Nipple Clamps & the Pleasurable Pinch
My nipple clamps: I have a love/hate/love relationship with them. (Although to be honest, sometimes it’s more of a hate/love/hate relationship.) I am myself often profoundly passionately ambivalent, and my nipple clamps embody this dyadic intensity with exceptional and excruciating precision.
They’re a simple machine, really. Just two alligator clips yoked together by a slender chain. Some nipple clamps seem kinder with their adjustable screws set in their metal centers, but it’s a sham kindness really, for where the lies the gentleness so rests the cruelty. You can open the alligator mouths wider by manipulating the screw, but you can also make their jaws shut tight. Too wide and the clamps slip off your nipples erect and hard as pencil erasers. Too tight and, well, you can imagine.
(more…)
Smartballs, a Roundabout Review
It’s always the quiet ones. The ones that look so unassuming, the ones that seem so humble. You never expect those ones to pack a whallop, and yet they do. At least that was my experience with my Smartballs.
Smartballs are a modern answer to the ancient ben-wa balls. Made by the Fun Factory, they’re two silicone orbs, grooved for your pleasure, bound together by a slim silicone umbilical cord, and housing two rubbery bouncy balls inside them that knock against the walls of their orbs in what turns out to be a very pleasing fashion. The whole kit and caboodle has a little nylon cord for easy removal and pleasurable tugging action, and as the toy is made from silicone, it cleans incredibly easily and can be sterilized by boiling.
I was interested in the Smartballs for a long time before I actually bought a pair. I would go to my local sex toy emporium and visit them, hold them in my hand, rub their silicone skin and thrill to the vibration of the bouncy balls inside. I liked the idea of ben wa balls: they both stimulate the g-spot and make you work your PC muscles—the muscles that run along the genitals from stem to stern and help both with incontinence and orgasm—without your being aware of it. Exercise I don’t know I’m doing and better sex? Count me in! After my third visit, I bought a pair.
(more…)
Dildo Meditations
The alcoholic, bisexual, syphilitic and scary smart John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, penned the politically satirical “Signior Dildo� in 1673. The poem offers these lines:
When next you go thither to make your Selves Sweet, [10]
By Buying of Powder, Gloves, Essence, or So
You may Chance get a Sight of Signior Dildo.
You’ll take him at first for no Person of Note
Because he appears in a plain Leather Coat:
But when you his virtuous Abilities know [15]
You’ll fall down and Worship Signior Dildo.
Like most of Rochester’s poems, this one swerves seamlessly between anxious praise and painful derision, between the deeply personal and the abjectly political, between male and female, between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between just about every polar opposite you can imagine. Rochester was never a man to be easily pinned down, a facet that Johnny Depp plays up in his portrayal of Rochester in the filmic version of The Libertine. In this particular poem, however, the praised and derided, loved and hated, feared and desired, vexed object in question is the dildo.
The dildo is an ancient object. One found in a German cave dates back about 28,000 years, suggesting that we humans have been using tools to for pleasure since the ice age. Before their current silicone, stainless steel, pyrex and jelly incarnations, dildos were often carved from stone, ivory or wood, or fabricated by stuffing a leather pouch with rags, horsehair or other filler, which is the type that Rochester’s “Signior Dildo� evenhandedly celebrates and vilifies.
(One has to marvel at Rochester’s choice of the dildo as the tool upon which to skewer his political enemies. He is one dead mother-fucker I’d invite to the apocryphal dinner party.)
But enough of dusty dildo history. I write here today not to bury the dildo, but to praise it. I, as Rochester predicted of his reader, have fallen down and worshipped the dildo. I love my dildo, and I am not ashamed to admit it.
(more…)
Ben Wa & Smart Balls
Recently the Cyber-Dyke studio went on a shopping trip at Good Vibrations, and I made sure that Smart Balls made it to the cashier. I had never really thought about it, but Smart Balls look like they’re based on ben was balls. I haven’t used the Smart Balls yet, and I haven’t really done any other research. I went back through the blog to look for our reviews on ben wa balls and Smart Balls. I also found a really great video by Ducky Doolittle on the topic of ben wa balls.
Ducky Doolittle talks about the history and use of Ben Wa balls
Grab The Bookmarketer For Your Site
Why Bondage Tape is on a Roll: A Spellbinding Review
Question: what smells like a new Barbie, won’t stick to your body hair, doesn’t require batteries, and could possibly dial your sexlife up to eleven? No, it’s not Jodie Marsh, though that’s an excellent guess. The answer, my inquisitive and possibly bi-curious friend, is bondage tape.
I bought my first roll of bondage tape about two years ago. In the cheery Bermuda pink shade of Pepto Bismol, the fat roll of tape looked innocuous and even a bit innocent, like it could be used to festoon a child’s birthday party. It seemed to me, then a neophyte in the world of D/s play—I’ve now graduated to the level of “dilettante,� a happy departure from the largely off-puttingly stern black-leather-and-chrome aesthetic of the lion’s share of D/s accoutrement. I didn’t feel ready to invest in anything that required a key for escape, but I did feel it was time to be bound tight and compliant. Bondage tape looked like it would fit the bill.
(more…)
Some Ways to Enjoy Your Girl Parts, pt.101
In some ways women get the short end of the stick when it comes to enjoying sex. While it’s true that some of us do get the benefit of being multi-orgasmic, most of us aren’t. And while it’s true that not only do we have the potential for many orgasms in one sexual session, and not only do studies prove that our orgasms longer-lasting and more intense than men’s orgasms, it’s also true that percentages of anorgasm in women have been so high that until recently, the inability to orgasm wasn’t considered a sexual dysfunction.
While I’m not saying that men have it easy in the sex department—especially men who have suffered sexual trauma, whether that trauma was emotional or physical—men’s biology makes it a bit easier for them to find pleasure and that our culture tends to be a bit more forgiving to men who like sex, at least to heterosexual men.
Our bodies don’t necessarily make it easy on us. Those recalcitrant sex organs tucked up, under, and away can play possum, and often as we lurch our ways toward pleasure, we may find that it’s like spelunking without a headlight. It’s often hard enough to discern what pleases us; it’s yet harder to give directions to someone else when we can’t even provide any kind of definitive road map. And on top of all of this, we’re often the unwitting bearer of sexual baggage—we learn to the bone the lessons we’ve been taught by culture and by experience that to experience sexual pleasure is, somehow, bad.
I’m not saying anything radically new to anyone who has ever opened a copy of Our Bodies/Our Selves, but I do think that it bears repeating: it’s your body and you can learn to enjoy it.
To that happy end, let me offer a few humble suggestions:
(more…)
Dildo Misadventures & Other things funny to Others
Last week, my mom came to visit me. This is a rare occurrence in my life; living for seventeen years in Gotham, I’ve had the pleasure of a visit from either of my parents exactly five times. Needless to say, the matriarchal visit necessitates some house-cleaning on my part, not the least of which is my gathering the sex toys from hither and yon, slipping any number of them into the many velvet and velveteen bags I have, stashing the roiling velvet-shrouded silicone, stainless steel, and plastic mess of them in a large bag and shoving that large bag into the hoary-deep recess under my bed.
My mom left on Sunday, the day of the wedding that wasn’t mine. The next day, or maybe the day after, I pulled the bag of toys and whatnot out from under my bed and put a few of said toys to their designated uses. After I’d reluctantly and begrudgingly come, I washed the toys, slipped the two of them—a sprightly new vibrator and a much beloved extra-large silicone dildo of color—into a small bag and dropped the small bag into the big bag that rested at the end of, no longer underneath, my bed.
On Thursday, I returned home from my long day out working my part-time job and saw that the scarlet velvet bag containing the extra-large dildo of color sitting on the floor, squat in the middle of my bedroom. Odd place for it, I thought, as I tossed it into the big bag of toys still gaping at the foot of my bed, and then I went about my evening.
(more…)
How I came to Come
I started masturbating at around twelve. As far as I can remember, my orgasms then were kind of like a box lunch: contained, satisfying, pleasurable, sometimes even surprisingly so, but nothing to write home about. I certainly enjoyed them enough to rub myself raw in the process of procuring them. I enjoyed them enough to learn how to masturbate in such a way as to orgasm undetected while sleeping in a bunk in a roomful of other sleeping girls at camp (face down, breathing huskily into my pillow, pelvis pressing on my finger that ran ragged circles on my clit).
But these orgasms pale in comparison to the orgasms I have now when I masturbate, and they whimper and cower in the face of the orgasms I have with my lover. These were fledgling comings, and inasmuch as I knew nothing else, they were fine.
(more…)
Chelsea: Njoy
Review submitted by
Chelsea Girl of PrettyDumbThings.com and sapphosgirls.com/words/
The packaging itself tells you these toys are different. A hinged black box wrapped in a serene strip of white paper, the packaging itself promises the combined joyous mystery of both a Tiffany’s and an iPod box. You are seduced by the box, in short, before you even see the toy.
You tenderly slide off its demure white band, you prise the two black halves apart with your fingernails, you open the box with your fingertips, and then, only then. you finally see the toy nestled in its bordello-red satin clamshell halves; it is a thing of beauty. It’s a multi-step disrobing, like undressing a Victorian virgin, and it’s a pleasure.
Njoy toys were designed by a mechanical engineer, and they have all of the aeronautic, ergonomic, and pragmatic essence you would expect of something designed within a centimeter of its infinitely long life. But these toys were also designed by a man who clearly has a sybaritic imagination, for they are not merely functional; they are fucking sexy as hell.
Stainless steel does not, for me at least, conjure up visions of erotic excess. I don’t swoon over medical implements, for example. I’ve never had a naughty nurse or dirty doctor fantasy. I have often appreciated the aesthetics of stainless steel; in a modernist utopian kind of way, stainless steel appliances—Viking ranges or 1930’s toasters, for instance—have a beautiful and sensual sheen. But aside from wanting to rub my cheek against them, I’ve never been compelled to get hot and bothered over steel.
(more…)