science! Archives - Page 2 of 2

Avery’s Anal Bead Horror Stories

August 31, 2016 palimpsex geekery, reflection, relationships, review, science!, sex toys, sexuality, storytelling, trans*, Uncategorized

Alternate title: “Inside the Buttholes of the Kitsch and Heinous”

Content advisory: Poop. So much poop. And a lot of CAPS LOCK.

I’ve been putting off writing for a little while. Life has been throwing a lot at me, what with my hands dipped in all things sexuality-related, board meetings at Masakhane, eldercare wellness-therapy groups, trying to negotiate new degree tracks at Widener, and now being offered an opportunity to speak on the politics of identity and sex toys for Widener’s CareersCon coming up in September. The semester is approaching, and I am coloring testicles furiously in an Anatomy book while watching “It’s Complicated” with Meryl Streep because that’s apparently what $1,800 costs for a class, though I will admit I am excited to have other classes with Elizabeth Schroeder and in a different class I get to profess my love for Judith Butler. Academia has its upsides and downsides.

Anal August is coming to a close and with it so are the doors of Come As You Are Co Op; life is aligning with the ebbs and flows of sexuality. After hosting a last minute poll as to what the subject nature of this post should be, it seems as though folks were interested in hearing about my horrific history with anal beads. I figured this was appropriate, given the topic of my upcoming workshop about sex toys and Formidable Femme’s most recent amazing blogpost. (Also a huge fan of this blogpost from Lilly in 2015). (And this one from Hey Epiphora!). You get the idea. My relationship with anal beads is paradigmatic of many things I find really fucking wrong with the sex toy industry, and I’m kinda glad I got to experience this learning curve in the way I did.

My first experience with any sort of butt play was at age 16 with an unlubricated attempt at my then boyfriend’s dick partially in my ass. This was followed by the “Oh my god NO, ouch, why did we do that, BAD IDEA BAD IDEA” dance/hop all around the apartment with my hands clasped around my buttcheeks. I had sworn off anal for another two years until college came when someone I started hooking up with introduced me to fingers and lube. THEN a dick. MUCH easier. MUCH more pleasurable. Particularly with a vibrator on my clit. I found that orgasming with a dick in my ass provided an incredibly intense orgasm, and decided butt play was for me.

Winter break came our freshman year and partner and I stopped by a little leather shop on Christopher Street in the village and decided to buy a black large jelly rubber butt plug which we later realized would never in a million years fit inside my ass. I ended up using it vaginally. (I know, what?)

Insert generic rubber butt plug here. Or don't, actually. — [Insert generic rubber butt plug here.] Or don’t, actually.

Years went by until I graduated college with much more knowledge in sexuality (heck, even a BA in it), began teaching sex ed for Masakhane, and started working at my local sex shop. For the next six years working at this sex shop, I used my 50% discount with reckless abandon. I bought hundreds of toys, spending each paycheck exploring the best and worst our store had to offer. And looking up at my toy shelf right now, I see all of 10 of those remaining. I’d try a toy and it’d either break, melt, I’d decide it wasn’t for me, it didn’t fit right, whatever. In retrospect, I wish I kept every single one of them because some serious science could have been done. Lilly’s Jar of Horrors? I could have made some sort of art installation! Hindsight…20/20…ableist idiom, but so true.

I finally get to meet Lilly's jar of horrors!!!

A post shared by Avery (@thepalimpsex) on Aug 6, 2016 at 1:26pm PDT

The first thing I heard about butt toys working at the store is how amazing anal beads were. “You know how good it feels taking a shit? Now imagine having an orgasm while taking a shit. Blumpkin level.” My colleagues were precious. I mean that sincerely. The honesty and crudeness of our conversations was something I still can’t have in a lot of other spheres. Even in the rest of my sexuality fields, I don’t know how comfortable I’d be casually watching porn at 9am while eating a taylor ham, egg, and cheese and commenting on the skill of a performer’s messy blowjob.

Anal beads were one of my first purchases with my newly acquired 50% discount. Not just any anal beads mind you. These. Tiny ones, green (because color was a huge factor in choice for me during my early purchase days, not material), connected with string knots, and a plastic green loop at the end. I used them twice. Once by myself, where they hurt immensely while taking them out, each knot scraping my insides, actually feeling the skin of my rectum catch in between each knot and bead as I pulled the string out of me. I used a ton of lube, but it didn’t matter. I still bled on toilet paper for two days.

The second time I used them was with my partner during sex. I asked him to pull them out of me while I was riding him on top with a bullet on my clit. As I was orgasming and he pulled them out, he yanked them way too fast, and while it felt better than the previous time, what he had hanging in his hand was mirrored by his face of horror. I didn’t need to look at either before the smell had hit me. The strand of beads were completely stained brown, each knot had caught a little bit of feces. I’m not talking a ton of poop here, but enough that by the swinging of the beads, the sweat of sex and the humidity of a Jersey summer, my boyfriend’s outstretched hand wafted the stink of shit from these beads while he looked at me asking “what do I do with these?” That ended our session pretty quickly, as I ran to the sink to scrub them out. Scrub them out. NOT throw them away! I put them in a wad of paper towels, left them in his basement to be forgotten, only so two months later his mom and little brother could find them and ask him about the plastic green bracelet behind his computer desk. Awful.

So I learned the hard way: No string, check. Bacteria, knots, pain, hard to clean, etc. Get beads that are connected, Avery! I fixed my eyes on these really funky looking beads that weren’t bead shaped at all, but rather shaped like little, fat, S‘s connected all with the same material. The same, disgusting smelling material that reeked so bad I could smell it through the packaging. It literally smelled the same as that Cherry scented dildo, minus the fruity notes. Like burnt medicine and shower curtains. All the typical phthalate signs I hadn’t learned about yet. But the texture wasn’t tacky (actually quite bumpy, which added to the disaster later on), and nowhere on the package did it say jelly, so I scooped it up. And then it scooped me up. Yes, these S-shaped nodules were absolutely perfect shit-scoopers. What I thought would stimulate my asshole upon exit and entry ended up provoking the SAME reaction in the SAME position with the SAME partner when I asked him to remove them. This strand of S‘s went even deeper into my butt, scooped out generous portions of feces per bead, and once removed I couldn’t tell what smelled more, the original material or this newer, poop-enhanced version. Not to mention the bumpy texture was a complete lube-eater, so we had a nice slathering of Santorum going on with this item as well.

The brand I bought doesn’t exist anymore, but this is what the beads were shaped like.

You’d think I’d learn. Ok, so maybe I just need ROUND anal beads. But maybe I should get graduated ones, where they get really tiny at the tip and wider at the bottom. And maybe we can make them vibrate this time! Because why not add a new variable into the mix of something already really uncertain and discouraging? But I’ll be really good about it, I’ll make sure they’re silicone this time, because when a reputable company like TOPCO says it’s silicone, it HAS to be silicone, right? The insertable bullet transmitted zero vibration throughout the beads. The handle ripped and I almost lost the entire toy inside of me. We ended up grabbing the beads by the bullet when the bullet, in all its lubed glory, popped out of the toy. So after sticking a finger in the hole where the bullet USED to be and slowly negotiating this toy out vof my rectum by holding one end of the ripped handle and keeping one finger in the bullet-hole, I was able to decide that “MAYBE I DON’T FUCKING LIKE ANAL BEADS.”

I know there are some good ones out there. Tantus makes some impressive Vibrating Progressive Beads. Fun Factory will always be famous for their Flexi Felix. But something about that sensation of shitting tiny turds I thought would feel so pleasurable a decade ago has absolutely zero appeal to me now. Don’t get me wrong. I love textured plugs. The Tantus Ripple feels absolutely amazing. I adore the Aneros Helix, even if it isn’t my current partner’s favorite. I can even handle the beaded end of the Fun Wand if I’m gentle enough. It’s just something about a loooong chain of bumps that my body can’t handle.

So there you have it. Anal bead mistakes were made. By a so-called “sexpert.” Which is why, with all the good toys out there, there are twice as many terrible ones. With even the most informed educators, we have the capacity for human error and need the space to learn and share those learning experiences (no matter how grotesquely crappy they can get). Sex-positive or not, whatever sex-positive means to you, we do stupid shit to our bodies all the time. We’re not always going to make the best decisions in life, and wisdom isn’t always a forward trajectory.

I’d like to think that my anal bead blunders are over, but I’m sure there will be a day down the road where I reflect on other practices in my sexual self-care that need improvement. I know there were moments working at the store in my later years where I had flickers of judginess at the customers who bought that string of green anal beads. I desperately tried getting my boss to take it off the shelves, but “It kept selling,” so we kept stocking it. Some days I’d do my best to offer a safer alternative. Some days I’d remember back to the moment I bought those beads. Would I really have listened if someone told me to pick something else? Probably not. My stubborn ways would have said, “No, this is cheaper, it’s my favorite color, and I don’t even know if I’m going to like it. I’m going with these.” You pick your battles and hope for the best. But that’s another story.

Now the gods grew quite scared of our strength and defiance…

July 6, 2016 palimpsex geekery, introduction, reflection, relationships, science!, sex toys, sexuality, storytelling, trans*

and Thor said, “I’m gonna kill ’em all with my hammer, like I killed the giants.”

As part of our Business of Blogging course with Epiphora and JoEllen Notte (The Redhead Bedhead) this past spring, my fellow bloggers and I were given the task of coming up with an origin story…something that encapsulated our desires to blog about sex, sexuality, identity, toys, and all the other delightful things we write about on a regular basis. I loved this assignment so much; it gave each member of our cohort such unique opportunities to express our backgrounds in so many different formats. It was a delightful way to learn about each other and I had tons of fun writing it. So here it is, in all its unedited glory:

The concept of an “Origin Story” has put Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s “Origin of Love” in my head on a loop all week with the simultaneous imagery of Weapon X from the Marvel universe (Uncanny X-men story arc ALWAYS). And I’ve sort of been traversing head and heart for my story. Do I illustrate a mosaic of snapshots from my life with a lens covered in more vaseline than RuPaul’s Drag Race seasons 1 and 2? Do I pick one cathartic moment and deconstruct that in order to respect its own value as life is full of origin stories? And then I realized my “Origin Story” had been staring me in the face the whole time. Hedwig and X-men. So what’s the connection to blogging, toys, my passions for sex education, sexual self-discovery and exploration?

First of all, I had discovered both Hedwig and the Angry Inch and X-men comics at hugely transformative stages of my life. I was around 7 years old when X-men entered my life. It was one of the first cartoons I ever really engaged with, the first arcade game I punched rolls of quarters into, the first comic series I began reading, and Goddess help me, when that 1994 Fleer Trading Card Series came out, the first thing I had ever began collecting feverishly (I still have every card, mint condition, in a plastic binder on my bookshelf).

I understood the higher value of the foil cards that shimmered with their metallic colors, the importance of collecting every card for the triptych stories in order to get the full picture, and I also loved talking about collecting these cards with other kids. It reminds me a lot of my sex toy collecting now. Between my highest quality “gets,” to fawning over other collectors’ toy displays, to wishing for those “rares” that were in such limited production that even if I didn’t want them, I NEEDED them, my appreciation for the different artists and aesthetics in the ’94 Fleer Set was really precocious for a 9 year old kid.

The characters in X-men have also been an evolving (see what I did there?) inspiration throughout my life. As a child, I dressed up as Storm for Halloween one year and Jubilee the next. In my preteen years, X-men gave me an immense respect for powerful women, but simultaneously allowed me to eroticize them, as my first fantasies as a kid were Psylocke and Polaris. Purple and green is still my favorite color combination, go figure. As I got older, and began to understand the political context behind X-men as mutant “others” and my own morphing (again, X-men puns) LGBTQ identity, I saw these characters less as fictional impossibilities and more as realistic role models than most celebrities in early 2000’s culture.

When the live action movies began coming out, I sort of twinged at their “artistic license” with the canon, but was really excited that they were getting more people interested in X-men…people that previously may not have considered themselves “comic folk” or “superhero affiliated.” It’s sort of like how Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey are all types of frustrating and problematic as introductions to sex toys, but they create dialogue among audiences that might never have happened, and that is something of merit. I was also really jazzed that Bryan Singer, one of the directors for several of the movies, was openly bisexual until I heard about all the cases of sexual abuse filed against him. My heart dropped. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it created a lot of conflict as to whether I wanted to continue supporting X-men films, where that would compromise my ethics, or if it might trigger me along the way.

I liken this a lot to my immediate knee-jerk reactions to companies like JimmyJane affiliating themselves with larger, “morally corrupt” corporations like Pipedream or concurrently wondering why She-Vibe continues to stock JimmyJane products. I see that when inserting my own personal narrative into someone else’s decisions without understanding the individual perspectives of everyone involved, it is really difficult to control my emotional reactions. I couldn’t rationalize any positives in the X-men films, for example, Anna Paquin, who is also openly bisexual and a proactive figure within several advocacy groups, and I was quick to write off an X-men movie if Bryan Singer had any affiliation with it. So this is definitely an ongoing battle of mediating my own impulse to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” which is something that will require extensive work if my blogging aims to explore sociopolitical subtexts behind the production and promotion of sex toys.

Yup. This was a thing. This was absolutely a thing.

Where the X-men had jumpstarted my sexual exploration in childhood and LGBTQ affiliations in teen years, Hedwig and the Angry inch engaged my sensitivity to self in terms of love, mental well-being, and using my “rebel roots” to connect with people instead of isolating. My early angsty teens were fueled by punk rock, Ani Difranco, and a complete transformation into masculine-leaning androgyny. I hadn’t begun identifying as genderqueer, but after seeing Hedwig in my best friend’s living room my sophomore year, I learned that just like my fluid understandings of gender, my ideas of appearing “hard” and “soft” to people were equally blurry. It became the pitch for my sex education from undergrad onward: because I looked “alternative,” I was actually “accessible.” People would understand that I wasn’t judging them because I was probably always being judged. Hedwig taught me to embrace my vulnerabilities in praxis, that I’m not going to get anywhere in life without taking risks, and that mistakes are a part of the process.

But most of all, Hedwig taught me love in a profound way. I learned about love as a spiritual process, love as a means of connecting to people, love as a foundation for creation, love as the element that runs through everything we do as humans. And today, it still holds true. Every paper I have written, every thesis, practicum, or capstone I have ever worked on has emphasized the importance of love in your work. It is the great equalizer in that it is indefinable and yet always felt in some form. I use love in how I teach students, how I work with clients in therapy, I am using love right now in how I write this entry. It is nebulous, explosive of time and space, heady yet simple, spectral beyond anything narrowed down to a “concept.” I still write anonymous letters to randomized addresses I find from whitepages.com telling people “I have no idea who you are, but you are beautiful and I love you.” It’s worth doing. Love makes this all worth doing.

https://www.instagram.com/p/5isfZIMtTm/?taken-by=thepalimpsex

Reflecting on X-men and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I think not only of Stan Lee and John Cameron Mitchell, but everyone else that has had input in the creation and writing of these stories. These stories are rich with value, complexity in symbolism that are universal enough that almost anyone can connect with them, but nuanced enough that they are not two-dimensional and individuals can take away different messages. These writers are absolutely brilliant at their craft and it takes a network of support and years of effort to achieve such excellence. But they are also unique as human beings, they had their own “Origin Stories” to bring them to writing.

Everyone has an origin story, if not one, than many, or even infinite. Some may say every moment is a new opportunity for an origin story. I am curious to hear yours, if you’d be willing to share. If you click on this entry, it will take you to the post where you can add your comments, or you can email me.

With love,

Avery

A regrettable purchase finally meets its end (now with butt puns)!

June 4, 2016 palimpsex review, science!, sex toys, sexuality, storytelling

Good lord. So I had this toy:

It’s a California Exotics Art Deco Jelly Butt Plug. I am deliberately not linking to it. I bought this toy in September 2008, the first week my employee discount ever went into effect at the adult store. We hadn’t really started stocking much glass or silicone at this point, and I would like to blame my purchase on a combination of that, not “knowing any better,” and this plug being the closest thing to glass “aesthetics-wise.” It was also beyond anything my ass could handle in my early butt play years, so it stayed unused for many moons (I liiiiive for ass puns) before I was able to use it comfortably.

Even now, it’s still not a toy that works well with my ass. Its width stays too wide for far too long. I’d rather have a plug with a brief moment of wide girth before it tapers back down to something tolerable that my butt can hold onto. But I kept this plug, if for no other reason than it still looked really pretty, so long as you didn’t touch it or look at up close to realize it was jelly (it never had a chemical smell to it, and the texture, though rubbery, was not sticky or tacky at all). As years went by, I had decreasing room for this plug in my arsenal, and considered throwing it away except that my one partner really liked it and insisted they didn’t care about the debatable material. That was until last night, when I got home from my second partner’s burlesque competition at 4 am only to discover the plug in a tupperware container full of soapy water at the bottom of our shower with a post it note, like some sort of crime scene. On the post it note was an apology:

“I washed this 5 TIMES and it still smells bad 🙁 Hope you made the best of your night. Love, Partner.” (I should mention I later confirmed my suspicions, that the “smell” was of anal descent, not the material itself. Lilly has some good tips for ridding your butt toys of lingering odors, but this was beyond hope.)

Cackling, I left the aberration in its watery prison and forwarded a video of the hilarity to the third partner in our poly family, asking them what the fate of said plug should be:

Judge, Jury, and Executioner of Bad Butt Plugs — Sorry to the twitching recyclers: since we live in the middle of nowhere we have to burn most of our cardboard.

Knowing full well how jelly goes up in flames like a dried out Christmas tree, I was ready with camera in hand. I had hoped for effects akin to Lilly torching that Screaming-O cock ring, and I was NOT disappointed.

So rest in peace, stinky jelly toy. As Lao Tzu once said, “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” I’m pretty sure that was never meant to be applied to a CalExotics Art Deco butt plug, but it works.