5 Nifty Things You Can Do With a Speculum

Kate Sloan

I have an impulse-shopping problem when I go to sex shops. When I was dating a dude, I used to spot Tenga Eggs at the checkout counter and throw a couple into my purchase without even thinking about it. Now that I’m single, I tend to impulse-buy things for myself, instead. Like, most recently, a steel speculum.

I went to Come As You Are to pick up a book I needed, and they had an affordable speculum in the display case by the checkout, and, well, I can’t be expected to resist something like that, can I?

I’ve been playing around with my speculum and I have suggestions for what to do with yours, if you have one – or what you’d be able to do if you bought one. (C’mon, I know you’re thinking about it.)

1. Look at the inside of your vagina. (Or a partner’s vagina.)

As you might have inferred from, y’know, my entire blog, I’m a pretty sexually exploratory person. I know my body better than most people know theirs. But prior to owning a speculum, I had never seen the inside of my own vagina.

It’s not exactly an accessible area. It stays closed unless you’re actively holding it open, which is hard to do. You can get a marginal glimpse of the inner walls if you’ve got a clear glass dildo, a mirror, a good lighting setup, and endless patience for experimenting with different angles. But that’s not ideal, obviously.

I was stunned by how beautiful and strange-looking my vagina actually is. It’s like an underground cave made of cotton candy. Gorgeous and creepy and fantastic.

2. Take vagina selfies.

I take selfies that feature pretty much every other part of my body. Why not my vagina, too?

If you’ve got a speculum, an adjustable lamp, and a camera or cameraphone, you can take vagina selfies too. I used my iPhone and one of those clip-on reading lights. It takes some experimentation – I found it difficult to hold my phone in such a way that it wouldn’t block the light – but when you get it right, the photos are worth the trouble.

These aren’t the sexy kind of selfie that I’d send to a flirty beau. The inside of a vagina is actually more alien-looking than it is appealing, if you ask me. But it sure is interesting to pore over those photos. Sometimes I pull mine up on my phone and just stare and stare, transfixed. That’s inside me?!

3. Medical play.

Doctor-patient scenarios get me a little hot and bothered. I’ve never had a partner who was into that kind of roleplay but it’s something I look forward to trying in the future.

I don’t really know what this kind of play would entail, exactly, but with an imaginative and open-minded partner, I’m sure even a cold, clinical-looking speculum could become sexy to me.

4. Gradually dilate your vagina.

For people with vaginismus or other vaginal tightness issues, I’d imagine a speculum could be a helpful tool. It opens wider in a way that’s very slow and gradual, so you can adjust it to a setting that’s comfortable for you and maybe push your boundaries a little more each time, until you can accommodate whatever width you’re trying to get to.

I’d recommend checking in with your gyno before you try this, and combining the speculum with clit stimulation so it’ll hopefully feel good rather than weird.

5. Monitor your G-spot.

If you insert your speculum sideways, it’ll open up horizontally rather than vertically, giving you access to the top wall of your vagina where your G-spot is. This makes it a lot easier to touch your G-spot as well as to look at it.

Like a lot of sexual anatomy, the G-spot swells when stimulated. If you use your speculum to check out your spot before a play session and then again afterward, you may be amazed by how much it’s changed in size and texture. Bodies are so cool!

Do you have a speculum? What do you use it for?

What Aesthetics Turn You On?

Kate Sloan

Isn’t it weird how attraction works?

There are sometimes specific reasons you can point to: clear answers to the question, “Why am I attracted to this person/quality/feature?” And sometimes the answers are less clear.

It can have to do with our formative experiences. I’ve had a thing for fauxhawks, particularly dyed-purple ones, ever since my first girlfriend at age 15 rocked one in the Facebook profile photos I pored over during many a lovelorn late night.

It can have to do with what makes us feel sexy. I know my predilection for staring at 1950s-inspired lingerie is all about my hyper-femme identity: when my eyes roam all over babely pinup models in product shots, I get turned on not because I want to fuck those women but because I want to be those women. And I know I feel beautiful when I wear what they’re wearing.

The line gets blurry a lot. I have occasional days when all I want to wear is impeccably tailored pants, beautiful silk neckties, crisp collared shirts, and shiny lace-up brogues – and I’m not sure whether that comes from my own gender fluctuations or from a fundamental desire to fuck people who dress like that. It makes me happy to tart myself up like a dapper dandy from time to time, so I don’t question it too much.

I have a vision board (also known by its technical name, “a corkboard with a bunch of pictures pinned to it”) which I created to evoke the feelings of my ideal relationship, and how my ideal partner would make me feel. It’s covered in pictures of cute people (boys, girls, androgynes, and others) variously wearing geek glasses, plaid flannel, leather jackets, V-neck cashmeres, Pucci bowties, and sharp blazers.

But I also get dark stirrings of something like lust when I see feminine ladies rocking thigh-high socks, bouncy pigtails, tight striped sweaters, fit-and-flare dresses, perfectly-applied red lipstick, platform wedges, and/or neat little hair bows. I’ve never particularly wanted to date or fuck a rockabilly femme in real life, but they own permanent property in the fantasy-visuals sector of my brain.

Oh, who knows why we like what we do?!

What aesthetics turn you on? What clothing, accessory, or hairstyle makes you want to climb someone like a tree? And do you know where those feelings come from, or are they just sorta random for you?

Image credits, clockwise from top left: Beautiful illustration by Cameron Stewart. Leather-and-gingham street fashion photo via Costin M. Photo of Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom (babeliest couple ever?!) from the Independent Spirit Awards via People StyleWatch. Screencap of Olly Alexander from the God Help the Girl movie (watch it, it’s visually and sonically stunning). Santiago and Diaz illustration by Celeste Doodles.

Sex Blogging Secrets, Part 2: Creating Good Content

Kate Sloan

I’m back with more sex blogging tips for y’all!

Overall guiding principles

When it comes to blog advice, I worship at the altar of the Blogcademy. There are two tips they emphasize that I’d like to share with you today, to set the tone for the rest of the content-creation stuff in this post.

The first is that you should think of your blog like it’s a magazine for a certain kind of reader. Cosmopolitan, for instance, isn’t just fashion or just beauty or just sex advice – it’s all of those things and more, because the Ideal Cosmo Reader is interested in a broad range of things, just like we all are. You’ll run out of ideas fast if you limit your blog to only one topic (like sex toys) or only one type of post (like erotica stories), so instead, try to pinpoint the sort of reader you’re writing for, and write all the various different things they would be interested in. (My Ideal Reader is a feminist sex geek with a sense of humor. Kind of like me!)

The second tip I’ve learned from the Blogcademy ladies is that your blog will be most successful if most of your content is helpful and valuable to your readers. That’s not to say there’s no place for writing about yourself and your own personal adventures, but it’s mostly going to be people who already know you and care about you that will read that stuff. Everyone else has no idea who you are and only wants to read your blog if it’ll help them in some way. That might sound sort of cynical, but actually, writing helpful content can be really fun! And it gets shared a lot more, so you’ll attract more eyeballs. Win-win!

Coming up with post ideas

Hopefully, if you want to start a sex blog, it’s because there are lots of sex-related things you want to write about. But even if that’s the case, we all still deal with writer’s block sometimes. So it’s important to have strategies for generating post ideas.

Here are some of mine:

• Read the news (online or in print) to see what’s going on in the world of sex, and respond to what you see.

• Talk to your friends (mostly the sex-positive ones, but sometimes even the less sexually open ones will give you ideas) about what bothers them about sex, what they wonder about it, weird experiences they’ve had, etc. See if anything sparks an idea.

• Write about your own past experiences.

• Write how-to guides.

• Write reviews of products you own (or can get retailers/companies to send you – see Epiphora’s guide for info on how to do that).

• Write wishlists of products you’d like to own, sexual experiences you’d like to have, fantasies you’d like to explore, etc.

• Write about your fantasies or turn-ons, or other people’s.

• Write about things you’ve learned about sex.

Whatever strategies you use, you’ll need to have a way to make notes of post ideas before they slip away (which, trust me, they will – our human brains are more sieve-like than we care to realize). I always have a notebook in my bag while I’m out, as well as the notes app on my phone. I also keep a notebook and pen by my bed, incase of sudden middle-of-the-night flashes of brilliance.

Keep an ongoing list of ideas you think are actually good, and have it near your workspace so you can refer to it if you ever feel stuck.

Regular features

Having features is a great way to make sure you don’t run out of ideas. They can also be something your readers come to excitedly expect from you, and they can become one of the signatures of your blog.

I find that features are fantastic for idea generation because they spark my imagination and I don’t have to work too hard to come up with ideas for them; I’m always brimming with sex writing tips, strange new-to-me fantasies, and sexual language pet peeves.

One of the beautiful things about blogging is that you are the boss of your blog and you make the rules, so you can try out new features without necessarily committing to them forever. Brainstorm a few ideas for features and give them a go for a while. If they help you, yay! If not, you don’t have to do them.

Planning ahead

Like most things in life, blogging is a lot less stressful when you’re overprepared and ahead of the game. I’m not always on top of everything, but it certainly helps to keep an editorial calendar and to queue up posts in advance.

An editorial calendar is just a calendar of what you’re going to publish and when. I started keeping one this year after 2+ years of just blogging whenever I felt like it – which works fine for some people but always made me feel sort of frazzled!

I keep my editorial calendars on index cards, one per month. I aim to post twice a week, so my cards are laid out in three columns so I can indicate which two posts I plan on doing for each week. It’s nice to have the dates at my fingertips because then I can plan date-appropriate content – for example, a Valentine’s Day-themed post when that day is coming up.

You’re not obliged to follow your plan to the letter, and I usually don’t – there are always lots of crossed-out posts on my editorial calendars, because I get other ideas that I’m more excited about and that I want to work on sooner. I just move the discarded post ideas back to my ongoing ideas list, and I can write them at a later date.

Queuing up posts in advance is another way to stay on top of your blog work. I find my enthusiasm for blogging often comes in bursts of a few hours, so when that happens, I try to write at least one or two posts and schedule them to be published later in the week. That way, I never have to force myself to blog when I don’t feel like it – because that never results in good content! (Fun fact: I wrote this blog post last Friday, because the day it’s being published, I’m going to be on vacation in Montreal. Pre-planning has allowed me to enjoy my vacation stress-free! Hooray!)

Next week I’m going to talk to you about one of my favorite subjects: building a readership! Tweet at me if you’ve got specific questions on that topic and I’ll do my best to address ‘em.

Sex Blogging Secrets, Part 1: Starting a Blog

Kate Sloan

A couple weeks ago, this email landed in my inbox:

Hi GJ. I’m writing because I was wondering if you have any tips for someone who is thinking of starting a sex blog. I’m not sure if I want to do it, but do you have any advice for starting a blog, keeping it going, getting readers, making money from your blog (if you do), etc.?

Needless to say, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic! So I’m going to split up my answer into a multi-part series. Today’s part focuses on starting a blog and all the choices and challenges that come along with that.

Choosing a name

I suggest you brainstorm at least a couple dozen different blog names that do a good job of capturing the kind of mood and subject matter you hope your blog will convey. Then, pick your favorites and roll them around in your mind for a while. Write them down, say them out loud a lot, ask your friends what they think, etc. If any name starts to feel wrong or uncomfortable in any way, axe it from the list!

I say this because – secret confession time – I really don’t like the name of my blog. I chose it because I thought it had the sexy-meets-dorky vibe I knew my blog would end up having, but the more that I’ve lived with this blog name, the less I like it. Saying it out loud makes me cringe (which makes in-person networking difficult, obviously!) and I often feel like I have to justify or explain what it means.

Choose a blog name that you’re in love with, that you’re proud to say, that reminds you of your vision for your blog, and that you could shout across a crowded room without someone mishearing or misunderstanding it.

Domains, hosting, and other web names

An addendum to the above point: the name you choose for your blog should, ideally, be available as a .com domain name as well as a username on every social media site you plan to use.

You’ll notice that I have a .net domain name, and my Twitter username has an underscore in it. Learn from my mistakes! Check this stuff before you decide on a name.

I’m not a wiz kid when it comes to stuff like domain registration and web hosting, so I will refer you to Epiphora’s sex blogging guide because she goes into those things in detail.

Can you really be a sex blogger?

A reality check: you should only start a sex blog if:

• You LOVE writing

• You’re VERY passionate about sex

• You can come up with at least 20-30 different blog post ideas off the top of your head right now

• You can handle criticism and rudeness (especially if you’re a woman)

• You can talk/write/think about sex without blushing or cringing, AND

• You understand that blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme

Please don’t start a sex blog solely for money, fame, free products, or sexual attention. You may well get those things eventually, but they are not good motivators for maintaining a blog in the long-term, and you will flame out before the going gets good if you’re expecting those faraway incentives to show up immediately.

Do this because you want to do it and love the thought of doing it. That’s really the only motivation that will keep you blogging for the long haul. (I say this as someone who is obsessed with sex and absolutely adores writing. Trust me, these things are important!)

What’s your blog’s deal?

What is your blog going to be about? And don’t just say “sex,” because, duh. Get more specific. Are you going to review sex toys? Criticize sexual media? Write erotica? Detail your sexual adventures? Will your goal be to help your readers, or to entertain them, or both, or something else entirely? Will your lens be feminist, sex-positive, both, neither, or something else? How do you want readers to feel when they read your blog? Will your voice be saucy, sexy, straightforward, silly, or serious?

Sharpening your vision is very important, especially since blogging is an oversaturated game and you need to set yourself apart to have any hope of success. It might help to come up with some kind of tagline or subtitle for your blog, even if you never use it anywhere. (Mine is “Reviews and how-to’s for feminist sex nerds.”) The better and clearer your internal guide for the work you plan to do, the stronger and more unique your work will be.

Here are some examples of bloggers who I think have really strong, well-developed, unique niches within the realm of sex blogging:

• Epiphora writes snarky, brutally honest sex toy reviews, and occasional feminist rants.

• Reenie approaches her reviews and writing from a perspective of relative innocence and sheltered-ness, which I think her readers find either adorable or relatable, depending on their own personal experiences.

• Lilly is hard to please and writes tough but fair reviews. She also writes easy-to-understand, no-bullshit guides to technical or scientific aspects of sex toys and sex blogging, like toxic toy chemicals and how to file copyright complaints.

• Aerie’s blog combines sex toy writing with board game writing, because they are passionate about both of those things. Aerie is a great example of someone who puts their own spin on sex blogging by capitalizing on their authentic interests.

Your “about” page

This should be one of the first things you write when you make your blog. It’s important, not only so your readers can find out more about you, but also so you get a better sense of the persona or personality you’re going to project with your blog.

Please include, at a minimum, all of the following things on your About page:

• Your name (or the pseudonym you’ll go by on your blog)

• Your pronouns/gender identity (yes, even if you’re cis and normative-looking)

• Where and how you can be reached (email address, social media handles, maybe a contact form)

• Why, how, and when you started your blog

• Your blog’s mission/what sets you apart (you can state this as simply or complexly as you like, but it should be there somewhere)

• Any other info you think your readers should know about you in order to understand where you’re coming from (possibly: age, location, sexual orientation, relationship status, etc.)

• Some personality! Let your sense of humor, writing voice, and real interests shine through.

Check out my About page and those of the bloggers I listed above for some examples.

Stay tuned; the next post in this series will be about what to do once you’ve actually started your blog – generating ideas and writing posts. Get excited!!

Love Yourself on Valentine’s Day

Kate Sloan

V-Day is almost upon us. But please, don’t get upset. This does not have to be a depressing holiday, or a saccharine Hallmark shill. I want you to do your best to re-frame this time of year in your mind.

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be all about love. And just because romantic love is the most glorified form of love doesn’t mean it’s the only one, or the most important one.

Whether or not you’re in a relationship today, here are some things you can do to re-affirm your dedication to self-love.

• Choose/buy/find a talisman to remind you of your commitment to self-love. It should be something personally meaningful to you, which can be as obvious and self-explanatory as a heart necklace or as obscure as an octopus brooch. If looking at it makes you smile and reminds you of the importance of loving yourself, you’re doin’ it right! (Some quick picks from me to you: stack these queer babe bracelets on your arms, stick these clitoris stickers all over everything, pin these feminist buttons to your backpack or put this rose quartz heart over your own heart. Too pretty!)

• Take yourself on a solo date. Bring your book, journal, laptop, knitting, etc. to your favorite café, bar or restaurant, and sit for a while. Enjoying your own company is an important life skill, and solo time can also be a great way to recharge in advance of a romantic date with someone else, if that’s on your docket for the day.

• Masturbate. Decadently. Loudly. In all your favorite ways, using all your favorite toys ‘n’ tools.

• Take the best bath (or shower) ever. Lush does fabulous bath bombs and shower jellies. Light a scented candle. Pour yourself some wine or tea or juice. Put on some soft jazz or salsa or whatever music makes you feel gorgeous. Exfoliate, wash, pamper, luxuriate, rejuvenate.

• Look up local cultural events and go see one (or a few). Gallery shows, arthouse movie screenings, live concerts, book readings, theatrical performances – anything that makes your heart sing and your brain buzz. (And hey, if you’re in Toronto, come on down to the Ten Thousand Villages shop at 362 Danforth around 2PM on V-Day… Someone who looks an awful lot like me might be performing some love songs. Wink wink.)

• Make a list of things you love about yourself and/or things other people have told you they love about you. Collecting your best compliments in one location, whether they’re from others or from yourself, is a great way to make yourself feel good – and you can refer back to it any time you need a self-love boost.

• Do something you’re really good at. This is such a fabulous way to remind yourself of your inherent value as a human being. Make music, write, paint, dance, whatever. Get into the “zone,” the flow, of doing something well. (And even if you do it badly, if you’re still having fun, you’re doing it right.)

• Check out local party shops, drugstores, etc. and buy some heart-shaped stuff. This is the time to do it (or maybe the day after Valentine’s Day when everything’s on sale). Having heart-shaped decor all over your house is a way to remind yourself on a daily basis that love is important, especially self-love. I have a red holographic paper heart taped up on my bedroom wall year-round and it makes me smile every time I see it.

• Be good to your body. This requires listening to your body and figuring out what it’s asking for, what it needs, which is always worth doing. Maybe you require chocolates today, or maybe your body’s crying out for leafy greens instead. Maybe you need to lie in bed and chill the fuck out, or maybe you’d feel better if you did an hour of intense yoga or went for a jog. Maybe you need more water, more dancing, less caffeine, less self-criticism, or a really good stretch. Listen, check in, and give your cute bod what it wants.

• Delete all critics and energy vampires from your digital life. Do a major clean-out of your Twitter stream, Facebook friends list, email subscriptions, browser bookmarks, etc. so that everything in your digital life actually serves you and uplifts you. Ahhh, the relief! What a beautiful favor to do for yourself!

What do you like to do for yourself on Valentine’s Day?