“Yes, your vibrator sounds powerful but can it make me breakfast, tell me the time and sing my cat a bedtime lullaby?”
Sometimes, I come across people on forums and social media who are looking for sex toys that can do everything in their imagination and dreams. Swiss-army-knife style sex toys, if you will. For example this post I’m writing now was inspired by someone who was looking for an automatic masturbator that would move up and down, vibrate, heat up and rotate… all at the same time. This person’s budget was about $90.
Depressingly, there are some companies who are trying to cater to such fantastically indecisive demands. Because from my point of view, this really does seem like indecisiveness. These consumers have been searching the internet for a certain amount of time and found a bunch of sex toys that do different things. They may have liked the sound of those sex toys, yet can’t help think… “what if I got one that does it all?!”
The issue I see is while this may seem like a genius move, it’s gonna end badly. Getting an all-in-one sex toy super machine will all too often end up being a regretful purchase from an obscure company that nobody knows. As with most things you can dream up, if you search for it on the internet for long enough, you’ll find some asshole promising that they can give it all to you… and often for a modest cost too.
We can often find obscure brands that overcomplicate and stuff bad toys full of “features”. The thing is, there are big European, British and American companies making their sex toys “smart” too. And I’m not against a bit of intelligence in my toys. People who need to use their sex toys in long distance relationships will find those features quite useful. Some people who really like porn will appreciate some porno sync.
Simple is best and quality always wins over quantity
I’m starting to see sex toy companies attempt to make their toys too clever – and for me it isn’t working at all. If I buy a toy, I want it to do one or two things and do those things REALLY damn well. If I buy a toy that does ten different things, yet it’s average at all of them… it’s still an average toy. The worst thing is, because of all the features, it’ll likely be an average quality toy with a luxury toy price-tag. The fact that it does all of those things doesn’t matter to me very much, because the quality is still average. If sex toy companies want any real kind of respect for their toys, they need to go for quality rather than quantity.
Did you find a toy that rotates, moves up-and-down, remote controls, vibrates, contracts, claims to be whisper quiet and it heats up? Yeah… I won’t be reviewing that. I don’t even need to read the product description or see the toy to know how astonishingly, mind-blowingly bad it would be.
Many of my favourite sex toys have no electronics at all. They don’t need electronics because they’re that fucking good. The Njoy Pure Wand is one of the best prostate toys you can buy, one of the best G spot toys you can buy too. The Ussy is a silicone masturbator so good that even after over one year of me owning it, it’s still sitting in my bedroom drawer because that’s the one I keep coming back to. Quite a sign of approval for someone who received at least 50 or 60 toys since it arrived.
I often rate electronic toys highly… but most of those are under my bed with empty batteries. The biggest toys I own… the automatic masturbators etc – they’re in my basement because that’s how little I actually use them. Now before this starts to sound alarming, also remember that I’m a sex toy tester. I sometimes receive several toys per week and so of course there are good toys that get “forgotten” under my bed. And of course there are people out there for whom automatic masturbators are very very useful, such as people with disabilities or those who just really like that style toy.
Simple sex toys win
My point with all of this is, even when someone has tried as many different toys as I have – simple wins. Of all the toys I have, it’s the very simple ones that I keep going back to. My recommendation for most people reading this is to focus on one or two features and get a sex toy that does those things well. Better to get a really high quality sex toy that you’ll be keeping for years and years, rather than a dodgy toy from the far corner of the Earth that will end up in a landfill within a year.
As for sex toy companies, my recommendation to any of you reading is to calm down with the features. I’m now seeing toys that sync to streaming services, have alarm clocks, have cameras inside them, sync to porn, connect via bluetooth, wifi and usb. Please, please, please – calm down. Your toy doesn’t need to do it all. I’ve tried toys with seven different features yet the same company manages to mess up the fitting and sizing. I’ve tried long distance remote toys that absolutely don’t need that feature. Please avoid making your toys gimmicks – it’ll harm you in the end.
Most sex toys only need to do one thing – pleasure people
If I could turn to an analogy from a common problem in commercial enterprises. Imagine a company where employees begin asking for justifiable wage increases. A common trick companies try to use is to add “features” to the work place. For example such a company might install table-football machines, arcade machines, hammocks, free coffee machines, free breakfast… maybe even things like discounted cinema tickets. All of that distracts from the main thing that everybody wanted in the first place though – a raise in salary.
With sex toys, what we need is pleasure. Don’t distract us from the pleasure. If companies want to add features that they think can boost an already amazing toy, then we’re all for it. However if the goal is just to stuff a badly thought-out toy full of fancy features, then sorry but fuck that. Or fuck-it-not, rather. Sorry couldn’t help myself.
End point – The most intelligent sex toy companies out there at the moment are focusing on quality. Such companies don’t launch products every other month, yet they go through all of the research and development that is required to make a toy truly great at what it’s meant to do – pleasuring people.
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