All Reviews

Book Review: Brothel’s Kitchen

Kate Sloan

Sex work is such a normalized field in my sex-positive, feminist communities that sometimes I sort of forget just how stigmatized it is in the world at large – even among people who claim to be “liberal” and “progressive.”

Narratives persist about how all sex work is nonconsensual and exploitative, despite sex workers screaming on social media for years that they’ve chosen their career path and don’t want or need to be “rescued.” Many people still use phrases like “selling your body” to talk about what is actually just the sale of your time and your body-based services, just like what happens in many other fields like massage, modeling, and professional sports. Far too many well-intentioned people try to argue that sex work is bad because it’s “disempowering,” as if the slog of earning a living is held to the same standard of “empowerment” in any other field. It’s perplexing and enraging – especially since so many of these folks think they’re being helpful by parroting their bullshit opinions that are (you guessed it) actively disempowering to sex workers.

I think a lot of this misinformation has to do with sex work’s representation (or lack thereof) in mainstream media, from the evening news to procedural dramas to blockbuster movies. For decades, if not longer, it’s been framed over and over as something one would only do under the direst of financial circumstances, or to get access to drugs, or to quench a psychological craving based in “daddy issues” or other trauma. While obviously there is poverty, addiction, and trauma in the sex work community (just as those things exist in pretty much every other community too), these narratives usually leave out the ways in which sex work can be incredibly positive and enriching for workers and their clients. And hey, newsflash: a job doesn’t have to be 100% peachy all the time to be a valid job worthy of respect and protections. We live under capitalism! Work sucks! Let people choose work that they like to do and feel able to do, since we all have to work anyway!

All this to say, I think positive portrayals of sex work are invaluable in shifting public perception of this misunderstood field. So I was pleased to be asked to review Phillipa Zosime’s new memoir, Brothel’s Kitchen: Flavours of Women.

The book follows Phillipa’s induction into the sex work industry in Austria. It opens with a series of scenes set at a massive orgy held by one of the brothels she works for, at which she’s expected to fuck and fellate clients for 7 hours (with breaks to shower, hydrate, eat, and rest). After she enjoys herself and gets paid, there’s a classic “You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…” flashback and we turn back time to when she first entered the sex work world. Once an archaeology student and political intern, she decided instead to follow her fascination with sex and start having it professionally.

One very interesting aspect of this book to me is the details about Austria’s legal and regulated sex work industry. Regular STI tests are required, workers are considered self-employed contractors for the brothels they frequent, and meticulous paperwork is kept to make sure everything is legit. Many sex workers I know in Canada and the U.S. advocate for decriminalization rather than legalization/regulation, since (among other reasons) legislative bodies don’t tend to know very much about what sex workers and their clients actually need and want – but nonetheless, it was intriguing to hear about how brothels are apparently run over in Austria. The book goes into detail about how profits are split up between workers, madams, and house owners, as well as how much they pay in taxes and what kind of legal due diligence they’re expected to keep up with on a regular basis. These procedural minutiae ought to captivate anyone who’s curious about sex work law around the world.

Another fascinating detail from Philippa’s story is that she had only had one sexual partner before becoming a sex worker. It hadn’t been the most satisfying relationship, and she ended up having her first-ever orgasm with a client at the brothel (which became a point of pride for him and a running joke between them!). This was the point in the book when I started to get excited: it’s a really uncommonly positive depiction of what a career in sex work can be like. If there were more stories like this out there – stories that showcase the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful parts of sex work – I think far fewer people would hold shitty misconceptions about the industry.

Yes, there are scary and sad parts of Phillipa’s story. Her friend dies; clients blow up in anger on occasion; women get into snippy arguments; someone’s money gets stolen from her safety deposit box at the brothel. But all of these details just felt really real to me. Writing a fully rosy sex work memoir would, I imagine, be just as absurd as making any other career sound 100% fun 100% of the time. Life has its ups and downs, and so do our jobs, no matter what field we work in.

In addition to heartwarming sex-work friendships and heart-pounding sex-work problems, this book also contains quite a few funny stories that had me literally LOLing. There’s one in particular about one girl accidentally spitting cum onto another girl’s face that I don’t think I will ever be able to forget…

I gotta say, I liked Brothel’s Kitchen even more than I was expecting to. It’s charming, and cute, and fast-paced, and full of strange and illuminating details. There’s a disclaimer at the beginning that explains that “the events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability,” and that “the author’s recollection of the past occurrences may deviate from those of others,” but there are so many parts of this book that seem like you couldn’t possibly have made them up. That realness is the heart and soul of Phillipa’s writing, and it makes this one hell of a page-turner.

 

Thanks so much to Phillipa Zosime for providing this book for me to review! This post was sponsored, which means that I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the book I was provided with. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Review: Hot Octopuss Amo

Kate Sloan

I always find it amusing when a sex toy company makes both a product I hate and a product I love. Why does the Dame Kip satisfy my clit while the Dame Eva buzzily tumbles from my labia in laughably short order? Why does the We-Vibe Tango make me swoon while the We-Vibe Wish distracts me to the point of rage? Why does the Fun Factory Stronic Eins give me deep, throbbing orgasms while the Fun Factory LayaSpot just makes me sigh and give up?

Well, the answer is that not every sex toy works well for every body – and that’s a good thing. It means there’s enough variety within the sex toy industry to accommodate almost anyone, at least pleasure-wise.

I bring this up because today’s blog post is about a Hot Octopuss toy. Hot Octopuss previously made the Queen Bee, a vibrator that ticks several of my “I hate this” boxes: it creates far too much noise and far too little sensation, and it has a frustratingly and unnecessarily cissexist name. But Hot Octopuss shouldn’t be written off entirely, because they’ve also made several top-notch toys, like my partner’s beloved penis vibe, the Pulse, and the toy I’m reviewing today, the Amo.

The Amo is a really fucking good vibrator. Hot Octopuss is known primarily for the rumbly motors in their penile toys, and they seem to have brought that technology into the clitoral sphere. The Amo visibly and tangibly rumbles from the moment you turn it on. This is not at all a wimpy vibrator like so many on the market.

It’s also a really pretty toy. I like the black-with-red-ombré aesthetic, and the top-heavy shape sets this vibe apart from standard bullets, albeit while preventing it from being useable in, say, the bullet-vibe hole at the base of some dildos. The shape allows for a lot of different types of sensation: you can position the squishy, pointed tip on your clit if you like focused stimulation, or use various other spots on the toy’s shaft for broader and/or firmer touch.

The aforementioned squishiness is worth keeping in mind if you’re used to using hard plastic bullet vibes like the We-Vibe Tango or ScreamingO Charged Vooom. Silicone – the material that the main body of the Amo is made of – has more give to it than plastic, and also muffles vibrations slightly. The Amo’s motor is strong enough to make up for it, but if you like full-strength, focused vibrations that are almost sharp in quality, hard plastic will still probably be your best bet.

The Amo has 5 steady speeds and 5 patterns. This should be plenty for most users, although I have found myself wishing on a couple of occasions that there was just one or two extra speeds on the top end.

For me, the controls of this toy are a little awkward. One small button on one side of the shaft turns the vibe on and off, while two equally small buttons on the other side control the vibration intensity. None of the buttons are placed where my fingers naturally want to rest while holding this toy, so there’s always a bit of reaching and readjusting involved. However, if you’re someone who tends to accidentally bump buttons while using a vibe, disrupting your own pleasure, you might find this layout functions better for you.

I wish the USB-rechargeable Amo’s battery life was better – you get up to 40 minutes of use for every charge, and charging takes 2-3 hours. However, given that its best-known competitor, the Tango, has a notoriously shitty battery that has necessitated me replacing mine once every couple of years, I don’t mind needing to charge a toy more often in the short-term if it will last me longer in the long-term. (This, however, remains to be seen, as I’ve only owned my Amo for a couple of months.)

Overall, the Hot Octopuss Amo is what all too many clitoral vibrators wish they were. It’s strong, rumbly, quiet, elegant, portable, waterproof, and relatively inexpensive – just $49, versus $79–99 for toys of similar type and quality. I’m still married to my bedside bestie the Eroscillator, but the Amo has definitely entered my rotation of favored small vibes for travel and overnights. Congrats to Hot Octopuss for making something that’s not only better than their abysmal Queen Bee, but actually genuinely excellent.

 

Thanks to Hot Octopuss for sending me this toy to review!

Book Review: The End of Policing

Kate Sloan

Here’s one of the whitest things I could possibly say: I’ve never had a memorable encounter with a police officer.

Unlike countless people of color and especially Black folks, I have never been harassed, victimized, pursued, or discriminated against by a cop. My opinion on the police for most of my life has been neutral-to-positive, a fact that makes painfully clear the effectiveness of “copaganda”: media created to sugarcoat and valorize the role of police in our society. From SVU to Brooklyn Nine-Nine to The Silence of the Lambs, much of our media serves to numb white people’s understanding of the havoc cops wreak on Black folks’ lives every day, and have since the birth of their institution.

It was for this reason that I felt compelled to read The End of Policing. Friends of mine more entrenched in the social justice movement than I am have been shouting (and tweeting) anti-cop slogans for years now, and – seeing the violence regularly inflicted on marginalized people by police officers – I agreed with them that something needed to change. But I didn’t know much about the nuts and bolts of the issue: law enforcement’s rampant history of racist profiling and unwarranted violence, and the alternatives being proposed to replace this frustratingly venerated institution. My privilege had enabled me to go a long time without investigating this issue beyond a few cursory Google searches and news articles, but I wanted to fix that, because information is power and can effect change. So when I saw that Verso Books was offering a free ebook of The End of Policing for a while, as per the author’s wishes to get this information out there, I snapped it up and started reading.

It’s worth noting that the author, a sociology professor named Alex S. Vitale, is (so far as I can tell) white. Some books written by authors of color on similar issues include How to Abolish Prisons by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, both of which I’d like to explore next because they focus more on the imprisonment part of the unjust law enforcement system, while the book I’m reviewing today is all about cops: what they do, where they go, how they operate, and why they’re ill-suited for the roles we’ve slotted them into.

Vitale’s central argument is that the entire way our culture understands crime, and its causes, is wrong. There’s a hugely prevalent “bootstraps” theory of crime that paints it as the behavior of the depraved and morally flawed. Why would someone steal a loaf of bread, this theory goes, unless they were an ethical degenerate? What is there to do for them but throw them in the slammer, give them a shot at self-rehabilitation, and then toss them back out onto the streets when their sentence is done?

This perspective completely ignores the existence of structural inequality – which, newsflash, is a pretty big component of any capitalist society. When you make a law that says “stealing is wrong” (for example) but you put one group of people in a situation where they regularly have to choose between stealing and dying, while another group of people rarely or never even gets close to the maw of that terrifying decision, of course the first group is going to get in legal trouble constantly. And because our culture works how it does, that group – poor folks, and especially poor Black and Brown folks – will be treated as if their thievery was an independent decision based on a moral failing, rather than something they were pigeonholed into doing by the way the world treats them.

I’d heard it said many times in social justice circles that the police’s purpose and function is essentially to keep Black people down, and I always thought that was a claim about the police’s current atrocities rather than an indictment of the institution’s entire foundation and original purpose. But Vitale’s book set me straight on this issue. Police – which haven’t existed in their current form for as long as you might think – were always assembled and deployed with the mission of protecting people who had money, power, and privilege. They would chase down slaves who escaped, for example, and squash workers’ rights movements on behalf of the upper-class whites who didn’t want to have to give their poor employees better working conditions or higher pay. Police, both historically and presently, put a higher premium on protecting white people’s “property” and “wealth” (which, let’s not forget, was stolen from Indigenous folks and built by BIPOC’s slave labor) than on protecting Black people’s lives.

Seeing as their entire institution was literally created for this purpose, it’s no surprise at all that they continue to be one of the most racist forces in a world some people still misguidedly insist is “post-racial.” This is especially true since, as Vitale explains, police are trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to view perpetrators of crime as their enemy in a war of sorts, so they come to view themselves as heroes when in fact they are usually targeting society’s most vulnerable at the behest of society’s most powerful.

This main idea – that the solution to crime isn’t stricter law enforcement, but instead, the end of structural inequality – echoes through every chapter of Vitale’s book. He looks at topics like sex work, border violations, homelessness, drug use, and street gangs, and systematically explains why police are not a good or even passable solution to most problems. Structural inequality, the likes of which we see between white folks and people of color in North America and elsewhere, leads to economic precarity and, in many cases, mental illness and addiction issues for those who get the short end of the stick. These factors are the roots of almost all the crime police crack down on, and yet the crimes themselves are treated as isolated incidents, related to nothing structural except the supposed moral decrepitude of the “criminal” class. Why are we surprised that we built a dam and now the water is overflowing?

Each chapter of Vitale’s book gives an overview of the area of policing it covers, including numerous horrifying statistics and stories, and then offers some alternatives to the police-based status quo. You’ve probably seen people talking about some of these alternatives on social media a lot lately. Because the law enforcement institution is deeply discriminatory and was built to be that way, reforms aimed at getting the police to behave better will never work. It’s like training a bloodthirsty animal not to eat meat: the best you can hope for is that they’ll successfully suppress their natural desires for a while, not that those desires will actually change. For this reason, police abolitionists – a group that, wonderfully, seems to be growing by the day now – want, instead, for the police to be defunded and for those funds to be reallocated to services and causes that will actually reduce crime, like affordable housing, mental health counselling, addiction treatment, employment programs, social work, and sex work decriminalization. The law enforcement system thinks the best way to reduce crime is to make life harder for those in vulnerable populations; Vitale’s perspective, and that of other police abolitionists, is that making life a great deal easier for those people is the true ticket to crime reduction and a more harmonious society.

One thing that astonished me to learn from this book is that these alternatives are usually much cheaper to run than the current law enforcement system. Vitale produces stats that back this up for a staggering number of issues. It turns out, for example, that it costs the state dramatically less to just give a homeless person a safe and stable place to live for free than it would to continually cycle them through jails and courts for the “crime” of sleeping in a park or urinating on the street. (Where else are they supposed to sleep and pee, when you’ve banned them from so many safer locations?) It would also reportedly be cheaper to supply addicts with treatment and harm-reduction services than it is to send them to drug courts or prison. The tired Republican argument of “Where will the money come from?!?” seems pretty weak when you realize that police budgets are often the highest line item in any city budget and can be billions per year. Do you actually care about “the taxpayers,” or do you just hate the marginalized people you see as intractable criminals?

While this post is ostensibly a review of The End of Policing – which I loved, and would heartily recommend – mostly I wanted to use my platform here to tell you what you can do if you believe enough is enough and the police should be defunded. You can call or write to your local political leaders to demand they take action on this issue. You can donate to, and signal-boost the work of, abolitionist activists and organizations like Critical Resistance. You can loudly question the dogmatic beliefs of your police-abiding friends and family, perhaps backed up by stats and facts you read in this book. You can educate yourself more and more on this issue until you flush the harmful “copaganda” out of your psychological system. I’ve been doing all of these things after a lifetime of relative ignorance on this issue, and I invite you to join me – because contrary to popular belief, if we truly want a safer world, we need to get rid of cops and replace them with actual solutions to the problems we face.

Got Chronic Pain But Love Giving Handjobs?

Kate Sloan

I remember the first time I realized my chronic pain disorder might seriously mess up my sex life. I was kneeling in front of a dominant gentleman friend, sucking his cock while he tugged at my hair, when a telltale twinge of pain began to creep up in my knees. They were, at that time, my most painful and volatile body part – and blowjobs were, at that time, my most beloved and calming sex act. I shifted around, tried putting a pillow under me, tried sitting on my ass instead, but it was a lost cause. My knees had cockblocked us both. Defeated, I finished out the encounter with a handjob.

Handjobs have long been one of my favorite things to do to a partner, so this wasn’t exactly a consolation prize, at least for me. But in recent years, pain in my hands has plagued me even more than pain in my knees. It’s a bummer to realize that the sex act I once turned to when I was in too much pain to do anything else is now sometimes off-limits to me due to pain.

Fortunately, I’ve always had partners who were very understanding about this issue. They’ve typically been fine with me cuddling up to them and kissing their neck while they jerk themselves off, or playing with their nipples while they fuck a Fleshlight. But as any handjob-giving aficionado will tell you, sometimes the joy in acts like these isn’t just about observing your partner’s pleasure, but in directly causing and controlling it. And in that regard, there was only so much I could do.

So when a company called Handy emailed me about their new product, I was intrigued. Designed by a Norwegian engineer, the Handy is an electrically-powered mechanical stroking device, much like the unfortunately-named Sybian Venus for Men – but it only costs $169, while the Venus costs a whopping $956. Okay, Handy; I’m listening.

To be fair, the two products aren’t really as comparable as I initially thought: the Venus is custom-constructed to fit your exact dick measurements, and uses different mechanics to create a sensation I have to assume is pretty different from the Handy’s. But if using a Venus is on your bucket list despite clearly not being in the cards for you financially, maybe the Handy would be a good substitute.

So what is this toy? It’s a somewhat clunky, Fleshlight-shaped mechanical cylinder attached to a fabric band which you can wrap around an included masturbation sleeve (of unknown material, though probably some kind of thermoplastic rubber/elastomer, and definitely porous – ergo, don’t share it with anyone you’re not fluid-bonded with). The band moves the sleeve up and down over the penis once it’s inserted, and you can use the 4 buttons on the Handy to control the speed of each stroke as well as the length of the stroke.

Setup is slightly annoying, as you have to keep adjusting the tightness of the band with its Velcro strap depending on how hard your dick is and how much pressure it’s craving at any given moment. But if you’re already pretty hard and aroused by the time you start using it, that might be less of an issue. Lube is also an ongoing consideration, as with just about any penile masturbation toy; the company recommends water-based only, and you may need to reapply during use, especially if your session runs long.

What I love about this toy, as a “handjob top,” is how much control it gives me. When I use my hands on a partner’s cock, I’m not just altering the speed, I’m also altering the length and location of my strokes – so I’m glad to have a toy that can approximate that, however clunkily compared to the nuance of skilled hands. The “left and right” buttons on the control unit are for speed, and the “up and down” buttons control the stroke length; everything is close together, so I barely have to move my hand or expend any muscle energy when I’m using this toy.

One small complaint is that it’s difficult to know exactly what to do during a partner’s orgasm. When using my hand, normally I would either hold still while maintaining pressure, or slow down and lengthen my stroke quite a bit for the duration of the orgasm; when post-orgasmic hypersensitivity hits, it’s easy to remove your hand quickly, but it’s trickier to do that with the Handy. You can hit a bunch of buttons to swiftly slow the toy down, but removing it from the dick in a rush is likelier to cause more discomfort than just leaving it in place would. However, this’ll only be a minor issue for most people, and some might even like it if they enjoy an overload of sensation.

Cleaning is also an annoyance, but that’s true for pretty much every stroker/masturbator. Resist the temptation to fall asleep in a post-orgasmic haze, and make sure to rinse the cum and lube out of the stroker within a few minutes after using it, or you’re in for a gunky, moldy surprise later on.

If this were a standard review, I would touch on the video synchronization and smartphone-control features of the Handy, and I’m sure that they would help folks whose hand pain is even more severe than mine. But for my purposes, I prefer to get as close to hands-on as I comfortably can, so physically holding the toy works better for me.

Overall, if you have pain/mobility/strength issues in your hands and would still love to be able to give handjobs (or jerk yourself off), I think the Handy is a worthy investment. The band-and-sleeve system makes it so that you could theoretically swap out the provided stroker for a different one, if there’s another texture or size you prefer. You can therefore get more variety of sensation out of this toy than many other comparable ones, especially considering the flexibility of the controls scheme. $169 is a bit steep for some people’s budgets, sure, but I’ve never seen a toy of this type and caliber sold for any less – so when fellow sore-handed people ask me how they can keep on strokin’ dicks, now I know to recommend the Handy.

 

Full disclosure: Handy didn’t pay me for this review, but they did send me the product to try (thanks!) and I do get a small kickback if you buy through my affiliate link. Want more sex toy recommendations for folks with chronic pain? I wrote this article recently for Xtra on that very subject!

Mini Reviews: BeOne, Carter, & Star Delight

Kate Sloan

Time for some short reviews to catch up on my sex toy queue! Here are some toys I’ve been testing recently…

The Fun Factory Be-One caught my attention immediately when I spotted it at ANME, because 1) a new Fun Factory toy! yay! and 2) it looked like it might work well for someone with chronic pain in their hands, like me. So I asked Fun Factory to send me one, and blessedly, they did. It’s a rechargeable vibrator designed such that you can grip it between two fingers without the need for a lot of muscle strength or flexibility. The silicone-covered tip of the toy curves downward, so it can make good contact with my clit even on days when my fingers or wrists aren’t cooperating.

That ease of use on bad pain days is, for me, the major selling point of this toy – but there are others, too. It’s waterproof. It’s small enough to fit between bodies easily during penetrative sex. It’s made of non-porous and hypoallergenic silicone and plastic. It comes with a cute, hard plastic storage case, shaped somewhat like a computer mouse, which (especially paired with the toy’s travel lock function) makes me feel much more confident it won’t thrum to life in my suitcase, if and when we’re ever allowed to fly again. Its one button, which you can use to cycle through the toy’s four steady speeds and one “flirty” pattern mode, protrudes and lights up so it’s easy to both see and feel in the heat of the moment (you would not believe how many vibrators get this very important thing wrong).

Crucially, the Be-One has two motors (TWO!) packed into its tiny body, so it’s more powerful than you would expect for a vibe of this size. The dual motor situation also makes the Be-One’s vibrations feel rumblier than Fun Factory’s previous clit vibe offerings; it’s almost like the vibrations are bouncing back and forth from one motor to another at a very high speed. This is no Tango, but I’d pick it over something buzzier like the Lelo Mia or Jimmyjane Form 2 any day. My picky clit can orgasm fairly easily with the Be-One, albeit with a bit of grinding/rubbing/circling added to the mix.

Fun Factory says that with the Be-One, “once it’s in place, you really don’t have to think about it anymore,” and unfortunately that isn’t really true because of where the control button is situated. It’s on top of the toy, a spot I can’t reach when the vibe is positioned between my fingers as advertised. When I want to change the vibration speed, I have to either pause what I’m doing to hit the button with my other hand, or reposition the toy in my hand so I can reach the button – which sort of negates the comfort of its design. However, this is a pretty minor issue (for my particular body, anyway), and overall I think Fun Factory did great with the Be-One. It’s a cute and compact vibrator with two lovely motors, and I think it’ll make a lot of people happy.

The New York Toy Collective Carter was an anniversary gift from my very thoughtful partner. Mine is turquoise and pink, because I love those colors, but it’s also available in various skin tones, a gorgeous teal, and some other shades.

I became interested in this dildo when I read my friend Epiphora’s review of it, in which she says that she squirts every time she uses the Carter. I mean… sounds pretty good to me! Sinclair Sexsmith once called the Carter their “desert-island dildo,” and they know their shit when it comes to strap-ons. I was also curious about this toy because, while the Godemiche Ambit has been my go-to pegging dildo for years, occasionally my partner wants something bigger. With its chunky 2″ diameter and comfortable dual-density silicone, the Carter certainly fits the bill.

However, so far I haven’t used the Carter for pegging purposes, because, y’know, butts are fickle and you can’t rush this stuff. I have, however, gotten fucked with it numerous times, and it’s lovely. Its 7.5″ insertable length allows it to reach my A-spot, and its pronounced coronal ridge can also stroke my G-spot with every thrust. That said, if you’re looking for a dildo to target a specific spot, I don’t think this is the right one; it’s more of a blunt instrument, best for days when you really just wanna be filled up and fucked, rather than having particular internal spots satisfied with the exacting precision of something like a Pure Wand or a Seduction. The Carter, like many New York Toy Collective dildos, has a flexible core that allows you to bend the dildo into a curve that suits you, but I’ve found this feature more useful for visual purposes (e.g. posing for strap-on selfies) than for actual fucking, because my vag tends to straighten out the dildo in short order.

This isn’t the sort of dildo that leaves me breathless or weeping after an orgasm, like the Eleven or Double Trouble can. But it’s squishy enough to be comfortable for longer fucks (assuming you keep the lube flowin’), and it looks fantastic in a strap-on. New York Toy Collective is a fabulous, queer-owned company that makes gorgeous dicks and gender affirmation products; I’m happy to support them in any way I can, especially since doing so involves telling you that you absolutely deserve a stunning and satisfying dildo like the Carter.

I bought myself a Crystal Delights Star Delight dildo in late 2018 and have somehow never gotten around to reviewing it at length here. It’s gotta be one of the prettiest dildos in my collection: clear glass, with an aqua-colored gem set into the base. It can be easy to lose yourself in the quasi-hypnotic act of examining it from all angles.

This, I feel, is a good dildo for a lazy masturbator like me. The bumpy texture all along the shaft ensures you get plenty of stimulation with minimal movement and effort. The girth – 1.4″ at its widest – is slim enough that you may not need to warm up before inserting it, especially if you pair it with a good lube (and being made of glass, it pairs well with any type of lube). I can rest the heel of my hand against the base of the Star Delight and gently rock it against my A-spot without needing to think about it or work too hard. The base is unobtrusive enough that I can easily use a vibe with this dildo, and the firmness of the glass makes orgasms with it extra intense.

That low-profile base is also one of the reasons the Star Delight works so well for me during oral sex. It’s become a favorite for my partner to insert while they’re going down on me, because it allows them to stroke my A-spot with the delicious firmness I like, while also attending to my clit. Very few dildos can actually pull this off – most feel awkward for the giver, the receiver, or both – so I’m thrilled to have found one that works reliably well for this purpose. As my partner noted in an earlier blog post, the texture of the dildo is not only stimulating for me but also helps keep the toy anchored in place during oral sex, so they can focus more fully on what their mouth is doing.

My only issue with the Star Delight – aside from the $100+ price tag, about which I can only say, wait for a sale if you can – is that the bumps make it a bit tricky to clean. I usually have to scrub around each bump individually with an old toothbrush or somesuch. But overall this dildo is versatile, useful, and pleasurable – practically everything I want a dildo to be.