the right note, Amanda Marcotte, a heavy hitter in blogging’s big leagues, decides to weigh in on the side of the angels. Favorite excerpt:
I was more in in the camp of arguing, “Kids should be taught to honor their sexualities, to demand the right to feel pleasure (with the enthusiastic consent caveat!), and to value sexual diversity, because sex is a good thing. It’s part of being human. Pleasure is how we know we’re alive.” A more radical, pro-liberty, pro-pleasure approach is the only way to win this argument.
But by all means, read the whole thing.
Thursday, February 24th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I wonder if this wonderful mechanical dildo chair (complete with metal restraints to make sure the pleasure doesn’t stop until the person with access to the control panel says it stops) is as vintage-historical as it looks, or whether it’s a modern-ish steampunky created artifact?
More proof, if you needed it, that fucking machines aren’t just for porn.
From Bondage Blog via Kinky Delight.
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Saturday, January 1st, 2011 -- by Bacchus
The most common sexual practice between two men involves an act of aggression — inflicting more pain than pleasure for at least one of the parties.
— Michael Medved
As quoted on Joe My God.
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Friday, November 5th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Is it just me, or has this fellow modified his cock in a surgical fashion for added sensation?
Lumpy Beaded Cock 1
Lumpy Beaded Cock 2
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Sunday, November 15th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
As I headed into the office on the morning of this recent Friday the 13th I had an intuition that interesting news would await me. It did, in the form of a headline on Bloomberg: “Desire Drug May Prove Sex Really Is All in Her Head.” Sometimes the news gods are kind.
The gist of this story is that the German pharmaceutical firm of Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, needing a new revenue source to make up for those which is likely to lose when its patents expire on Mirapex and Flomax, surveyed a large number of women over 18 and discovered that among many of them, ebbing sexual desire was seen as significant cause of distress. Boehringer’s answer has been to begin trials of a new drug called flibanserin, which by blocking serotonin and triggering dopamine production is supposed to amp up the libido. Boehringer is supposed to be presenting results at the upcoming meeting of the European Society for Sexual Medicine, starting Monday.
A big win, perhaps? Humanity has sought aphrodisiacs since it climbed down from the trees. The big difference is that we might just be closing in on ones which can be clinically proven to work, with all the fun that might entail.
But of course, these moves are controversial. The problem seems to really stem from an annoying distinction between therapy and enhancement uses for drugs. Many people believe that it’s okay to use drugs to treat “illnesses” or restore “normality,” but not to use them to just enjoy yourself (or make yourself smarter, stronger, etc.) So advocates of drugs like these are forced into the dodge of claiming that they exist to treat something called “Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.” Critics can then point out that there is no universally (or perhaps even generally) accepted standard for what the “right” level of sexual desire is, and further that there’s something a little nasty about stigmatizing people with the “wrong” level as somehow pathological and in need of treatment. On one version of this view, hypoactive sexual desire disorder is just a made-up condition to allow Boehringer to sell drugs and make money.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is to acknowledge that the critics may have a point but then to ask whether we should care that much. Why should we rely on men in white coats to tell us what the “right” level of sexual desire for us. Shouldn’t we deliberate for ourselves and make our own judgments about what degree of sexual desire will make our lives go well and, having so deliberated, aren’t we entitled to have our judgment respected? (Reflections like this one show just how coercive and illiberal the therapy/enhancement distinction potentially is.) Shouldn’t we decide for ourselves whether our sexual desire should be enhanced or, for that matter, reduced if it so suits us, without having to pretend we’re suffering from some sort of disease?
Of course, I would also offer a caution here, to the effect that perhaps what we really want to enhance is not desire but pleasure. If you think about it enough, enhancing just desire by itself is a peculiar goal. Wanting is not the same thing as liking, even if the two are often intimately connected. Having stronger desires could be a positive problem if you lack the means to satisfy them — you might just be letting yourself in for a more frustrating life rather than a more fulfilled one. And perhaps satisfaction of desire isn’t really all that great just by itself and unaccompanied by the right hedonic state. Haven’t you ever fulfilled a great desire in your life only to feel at least somewhat disappointed in the end? It seems more plausible to think that it’s the hedonic state itself that matters: isn’t it wonderful when something happens to us for which we had no antecedent desire (perhaps because we did not even know it existed before experiencing it) but which was a source of joy when it happened (a major point in favor of skilled lovers, yes?).
Though of course, I see no reason to think that flibanserin or other future additions to the pharmacopoeia won’t also enhance pleasure. If so, good times ahead.
Sunday, August 30th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
I had many excellent philosophy teachers back in the day, and one of the excellentest of the bunch was Robert Nozick (1938-2002).
Perhaps one thing (among many) for which Bob will be well remembered is a thought experiment, called the Experience Machine, which he first outlined in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). It begins like this:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life’s experiences?
(Fuller text here for those who wish to pursue the experiment in more depth.)
Bob thought it was pretty obvious that you would not want to plug into the machine: it would be “a kind of suicide.” And he and others have drawn various philosophical conclusions — that positive experiences are not what we do or should primarily value, that pleasure is not the (or even a) cardinal good, and so forth. (Sometimes this all gets amusing: watching conservative lawyers like John Finnis wheel out this thought experiment in hopes of banishing forever the Evil Doctrine of Hedonism reminds me of a character in an old movie brandishing a cross to try to ward off Dracula.)
Now the thought experiment of the Experience Machine does not lack for problems. For one, there really are people who just disagree with Nozick’s intuition. I once knew a woman who, when I told her about the Experience Machine, reacted with “Where can I get me one?” I suspect there are readers of this blog who might feel the same way, since precisely because they are readers of blogs like this one, they have a keen appreciation of all the really cool experiences there are to be had.
(This woman was a really fun person, by the way, and… Okay, Faustus, enough daydreamy reminiscence. Back to philosophy class.)
There are deeper and more philosophical objections to be made to Nozick’s thought experiment. At least in so far as it’s meant to attack hedonism, it ignores a subtle but really very important distinction between a machine that would give us any experience we want and one which would give us those experiences we would most enjoy. (A refutation of hedonism would require that we would not want to plug into the latter kind of machine, a point which I might try to explain in a later post).
Given my own interest in these matters, I was greatly pleased to see that George Mason economics professor and Marginal Revolution co-proprietor Tyler Cowen (1962 – Forever I Hope), in his intriguing new book Create Your Own Economy likewise sees fit to address the Experience Machine with a bit of skepticism.
…I’m not quite convinced by Nozick’s critique…. Perhaps my skepticism stems from my background as an economist and my profession’s emphasis on “choice at the margin,” to cite that theme again. The choice is not “Fantasy: yes or no?” but rather “How much fantasy do we want in our lives?”
Cowen is writing to defend the virtues of what he calls “human neurodiversity,” the value created by the differences different people have in their ability to have experiences and process information due to different neurologies. He focuses largely (though not exclusively) on the values and virtues of what he calls “autistic cognitive profiles,” and notes that in an important sense he (and perhaps everyone else) is already plugged into an experience machine: we structure our inner lives with stories about ourselves and benefit in real ways from certain kinds of self-deception. If these issues interest you, the book is very much for you (it was for me). You can also see Tyler Cowen in a Bloggingheads conversation with Fly Bottle blogger Will Wilkinson largely about the book here. Do check it out.
But fundamentally I would love to hear from readers about their intuitions in reaction to Nozick’s though experiment. Would you plug in? And if so, for how long?
Sunday, July 15th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Remember my post arguing that making sure your porn is ethically produced is no harder than doing the same thing for your salad dressing or your cheap manufactured goods? (You’d think this was obvious, but as I documented in that post, some in the rabid anti-porn crowd dispute it.)
Anyway, Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked remains one of my favorite pieces on this blog. In support of my argument, I chose some of the scariest Eastern European spanking porn I could find and then did some basic consumer research, quoting spanking model Niki Flynn at length on the professional conditions at a Lupus Pictures porn shoot.
 
Well, now from Spanking Blog comes a link to spanking model Adele Haze writing on the same topic: Why I Modelled For Lupus Pictures.
This was serious business — you can see her welts here — but she had her reasons:
I don’t process pain as pleasure. I knew my caning would hurt a great deal, possibly more than any of my previous experiences. I did briefly wonder whether, caught up in the moment, I would find pleasure in my real-life flogging in a way I couldn’t enjoy some other girl’s filmed experience — and, pre-empting an upcoming post on the topic, no, I didn’t get any enjoyment out of the pain until it was all over — but, on the whole, I was prepared for a thoroughly uncomfortable several minutes over the famous bench.
And that was OK, because I knew – from studying the films, and from talking to Niki Flynn, who’d gone to that scary place before — that the rest of the shoot would give me the sort of pleasures that would make a few minutes of acute pain worth going through. For somebody who has a separate fetish for artistic suffering, working with a production on the scale of Lupus’s would be worth every stroke.
I had never before worked to a script, and I’d get that. I had never had somebody else think through the costume and make-up for me — I’d get that too, and in the end even the hideous pieces of reformatory wardrobe would turn out charming in their appropriateness. I had never before taken detailed direction, or shot completely — and confusingly — out of sequence, or acted in sets built for the purpose in every small detail; in short, I had never been a part of a spanking shoot run on such a professional level — and I knew that all of these experiences were mine for the taking.
Thanks, Adele, for the eye-opening account!
Friday, April 30th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
I have heard tales that some of the serious body modification guys have suffered foreign objects to be introduced under the skins of their penises, with the purpose and intent of creating small lumpy scars or bumps “for her pleasure”. Well, in the course of a long internet surfing life one eventually sees pictures of almost everything, and now I’ve been sent pictures of this. I cannot suffer the trauma alone, I must share:
As for me, I’d think the girls willing to try it would be way outnumbered by the ones who would shun it as diseased-looking. But perhaps I’ve merely led a sheltered life.
Sunday, October 12th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
Vikki has just discovered Fucking Machines — and she’s fascinated. This is a porn site that’s taken “fun with power tools” to a whole new level. (They also have a site featuring guys using the same machines – the bluntly named Butt Machine Boys.)
Vikki, where were you when I first posted pictures of some of these fucking machines? Just think, if you had been a faithful ErosBlog reader back then you would have known about them seven whole months ago!
Not that the idea is new. I’m sure this steam powered model (complete with carefully filed rivet heads for her pleasure) was a big seller in the 1903 Sears Catalog:
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