The Joys of Sex Toys
How do you divide intimate, er, stuff after a breakup?
In the wise words of Neil Sedaka, breaking up is hard to do. There are hearts to tend to, bruised egos to soothe and livers to abuse with copious amounts of pity party drinking. There are photos to burn and revenges to plot (incidentally, did you know that in Hong Kong a wife may legally murder her cheating husband as long as she does it by her own hand? Just a by-the-by…), but the most awkward and unsettling matter is that of returning personal items.
Especially if it’s your sex toy goodie box you have to consider.
Miss America highlighted this particular problem of ex-etiquette this week over a dodgy breakfast of Bloody Marys and cold toast.
‘I mean, do I ask for it back?’ she scowled, waving her celery stick in the air. ‘And even if I do get it back, what the hell am I supposed to do with a box of butt plugs and penis sleeves? Reduce, reuse, re-bloody-cycle?’
It was a dilemma. There’s over two grand’s worth of toys collected over three years in there. Ah, the wages of war…
A few years ago this wouldn’t have been a scenario I could relate to. Back then, my idea of sex toys ended with Sir Percival and Long John Silver, two penis-shaped vibes of varying length, girth and pulse settings that were snuggled in the far recesses of my panty drawer. That was it. It was the rys, vleis en artapples of sex toys. It was Tumbleweed Town in my sex toy goodie box.
It had never really occurred to me to spend serious money on partner or solo toys. I’d grown up in the hard days of manual labour when, if your hand wasn’t good enough, you’d make do with surface edges, shower heads, fresh produce and electric toothbrushes. Hell, I know about a woman who developed an early fetish for her clarinet (a fact that would later see her divorced by a husband who didn’t like competing in the wood department) and another that found an intriguing use for popsicles by the age of 10. We were enterprising. We had to be. It’s not like we were being handed sex toys to experiment with.
So I felt kind of old and technologically decrepit when I watched the episode on teen girls and vibrators on Oprah a few months back. Her flavour of the month, Dr Laura Berman, suggested handing teenage girls vibrators so that they could learn about their bodies and ‘own their orgasms’ instead of handing responsibility of it over to some sweaty, over-eager pimply ball of testosterone.
The idea is that informing and educating your daughter about her body and orgasms would have her less likely to ‘give herself’ to the first boy to wind her up.
While I like the idea in theory, it kind of ignores the basic function of sexual chemistry, which is to shag. Knowing what your orgasm’s like is neither going to encourage nor prevent ‘popping your cherry’ with a boy you like. It’s not much different when we’re all grown up. No matter how cool vibrators and other gadgety sex toys are, they just don’t replace the actual act of getting down and dirty with someone that knows how to push your buttons.
Unless they don’t.
While I might not agree that shoving a Lelo in your daughter’s Christmas stocking will keep her a virgin, I do think that sex toys go a far way to educating us about our bodies and can help those whose bodies need a little help to feel pleasure - or less of it. Much like how the simple cock ring can keep a guy harder for longer, masturbatory gadgets like the Tenga Flip Hole and the (somewhat creepy-looking) Fleshlight can become useful tools in helping men overcome premature ejaculation (although it makes me shudder, the Fleshlight has a specific model just for this purpose). Inoffensive and pretty vibes like The Delight and Lelo encourage women to explore their sexual hotspots without much or any penetration (something that might seem daunting for some), and g-spot stimulators get to where few penises (penii?) can go successfully.
There’s a whole world of toy delight out there. Of course most of it happens to be sitting at Miss America’s ex’s house in their goody box.
I kind of hope she asks for it back. I imagine that after she’s extracted her personal favourites we could do something useful with the rest, like create doorstops with the butt plugs and repurpose the silicon cock rings as baby teethers. I’d consider it an exercise in creative thinking. Breaking up may be hard to do, but with enough liquor and imagination, you sure can squeeze a few laughs out of it.
Follow me on my blog, here.
What are the rules of breaking up? Share your thoughts in the box below.
- Women24