I chose The Big Red Thruster. That was my first vibrator.
It was definitely red. It had considerable more girth than any penis I'd had at the time. It was all veiny. It had a dial for vibration speed control. And "thruster" was just fun to say.
I was about 17 when I discovered that such a plethora of women's pleasure tools existed. (Well, I knew they existed, but until I caught a glimpse of the contents of the "18 and older" section inside the naughty toys and clothes boutique did I really get it.) My boyfriend was a pot-smoker, so we often visited the downtown boutique that sold glass pipes (for tobacco use only). The shop also sold counter-culture clothing, body piercing jewelry, really tall fuck-me stilettos ... and sex toys.
I swear that I counted the days until my driver's license announced I was old enough to enter the room behind the black curtain. Is that weird? That I couldn't wait to by a vibrator? Everyone else my age was probably worrying how to get their underage hands on a six-pack of beer or a few smokes.
Not me. I wanted a vibrator.
Luckily my boyfriend was intrigued by the possibilities of new sex play so he supported my intention to buy at first chance. That was until I made him come with me to choose one. I envisioned a fun shopping spree where I could grab a bunch of dildos of the racks and he and I could pass them back and forth chatting about which one we liked better.
Yeah, not. He was totally embarrassed to be standing in that room behind the black curtain with his girlfriend fondling rubber penises of all shapes, sizes and colors while the weird girl behind the counter with all of her face piercings and electrocuted hair-style watched on. But I didn't care.
I was trembling with adrenaline and excitement for doing something naughty; something that I would have died over before letting my mom find out. Paying 50 bucks for the Big Red Thruster was a rush.
In all honesty, it's not the vibrator I really wanted. But it was the best one I could afford and I was superbly happy with my choice.
It saw a lot of battery changes. I kept the Big Red Thruster for many years until the rubber began to slip away from the plastic battery box and the on-off dial began to make louder-than-a-vibrator-should-be noises. I threw it away and didn't have a vibrator for almost three years.
I don't know what hit me. I don't know what changed. Maybe my married-sex life was a little stagnant. (Married-sex goes through up-and-down stages, right? It's been six years with my husband and perhaps the sex at this stage is a little predictable and too much work for such a high level of predictability.) Who knows.
I wanted another vibrator: a bigger, better, more expensive one this time. Maybe one with those little pearls in the shaft that allow for superior rotation action. I wanted one of those rabbits. I scouted the area around my home for signs of some kind of naughty boutique. Week after week it weighed on my mind; just like it did when I was 17.
I mentioned it to my husband, who said, What ever you want, honey. But between commuting for work, getting home in time to walk the dog so she doesn't pee in the house and carting the kid to and from school, the time was never right. Even on the weekends when there might have been more time, it's not a real good idea to take a 3-year-old into the sex-toy shop to browse. So I waited.
And waited and waited. This is enough! I yelled to myself. And I left work early one day to indulge my desire.
Meet my new rabbit. It's pink, it's long, it vibrates, it rotates and it's waterproof. How. Cool. Is. That.
I'm back in the game. I can have it when I want it, as often as I want it, with or without the company of a husband. I feel empowered and am super psyched.
'Scuse me, I'm going to hop in the shower.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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ps "in the closet"? about what? obviously not sexuality or vibrators :)
And now, I'm trying to remember my first experience buying a BOB for myself. Hrm. Honestly? I can't remember. But they have each touched me deeply.
Rated.
Our son, then 5, found it one day. He brought it out and asked me what it was. I told him it was a case for holding spare batteries, for emergencies. I opened it up and showed him the batteries. Crisis averted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VtzSDI8u2o
Look, I masturbated too much for too long - long enough to see how it interfered in the intimacy I had otherwise hoped to continue to cultivate and develop with my wife. I left her watching TV while I absorbed myself in another, smaller display screen. So while I completely agree that there should be no shame in the act of self-pleasure itself, let it not be at the expense of the non-waterproof friend who actually loves you.
I have three words to add, though ....
Hitachi Magic Wand
aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
"What's buzzin', cousin?"
With love,
Roger Rabbit;-)
vzn: I'm just generally in the closet when I write on this blog. I prefer to keep my anonymity when I write on spicy topics.
Radames: Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Perhaps using the word "stagnant" to describe my married-sex life was a little strong. My husband and I have a fulfilling intimate relationship, no doubt. I just tend to want sex more often than he; and there are sometimes when we're not in the mood at the same times. That's when the rabbit comes in handy.
We rise. We brew coffee. We gaze through the French window at the drizzle blurring our hillside. Weak sunshine dabs at the cloud. A spray of pink cherry along the wood. We settle to the desktop, where has just arrived the day’s sampler from Salon.com.
We glance at ‘Rabbits, Thrusters and Female Empowerment’. Unsigned.
To get the head electricity flickering. — Will there be something here to do that? It’s a piece about masturbation. About the author masturbating herself, and pretending to imagine that the world is interested. She’s only forty years after Portnoy’s Complaint (which was a book, which a man wrote before she was born; which drew the radio comment on Roth from a supposed critic, writer, arts bureaucrat — a woman of course — “he was a dirty young man and now we see he’s a dirty old man”. No doubt a similar fierce moralism will apply to this present masturbatory effusion?)
Her piece is full of tense self-love, demands at nib-point (as it were) our validating approval. Which comes in a bucketload of posts from girls as empty as she is.
Has she, have they, ever heard of Abu Ghraib, of Guantanamo, Iraq? Do they have a starting notion of how utterly depraved a culture they project, that’s imposed by American arms-and-bluster on the dignified nations of the world?
You don’t need to be any sort of detective to see that this blogger’s female, thirties, college-educated to a level that allows her to buy a car and mortgage a house and make out the instructions on her contraceptives. She’s only too determined to tell us all about herself, while maintaining her spurious anonymity. Her 700-word squib uses the first-person pronoun 50 times: roughly once a sentence (there are 58 sentences), or every fourteen words.
She’s a ‘professional’, we’d say, in some unexciting, quietly desperate but still-ambitious fashion. (She works, let’s suppose, as a travel agent or ‘executive’ or ‘consultant’ in an insurance or a law office, but she’s a double major — we might guess — in English and Social Studies, and she hasn’t given up on the day when she’s going to break into journalism.
She thinks of journalism as unbelted self-expression, and she thinks of good journalistic style as a chain of snappy, buttonholing phrases: “Look at me! Look at me!” Up-to-the-minute and spanking clean, although the content’s dirty — like the chain which wraps around her and the processor and the sports utility, and the one she uses to tie down her noncommittal husband. These are not the mind-forged manacles of Blake’s industrial age; they’re the virtual chains of a Teflon culture. They trammel no less because they’re spick-and-span plastic, autoclaved, germ-free.)
Six years married with one 3-year-old child — she calls her child “the kid”; it’s maybe a boy from this way of referring to it. Has a brick house in a suburb in the American northeast. We might guess Washington or Boston, or outer New York. Anglo or Jewish.
No surprise that she’s wasting her life because she doesn’t know she’s born. She has no inkling what life is, who she is, how appalling her squib of an article must be — and the gushing posts it elicits — to any normal human outside her tiny Yankee provincialism, and untainted by it. Hers is the culture that brought us Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives without any thought of consequences — except perhaps for assuming that spreading sex and desperation is in some loose way connected with red-blooded American capitalism. A culture that cannot judge when enough is well beyond the limit already.
Hers is the microculture that brought us feminism: wholly self-obsessed and self-indulgent, substantially ignorant, aimless beyond the fact of knowing that it wants for itself more and more of whatever is going, and then some more. Our blogger is saturated with that selfsame barely-suppressed hysteria that fired 1970s feminism, that’s waiting for the moment when it can launch the whole society on a mid-life breakdown. Which she and it will blame on the husband (“Whatever you want, honey.”), on the naughty ‘patriarchy’.
She is living a laminex life. Masturbating herself in the lavatory, she thinks to expose herself to the whole world over it. Why? For approval. And exhibitionism. But that tempered exhibitionism of the female — no risk, no fault, no genuine exposure. Her article is a virtual thrill — talks dirty from anonymous safety, from behind a keyboard to a virtual public. She has made a religion of herself. She’s her own Holy Cow. And the juggernaut, the guillotine, the turbo-charged taser waits for those of us who beg to say we aren’t interested.
And what’s ‘empowering’ about all this? She seems to fancy that telling everyone and no one about her masturbation is somehow making a political statement. Is it? What statement? That she’s a sad individual who’s feeling she’s nearer the end than the beginning?
Maybe if the West hadn’t just grunted “Whatever you want, honey” when the first rash of feminism started itching itself and screaming “Look at me! Look at me!” — maybe then we wouldn’t have slid into the decayed civilisation we suffer today.
We sigh. The cat mews as ever, demanding her food. Can’t she go out and earn it? The sky lours again.
Not a good start today.
Fortunately, he had about a free hour to count the words and pronouns and then type a response to the post that dwelt on your trivial self-absorption.
All the capitals, all the counting, the hours spent trying to make someone feel bad using carefully manicured language. I think there might be a confused OS crush brewing.
Assuming an online identity to diss on others without having generated any content yourself is a very classy move. Well done, Les.
If you are so worried about the war in Iraq, why aren't you devoting your energy to fixing THAT problem rather than spend an inordinate amount of time dissing an account of a women's honest post about masturbation?
not impressed with your word count, (plus your vitriol needs work)
gr
Les, clearly you are smarter than I. However, I'm not sure I'll take the blame for you clicking on, reading and then disliking my post, which is about a vibrator, not about masturbation. There, I only used "I" five times.