Musings

Things I Hope to Do When This is All Over

Kate Sloan

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.

Le Wand Keeps Copying Other Companies’ Sex Toy Designs

Kate Sloan
Top: Le Wand Hoop. Bottom: Njoy Pure Wand.

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?

Left: the Magic Wand Rechargeable. Right: the original Le Wand.

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.

Top: Le Wand Contour. Bottom: Njoy Eleven.

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 seen Satisfyer’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.

Left: Le Wand Deux. Right: Crave Duet.

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.]

30 Fun Things to Do When You’re High

Kate Sloan

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!

  1. 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.
  2. Watch people perform methodical tasks on YouTube, such as making cocktails, cleaning workboots, or applying a full face of makeup.
  3. Read a children’s book you love, for the nostalgia and the pure childlike glee of it.
  4. Take a shower and really revel in the sensations. Bonus points if you have wonderfully-scented soap or body wash.
  5. Go for a walk and appreciate nature. (While maintaining social distancing, of course.)
  6. Masturbate decadently, with toys and lube and self-administered foreplay. The whole nine yards. You deserve it!
  7. 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!
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Wear your comfiest loungewear and enjoy the way it feels on your skin.
  11. 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).
  12. Sing or play music. Karaoke tracks are easy to find online and are ideal for this purpose.
  13. 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.
  14. Moisturize. Mmm, luxurious.
  15. 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.
  16. Dance to great music. I recommend Reverie Sound Revue and Robot Science.
  17. Cook an elaborate meal, if you think you’re level-headed enough to be trusted in the kitchen.
  18. 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.
  19. Do yoga or stretch. Feel how the weed makes the sensations register differently in your body.
  20. 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.
  21. Watch videos of baby animals. No explanation necessary.
  22. 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.
  23. Play a video game, especially one with beautiful graphics. Virtual worlds can feel extra immersive on drugs.
  24. Talk on the phone with someone who is also high. It’ll either be really weird or really funny or both.
  25. Eat snacks. “The munchies” are very real.
  26. Take sexy selfies for you and/or a sweetheart to enjoy later.
  27. 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!)
  28. Watch a really dramatic TV show like The L Word or Westworld and allow yourself to get swept up in the ensuing emotions.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.

How the Vacation Mindset Can Make You a Better Flirt

Kate Sloan

When you’re stuck at home, like so many of us are right now, it’s hard not to start planning what you’d like to do when you’re allowed to go out again. Or, more accurately, when you’re allowed to go back out into a world that has regained some modicum of normalcy.

Along these lines, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a book I read and reviewed a while ago, The Offline Dating Method by Camille Virginia. The book presents tips and techniques for striking up a conversation with a hot stranger in public, and then parlaying that conversation into a date or even a relationship. While the book seemed fun and frivolous (in a good way) to me when I read it, it seems even moreso now, when an in-person meet-cute seems as remote and perilous a possibility as a hookup on a mountaintop. But it’s a nice notion to ponder, when daydreaming optimistically about what will happen when public life reopens for business.

One of the many concepts I’ve retained from Camille’s book is her idea of the “vacation mindset” – the state of mind you get into when you’re visiting an unfamiliar place. Camille argues that being a fish out of water can help you shake off your stale old self-image and slip into something a little sexier, flirtier, flashier. It’s the reason I’ll often chat up bartenders in cities I’m unlikely to visit again, despite almost never doing that at home; it’s the reason I’ll smile at strangers on the street in Portland or Montreal but rarely Toronto; it’s even the reason I looked into Los Angeles escorts when I visited Burbank earlier this year. (Unfortunately, constraints on time and money ruled out that last one!) Being in a new place makes it easy to imagine being a new person – and even to move toward becoming that person.

See, if you feel trapped in an identity that is shy, reserved, and afraid, it’s easier to move away from those traits when no one around you actually knows what kind of person you are in your “regular life.” This was an exciting notion to me when I entered high school, for example, because I fully intended to cast off my long-outgrown plainness and step into a more fulfilling self-image – and I did! But the thing is, you don’t actually have to enter a new context in order to access this effect. You can trick yourself into embodying the vacation mindset without ever leaving your city.

I find this easiest to do in neighborhoods I don’t often visit, because – like when I’m on vacation – I have the sense that I’m unlikely to see the people around me very often, or ever again, in the future. You could strike up a convo with a barista at a café across town from you, for instance, or get to know the person sitting next to you at a comedy club you’ve never been to before. This helps create a sense of “having nothing to lose” which I find very freeing in social interactions. You can still fuck up this type of encounter, obviously, but if you do, you can just apologize and then disappear forever from the life of the person you’ve weirded out, like a socially awkward Macavity.

These types of seemingly low-stakes interactions can be good practice for higher-stakes ones. You’re building up your confidence, sure, but you’re also building up your mental picture of the type of person you want to become. Even if you feel like a nebbish nobody for most of the week, feeling like a fabulous flirt for even one night can give you a foothold into that mindset – and maybe one day you’ll be that charismatic charmer all the time!

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

They Can’t Take That (Wand Vibrator) Away From Me

Kate Sloan

I’m having a minor mental breakdown because the Scrabble app is being discontinued.

I know that doesn’t sound like it’s going to be relevant to sex toys and the other topics covered on this here blog, but bear with me for a moment. The Scrabble app – totally classic, with no bells or whistles, just that well-worn Hasbro aesthetic and those well-understood rules – has been my constant companion in my battle against anxiety and depression for several years. It’s one tool in my wide-ranging toolbelt of coping mechanisms, but it is a significant one. When I start to hyperventilate on the subway, or am en route to a party I’m nervous about, or am crying so hard I can’t get out of bed, I can always whip out my phone and play a few games of Scrabble against a skilled robot. The familiarity of the game, and my skill at it, calm me down in minutes.

When EA recently announced that they’re phasing out the classic Scrabble app in favor of the new (and way, way worse) Scrabble Go, and that users of the original app will be unable to keep using it past June, I honestly felt like a piece of the cliff I was standing on had suddenly crumbled and fallen away. Maybe it’s the fact that this announcement coincided with global panic about a pandemic as well as a continuing political shitshow, but it really felt like something had been taken away from me that I needed in order to function. Something I thought I could trust, and that I thought would always be there somehow, in fact will be gone in not too long.

That brings me to the Magic Wand. The Japanese corporation originally responsible for making and selling this legendary vibrator, Hitachi, almost pulled the plug on the product (so to speak) in the mid-2010s when – according to various sources – the conservative company got cold feet about the sexualization of their product. Marketed as a muscle massager, the Magic Wand had nonetheless picked up steam as a sex aid in North American masturbation workshops and porn flicks (though it is also available in the UK and elsewhere) and Hitachi wasn’t cool with that. American sex toy distributor Vibratex swept in and saved the day by taking over branding and distribution of the product so Hitachi could save face – but in the interim, Magic Wand fans were terrified. Theories abounded about the toy’s potential fate. Wands started popping up for hundreds of dollars on eBay and the like. The situation looked dire, until Vibratex started cranking out wands again (including the Magic Wand Rechargeable, a brilliantly-conceived update on the original) and harmony was restored to the universe.

I was reminded of this story when I heard the news about the Scrabble app, because there is something uniquely terrifying about finding out that what you once considered a constant comfort actually is not. This is true whether the thing that has crumbled is big – like your relationship, your family, or, say, the entire world order as you know it – or small, like an app or a vibrator. We place our trust in these things; they hold our emotional safety precariously in their hands. So it’s immensely destabilizing when one of them just winks out of existence.

The world may be incredibly fucked up right now, but I still have my Magic Wand, and it feels like a security blanket. Even when I’m scared of what’s to come, I can still have orgasms. Even if I have to self-quarantine, I can still have orgasms. Even if I get sick, I can still have orgasms (assuming I can muster the energy to administer them). Lots of people are turning to lots of familiar comforts in times like these – beloved shows on Netflix, dog-eared and much-read books, Skype calls with loved ones – and I’m glad that the Magic Wand is one of mine… especially now that my long-cherished Scrabble app is being ripped from my hands. (Okay, I might be being a tad melodramatic. Just a tad.)

 

If you want to know more about wand vibrators available worldwide, check out this review of the Hitachi Magic Wand alternative in Australia. This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.