The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (55 page)

As discussed in the Vibrators chapter, many battery vibrators are dildo-shaped and can be used for penetration both before and after their motors give up the ghost. This chapter focuses on dildos: nonvibrating toys designed purely and simply for penetration.

Adult-Industry Dildos

Mainstream commercial dildos, marketed as “novelties,” are made of either vinyl or synthetic rubbers molded into flexible, more or less representational penis shapes. Here’s a quick tour of what you can expect to find on the shelves of your local adult store.

VINYL AND RUBBER: Dildos made of vinyl or rubber are generally produced in either the unique peachy-orange tint that the adult industry has designated Caucasian skin color (think “flesh”-colored Band-aid) or in a flat black color. While this black color doesn’t remotely resemble any human being’s skin color, it does go nicely with all your evening wear. Some styles are set on a handle for greater maneuverability; some flare at the base, allowing you to wear them in a dildo harness; and some feature rubber nubs at the base, ostensibly as clitoral stimulators for women. All tend to be inexpensive.

Vinyl dildos are lightweight (either they’re hollow or they have a foam core) and less porous than rubber, making them easier to keep clean. Rubber dildos are heavy, porous, and difficult to keep clean. Grime works its way into the air bubbles under the surface and is impossible to scrub out. Furthermore, scrubbing will only produce unappetizing little rubber pills all over the surface of your dildo. If you own a rubber dildo, your best bet is to use condoms with it at all times. On the bright side, rubber dildos are quite flexible, and they will soften up with time, handling, and heat to become even more flexible.

Various styles of dildos

REALISTICS: Realistic dildos are supposedly molded from live models to, as one manufacturer puts it, “capture every vein, bulge, and crease of a real erect cock.” This marketing ploy has resulted in dildos that are cast from the genitals of famous male porn stars (and there are similar lines of rubber vaginas cast from the genitals of female porn stars). Most realistics are available in Caucasian skin tones, some in black skin tones, and all are sized from big to bigger—few are less than two inches in diameter or eight inches in length. Uncircumcised realistics come complete with sculpted foreskins—we’ve yet to find a model with a retractable foreskin.

The larger realistics are so long and heavy they frequently sag under their own weight, giving the impression that your porn star pals don’t have their hearts in their work. What keeps these drooping dildos from falling off Good Vibrations’ display shelves are their suction cup bases. The removable suction cups adhere to any nonporous surface, such as glass or bathroom tile, for easy mounting.

While realistics have a unique aesthetic niche, they’re not cheap, they’re hard to keep clean, and they’re too bulky to be very comfortable when worn in most harnesses.

PROSTHETIC PENIS ATTACHMENTS: These are hollow vinyl shafts, usually attached to an elastic strap. The idea behind what we call PPAs is that some men may have trouble sustaining erections, may want to continue penetrating their partner after they themselves have reached orgasm, or may want to penetrate their partner with a longer, thicker “penis” than the one nature gave them. A man can slip a PPA over his flaccid penis, snap the elastic strap around his waist, and continue to have intercourse with his partner. Sometimes women express interest in buying a PPA as a budget alternative to buying a dildo and harness. Without some kind of stuffing, however, the PPA is prone to being squeezed out of shape. Furthermore, an elastic strap is a highly inefficient means of fastening any kind of dildo to your body—it’s hard to thrust in and out of your partner with conviction when the dildo is wobbling and snapping against your torso with every move.

In general, PPAs strike us as inefficient sex toys. They also seem to be uncomfortable for both the wearer and his partner—at the very least, you’d want to slather the inside and the outside of the vinyl sheath with lubricant.

JELLY RUBBER: In the nineties jelly rubber burst onto the scene and spawned a minirevolution in the sex toy industry, releasing manufacturers from their focus on “realistic” styles and skin tones and encouraging the development of truly playful-looking toys. While jelly rubber probably contains some latex (jelly toys degrade when exposed to oils), its primary ingredient is PVC. Polyvinyl chloride is a plastic that’s used in everything from fetish fashion to floor tiles to children’s toys. Adult jelly toys are soft and pliable and have sleek, smooth surfaces. They’re available in luminous jewel tones and bright neon colors; some models have a festive carbonated appearance from air bubbles floating beneath the surface.

I love your Jelly Boy dildo! (There’s a “plug” for you—no pun intended.) Good size, texture, pliability/hardness ratio, and I love that pink Day-Glo color!

Jelly rubber is a popular material for dildos, plugs, and vibrators because it’s inexpensive, supple and pretty. However, it is porous and difficult to keep clean. Some people complain that it smells too much like petrochemicals, and its elastic texture is not to everyone’s taste:

I bought a gummy double-headed dildo…not only does it feel weird in the hand, but it feels totally weird anywhere else you put it as well. The girlfriend and I were both pretty cracked up about “fucking Gumby.”

One recent study has raised concerns about the safety of PVC. A group of chemicals called phthalates are commonly added to PVC products as a softening agent—yet phthalates tend to leach out of the PVC. Unfortunately, phthalates are environmental pollutants and possible carcinogens that have been linked to liver, kidney, and testicular damage in humans. In 2001, health authorities in several European countries recommended banning children’s toys, such as teething rings, made of PVC. Although a subsequent German study found that adult toys contain a significantly higher phthalate content than children’s toys, no one has yet proposed a ban on PVC sex toys. Are jelly dildos really hazardous to your health? It’s impossible to say. After all, adults don’t spend as many hours sucking on (or slipping in) a jelly dildo as infants spend sucking on a teething ring. But the phthalate debate certainly offers one more excellent reason to keep your jelly toys covered with a condom.

CYBERSKIN: An amazing product, cyberskin is so named because it really does feel eerily similar to real flesh and because—or so the story goes—it’s made using an injection-molding machine designed by NASA engineers. We’re talking space-age material here, folks. Cyberskin is to the turn of the millennium what jelly rubber was to the previous decade—it has quickly become a must-have ingredient in vibrators, dildos, and sleeves. The folks who trademarked this material are fiercely proprietary regarding the details of their formula; our best guess is that cyberskin is some form of thermal plastic, possibly blended with jelly rubber.

Cyberskin is unique both for its resiliency—you can yank away on it, and it will always return to its original shape—and for its life-like density. When you heft a cyberskin dildo in your hand, it feels like yielding, velvet-soft skin surrounding a core of erectile tissue. It also warms quickly to body temperature.

The downside of cyberskin is that it is just about the most porous sex toy material around and is notoriously hard to keep clean (we recommend using condoms with any cyberskin toy). And, it doesn’t mix well with other materials—direct contact with everything from silicone-based lubricants to oils to other rubber toys has been known to “melt” the surface of cyberskin toys. It’s also on the pricier side. Despite these caveats, cyberskin’s amazingly realistic properties have won it a legion of fans.

Silicone Dildos

The dildo revolution got its start in the early eighties when Gosnell Duncan, a holistic health practitioner in Brooklyn, began experimenting with molding silicone into prosthetic devices that would be more pleasurable and comfortable to use than what was then available in the disability community. As word about these unique products spread to the owners of women’s bookstores and sex boutiques, demand increased, and an industry was born.

Silicone—the same substance used in surgical implants—is an expensive and delicate raw material, which must be kept sterile and dust-free. Manufacturers continually tinker with their formulas to make their silicone products both resilient and strong, and they must monitor the degree of moisture in the air for successful casting. Silicone manufacturing is a labor-intensive process—each toy must be hand-poured into handmade molds. Consequently, the demand for silicone dildos far outweighs the supply. So far, the prohibitive cost of silicone as a raw material and the difficulty of mechanizing production has kept adult-novelty manufacturers out of the field. (Although novelty companies label certain toys as being made of “silicone,” these don’t feel anything like the genuine article.) Instead, silicone manufacturing is the exclusive province of cottage industries, whose owners have put imagination and empathy into their work, are responsive to their consumers, and take personal pleasure in the products they create. There are probably fewer than a dozen silicone sex toy manufacturers around the world.

So what’s so great about silicone dildos? Texture, for one thing. Silicone is delightfully firm yet flexible, neither too floppy nor too hard. Yes, if Goldilocks and Baby Bear were to select one dildo to take into their sweet tiny bed, it would doubtless be made of silicone. Furthermore, silicone has a smooth, nonporous, velvety surface that is enticing and easy to clean. It retains heat and warms quickly to body temperature. Hygiene fiends are always pleased to hear that you can safely boil silicone products for up to three minutes, while the efficiency-minded can pop silicone dildos into the top rack of their dishwashers.

Best of all, silicone manufacturers have created a wide variety of colors, sizes, and styles. You’ll find silicone toys in richly hued jewel tones, marbled swirls, pastels, even glitter. They’re available finger-slim to fist-wide in both representational and abstract styles. Because of the high costs and low volume of production, silicone dildos aren’t cheap, but they’re certainly heirloom quality toys.

Silicone also conducts vibration exceptionally well. A couple of silicone models are available with hollowed-out shafts, so that you can insert vibrating eggs inside them for an extra treat. And some companies have begun to produce silicone vibrators plus vibrator attachments.

While silicone is highly resilient and can be yanked, tugged, and mauled with no ill effects, if you break the surface of the silicone in any way, your dildo will rip right through with distressing ease. So watch out for teeth and nails. Silicone-based lubricants may ruin the surface of a silicone toy—stick to water-based lubes. If you follow these precautions, your silicone dildo can provide you with literally decades of pleasure.

Latex Dildos

Real latex dildos are made of the natural rubber from rubber trees, and they’re produced only in Europe. As a result, they’re hard to find in this country. They’re available only in black (just like your tires) and generally consist of a latex sheath enrobing a foam-filled core. One real show-stopper you may encounter in a sex boutique is an inflatable latex dildo, which can be pumped up from about one-and-a-half to three inches in diameter. We’ve also seen a latex whip consisting of a dildo-shaped handle attached to numerous long latex strips. Now if you can crack this whip while the handle is inside you, we’ll know you’ve been doing your Kegels.

Latex is nonporous, so these dildos are easy to keep clean. But latex deteriorates if exposed to heat or light, and oil will transform it into a tacky, gummy mess.

Acrylic Dildos

Dildos made of acrylic are elegant enough to display on any art-lover’s coffee table or altar. With colors ranging from clear to translucent rose, blue, or lavender, these shapely sculptures allow you to satisfy your glass-slipper fantasies without risking an accident. Acrylic dildos are smooth, nonporous, and safe for insertion, but they are completely unyielding. They provide a firm pressure that some folks find ideal for G-spot or prostate stimulation and that others find unappealing. Whichever side of the fence you fall on, make sure to use plenty of lubricant when you experiment.

“Barbells”

The Kegelcisor is a stainless steel rod that resembles a barbell. Marketed as a PC muscle toner, the Kegelcisor is packaged with instructions for doing Kegels and sold as a health care product. Nobody needs a resistive device in her vagina to do Kegels correctly—however, many women find that this cool, heavy, space-age toy makes an appealing dildo. Sex educator Betty Dodson, who told us the following anecdote, has been a longtime advocate of these self-awareness toys and has produced her own model called “Betty’s Barbell.”

My first vaginal barbell was taken away from me by an airport security guard, who claimed I couldn’t get on the plane with this potential weapon in my purse. Of course, they lost the barbell before returning it to me, so I wrote a letter to the airline officials asking just how many times one of their airplanes had been hijacked by an elderly woman brandishing a sex toy. Eventually, they reimbursed me for my “item.”