Sex toys are often an impulsive purchase. You’re horny and you order the dildo you wish you could use right now, or you fantasize about flogging your partner and have to immediately purchase the equipment needed to follow through on this fantasy, or you read a saucy sex toy review online that riles you up and you order the product on the spot. Promotional slogans like “FREE shipping on orders over $35” and “sex toys, next day delivery” can easily catch your eye in a Google search. You get out your credit card, gleeful, eager.
But if Amazon is your go-to place to buy sex toys, I think you should think twice about that. Here are 7 reasons it’s generally a terrible idea to order sex toys from Amazon.
1. Toys on Amazon are often mislabeled, whether accidentally or intentionally. This means you can get a porous toy that claimed to be nonporous, or a toxic toy that claimed to be body-safe. You really can’t know for sure what’s in a toy unless you have it tested in a laboratory, so it’s far better to order from sellers you trust – and Amazon, as a whole, just isn’t trustworthy.
2. Toys on Amazon are often counterfeit copies of the toys they actually claim to be. If a deal seems too good to be true, it usually is. Placing an order on Amazon for a Magic Wand or an Njoy dildo, for example, is super risky because of how often these toys are poorly copied by shitty companies trying to make a buck.
3. Toys on Amazon might be USED. Yes, it’s true: morally unsavory third-party sellers on Amazon have been known to resell previously used and returned toys. I’m sure it’s rare, but it’s not a risk I’m willing to take; how about you?
4. You’ll get a better idea of a toy in-person. It’s far too easy to accidentally order a toy on Amazon that’s way too big or way too small for your needs, particularly since so many of them are mislabeled or poorly described. It’s also impossible to tell how buzzy or rumbly a vibrator is without feeling it in person, or to figure out whether an insertable toy is squishy or unforgivingly hard without actually squeezing it. Sex toy reviews can help, but these things are subjective to some extent, so it’s best to touch and test out a toy for yourself in a sex shop if you’re considering buying it.
5. Independent sex shops need your money more, and offer much more value in terms of being community hubs and sex education sources. You might pay more at a local shop than you’d pay on Amazon, sure, but you’ll be supporting people who actually know stuff about sex toys and are committed to promoting sex-positivity and pleasure. These stores are also more accessible than buying online for many people, such as teens and older folks; keeping local shops in business helps ensure that those people have continued access to sex products.
6. Does Jeff Bezos really need more money? I mean, come on. He’s the world’s first-ever “centi-billionnaire.” He owns hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of real estate. He’s going to fucking space. If you decide to spend your dollars elsewhere, trust me, he’ll live. 🙄
7. Amazon workers are terribly mistreated. There’s an entire “criticism of Amazon” article on Wikipedia, a massive subsection of which is titled “treatment of workers,” which should give you an idea of just how bad this problem really is. They are frequently required to work long hours without breaks, their attempts at unionizing have been heavily suppressed, and they were forced to continue working in close quarters during the COVID-19 pandemic despite the obvious riskiness of this. People of color – especially Black people – are also vastly overrepresented in the delivery and customer support sectors of Amazon, and vastly underrepresented in its leadership and corporate sectors. It’s fucked up. And Bezos doesn’t seem to care at all.
There are some sex toy companies who legitimately sell their wares on Amazon, often because they know it can help them increase their sales by reaching customers they wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. But for the most part, I would not recommend buying sex toys from Amazon. Doing so is a medical and ethical mess, and it’s just not worth the hassle when you could place an online order from an indie shop instead, or just stroll into your local store to pick up that new vibe or butt plug you’ve had your eye on.
This post was sponsored (not by Amazon, lol). As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the inexpensive-but-great toys Sohimi has sent me to review before, like their efficient dual-stimulation clitoral sucking vibrator and their inventive tongue-like toy. Some of my readers have even reached out to say that they bought a Sohimi toy on my recommendation and enjoyed it too, which is great!
When the company reached out to me this time, they wanted me to review a product from their “sex toys for men” section. Unnecessarily gendered language aside (please, companies, if it’s a toy for penises, you can just say that! Trans and non-binary people exist!!), there are a number of toys in that category that look just as innovative and interesting as the vulva-focused toys Sohimi has sent me before, so I was curious to see what my partner Matt would choose to review.
They eventually settled on the Alice hands-free masturbator, a mechanized stroker that both rotates around your dick and strokes it up and down. I asked Matt to take notes during their initial testing session with the Alice and they described it as feeling “like a car wash for your cock.” But in a good way. Mostly.
In lieu of having adjustable speeds and separate controls for each function, the Alice just has a series of pre-set patterns you can flip through. Some of these are nice, while some are too overwhelming and/or erratic to feel all that pleasurable – unless you’re into overloading a partner with sensation for kinky reasons. Actually, sadistic fantasies are one of the first places Matt’s mind went when trying out this toy; we’ve watched a fair amount of porn involving dommes “milking” their subs for cum, in a way that combines D/s, bondage, orgasm control, edging, medical play, humiliation/objectification, and various other delightful fantasies, and the Sohimi Alice is pretty ideal for scenes of that nature. The unpredictability of its array of patterns can make it feel more like someone else is controlling the toy – and your dick – even when you’re operating it yourself.
The internal texture of the sleeve is intense, particularly when combined with the spinning/stroking combo served up by the toy’s motor. My partner’s dick sensitivity is average (I’m a slut, I would know), and they noted that people with more sensitive cocks might find this toy overstimulating. But, again, that could be cool for scenes involving consensual overstimulation and maybe even forced orgasms.
Indeed, Matt says they can get off from using this toy easily, because of how hyper-stimulating it is. It works best if you hold it still, rather than thrusting into it, which can strain the motors and slow them down – but that need to remain still, too, plays into potential fantasies of being controlled and toyed with.
Like most strokers, the Sohimi Alice has its problems. It’s quite loud. It’s a bit big and bulky, so if you have strength/grip issues, you may want to find a way to brace it against something (like a pillow or a wall) to hold it up at least some of the time while you’re using it – although it does also have a suction cup mount, so if need be, you can affix it to a wall or a floor and thrust into it hands-free. The sleeve is made of TPE, which is porous, so you shouldn’t share it with people you’re not fluid-bonded with, and should expect to need to replace it within a few years. Cleaning it is annoying, mostly because you have to dissemble the device before washing it to avoid getting the mechanics wet, and because the time at which you have to do it is the time when you’d most often like to lie in bed enjoying the afterglow instead.
However, overall we’ve really enjoyed using the Sohimi Alice together. It provides unique sensations not often found in other strokers, and is surprisingly well-suited to numerous different pervy fantasies. Who knew a “car wash for your cock” could feel this good?
Thanks to Sohimi for supplying us with this toy! Check out their “male” sex toys online. This post was sponsored, which means I was paid to write a fair and honest review of this product. As always, all writing and opinions are my own (and my partner’s).
Usually in this type of toy, one of the functions is good, while the other is just so-so – or sometimes they’re both bad. I had higher hopes for this one, because its two ends seem to be modelled after two types of toy I already know I enjoy: a Zumio-esque “high-frequency” hard-plastic vibrator designed for pinpoint clitoral stimulation, and a pressure-wave toy like a Satisfyer or Womanizer, meant to pulse around the clitoris, creating a suction-y sensation and triggering ethereally indirect orgasms. Neat!
This toy is rechargeable, and has a satiny silicone coating on most of its body. This makes it feel surprisingly luxe for its $22 price point. There’s one button for each of the two functions, and you cycle through each function’s various speeds and settings using its respective button. You can enable both functions at once, but I’m not sure why you would; this toy isn’t shaped well to allow for two clit-possessing people to use it simultaneously.
The Zumio-ish vibration portion disappointed me, for the most part. It claims to use the same “spiral oscillating waves” that you’d find in the Zumio (of which it is an obvious copycat, which, as you may know, I’m not a fan of on principle), but to me it just feels like too-buzzy, too-strong vibration. It overloads and desensitizes my clit in short order the way an overly buzzy vibe does, which the Zumio doesn’t do, at least not as quickly. It’s also very loud, and the entire toy vibrates when this setting is enabled, making my hand feel numb and itchy within seconds of turning the vibrations on.
The toy comes with two little silicone attachments for the vibrating end, which is cool. One of them is spherical and one looks like flower petals that can flap and flutter against your clit and labia. Interestingly, the toy is much quieter when there’s an attachment on it. I liked it best with the flower petal attachment because I could hold it on the top of my clit, with my clitoral shaft placed between the two petals, allowing for much more spread-out and indirect stimulation than the vibrator allows for sans attachment. I probably could get off using the toy this way, but eking out an orgasm with super buzzy, surface-level vibrations is not my favorite thing, and tends to take me forever.
The suction side of the toy is better. It, too, feels “buzzier” than many of its competitors in the pressure-wave space, like the thrillingly thrummy Lelo Sila. But design-wise, this is in the top half of pressure-wave toys I’ve tried: its silicone “mouth” is comfortably shaped and wide enough for me to fit more than just the hypersensitive tip of my clit into it, so I can get some of the clitoral shaft/clitoral hood stimulation I tend to crave when using this kind of toy. There are only three steady speeds and I found myself wishing, in the moments before orgasm, for just one more setting at the top end, probably because of the aforementioned buzziness having lessened my sensitivity a bit. But I can achieve orgasm readily with this thing, and it feels just as involuntary, spasmodic, and surprising as it does with other pressure-wave toys.
I have to say, for its price tag, I think the Loveorl 2-in-1 High-Frequency Clitoral Sucking Vibrator is a great value. If you only have $22 to spend on a clitoral toy and you want to try a broad range of sensations, this toy’s dual functions and two included attachments will give you a lot of bang for your buck. I wish it was quieter and rumblier, but frankly it’s pretty astonishing that Loveorl managed to make a rechargeable, body-safe, two-function sex toy for under $25, so maybe I’m asking for too much.
Get this toy if you want to experiment with pinpoint vibrations and/or pressure-wave stimulation without breaking the bank, and you don’t mind a moderate-to-loud noise level. You can always upgrade to higher-quality options later, but for an entry-level clit stim toy, you could do a lot worse than this petite pink creation.
This post was sponsored, which means I was paid to write a fair and honest review of this product. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
Content notes:This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.
Cybersex in online roleplaying games made me feel like an adult for one of the first times in my life. In some ways, no other online sexual experiences I’ve had since then have quite scratched the same itch.
I was always a sexually precocious kid, scribbling anatomically uninformed erotica in my journals and googling for lists of masturbation techniques to marvel over. Porn didn’t particularly interest me – there were few safe porn sites at the time that would neither load a virus onto our shared family computer nor crash it with pop-up ads blaring autoplay moans – but I loved to read about sex. That’s still largely how my sexuality works to this day: although I’ve gained an appreciation for some types of porn, in many cases I’d rather read someone’s detailed cunnilingus guide or a well-crafted erotic fanfiction story than ogle cumshots and gangbangs.
Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) were some of my first online social spaces, after early forays into ICQ chatrooms and TeenOpenDiary blogging. My two favorite games in this genre were Furcadia, a highly user-customizable world where everyone was an anthropomorphized animal and you had to learn a basic coding language to craft your own private rooms, and Runescape, a vast medieval fantasy world involving quests, guilds, mining, and magic. It was in these two strange universes that I began to understand the massive implications the internet had for people like me, people who were shy and reserved in the “real world” but came alive online, making friends and having adventures.
I was surely too young to be having cybersex, legally speaking. That’s the detail of this story that makes me cringe to type out. Sometimes I told other users my real age – and many of them were, or at least were pretending to be, teens as well – but sometimes I didn’t. Young people’s burgeoning sexuality is a highly controversial and fraught topic I’m probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about. But I can tell you that in my case, everything I pursued in these mediums was something I had consented to and was not traumatized by, and any time anyone made me feel at all uncomfortable, I had no qualms about closing the window or teleporting to a different corner of the virtual world I was navigating.
In Furcadia, as I mentioned, you could create your own areas – called “dreams” – by coding them yourself and then uploading them to a communal space, where others could visit them if they so chose. I have always been profoundly nerdy and was immediately interested in this aspect of the game, for the huge amount of freedom it provided. It wasn’t long before I started building myself elaborate mansions with big, ornate bedrooms, complete with doors that locked at the flip of a lever due to my careful coding. It delighted me to build secret entrances, hidden teleportation pads, dim dank dungeons no one would know about unless I showed them.
There was an 18+ area in Furcadia, where, of course, I spent a good deal of time long before turning 18. Within that area was a place called The Slave Auction. (I must note here that the language of slavery is no longer something I’m comfy playing with, in kink or otherwise, due to, y’know, centuries of systemic white supremacy and horrific violence against enslaved Black people. I’m white so that language isn’t mine to reclaim or subvert.) In that area, you could line up to be “auctioned off” to a buyer in the crowd. No money was exchanged, actual or virtual; this was all fantasy. I find it telling that this was probably the communal space where I spent the most time in my years as a Furcadia user, despite believing until about a decade later that I was vanilla and had no kinks. (Oh, precious baby Kate, there is so much you didn’t know.)
When someone “bought” me, typically I would take them back to my “dream,” lead them to the ostentatious bedroom I’d hand-coded for the occasion, and commence having cybersex.
Much like sexting today, different people had different ways of approaching cybersex. I would always click on potential partners to see the bio they’d written for themselves, and if it was a long paragraph full of big words and impeccably-employed punctuation, I knew I’d get the type of cyber-fuck I liked best: articulate, loquacious, and seductive. When I had them in my virtual bed, we’d start describing – in walls of text that took so long to type, you could be waiting 3-5 minutes between missives – removing each other’s clothes, kissing, touching, and whatever came next. My replies were probably fairly generic and naïve. I was much more interested in what the other person typed.
It’s telling, too, that I tended to guide the conversation toward cunnilingus. Being a person who’d learned to masturbate via only clitoral stimulation, and had rarely – if ever – done anything else, I found descriptions of penetrative sex boring and hard to relate to. Instead I would prompt my pixelated paramour to craft strings of sentences about going down on me, and would reply with paragraph-length descriptions of my own moaning and writhing. A pillow princess in the extreme.
There were people who, upon noticing these limitations of my lust, would vanish to another realm, leaving me alone in my abandoned dream. That is fair enough. But there were also people who would stick around the whole time, giving me what I obviously wanted, and those people shaped my sexuality in ways they’ll never know. These were some of the first instances of me ever formulating a clear sexual desire and asking someone else (albeit indirectly) to fulfill it. The skills I took away from these interactions (including typing fast one-handed) would serve me for many years to come.
While some therapists and friends of mine, in the years since, have sometimes (very reasonably) expressed concern upon hearing about these youthful dalliances, for me, cybersex was never a site of victimization or violation. I know many people have had a different experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to credit those late nights of furtive typing with making me into the sexually fulfilled, adventurous, and communicative person I am today.
This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
Recently, sex doll company Tantaly reached out to me about doing a review. I asked my partner Matt if they wanted to try a sex doll, and… of course they did! The one we picked is the Scarlett mini sex doll, and you can use the code GirlyJuice10 to get 10% off your entire order if you choose to buy Scarlett or any other doll on Tantaly’s site.
This isn’t a typical review; it’s a transcribed interview we did while Matt was testing out the doll in various ways at my behest. So, be aware that there is sexual activity in this interview! I hope you enjoy…
Matt: I looked at all of them, and there’s some weird things about the way that they’re sectioned on the website. The weirdest thing is that all of the ones that have Black skin are in a separate section that you don’t see by default, which is very strange and very weird. But they also separate full-size dolls from miniature ones. And I was thinking, I have a pretty small apartment and I don’t have a ton of room to store a human-sized object, so I looked at the miniature ones. I think this the best-reviewed or the most-purchased of those. Also, there are some that only have one entry hole, and I wanted to test one that had two at least.
Kate: How did you feel when the package arrived and you opened her up for the first time?
Matt: Good question. Well, I live in a doorman building, so the first thing I felt was kind of like, Oh, it sucks that someone had to carry this 15-pound thing up to my apartment… They probably put it on a cart, but still I felt a little weird about that. And then I was like, well, could they tell it was a sex doll? They’re going to judge me every time I walk through my lobby. And I looked at the label on the box and I was like, no, it’s not obvious. Okay.
And then I was just curious. I was like, what’s it gonna feel like? Because I’d only seen pictures of a sex doll. I hadn’t really touched one before this, in a store or anything. So I didn’t knowexactly what it would be like. What did you think when it arrived?
Kate: Oh, I mean, she’s very tiny.
Matt: Yes. That’s… yes. After I opened it, that was my thought too. The smallest.
Kate: Well, at least she’s proportional, so she doesn’t look like a toddler, which is what I was concerned about.
Matt: I was also concerned about that. Yes. I looked at the pictures and I was like, am I going to feel like this is weird for that reason? And no, I don’t think so. I mean, some people might, and that’s fine, but definitely it seems like an adult, even though your brain has to do some kind of like weird thing where it’s like, this is not an adult-sized person, so your brain kind of maps a human body onto this tiny thing. And I think my brain does that fairly naturally, even though the belly button is the size of, like, the tip of my pinky, but, you know.
Kate: What were your expectations about how using the doll would make you feel, both physically and emotionally?
Matt: I had no idea how it would feel emotionally. That’s what I was most curious about. Physically, I figured it would just feel like fucking something, but not like fucking a person. And it felt more like fucking a person than I thought it would.
Kate: In what sense?
Matt: I think the main reason is I don’t fuck strokers in the same position that I would fuck a sex doll. So they feel more like masturbating just because of the… like, I’m lying on my back, and I’m like doing a thing with my hand, whereas if I’m proneand like, fucking something, that feels different, just qualitatively, and I’m feeling a skin-like texture against me at the same time. With the visual, it all combines into a different feeling from a stroker.
Kate: Yeah. I was going to ask you, when would you tend to choose a sex doll over a stroker, or a stroker over a sex doll?
Matt: If I was with a partner and I wanted to use a toy, I’d probably pick a stroker, unless there was some fantasy element where the sex doll came into play, like a threesome or a cuckolding scene or something. If I was by myself, I would pick a stroker if I was going for “quick and easy,” if I didn’t want to lug something out and have to clean it out in the sink afterward and the whole thing. But if I was missing human connection and I was alone and I had time, then I would use the doll, I think.
Kate: Can you go down on her a little bit?
[Matt performs cunnilingus on the doll]
Kate: How would you compare this to the real thing, as a fan of cunnilingus?
Matt: Hmm. Well, you can feel all the parts of the vulva, which is great. You don’t get any reactions, obviously, so you have to be able to imagine the reactions, which I can – or not care about them, I suppose. The textures are right. The taste is obviously not, since it’s not human skin so it’s not going to taste like that. And the smell is not right, but it’s not distracting or bothersome either. It’s totally fine. It’s the best version of fantasizing about oral sex that I’ve had, ’cause you’re in the right position and you have all the parts and all the parts feel like the right size and shape and they’re in the right spots. So that’s very helpful for constructing that fantasy.
Kate: Yeah. I was going to ask you, would you ever do this in the absence of a human partner to go down on?
Matt: Oh yeah, totally. Cause like I love going down on people and that would be a turn-on for me inherently.
Kate: Hmm. Interesting. Do you think on a fantasy level, you think of the doll more as a stand-in for a real-life person, or as its own sexual entity?
Matt: Oh gosh. Well, I don’t think of it as a stand-in for a specific person. Like, I don’t think about a specific person usually when I’m touching it. So in that way, I guess it’s its own sexual entity. And I think it would be hard to mentally map this smaller-than-human body onto a specific regular-size human. Maybe with a full-size one, you could more easily order one that looks like the person you want to fantasize about, but for me, I think it’s its own thing.
If I was doing this by myself, I would put on cunnilingus porn just for the sounds.
Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt: Yeah. That’s the biggest thing that’s missing. Taste is missing, and that’s a big thing, but the biggest thing is actually sound.
Kate: Hmm. Okay. Lie down and touch yourself to get yourself hard, and I’ll ask you another question while you do that.
Matt: Okay.
Kate: It’s not a very arousing question.
Matt:[laughs] That’s fine.
Kate: How do you feel about her being a headless, disembodied torso? Does it affect your experience in any way?
Matt: It definitely is something you have to work around, but it’s not that hard for me to work around it. Like when I’m going down on it and I’m looking up, I can easily sort of screen that stuff out of my peripheral vision. The planes [of the thighs and neck] are super flat and smooth, so it’s not creepy or distracting and doesn’t feel like it’s been dismembered or anything. It’s just like, it’s an object. And thelack of a head might actually be a good thing, because I think if there was a face, it would never really look like a human face and it would freak me out.
Kate: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I want you to start fucking her front hole.
[Matt fucks the doll’s vagina]
Kate: Next question is, what does its vagina feel like?
Matt: We’re switching between “she” and “it” pronouns. I don’t really know its pronouns. Um, it’s textured. It’s nicely textured on all sides. I can feel the lips. They feel aroused when I press against them, which is nice. It can take my whole cock, which is nice. It’s not quite as tight as the Quickshot, but it has a very realistic human tightness. There’s nothing super crazy at the back. Some Tenga toys have a really wild texture toward the back of the sleeve, and I don’t think it has that.
Kate: Okay. When you’re ready, you can flip her over and try the back hole and tell me what that feels like. [Matt flips the doll over] Wow, her back is gorgeous.
Matt: That was one of the first things I noticed too. I like that she’s very stable in this position.
[Matt starts fucking the doll’s butt]
Kate: Does it freak you out that you can see your dick moving through her back?
Matt: Yeah. That does… When I focus on that, it does freak me out a little bit. ‘Cause if that was happening with a human, I’d be like, where’s your spine?! There’s wire in here, but it’s not where the spine is. The spine area is just all squishy. The butt has a good bounce to it, too.
Kate: Does it feel like you’re having anal sex? Physically or psychologically?
Matt: Yeah, it does.
Kate: Hmm. How does coming in the doll feel different from coming inside me?
Matt: It’s the same as with the oral – there’s no reactions. I’m missing the sounds and the gripping and stuff.
Kate: Okay. Whenever you’re ready, fuck her tits a little bit. And I’ll ask you about that.
Matt: Okay.
[Matt tries to fuck the doll’s tits]
Kate: You didn’t like this as much when we tried it before, right?
Matt: I don’t really know… Yeah, it just doesn’t do anything. The boobs are not close enough together. You can’t really even push them together. It just doesn’t work. No, I can’t fuck them. Too far apart.
Kate: What’s your overall review?
Matt: How much does it cost?
Kate: Like 200 bucks or something. [Editor’s note: It costs $209.99.]
Matt: Yeah. I think it’s good. For that price, it’s good.
Kate: Do you think you’re going to use it even after we’ve already reviewed it?
Matt: Yeah! It’s useful for like, if you’re long-distance and your partner’s super into pearl necklaces or anal or whatever; you have a prop, and you can shoot nudes with it that aren’t just, like, your dick.
Kate: Yup. That’s good. Definitely good for an LDR.
Thanks so much to Tantaly for sending us the Scarlett mini sex doll to review! Remember, you can get 10% off your order from Tantaly by using the code GirlyJuice10 at checkout. This post was sponsored, which means we were paid to provide a fair and honest review of the product.
Sex toys are often an impulsive purchase. You’re horny and you order the dildo you wish you could use right now, or you fantasize about flogging your partner and have to immediately purchase the equipment needed to follow through on this fantasy, or you read a saucy sex toy review online that riles you up and you order the product on the spot. Promotional slogans like “FREE shipping on orders over $35” and “sex toys, next day delivery” can easily catch your eye in a Google search. You get out your credit card, gleeful, eager.
Content notes: This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.
Kate: Can you go down on her a little bit?
Kate: