Okay, many of you know I have been in this wacky business for almost 20 years, opening my retail store Grand Opening! in Brookline, MA, right next to Boston (a mile from Fenway Park), in November 1993. I left my job at Harvard to sell rubber dicks to girls. No kidding. Anyway, one of the main reasons why I opened my store was because the choices I had of toys and the places to buy them was woefully inadequate.

I really started out as a sex toy aficionado when I met Smut Hound in 1987 after I was married for 7 1/2 years to a non-adventurous guy. zzzzz... Smut Hound turned me on to everything sex, which was, and continues to be, a HUGE passion of mine. It ceaselessly gives me pleasure in the purest sense of the word.

One of those many pleasures I have is to be an official sex toy reviewer for the print version of XBIZ (writing this here blog is another big one, too). I get a box of four (usually) every month on my doorstep of the latest and greatest recently released gizmos from companies big and small. It's like Christmas for perverts. Some of the toys are one-offs, meaning I have never seen the toy before (and sometimes realize why), some are from well-established brands, some are brilliant, and some, well, I can use them better as doggie chew toys. "Come here, Skippy! Mommy has a present for you!"

Imagine my surprise this month when I got a box of four toys and NONE of them looked like a penis. Not in any way, shape, or form. No tapered, tilted coronal ridge, no fake ejaculation slit at the end (as if a dildo could really squirt - oh wait, there are some that do), no fake balls for me to play with, nothing. Nada. None.

And then it hit me. Gosh, how far we have come from the days of only phallic shaped toys that either vibrated or didn't and my guess that is all within my lifetime in the adult industry. Come to think of it... twenty years. For sociologists and demographic bean counters, that's considered a generation and maybe I shouldn't be surprised after all.

I think the biggest advancement in sex toys has not so much been the toys themselves, that's certainly a HUGE factor, it's this plain and simple fact: women are now probably the biggest buyers of sex toys. Think about it: sure, there might not be that many women in the local sex toy store when you walk in but there's a world's worth of them out on the internet, trawling around, finding the best deals on Rabbits, BDSM toys, anal plugs, strap ons to use on their partner's willing buttholes, the list goes on and on. And we can't forget the giganterous and undeniable revenue stream that home parties generate. Unless you're in the adult toy industry and know the home party industry, you have no idea how big it really is. It's like the quiet giant lurking in the room and there's hundreds of thousands of women cranking out these parties and selling stuff to discreetly be delivered (but that's another blog). It's big and I'm sure you know someone who has been to one if you haven't already been to one.

I've also seen the change in the shift in packaging. Twenty years ago, fakely boobed women were begging their horny male buyers to "make me cum with this vibrator" so the guys would buy one just because of the chick on the box to bring home to their unsuspecting mate to put it in hers. Sure, there's still packaging out there like this but as for naked women, they're certainly on fewer and fewer boxes than ever before.

The colors twenty years ago were pretty limited - sure there was pink (which is still the most popular color), and a few other colors here and there. Latex was still commonly used for toys which has pretty much been discontinued due to it's messiness in manufacturing and general stinkiness. And due to the fact that there are many more higher quality materials for sex toys these days, most notably, silicone, which has crept into all aspects of sex toys including men's toys and just about everything else for that matter. On the less expensive, raw materials side, there's TPR (thermo plastic rubber), a variation of rubber that doesn't have any smell to it. The luscious coating on many toys is TPE which is thermo plastic elastomer, also not stinky (the materials seem to be somewhat changeable so sometimes the toys are made of TPE and sometimes TPR. Don't ask me for the specifics between the two - I'm not a chemist - just a lowly product tester, retailer, designer, writer, consultant, etc., you know....).

And lest we forget about the shapes. There's leaves, berries, octopi, rabbits (natch), dolphins that spin, balls in every imaginative size that rattle and shake, slender, sweeping arcs of pleasure that vibrate and twist, ripples, ridges in glass and metal. Objects that look like three dimensional brush strokes designed to give women pleasure without even thinking something has to look like a penis to get us off. It's not that we don't love penises, we just that we like to have a choice in the matter.

So, I had better get back to reviewing those toys. I mean, I've already sent in my reviews but I think I need to take them out for another test drive... Vroooooommmmm.....

JOTB:

So one time, two eight year old boys are talking. One says to the other "I went to the doctor yesterday and he said I have to get circumsized."  "OH MY GOD!" the other boy gasped. "I was circumsized as a baby, and I couldn't walk for a YEAR!"

Two guys are talking and one says to the other "Hey, I got a vasectomy the other day." "Really?" says the other guy. "Where did you get that done?" "Sears" the first guy says. "So, how's that workin' out?" asks the second. The first guy responds "Not bad but every time I get a hard on, the garage door opens."