Septimus Still Reviews!

So… Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been gone… for almost 3 years. That’s a long time, I know. But I promise, I have a good excuse. Or rather, excuses. (Why come up with one when I can come up with 3?) Anyway, here goes:

First of all, I was in grad-school. I know I had tweeted about that a few times, but grad-school kind of ate my for 2.5 years. It was… fun? I’m very glad that I stuck through it and finished my program, there was more than one point where I wanted to just say ‘fuck it’ and quit. But still she persisted, and after 2.5 grueling years, I now have a shiny Master’s Degree to show off (It’s a Masters in Library and Information Science, for those who are curious. And yes, I’m a librarian in my “real” life).

Second, depression. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before, but I suffer from depression. I’m not on any medication at this time, but I’ve taken anti-depressants in the past, and I’ve also seen a therapist on and off since I was a kid. My depression hasn’t been bad in the last several years (moving out of my parent’s house really really helped), but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t impact my daily life.

For the most part, I’m fine. I can get through every day with little to no symptoms. But when I’m stressed (like, trying to write 2 papers and get my ass to work on time), my depression tends to be worse.

Excuse number 3, and it’s a big one: I have ADD. ADD and depression you say? Isn’t she lucky! Yeah… Anyway, I’ve been dealing with symptoms of ADD since I was in middle-school (and isn’t that just the best time of our lives?). It’s been mostly under control since I finished college, but then again, I haven’t had to write papers, and do reports and surveys, and keep track of my own deadlines as intensely as I had to when I was in school. And then, well, I went back to school. I was very impressed with how I did in grad-school, but it was because I hyper-focused on school and work. If it wasn’t a paper for school, or something that paid my bills, I couldn’t focus on it.

This is also tied in to my depression. When I slipped up, or fell behind on an assignment or work task, I got stressed, which made my ADD harder to deal with, and depressed me. Being depressed makes it harder to concentrate on tasks… and well, vicious cycle and all.

So, where does this leave poor Septimus? Not reviewing, that’s where. Not only does depression decrease your sex-drive (which makes it a lot harder to review sex toys), but it makes it harder to get and stay motivated to complete tasks at all. Plus, with me having to hyper-focus on school and work, there just wasn’t a lot of time for me to be blogging.

TL;DR? I let my blog slip over the last few years because of grad-school and the ADD symptoms and depression that can with it. I lost my domain and stopped blogging at all. Luckily, I had all of my reviews and was able to re-publish them on blogger.

I’d been thinking about getting back into blogging since I finished school in December, but a week or so ago I was approached about reviewing a new toy from a company I already love. That was the kick-in-the-pants I needed to get my blog back up and running.

So…

What can you look forward to here?

A new toy review coming soon (I hope)

A write-up of my pilgrimage to the Good Vibrations store in San Fransisco

A renewal of my own domain (though it might be slightly different - update your links!)

And much more!

Stay tuned folks, I’m back.

My Experience with the LayaSpot

A caveat before we begin. This is not a review. This is just a post (maybe a rant) talking about my experiences with a specific toy. Other people might have had a different experience, this is just mine.

This is a post that I've been wanting to write for a very long time, but one that I had actually convinced myself shouldn't be written. Recently however, I listened in to a twitter conversation about the pros and cons of reviewing bad toys, and I decided that this was something I had to write.

A long time ago (back when I was just getting into sex toys), I bought myself the FunFactory LayaSpot. I think it was the second or third toy I had ever bought, and it took me long enough to work up the nerve to actually take the thing up to the register and purchase it.
At the time, I had never even heard of FunFactory, (The only toy company that I was even remotely familiar with was California Exotics who made the set of crappy jelly anal beads I had purchased a few months earlier - a mistake) and didn't know anything about them. All I knew was that the LayaSpot looked like a higher quality of toy than the crap I had been purchasing up until then.
I took it home and was eager to try it out right away. The LayaSpot is a clitoral vibrator that is supposed to fit easily into the palm of your hand  (and therefore be more ergonomic than other clit vibes out on the market), and since at the time I wasn't big on internal vibes, I thought that this would be perfect for me.

The FunFactory LayaSpot, which I inexplicably still have

Unfortunately, I didn't get to find out that night. I took the toy home, put batteries into it (it takes 2 AAs) and turned it on. It felt nice and buzzy, especially in the tip (which was exactly what I had been looking for). I tried it out, and at first, I was pretty pleased. The LayaSpot fit nicely into the palm of my hand, and the tip sat right over my clit, transferring the deep buzzy vibrations nicely. I was really enjoying myself, and just starting to get into things when... it stopped. I assumed that in my pleasure-induced haze, I must have pushed one of the two button controls. I pushed the + button to turn the thing back on, and resumed what I had been doing. But again, as soon as I started getting into things, the toy just turned off.
This time I opened up the battery compartment (still one of the more obnoxious ones I've dealt with) and checked to see if anything was leaking. Since nothing was, this time I made the assumption that the batteries I had supplied it with were perhaps not the freshest.
So I dutifully switched out the batteries and tried again... with the same result. Dead after just a few minutes of use. Frustrated, I shoved the toy back in my toy-drawer and tried to put it out of my mind long enough to finish the task at hand.

Sometime later, I decided to give the LayaSpot another go. And to my surprise, it turned on without any problems! But then, a few minutes later... You guessed it, dead again. At this point I was so annoyed that I boxed it back up and took it back to the store I got it at.
The lady who ran the store was very nice and exchanged it for me, no questions asked. We both assumed that I had just gotten a defective item. It's annoying sure, but it happens from time to time.

I took my new LayaSpot home and ended up having many enjoyable orgasms with it, at least until it too started exhibiting the exact same malfunctions.
After a few days of normal use, it started to randomly die on my during use. It happened over and over and over again. I switched out the batteries almost every time I used it, just so I could try to get a few moments of use out of my only "real" viberator.

But it was no use, the thing was a dud and there was no getting around it. A few months after taking my second LayaSpot home (most of which time it lay forgotten and dead at the bottom of my drawer) the thing died pretty much for good. I had taken it out to give it yet another one last chance, and it wouldn't work at all. I opened up at battery compartment and found that the batteries had leaked everywhere. I cleaned it up the best I could, dumped the batteries and shoved the thing back into my drawer, this time for good.


Like I said at the beginning, this is a post that I've been wanting to write for a long time. At the time, I was just starting to get into the toy-reviewing community and was a member of a web-site with some pretty stringent rules regarding toy reviews. One of which was that "As a matter of policy ***** does not host reviews on defective products." This of course served to deter me from sharing my experience with this toy. In principal, I agree that reviews of defective products don't really help anyone (which is one of the reasons why this isn't a review), but when you have the same bad experience with two separate items, you have to wonder if they were defective, or if something else was going on.

I've since owned several other FunFactory products, including the SmartBalls (which I loved), and don't really understand how I seemed to end up with 2 broken toys in a row. I want to make it clear again that I did not buy straight from the manufacturer, I bought from a 3rd party retail establishment. And I probably could have gone back and exchange my LayaSpot yet again for store credit or something, but at that point I was so annoyed that I didn't want to deal with it.

I'm sorry that this post has been so long, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there and share this experience with you nice folks. Please let me know what you think. And if you have had any similar experiences with the LayaSpot, please, share them!

I Dream of A Well Regulated Sex-Toy Industry

Before I get into the meat of this post, I wanted to present you with a little scenario to really set the mood.

Imagine this if you will:

For some time now you have been wanting to by yourself a sex toy. Dildo or vibrator  you don't care, as long as you can have some fun when you're by yourself. So you walk into your very first sex-toy shop. Immediately you are overwhelmed by the sights sounds and smells of all of the various toys on display. You don't even know where to start, there's so much to take in. But then your eye spots a small friendly-looking dildo in the corner. Its packaging proudly proclaims that it is 100% silicone. You don't know much about sex toys, but you know what 100% means, and you've heard that silicone is one of the safest toy materials you can get. You purchase your dildo and immediately take it home to enjoy.

But the next morning, you notice that something is horribly wrong. You're itching and burning in a place that no one ever wants to itch or burn. How could this have happened? You bough a safe toy, didn't you? You double-check your toy's packaging and once again see the bright pink label proclaiming 100% silicone. Unless of course, 100% silicone means different things to different people.

And that, my friends, is one of the sad truths about the sex toy industry. Most of us probably think that we know what 100% silicone means, but we would be wrong. 

100% Silicone can mean that a toy is:

• A blend of Silicone and PVC (which is porous)
• Jelly, with a little bit of silicone thrown in (also porous)
• CyberSilicone (which is a blend of silicone and rubber [porous again])
• actually 100% silicone (non-porous)

The problem is that the sex toy industry is not regulated. There is no oversight board or committee (like the FDA) to tell us as consumers when a company might not be telling the truth about its materials. If organizations weren't in place to regulate the food industry grocery shopping would be a very different experience. And unfortunately, that's the exact type of experience many of us have when trying to buy sex toys.

So what can be done? 

Enter:

A brand new non-profit organization that aims to help provide some oversight to the sex toy industry.

How exactly do they propose to do this? you ask. Good question. I'm going to go ahead a let the wonderful people over there tell you all about it:

"Dildology.org intends to provide material verification services and maintain a public database of the results, adding transparency and oversight to the industry while educating the public about the science behind pleasure products. We stand on our own, uninfluenced, and we are dedicated to protecting the health and wellbeing of the dildo-loving population at large through education (and maybe a little entertainment)."

Dildology.org is being run by three people who are very passionate about sex toys and safety. They believe that we as consumers deserve not to be lied to by companies trying to pass off materials like PVC and rubber as "100% Silicone". Unfortunately, as most of us know, sex toys can be expensive. What most of us don't know, is that material testing is also quite pricey. And since Dildology.org is committed to remaining a non-profit (which means not taking on advertisers), there are few options for raising the necessary funds.

 

That means, you guessed it, fund-raising! Dildology.org is currently taking donations to raise the money to purchase and test various toys.

How can you help? Easy, tell your friends, tell your neighbors! Go door-to-door! Help spread the good word of sex toy safety! We all deserve to know what materials are going into toys that we put into our bodies. 

Door-to-door not your thing? That's totally cool too, you can help by making a donation!

The majority of your donations will go directly to product purchase/testing (with the remainder going to donation incentives, equipment and educational materials).

Why should I donate? you might be asking. What's in it for me? Good questions. 

Well, first of all, you get the satisfaction of knowing that you helped to educate people about what materials are actually going into their sex toys. 

Also, you're helping to force the sex toy industry to be more responsible for the items they create. As it stands now, just about anyone can slap a "100% Silicone" sticker on pretty much any product they choose, and very few people are going to do anything about it. But if companies know that their toys are being independently tested and verified, they're going to think twice before blatantly lying to their consumers.

On top of those amazing (and personally satisfying) incentives, there's more!

How much more you ask? (boy, you ask a lot of questions!)

• Donate $15 and get a coupon for 15% off at SheVibe.com
• Donate $50 and get a Dildology T-Shirt!
• Donate $100 and get a spot on the (coveted) Dildology.org Donor List!
• And much, much more!

(Go to http://www.dildology.org/donations/ to check out all of the amazing donor incentives!)

So that's it, donate, spread the word, do what you can to help this amazing non-profit get going and help us all! Like I've said many times before, we're consumers in this industry, and there's a surprising amount of power in that position. We're the ones who can make change in this industry, but none of us can do it by ourselves. Dildology.org is going to make a difference to the industry, so donate and be a part of history!

National Masturbation Month!

Happy National Masturbation Month! I know I'm a little bit late to the party (fashionably late, as I like to think of it), but May is, you guessed it: National Masturbation Month!
Let me say it again, because I really like the way it sounds:

National Masturbation Month!

Ah, doesn't that just sound awesome? And it really is. After all, masturbation is sex with someone you love. Okay okay, I know that's cliche. But there really are advantages to masturbating. Like what? you ask. Good question.
First of all, masturbation is the safest form of sex you can have. You're not going to catch anything, and no one's going to get knocked up.
It's also free! There are obviously more expensive options (ie toys), but almost everybody already comes with the basic equipment they'll need to get started! (your hands/fingers can really be your best friends. Especially if you live in a crowded dorm or don't want to spend money on toys.)

But you don't have to take my word for it. There are lots of more reputable (at least, more reputable than some random blogger on the internet... hi!) sources who'll totally back me up on this one.

Like:

Planned Parenthood, who advocate for masturbation as the safest form of sex out there.

And Scarleteen, where you can find lots of fabulous information about how to masturbate. Their site is primarily aimed at teens and preteens, but it's got loads of wonderful information that's great for all of us. Seriously, who couldn't use a refresher about masturbation?

Also, did you know that masturbating can help you lose weight? At least it can if you're replacing snacking with orgasming! Meet the Orgasm Diet! Started by NymphomaniacNess, some of us on twitter (like SugarCunt and others) got really into it and decided to join up.
You can participate too! It's really easy: Instead of reaching for that slice of delicious delicious cake, reach for a dildo instead, and have yourself an orgasm!* (hmm, idea for a new series of YouTube videos... Cake vs. Dildo! There can be only one!)

If you'd like to participate, check it out on twitter!

And finally, in honor of National Masturbation Month, I wanted to give a shout out to a brand new non-profit that is working hard to make sure that our orgasms are safer orgasms.

Dildology is a brand new company that will be testing the materials of different toys and products to let us as consumers know just what exactly is going into our collective vaginas. As they point out, the sex toy industry is unregulated. There's no FDA to prevent companies from masking dangerous chemicals and materials behind the banner of "100% Silicone!". Thus, Dildology was born. I'll be writing more about them soon, but I wanted to give you guys a brief intro here. Go check them out!


Okay, that's it for now, but I've got a lot more cool stuff planned for the rest of the month. I'm hoping to have 2 new reviews up, plus the most awesomest "Mail-Call" post yet. Stay tuned! I'll also be writing more about Dildology, and why we should all get behind their mission statement!

And finally, I will leave you with this:

It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Why are you still reading? I'm done. Go masturbate!




*I can't actually promise that you'll lose weight this way. I'm not a doctor or even a health care professional  I'm a blogger and have no reputable credentials (haven't we been over that before?). But I can promise you that it'll be a hell of a lot more fun than most other diets out there. While all of your friends are counting calories to get in shape for bikini season you'll be having orgasm after orgasm after orgasm. I think you'll agree that that's more fun.