A selfie taken with Taylor J Mace at one of our local sex shops.
It’s a scary time for almost every type of business, but I’m especially worried about sex shops.
Right now, adult shops in Sydney and New York and Toronto and other metropolises with thriving sex-positive communities are faced with difficult daily questions, like: Should we stay open, offer only curbside pickup and delivery, or shut down completely? Are our sanitization procedures sufficient for the global health crisis we’re facing? Are we supporting our employees as best we can? Is all of this struggling even worth it?
I think it is, and I think most sex shop owners probably think that too. Many of the best sex shops in Melbourne, Los Angeles, Portland, etc. were founded by people who are passionate about sex toys, sure, but also about sex education. Sex shops function as hubs for community learning on topics like pleasure, anatomy, and even consent. I did more direct sex education work in my few months working at sex shops than I’ve done in entire years elsewhere in the sexuality field. I saw people’s eyes light up when they happened upon a new-to-them erotic possibility. I saw people’s excitement radiate off them as they sauntered out of the shop with a fresh sexy treat in a brown paper bag. I saw that this work transforms sex lives and also sometimes saves lives.
I miss sex shops not just as an employee but as a customer. I miss strolling into my local women-owned erotic boutique and being offered a cup of tea to sip as I shop – it reminds me of the very first time I went into that very sex store, when I was 16, and they sold me my first vibrator, no questions asked. I miss trying on lingerie in a fitting room while an attentive salesperson swans around outside, available for insight and advice as needed. I miss picking up a dildo I’ve had my eye on and getting an embodied sense of its size and weight that product pictures online just couldn’t convey. I miss smart salespeople offering tips and tricks for the vibrator I’m buying, life hacks I could take home to a partner for some revelatory fucking. Every sex shop is a treasure, and so are many of their employees.
What can you do to support your favorite adult stores in Sydney or Vancouver or Paris or wherever you live right now? You can order products from them online if they offer that – or if not, try calling them to see if they can arrange a curbside pickup or any other appropriately safe hand-off method. You can buy tickets for online classes or workshops they might be offering. You can refer friends to them, should you happen to know anyone who’s just run out of lube in quarantine or wants to use their lockdown period to try out a neat new sex toy. Hell, you can even buy a gift card to use once restrictions have eased up.
This pandemic is perilous for so many institutions, from New York’s healthcare system to Montreal’s restaurant business to, yes, Brisbane’s adult shops. I deeply hope these de facto sexual community centers can pull through, if just so that more people can discover and take charge of their sexualities, the way I started to when my first sex shop sold me my very first vibrator all those years ago.
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. For more info on this topic, read my friend Epiphora’s post!
You know… sometimes I refer to this website as a sex blog, but other times, I just think of it as a place where I celebrate my favorite things, many of which happen to be sex-related. Today I feel like talking about cocktails. Let’s dive in and drink up! (Unless you don’t drink, which is totally cool! My drinks-savvy partner recommends this book of mocktail recipes, and I’ve also tried Seedlip non-alcoholic spirits and think they are delicious.)
Gin Martini, Extra Dirty
I’ve had a lot of different martinis, and after much experimentation, this is my favorite one. Some people prefer a vodka martini, but I find gin more flavorful and more pleasant. Some people prefer a martini without vermouth, but (whispers conspiratorially) that’s not actually a martini, it’s just a chilled glass of gin or vodka. Finally, some people prefer their martinis with a lemon twist instead of olives, and with no brine, but I am a filthy girl with filthy tastes. Dirty gin martini it is! I love how the saltiness of the brine balances with the florality of the gin in this classic drink.
Stir ingredients over ice in a mixing glass until very cold. Strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with olives on a cocktail pick.
Southside
I can’t think of a more refreshing cocktail than this one. It’s considered a classic, though it’s nonetheless obscure enough that many bartenders won’t know what the hell you’re talking about when you order it. However, luckily, it’s fairly easy to make at home.
Put the mint leaves and simple syrup into the bottom of a cocktail shaker and gently muddle them with a muddler, wooden spoon, or similar. Add gin, lime juice, and ice. Shake vigorously until the outside of the shaker is uncomfortably cold, and then double-strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with additional mint leaves.
Manhattan
Another classic. I like this one as an after-dinner drink to wind down the evening; it also pairs excellently with steak! I really like how the spices in the Angostura bitters add a satisfying richness to this boozy drink.
Please note that your vermouth needs to be fresh – many people don’t know that vermouth goes bad after a few months, so they keep using the same old bottle and then wonder why their drinks taste terrible. Toss that old bottle and get a fresh one!
Ingredients:
2 oz bourbon or rye (bourbon is smoother, rye is spicier)
Add bourbon/rye, vermouth, bitters, and ice to a mixing glass. Stir until cold. Strain into a glass of your choosing, and garnish with the cherry on a cocktail pick.
Negroni
This is a refreshing, summery drink often associated with Italy. I can imagine sitting in a piazza somewhere, sipping this during an animated conversation over burrata and cacio e pepe. Yum.
My partner and I have also experimented with subbing in fino sherry for the sweet vermouth, which gives the drink a slightly nuttier, drier flavor. It’s delicious both ways!
Ingredients:
1 oz gin
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
A twist of orange peel
Stir or shake the gin, Campari, and vermouth over ice. Serve on the rocks. Squeeze the orange peel over the drink to express the citrus oils, and then run it around the edge of the glass to add extra aromatics before dropping it into the drink as a garnish.
London Calling
This one’s a bit more unusual than the others on this list… Once I went to Civil Liberties and asked the bartender, Nick, if he had any limoncello. He didn’t, but he told me he would make me something that tasted kind of like limoncello. He came back a few minutes later with a London Calling and I immediately fell in love. The bright, tart fruitiness of the lemon juice blends beautifully with the dryness and minerality of the sherry. It’s a refreshing drink with a backbone.
Ingredients (according to Nick’s recipe; opinions vary on this):
Shake gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and sherry in a cocktail shaker with ice. Strain into a glass. Garnish with a twist of citrus peel (Nick suggests grapefruit).
Here’s a fun and dreamy exercise for the coronavirus era. Open up a new document in your notes app of choice, or turn to a blank page in your journal. Make a list titled “things to do when this is all over.” Then let your imagination transport you to a happier place and time in the future.
“This” being “all over” is sort of a nebulous concept at this point, but in my case, I’m choosing to imagine that daydreamy future as one in which a safe and effective vaccine has been developed and distributed around the world, and we can once again walk around outside and gather in groups and go to places (remember places?!) without needing to worry that we’re endangering others or ourselves. What will you do when things go “back to normal” – or when we move into a hopefully new-and-improved definition of normalcy? Here’s what I’m excited to do once we kick COVID to the curb…
Hug my friends and family for as long as they consent to be hugged.
Go to a cocktail bar alone, with just my Kindle to keep me company. Sip excellent drinks, make small-talk with the bartenders from time to time, and revel in the cheery din of my fellow bar-goers.
Curl up on the couch in my parents’ basement and watch a movie with my family – probably a Billy Wilder classic.
Go to La Banane (one of my favorite restaurants here in Toronto) and eat an extravagant platter of oysters and shrimp cocktail while swilling martinis and laughing with my love.
Sit in the front row at the Bad Dog Theatre and see an improv show.
Go on a long, meandering walk through the city while listening to podcasts. Stop into any stores that seem cool and take a look around.
Have group sex again, in some configuration, or just sex in front of a modest crowd at a sex club. In the meantime, there’s always VR porn and Zoom orgies. (It cracks me up that one of the most popular VR porn sites is called BaDoinkVR. Can I just start shouting “BaDoink!” every time I touch a partner’s genitals, like some kind of pornographic slapstick foley artist?!)
Visit the art gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum, the aquarium.
Show up an hour or so before the curtain at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, dressed to the nines for a solo date. Order a sandwich and a pint at the lobby café, and sit there quietly reading until they open the house. Take a program from the usher, find my seat amongst polite older couples and rowdy art-school teenagers, and read about the cast, crew, and creative vision of the production.
Walk around a big grocery store buying excessively fancy ingredients, which I will later assemble into an extravagant meal.
Sit on a patio sipping a beer and writing.
Walk around a Sephora, testing various lipsticks on the back of my hand until I find one I absolutely must own.
Get on a plane to New York. Stare out the little window at the big city as it unfolds below me. Walk off the plane half-dazed into the wonderful mediocrity of LaGuardia, and get into a yellow taxi.
Swim in a pool or a lake or an ocean or even just a hot tub.
Decide, on a whim, to ask someone who seems to want to kiss me, “Do you want to kiss me?” and, if so, let them.
Go to a burlesque show; hoot and holler when the dancers cast off their clothes.
Get a pedicure or a Brazilian wax or a massage or some other treatment where a careful, skilled person helps me feel better in my body. Tip them well!
Walk into a darkened movie theatre with a bag of popcorn and a box of peanut M&Ms. Settle into some good seats and watch something silly.
Attend a standing-room-only concert – maybe Andy Shauf or Carly Rae Jepsen or Tegan and Sara – and let the crowd throw me around a little as we all dance in place.
Sit in Trinity Bellwoods Park with some friends, smoking joints and telling stories.
Attend an industry tradeshow and marvel at the latest sex toys to hit the market. Leave with armfuls of lube samples and product pamphlets.
Visit my book editors in London or my literary agent in New York or both. Break bread (metaphorically or literally) with these strong, creative women I am proud to be working with.
Walk around a mall for hours, shopping for a dress to wear to some special occasion.
Eventually, tell my kids (?!) – or somebody’s kids, anyway – about what happened in 2020.
What are you looking forward to doing, once we’re able to do things again?
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
I know we all have bigger problems right now, but… have you noticed that the “premium” sex toy brand Le Wand has been blatantly stealing designs from other, more established companies in the industry?
I’ve been suspicious of Le Wand from the beginning. I reviewed their original wand and noted that it “borrowed” heavily from the design of my beloved Magic Wand Rechargeable, which industry titan Vibratex had launched a couple years earlier. Although Le Wand’s founder Alicia Sinclair boasted in interviews that her new wand was “a stylised, fresh, and sexy approach to an all-time best-selling sex toy,” it appeared (and still, to this day, appears) to be an outright copy of the MWR.
It’s the same shape and size, the buttons are placed in the exact same spot and laid out in the exact same way, and it even uses the same unusual two-pronged charger as the MWR. The only significant things Le Wand actually changed are the aesthetic (and honestly, despite Alicia’s insistence that the Le Wand’s “elegant design” is better, I prefer the look of the original), and the motor, which – compared to any Magic Wand product – is abysmally buzzy and just not up to par, last I checked.
Alicia Sinclair’s next foray into toy plagiarism was the Cowgirl, a rideable vibrator and obvious knockoff of the Sybian. I’ll give her a pass on this one because – as I noted in my review – I do think the Cowgirl actually innovates in some ways, namely: luxe leather casing, all-silicone attachments, and handles on the sides that make the toy easier to carry. Still, though, it’s clear that Alicia Sinclair, or at least the companies she founds, have a habit of claiming to “improve” classic sex toys while mostly just riding the coattails of those toys’ success.
Le Wand’s latest misstep is their new line of stainless steel dildos. Anyone who’s paid attention to the sex toy industry any time within the past ~15 years could tell at a glance that these toys are blatant rip-offs of those made by Njoy. Legendary dildo designs like those of the Pure Wand and Eleven have been shamelessly copied and renamed the Le Wand “Hoop” and “Contour,” while the other 3 toys in the steel line aren’t direct clones but are nonetheless still stylistically derivative of Njoy’s. I happen to know that Njoy toy designer Greg DeLong has a mechanical engineering degree and spent years prototyping and reworking his various designs – only to have other companies remorselessly steal them out from under him.
Yes, other companies besides Le Wand have ripped off Njoy designs before. Of course they have: these toys are hugely successful and famously effective; everyone wants a piece of that action. And notably, Njoy doesn’t seem to have a patent for their designs, so this is stealing in the ethical sense and not the legal sense. But Le Wand’s plagiarism hit me harder when I saw it, because this isn’t some cheap two-bit company appearing out of the woodwork; this is an established sex toy company that positions itself over and over again as both luxurious and innovative. How can you claim to be either of those things in good faith if you’re fully stealing designs from a company that is actually luxurious and innovative?
One of the troubling things about all this (there are many) is that Alicia Sinclair’s other company B-Vibe actually fucking rules. They make – among other things – butt plugs that use rotating beads to create a “rimming” sensation. While other toymakers have used rotating beads before, in rabbit vibes and – yes – butt plugs, the B-Vibe plugs’ sleek designs, excellent motors, and surprisingly good remote-control capabilities set them apart. Could B-Vibe be the one actually good and actually original idea this group of companies ever had? [Edited to add on 4/24/2020: Someone called LadyPseudonymia on the SexToys subreddit has since pointed out to me that B-Vibe’s line of “Snug Plug” weighted butt plugs appears to be lifted almost exactly from the Mr. S Leather “World’s Most Comfortable Butt Plug.” (That link is very NSFW, FYI.) Here’s a comparison image. So I guess I was wrong about the B-Vibe line being the most original of this group of companies’ products.]
Some would say I shouldn’t be so hard on Le Wand because lots of sex toy companies steal designs. (Have you seenSatisfyer’s flagrant copies of Fun Factory toys?) The type of person who makes this argument seems to see plagiarism as par for the course in any creative field. But it really isn’t, or at least, it doesn’t have to be. There are enough genuinely inventive sex toy designers out there making cool new stuff every year that I really don’t buy arguments about how “everything is derivative” and “we all steal from each other.” Sure, every creative person in every field is borrowing slightly from things they’ve seen before – that’s the nature of the human brain – but that doesn’t entail, or require, stealing full designs down to the tiniest details. There is no excuse for that level of dishonesty and exploitation. If you don’t have any new ideas for sex toys, you probably shouldn’t start a sex toy company!
Le Wand as a company doesn’t seem all bad – they’ve sponsored friends and colleagues of mine who do important work, and have hired my brilliant pal Eva as their resident sex researcher (yay!). But if they really want to be an ethically good company, they’ll apologize for stealing toy designs, stop selling those copied toys immediately, and produce only original designs from here on out. But they won’t do that, because their business model is predicated on “innovating upon” – by which I mean, poorly duplicating – successful toys that have come before.
Is there anything you can do about this? Absolutely. You can stop supporting companies that steal designs, and tell your friends and partners to follow suit (possibly by sharing this post to your networks!). You can notify these companies, via email and/or social media, that you’ll be boycotting them and telling others to boycott them until or unless they right their wrongs. You can ask your favorite sex toy retailers not to carry brands that steal designs (although, adult-industry retailers need to make money and the small/indie ones usually struggle to do so, so I wouldn’t necessarily push them too hard on this). You can buy toys directly from companies whose original designs have been stolen, like Njoy and Fun Factory. Voting with your dollar has actual, practical effects; we’ve seen sex toy companies slow the production of toxic toys due to consumer outcries, so maybe we can achieve similar ends with regards to design plagiarism.
As for me, I won’t be supporting Le Wand, personally or professionally, until they pull their copycat toys and apologize for their misdeeds. But I’m not exactly holding my breath.
[Edited to add on 4/29/2020: I don’t currently have any business affiliations with Le Wand or any of its sister companies, but I should disclose that their company Cowgirl gave me a free press tour of its Museum of Sex exhibit in 2018. All the toys I’ve reviewed from Le Wand/B-Vibe/Cowgirl were either supplied to me by a retailer for review or bought by me/my partner.]
Happy 4/20, friends. I don’t know how many of you are, like me, lucky enough to have access to weed if you want it, but if you are, here are some things I have found are fun to do while baked as fuck. Give some of ’em a shot today if you like!
Listen to beautiful music. Ideally with good headphones and while you’re not doing anything else. Just focus totally on the music and feel it in your body.
Watch people perform methodical tasks on YouTube, such as making cocktails, cleaning workboots, or applying a full face of makeup.
Read a children’s book you love, for the nostalgia and the pure childlike glee of it.
Take a shower and really revel in the sensations. Bonus points if you have wonderfully-scented soap or body wash.
Go for a walk and appreciate nature. (While maintaining social distancing, of course.)
Masturbate decadently, with toys and lube and self-administered foreplay. The whole nine yards. You deserve it!
Listen to a hypnosis file. Some people find that drugs and alcohol hinder their ability to focus and thus to go into trance, but some others find that trance combines well with intoxication. Find out which camp you fall into!
Write love letters to your favorite people. Don’t send them until you’ve sobered up and can make rational decisions about whether or not it’s a good idea to do so – but you may find that the words and feelings flow more easily in an altered state.
Pursue pain, whether through a little light scratching and pinching of your own skin, or through a full-on S&M scene with a partner. I find that pain feels much more pleasurable when I’m high.
Wear your comfiest loungewear and enjoy the way it feels on your skin.
Think about God. Do you believe in a higher power? What are your reasons for holding that opinion? How would your lifestyle change if your theological beliefs changed? These are interesting questions to mull over, even if you’re staunch in your religious views (or lack thereof).
Sing or play music. Karaoke tracks are easy to find online and are ideal for this purpose.
Watch stand-up comedy. Everything is funnier when you’re high. The stand-up section on Netflix is a goldmine; James Acaster’s absurdist specials are faves of mine.
Moisturize. Mmm, luxurious.
Read a fascinating and long piece of journalism, the likes of which you might find on Longreads.com. Let yourself get absorbed in the story.
Dance to great music. I recommend Reverie Sound Revue and Robot Science.
Cook an elaborate meal, if you think you’re level-headed enough to be trusted in the kitchen.
Journal about your feelings, recent events in your life, things you’ve been thinking about lately, and so on. Sometimes drugs can help you access a deeper, more authentic self than regular life tends to allow for.
Do yoga or stretch. Feel how the weed makes the sensations register differently in your body.
Sit and look out a window, contemplatively and at length, like you’re a sad boy in a Victorian-era novel. We so rarely spend time just being quiet with our thoughts these days.
Watch videos of baby animals. No explanation necessary.
Make art. Pull out your paints or pencils or tablet or what-have-you. If you’re feeling uninspired, start by picking a random object in your room to create a likeness of.
Play a video game, especially one with beautiful graphics. Virtual worlds can feel extra immersive on drugs.
Talk on the phone with someone who is also high. It’ll either be really weird or really funny or both.
Eat snacks. “The munchies” are very real.
Take sexy selfies for you and/or a sweetheart to enjoy later.
Put on a cam show, either for your sweetheart or in a more public venue like FireCams. (Just be sure that this is something Sober You would’ve wanted to do, too!)
Watch a really dramatic TV show like The L Word or Westworld and allow yourself to get swept up in the ensuing emotions.
Answer questions on Reddit in subforums like /r/AskReddit, /r/AskWomen, or /r/Sex. (You can make a new account to do so anonymously if you prefer.) This activity typically requires some self-reflection, which weed’s creativity-boosting properties can help facilitate.
Focus on your breathing, in a meditative manner, for as long as you like. Notice the thoughts that come up.
How are you spending your 4/20, friends?
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
Gin Martini, Extra Dirty
Southside
Manhattan
Negroni
London Calling
