The Ballad Of The Big Blue: My First Sex Toy

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Everyone has a first sex toy story right?

I recently bought happymash’s clitoris clip vibrator PAUSE.

It’s pink, palm-sized, and made to look after my clitoris. I like it a lot – it’s the first sex toy I’ve ever bought for myself. One of the reasons I chose it is because it’s so different from my first vibrator.

This is its story – get ready for a timeslip, because this happened about twenty years ago…

My boyfriend looked excited as he handed me what looked to be a small, white shoebox.

‘This is for us,’ he said, with a certain glint in his eye. He was thinking about sex. Which meant, whatever was inside this box had something to do with sex. I opened the box, telling myself I’d be open to something new.

And there, beneath white tissue paper, was my first sex toy. It wasn’t love at first sight.

Now, it was no horse or elephant replica (I am told this is a thing – I mean, what the hell?), but still, my eyes widened at its 7 inch length and wide girth. Made of hard plastic with a pulsing light inside, I knew straight away where this blue, glittery, missile shaped dildo wasn’t going: anywhere near my insides.

‘Let’s try it tonight,’ said the boyfriend, looking at me as if he thought I could barely contain myself.

‘Yeah, ok.’ I shrugged indifferently.

I said I’d give it a go, but wouldn’t have it inside me. At first, he seemed cool with that. We used it on my thighs, stomach, over the top of my pubic mound, and sometimes on my vulva; I didn’t come, but it wasn’t terrible. And it was a handy interim night light when the power went out one night and we needed to put new batteries in the torch.

It was all going ok until the night he turned it on, rubbed it on my thigh and whispered, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if I shoved this up your arse?’

‘Nope,’ I said, pushing it away.

The penny dropped. Of course, of course this is why he was suddenly inspired to buy a vibrator. A couple of weeks before giving me what I came to think of as the Big Blue Bullet, he’d started pestering me for anal sex. Now, if you love anal sex – you go for it. But the words ‘anal sex’ make my anal sphincters clench; I use it quite strictly for its biological purpose. And he knew that.

But he kept asking.

I kept saying no.

But then the Big Blue Bullet would come out and he’d ask, again.

One night, I turned to him, took the vibrator from him and said, ‘You know what? I’ll let you put this up my butt only AFTER you’ve let me do the same to you.’ He was indignant, and did not see why this was hypocritical. It’s normal and right for men to put things in women’s holes, not the other way around, right? Right? He knew I was serious.

And just like that, he never asked for anal again!

I didn’t like the vibrator. I didn’t like the boyfriend. I needed to think about what I did like – on so many levels. My starting point was to love myself more. First, I chucked the boyfriend. Next, I quit smoking, soft drink, and cut back on alcohol. I started to exercise and eat healthy foods. I was detoxing my life.

Months later, I found Big Blue. Pressing the buttons to see if it still worked, I used it a couple of times (on the outside, as I had before). It wasn’t unpleasant, but again I didn’t come. I decided it might be alright to try using it inside my vagina, with me in control of it. In the shower. Well, it felt as comfortable as I’d expected, which is to say, not at all. And, Big Blue Bullet wasn’t waterproof.

Alas, it had buzzed its last vibration, lit up its last canal. It was broken. I’d broken a vibrator.

For some reason, binning it with all the other rubbish didn’t seem…safe.

‘What if someone finds it?’ I thought absurdly, as if people were in the habit of going through my rubbish to find…broken sex toys? That they’d assume I’d broken it from using it too much?

I wrapped it in pages of the local rag, and lay the Big Blue Bullet in its own little shoe box coffin. It couldn’t help being made and bought by clueless men who like penetrating women with large, uncomfortable instruments.

I taped the lid tightly shut with the satisfying squelch of brown removalist tape, and threw it into the rubbish bin.

An hour before it was due to be collected. You know. Just in case.

And that, my friends, is the story of my first sex toy. It highlights a lot of things about my life at the time – a lot of stuff to do over if I could, some 20 years later. The bright side is that 20 years on, I love myself a whole lot more than I did then – even after my detoxing epiphany. Now I know about businesses like happymash, where Anna produces sex toys made by women for women – so, so important. Finally with her clitoris clip vibrator PAUSE, I can give myself pleasure, freely and without guilt or shame, for no other reasons than because I can, and it feels good to do it.

Jennifer Zeven AuthorJennifer Zeven is a freelance writer on mothering, parenting, and other feminist concerns. She is working on her first manuscript, which at this point has nothing to do with vibrators.

Follow her @jennifer_zeven

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