Musings

5 Things I Learned From Working in Sex Toy Retail

Kate Sloan
One time I worked on Halloween…

Though it’s been a year and a half since the last time I set foot behind a sex-shop sales counter, I still remember my sex toy retail days as some of my fondest. It was a job quite unlike any other in my employment history, and I say that as someone who had already been working in sex media for years at that point. Nowhere else do you get so up-close-and-personal with everyday people – not just the clued-in, sex-positive crowd – trying to expand their sexual horizons. It may be just another shitty retail job, but it’s also a magical and unparalleled experience!

Here are five big things I learned in my stints as a sex toy saleslady…

1. People are – still – really nervous and insecure about sex. People who sell sex toys wholesale or online get to see some of this, perhaps in the forms of email, Instagram DMs, and the like – but it’s working in a physical shop that really exposes you to customers’ fears and neuroses. I watched middle-aged moms pace the vibrator aisle biting their nails; I helped men pick out toys meant to compensate for the boners they feared they’d never get back; I showed giggling teenagers how to operate their first-ever vibes. It was always my mission to try to impart a sense of casual confidence around sex via my speech and behavior – which sometimes involved putting on a poker face – because what else is a sex shop employee really for?

2. There are soooo many weird sex toys out there. And I am using the word “weird” in the most affectionate way, I promise. The shops I worked at bought through sex toy wholesale suppliers, and sometimes just loaded up their orders with whatever looked interesting or sellable – which sometimes meant our sales floor would be stocked with giant fist dildos, glow-in-the-dark enemas, and vibrators that doubled as jewelry. You see a lot of strange shit as a sex toy reviewer, but I saw even more strange shit at sex shops, and it delighted me.

3. I like work that’s variable and challenging. Previous office jobs (not to mention, monogamous relationships…) had taught me that monotony saps the life force from my soul. Work that engages you is a privilege, and I’m so grateful I’ve been able to find it in so many forms. Working at a sex shop may get boring on occasion – for example, when you’re putting price tags on dozens of lingerie sets, or mopping the lube aisle after yet another spill – but the one-on-one interactions with customers were totally unpredictable from day to day. I could talk to a brassy grandmother buying her 8th Magic Wand, a meek teenager coming in for a harness and dildo, and a fast-talking sex worker picking up some lube before her next rendezvous, all in the same day. Amazing!

4. Even sex toys can get boring after a while. Look, I said the people were interesting; not all the toys were! I bet people who work in the lube production, wholesale sex toys, and sex toy marketing world also find this to be true: after a while, almost nothing can shock you anymore. Customers giggled daily at the giant arm-length dildos we carried, or the horse-tail butt plugs, but I was so blasé that I was just like, “Yeah? And?” This is why it’s funny to me when people worry that they’re going to freak out a sex shop employee with their “out-there” request… If they’ve been working there for a while, they’ve probably seen it all.

5. A little empathy goes a long way. I don’t mean this in a super-salesy way – “establish commonality with the customer so they’ll be likelier to drop some cash!” – but an empathetic approach to sex toy sales really does help. People want to feel listened to, understood, and normalized – and as a sex shop employee, I think you encounter more opportunities to do this type of emotional service than almost any other kind of retail worker. I never took that responsibility lightly.

Have you ever worked at a sex shop? What did the experience teach you?

 

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

5 Questions to Ask Your New Kink Partner

Kate Sloan

A vanilla friend once asked me, when I gushed about how well my new dommy beau’s kinks fit with mine, “Isn’t that the point of identifying as dominant or submissive? So you can easily find someone who’s compatible with you?”

Ha. Easily? That’s a laugh. While I am indeed a submissive – and a damn good one, if I may say so – that doesn’t mean I automatically jive with every dominant who crosses my path. Even setting aside more basic factors like attraction and harmonious personalities, we might not work well together kinks-wise because there are so many different ways to be dominant or to be submissive. If I want to be nurtured but you want to degrade me until I cry, maybe we’re not gonna work out. If you get off on heavy sadism and my pain tolerance is only so-so, we might have to part ways. If the names and words that light your fire are ones that squick me out, maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

While there’s no foolproof and thorough way (in my view) to assess compatibility quickly, there are certainly ways you can help speed it along. With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask your new beau (and answer yourself, too) to figure out whether your approaches to kink could work well together – for an evening, a fling, or maybe even for the long haul.

1. What kinds of feelings do you like getting from kink?

When you’re in the midst of a kink scene, do you like feeling adored, appreciated, accomplished? Or do you prefer to feel overwhelmed, overpowered, and owned? How about degraded, dejected, or dismissed? (More great feelings words on Bex’s Yes/No/Maybe list.)

Knowing this about a potential (or current) kink partner can help shape your scenes. I’ll take a very different approach when submitting to a dom who appreciates quiet obedience, for example, versus a dom who likes a little bratty resistance. Likewise, if a dom thinks I want to feel used and put down, they’re not going to be able to give me the type of scene I actually tend to want, which involves me being cherished and coddled. Figure out your desired feelings first, and then you can start to figure out everything else.

2. What does it look like when you’re enjoying yourself? What about when you’re not?

As a sub, I giggle when I’m enjoying myself – but I know other subs whose mid-scene giggles might mean they’re uncomfortable and don’t know how to say so. I know people whose stony silence might mean they hate what’s happening, and people who only go silent when things are feeling really good. I know people who kick and scream when they’re taken past their pain limits, and people for whom that’s just a sign that the scene is going swimmingly. It’s important to know how your particular play partner responds to both good and bad stimuli, so you know when to slow your roll and when to hit the accelerator. Of course, you shouldn’t rely only on these cues – it’s still important to have (and heed) a safeword, and perhaps a green/yellow/red check-in system or something similar – but they’re crucial to know, nonetheless.

That doesn’t only hold true for subs and bottoms, either. Doms and tops also have “tells” for when they’re enjoying a scene and when they’re decidedly not. A bonus of articulating these signs to a partner is that you get clearer on them yourself. I never used to notice, for example, that my ankles would cross together protectively when I was nearing a pain limit, until a partner asked me to list and explain some of my nonverbal signals. Being more aware of your own body and responses is always useful!

3. Has anyone ever safeworded with you before? What happened?

This is one of my favorite screening questions for new doms, because it shows me quickly how they handle consent in scenes and to what extent they respect their partners. A bad or dangerous dom will tend to get defensive when asked this question – “Of course no one has ever needed to safeword with me!” – while a good dom who’s been around the block will likely have at least a few stories to share. (I’m sure you could learn a lot about a sub by asking them this question, too.)

Pay attention to how they talk about the person who safeworded (affectionately? dismissively?) and what they claim to have done after the safeword was said (hopefully they tried to give the person what they needed, instead of reprimanding them or abandoning them). Notice, too, what their general attitude on safewording seems to be. If they view it as a wimpy cop-out that should best be avoided, rather than a vital communication tool in any encounter, maybe you should steer clear.

4. What are some edges you’re interested in pushing?

These malleable edges are also known as “soft limits”: things you aren’t interested in doing, with most people or in most circumstances, but that you might be open to if the right situation and partner came along for that particular thing.

For example, I don’t want to feel like some douchey bro’s blowjob machine, but with a compassionate dom who I trusted and loved to please, having my mouth used in an objectifying or degrading way could be fun. Maybe your partner’s been curious about knife play for ages but has never had a chance to try it out. Maybe they’re a dom who’s curious about subbing, or vice-versa. Whatever it is, you don’t have to push that edge immediately or at all, but it’s good to at least know about it, so you can perhaps start to work toward it together.

5. What kind(s) of aftercare do you need?

If someone is new to kink – or hasn’t done it in a while – they may not know the answer to this. But they probably have at least some idea. Common elements of aftercare are cuddles, compliments, and snacks – but of course, these don’t work for everyone.

I get nervous doing scenes with new partners who I haven’t discussed aftercare with yet. While most kinksters seem to know intuitively that aftercare is important, it’s hard for me to relax and have fun if I don’t know that I’ll be properly taken care of when I’m too subspacey to articulately advocate for myself. So it’s best to have this conversation before it becomes relevant, so both of you know you’ll be able to get what you need.

What questions do you like to ask new kink partners before playing?

 

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

5 Myths About the Clit

Kate Sloan

Clitoris, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. You are a sensitive seductress, an orgasm-enabler, a prettily-hued part. You thrill and satisfy many a mouth, and you give purpose to vibrators that might otherwise remain unused. You are chronically ignored, epidemically mistreated, but still you rise to meet the pleasurable reputation which precedes you. You are, in short, a hero: responsible for great joys worldwide but fiercely unappreciated for all that you do.

Despite all my rhapsodizing, I still have beef with some of the discourse that exists around the clit. It is, to say the least, a widely misunderstood body part. Here are 5 common myths about the almighty clitoris…

It’s only for foreplay.

As artist Sophia Wallace points out in her Cliteracy project: “Mastered the Kama Sutra? If you are not cliterate, 70% of [people with vulvas] will still be unsatisfied.” These stats vary depending on who you ask, but I’ve seen estimates that anywhere from two-thirds to nine-tenths of vulva-possessing folks need clitoral stimulation in order to get off. These numbers are, presumably, similar to the proportion of folks with penises who need those penises touched if they’re going to reach orgasm… because – surprise, surprise – the penis and the clitoris are anatomically analogous.

I have cringed through many a porn scene or fanfic story where clitoral stimulation is treated as a cursory appetizer to the “main event.” And let’s be real: this attitude spreads to real life, even if clitorally oblivious pornographers and erotica authors claim they only create works of fantasy. Several of my cis male partners have demonstrably not understood how important my clit is to my sexual response – and then sometimes they would seem shocked or offended when their penetrative fumblings didn’t push me anywhere close to climax! Our culture needs to change the way it discusses and treats clits, if we have any hope of closing the orgasm gap.

It’s just the little bump you see on the outside.

The head of the clitoris – that is to say, the part that is most visible – is often mistaken as the clit in its totality. In reality, though, medical imaging has taught us that the clitoris extends into the body, just like the penis does. It has a shaft, long legs (“crura”), and bulbs, which can be indirectly stimulated with fingers or clit vibrators through the labia, mons pubis, and vagina. Some theorists even posit that all “G-spot” and “vaginal” orgasms are actually indirect clitoral orgasms in disguise.

Once you know this secret truth about the clit, it really opens up your options for stimulating this body part. For example, many folks (myself included!) find that the head of the clitoris is too sensitive to be touched directly, in which case, stimulating the sides and top of the clitoral shaft might be a better route to pleasure. Don’t be afraid to suck or stroke the shaft as if it were a tiny penis, either – because it basically is. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (Uh, maybe we could re-frame this to say that a penis is essentially an oversized clit?!)

Only women have them.

Fuck off with your cissexist bullshit. Trans men exist. Non-binary people exist. Intersex people exist. There are people all across the gender spectrum – and beyond – who have a clit. If you ever refer to “women” in your spoken or written clitoral discourse, ask yourself: why? Is it really, truly, actually necessary to phrase your ideas that way? Probably not.

On that note, the marketing for clit vibes is habitually feminine, and it’s disheartening to see. Sex toy companies need to get with the program already; it is 2019, and excluding trans people isn’t acceptable, nor was it ever.

It has more nerve endings than the entire penis.

An often-repeated factoid about the clitoris is that it contains 8,000 nerve endings, apparently twice as many as the entire penis. But that stat can be traced back to a 1976 book about cows and sheep – not even humans. Even if that estimate did apply to people, it would probably refer to the circumcised penis, because modern medicine estimates the foreskin alone contains about 20,000 nerve endings. Yeesh!

This isn’t exactly the moment for me to mount an intactivist spiel, maybe, but while I’m on the subject: no one should be circumcised as a baby unless it is literally medically necessary. Beyond affecting genital function and health, routine infant genital mutilation (whether of a penis or a clitoris) robs the patient of thousands upon thousands of nerve endings that would enrich their lives. If a person wants elective surgery on their genitals for whatever reason, it’s my opinion that they should do it when they’re old enough to make that weighty decision for themselves in an informed way, rather than having it thrust upon them by archaically-minded parents or doctors.

It’s hard to find.

This myth was a staple of 1990s stand-up comedians’ acts, I guess because it’s hilarious when men think their partners’ pleasure is unimportant or too much work?? What a weird world we live in.

It’s true that the clitoris is usually nested in layers of skin – a hood and two sets of labia – which, combined with its size, make it less visually obvious at first glance than, say, a penis. But once you’ve looked at a few vulvas, it’s hard to miss the clit. It’s the protrusion where the inner labia intersect, and you can usually feel it with your fingers, especially when it starts to harden with arousal. (A particularly memorable Vice cunnilingus guide said that the clitoris feels “like a tumor in a pile of earlobes,” which, while horrifying, effectively illustrates the textural differences between the clit and the skin that surrounds it.)

Frankly, if you regularly fuck people who have clits, and you’ve never taken the time to either find those clits yourselves or ask their owners to point them out, you are not even doing the bare minimum as a sexual partner. I get that it can be anxiety-inducing to do something you’ve never done before, but pleasing your partner is more important than your pride. Figure it out, if just because you’ll feel like more of a Casanova once you do.

 

What are your least favorite myths about the clit?

 

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

Love Through a Voyeuristic Lens

Kate Sloan

In the age of the internet, it’s normal for our private lives to play out in public. In just a few clicks, you can peek into a beauty influencer’s medicine cabinet, peruse a sex toy blogger’s prized collection (hi), or visit voyeur house private cams where you can watch the life of real people. Not everyone is thrilled about all this openness and exhibitionism, but it’s undeniably part of our culture now.

So, as a sex writer and certifiable member of the Oversharers Club, it surprised me how private I was about my current relationship in its infancy. I talked about it in oblique terms on Twitter, and mentioned to a few friends that I’d been texting with a promising new dude who lived in New York, but for the most part, I wanted to hold those cards close to my chest. Our courtship happened primarily late at night via FaceTime and iMessage, encrypted end-to-end, cordoned off from the rest of our lives. It felt weird to bring it out into the open by talking about it too much – like someone throwing open the door of a darkened closet during a heated game of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

But because this private intimacy was shared between only me and my new crush, it felt almost like it didn’t really exist – like it could be a mirage, a hallucination, a midnight fever-dream. It brought me back to my early days on the internet, when I’d build elaborate romances with strangers in IRC chats and then just go to school the next day like nothing had happened, like nothing had changed. Even as we escalated to using weightier words for each other – partner, boyfriend and girlfriend – still, part of me felt like: here is my “real life,” and here is this relationship, and scarcely the twain shall meet.

So it was quite a jolt the first time my new love – mb – came to visit me in Toronto. Seeing him in familiar locales, like my bedroom, my parents’ living room, and the coffee shop I go to every week, was as jarring as a bad green-screen sequence in a low-budget movie. How could such a cute, sweet person, who had taken on an almost mythical quality in my mind, exist in the world at all, let alone in my life? I felt like Rob Gordon, the antihero of High Fidelity, when he looks up his long-lost college girlfriend: “She’s in the fucking phone book! She should be living on Neptune. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person in a phone book!”

He met my family. He met my friends. I took him to my birthday party. But none of it quite felt real – until, shortly after leaving the party, I got a text from my friend Suz, who had left at the same time as us. “Okay, so, creepiest thing I have ever done,” she wrote, “but when we departed at the subway, I could see y’all from the other side. You both looked so in love, so I took some creepy stealth pics for you.”

mb and I giggled over the photos, crowing “We’re so cute!” and zooming in to examine our amorous body language. Something clicked. Seeing my relationship from the outside allowed me to believe in it from the inside. I felt validated: Yes, he really exists; yes, he really is that cute; yes, he really loves me! Some part of me had been continually nervous that he would evaporate somehow, that I would wake up from the dream or forget to save my game, and he would be gone. But there he was, in a handful of .jpegs, flirting with me on a Toronto subway platform, irrefutable.

Feeling observed in a feeling can make that feeling all the more palpable. Maggie Nelson writes about it in Bluets: “We sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.” Beauty vloggers know this, as do reality TV stars, theatre actors, Instagram influencers, exhibitionists and voyeurs. Like Schrodinger’s cat, sometimes it is the very act of seeing that heralds the seen object into existence. My relationship would have been real with or without spectators, of course – but my rock-solid, comfortable, life-affirming belief in that relationship? Maybe not so much.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Thank you to Suz for the photos; we love them!

Sexting, Spanking, Stroking: What “Counts” As Sex?

Kate Sloan

In the 12th grade I took a psychology/sociology/anthropology class, the first day of which was spent debating what constituted “sex.”

Our teacher said it was a useful exercise to get us thinking about the nuances of the class’s subject matter – and he was right. The ensuing discussion was psychosocial and sociocultural, surprisingly thoughtful for a roomful of horny teenagers.

One person suggested sex could be defined as a physical act meant to invoke sensual pleasure in oneself and one’s partner, but someone else pointed out that under this definition, holding hands could be considered sex. Another person thought orgasm should be part of the definition, but of course that leaves out all the perfectly valid sex that doesn’t involve orgasms, whether by choice or not. We debated whether sex had to involve romantic feelings (no), penetration (no), mutual pleasure (no), genital touching (mayyybe?). Despite feeling fairly certain we knew what sex was, we couldn’t agree on a definition that we felt included all the things it ought to and excluded all the things it ought to.

This was years before the “galaxy brain” meme became popular, but damn if that wasn’t a galaxy-brain moment for me. If I didn’t know what sex was or wasn’t, then could sex be… almost anything? Could I experience sexual pleasure from… almost anything?

I’ve been writing about sex online for the better part of a decade now, and my understanding of what “sex” is has only become broader and murkier as time has progressed (not to mention, as acts like sexting and phone sex have become a bigger and bigger part of my life). I’m not sure I know what sex is. I’m not sure I ever knew.

I’m playing Scrabble and drinking wine with a cute, toppy enby at their house. It’s our second date. They’re really, really good at Scrabble; they beat me spectacularly. And then I ask if they want to beat me in another way.

They are amenable, and I sprawl over their lap, face down and ass up, like a good girl. They warm up my ass with light swats and then transition into more substantial smacks. The impacts get louder and the pain gets worse and I almost want to cry and it’s so so good.

When we mutually decide we’re done with impact, I sit in their lap and kiss them, our hands roaming lazily along each other’s skin. I feel like a sweet, petite princess under their gaze. The kisses fade out like the end of a pop song, and they gesture at the Scrabble board. “Wanna play again?”

Does this count as sex?

Kink, as you may well know, makes everything more complicated.

Where previously I might have said that a sexual activity had to involve genital touching for me to consider it “sex,” the deeper I’ve waded into my kinky identity, the less certain I am that that’s true. When you’re a spanking fetishist, for example, your butt basically is a genital region, or at least, your brain and body respond as if it were (and isn’t that the whole point?). Does that make the feet a sexual organ for foot fetishists? Is the brain a sexual organ for hypnokinksters?

I keep a sex spreadsheet, and currently my threshold for including an encounter there is:

  1. At least one person’s genitals must be touched by at least one other person
  2. The purpose of the interaction must be for sexual pleasure
  3. It must “feel like sex” to me

Of course, that last point is the most nebulous, and probably the most important. Some spankings leave me panting and dishevelled, satisfied and wrecked, like good sex; others just feel like a few fun swats from a pal. Some sexting sessions feel obscene and all-encompassing; others just feel like typing words into a phone. Maybe it’s okay for your definition of sex to be subjective. But then, what happens if someone thinks they’re fucking you, deeply and fully, and to you it just feels like a bit of rollin’ around?

My fuckbuddy is looking particularly cute tonight – but I swear I think that every time I see him. He’s naked in the pool at the sex club, sipping a cider, not a trace of self-consciousness in his body. We’ve been chatting for a good few minutes, but suddenly the cadence of our conversation shifts. I set my drink down by the side of the pool and he starts kissing me and it is the most natural thing, the most familiar treat.

His hand is in my hair and his other hand is on my back and his legs are pulling me closer and I’m tugging on his chest hair and his beard is scraping my cheeks. There are so many sensory details I associate with him and basically no one else: a splash of chlorine, the squeak of wet skin on skin. He is also a certified master of dry-humping: his hard cock finds my clit underwater with perpetually startling precision. Our most sensitive spots slide against each other as our kisses get deeper and more frenetic.

After languorous minutes of this, I am turned on – but tired. It’s been a long day. Normally at this point we would progress to sex, but I want to stop here; this was enough. I explain, and he understands, and we kiss goodnight. I get out of the pool and towel off, feeling glowy and gorgeous.

Does this count as sex?

I hate the narrative that sex without penetration isn’t sex at all. This myth is rampant, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and so many other things that make me shudder. In Laurie Mintz’s book Becoming Cliterate, she reports – based on a survey she did – that while two-thirds of women consider it “sex” when someone goes down on them, only one-third of men consider it “sex” when they go down on someone. The clitoris is the anatomical equivalent of the penis; it’s absurd that when the latter is stimulated, it’s widely considered sex, while the same isn’t true for the former.

And yet… when my clit is merely grazed, or lightly rubbed, and there’s nothing inside me, often it doesn’t feel to me like sex. It feels like something that could’ve happened accidentally, if I was squeezing past strangers on a train or enjoying a particularly deep kiss.

Have I internalized the concept that “foreplay” alone isn’t real sex? Or do I simply know what I like? Is it okay to build one’s own definition of sex based on what one finds subjectively sexual, or does that inherently exclude people who experience sex differently? Maybe it’s inevitable that humanity can never agree on a universal definition of sex. Maybe that’s okay.

My boyfriend calls me up, as he does almost every night. After a few minutes of catch-up conversation and goofy giggles, some particular piece of flirty repartée makes his voice drop an octave into a distinctly dommy register. We’ve been sexting on-and-off all day; we want each other, and on the phone, we can almost have each other. The game is on.

Dictating my every move, he guides me through gentle touches, a satisfying spanking, and a deep hard fuck with a dildo and vibrator. My body provides motion while his voice provides direction, excitement, encouragement. My eventual orgasm feels collaborative, like a canvas we both slung paint at until it was beautiful.

Does this count as sex?

I thought I was at peace with my (lack of a) definition of sex, and then I got into a long-distance relationship.

Sexting and phone sex are hugely popular endeavors, as the plethora of free sexting sites and phone sex operators on the internet will attest. But are they sex?

For a long time, I didn’t think so. I didn’t record these encounters on my spreadsheet; I didn’t say “We fucked,” but rather, “We had phone sex.” Meanwhile, my partner was viewing those late-night phone calls as sex with me, which was a bit of a weird disconnect. It was like that scene in Down With Love when a smitten Ewan McGregor tries to get Renée Zellweger’s blasé, love-wary character to sleep with him: “So I can make love to you – heartfelt, passionate, worshipping, adoring love – and you can still have meaningless sex with me, right?” It’s strange to have a vastly different conception of sex from the person you’re having it with.

So I stayed open to the idea that sexting and phone sex could feel like sex, could be sex. And after a year of getting lascivious on the phone almost every night (why are we like this??), I can now report that it indeed feels like a sexual act to me. I look forward to it like sex; I get fully engrossed in it like sex; it satisfies me like sex; it brings me and my partner closer like sex. And it’s upwards of 70% of our sex life together, so it would feel odd to write it off as “illegitimate” in some way. I still don’t record it in my spreadsheet alongside IRL encounters, only because it doesn’t pose a risk as far as STIs and pregnancy, so I have less of a need to track it. But maybe someday I’ll start doing it anyway.

As our culture goes deeper down the rabbit hole of stuff like sex robots and teledildonics, we’re going to have to broaden our definition of sex. And that, I think, is a very good thing.

 

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