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Notes -
For any of you who's familiar with New York Times's Wirecutter, which publishes products reviews and lists hot deals:
As of right now, among deals on toys, subwoofers, and mattresses, there are also two vibrators, both around $100.
As far as I can tell, there are no deals on sex toys for men (I'm ignoring vibrators' cross sex appeal here, or how men may use toys to pleasure their female partners).
I don't expect this observation by itself to generate much new insight, as it seems fairly obvious that culturally, men tend to be viewed as perverted or losers for pleasuring themselves with tools, while for women it's fun and almost virtuous (well, certainly less slutty than finding a casual partner). I can see a Wirecutter staff member publishing a review of her personal experience testing various toys, but cannot fathom a male staff member talking about how this particular lifelike doll had very full lips but that one has perkier breasts, and this third company makes ethnic dolls for your fantasies. If you Google Wirecutter and sex toys, all the articles that come up are exclusively focused on women or gay men (i.e. anal stuff).
So my question is more about a prediction for how culture may evolve along this front. By what year do you think Wirecutter will publish reviews and deals on sex toys targeted at straight men looking for thrusting fun?
The year that I'll pull out of my ass is...2032
My guess is when men's sex toys start selling a the rate women's sex toys sell. How many men on here own sex toys they bought strictly for themselves? I know I don't and I'm unaware of any of my IRL friends who own them. Meanwhile, almost every woman I know owns a vibrator and isn't afraid to let you know about it if the topic comes up in conversation. A bar I used to frequent hosted a sex toy party once and all the men who were regulars were asking when it was going to end so they wouldn't show up while it was going on. The bartender said that there was no need to wait because the lady hosting the thing had a few items for men they might be interested in, and everyone took this as a joke. The truth is, the reason men's sex toys don't sell has nothing to do with status, or feminism, or any other culture war topic, it's because men generally don't need help getting off. Most guys learn to rub one out in 15 minutes at the age of 12 and though it may take longer in later years, the basic technique remains the same. Women, on the other hand, don't reach orgasm as easily and it can take quite a bit of self-exploration to figure out what they like.
Do you want to have that answered? At least some of the disparity does exist at ground level, but there's another disparity where it's considered impolite to talk about this stuff, even in fields that are already pretty focused on discussing male sexuality.
No obvious source and these are often wrong but this claims many men own sex toys,
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This is 100% your bubble. I have never met a woman that owns a sex toy or masturbates. This is media programming of masculinized blue tribe women
This is late but I haven't noticed any consistent political affiliation among any of the women who mention this. My "bubble" includes typical urban progressives, left-leaning (but not particularly political) rural outdoorsy types, and working-class Trump supporters, and all three groups are represented here. The sex toy party was at a bar in an outer-ring suburban strip mall that leaned heavily Republican and had a large number of police among its clientele.
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That study supports my point. Even among WEIRD urbanites willing to sign up for a study to discuss masturbation habits (which is surely biasing the numbers way upward) only 38% of women masturbated. Now I haven’t read their study, maybe they were ambushing Amish girls and forcing them to discuss their masturbation habits at gunpoint to balance things out, but I assume not.
I’m not saying I have never brushed past a woman at the grocery store who has masturbated. I’m saying that among women that I’ve known well enough to be confident about their masturbation habits, which is around 10 women, the rate is zero.
Given that I probably have some spooky law of attraction thing going on that biases the pool of women that I know, my experience seems eminently plausible given this study.
Not convinced that it would bias the numbers upward. Without further info, just as likely that those who don't masturbate are more likely to sign up for such a study (they have nothing to hide).
For any woman who doesn't masturbate, I would assume it's less due to her being non-horny, and more due to her getting enough sex that she doesn't need to go solo.
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90% of women you know are into bestiality. You can’t object to this by bringing up personal experience or studies because they are clearly just ashamed about it and lying to hide it
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I have never, personally, met a woman who would admit to owning a sex toy, and it doesn't shock me that some might. TBH talking about female sex toys nonstop seems like extremely blue tribe behavior to me, owning one just makes you a coomer. I mean, I see plenty of billboards for them, so clearly someone is buying them. I always just assumed that women didn't talk about masturbation in public the same way men aren't supposed to. Yes, obviously the blue tribe likes to talk about female masturbation, but I wouldn't take that as evidence that they do it more, or that non-blue tribe women don't masturbate. It's just evidence that the blue tribe has a bizarre cultural trait that I don't understand.
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You've definitely met many of both (more who masturbate), it just hasn't been mentioned due to local norms
False, this is Kinsey style propaganda like how 50% of men have had homosexual relations. Pure cope from blue tribers who feel compelled to insist everyone is as sexually perverse as they are. I have lived with female roommates, lived with multiple girlfriends and am married. This tactic doesn’t work on me
edit: I’m just speaking the truth of my lived experience, please stop invalidating me
Let's take a 30 day break from your trolling this time. Come back better, please, or just don't come back.
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No, if you were doing that, you wouldn't have said "This is 100% your bubble... This is media programming of masculinized blue tribe women".
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gulps down bait
Even if/given that it is modern society-degenerate-prison brainwashing, most people still do masturbate. Most conservatives I know jerk it to porn just like the liberals do. There's no point in making stuff up about it, the libs aren't gonna lose because you claimed conservatives doesn't jerk off, it just means you have a flawed understanding of social dynamics and are less equipped to solve whatever issues there are
Why does your experience trump mine? OP said every woman he knows owns and talks about sex toys proudly. I said my experience completely contradicts this so it must be a bubble thing. Is this really so hard to imagine given he is the kind of guy who attends sex toy parties? Isn’t it a little bit likely that is evidence his bubble is somewhat skewed on this issue? I have never even heard of such a thing and neither has my wife. If you are attending sex toy parties that probably puts you in the top 5% (just pulling a number out of my ass (definitely in a totally straight way though)) in terms of progressive sexuality.
But now people in the “attends sex toy party” bubble are boldly asserting “No way, every woman you know definitely owns vibrators and masturbates secretly.” It would be equally supported for me to claim “No way, all those women claiming to own vibrators are just lying to you for feminist cred”
For some reason blue tribers have some obsession with claiming that definitely everyone is sexually degenerate/adventurous as they are and any claims otherwise are false/lies/social pressure/shame. Like I said, this is like Kinsey citing outrageously inflated numbers for homosexual activity in men.
I can believe none of them talk about it around you/men in public generally, but they certainly do it. ref - "I have never met a woman that owns a sex toy or masturbates"
nobody claimed this, and everyone who was told they claimed it clearly stated it wasn't true. But certainly some of those women have sex toys, and many of them masturbate!
I'm not really a 'blue triber', and acknowledging the sexual degeneracy of even the 'conservatives' is important even in the case one opposes sexual degeneracy, so you can understand the situation. If you want to stop sexual degeneracy, believing conservatives are more or less pristine of it will make it virtually impossible to understand anything or take any useful action!
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I don't necessarily think every woman masturbates or has a vibrator. I do know for a fact that there are genuinely non-horny women out there who do neither. But given the fact that we're programmed to want to orgasm, you'd think that there'd be a bunch of women out there who do try to reach it on their own. Many people have very strong urges that they submit to, even more so than just masturbation. I think something like 60 to 80 percent of Christian women have premarital sex, despite the fact that the general Christian line is that it's immoral. So we can see that sexual urges are quite strong, strong enough to make people take action.
IME, moderately to very horny women are not an insignificant percentage of the population, so you really are bound to have met some of them. Just because they're not personally telling you about it, doesn't mean there aren't a lot of them. And just because you have only dated women who are non-horny, or have not told you about it, doesn't mean there aren't a lot of them.
Major confound with with your premarital sex figures is that many people check a box claiming they’re part of the majority religion without knowing very much about it or intending to follow it. The better practice for studying religious people is to restrict the sample to regular church attendees. I’m not denying that a significant percentage of these people have premarital sex, but I am saying that the numbers might well be different from general population numbers in ways that self professed Christians often aren’t.
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That's an interesting perspective. I would add as an addendum that I don't necessarily think men's anatomy makes more sense for how they make themselves cum (though it's possible that's the case). But I think the biggest factor is that at a certain age, men start to experience crippling, debiltating urges to cum. So they undergo the self exploration of how to make themselves orgasm by necessity, whereas for most women it's an optional thing.
I can't believe this is the comment thread I'm hopping into, but oh well.
I think for boys around puberty, the thing that makes them go "ooh" is fairly obvious. When an erection happens, you may not know what or why it is happening, but you sure notice that it's happening. Everything is on the outside and is visible.
For girls, it's more complicated because everything is inside and you're not really supposed to be touching yourself 'down there' (caveat: it's been a looooong time since I was a teenager, things probably have changed a lot since my day). But even if you have some idea of "This is my vagina", you don't really have much idea of what to do to make things go "ooh".
Boys, to be blunt, can figure out that grabbing their dick when it's standing up like that and rubbing it makes them go "oooh". Girls may not even know where their clitoris is, or if they do, how to touch it to make things go "oooh". As for vaginal penetration - yeah, that's a minefield. From a female perspective, it's a lot easier to stroke a dick than to try sticking things like the handle of a hairbrush up inside you and see if you can move it around till it feels good.
And that's before we even get into the whole "putting things up inside your vagina is how you lose your virginity, and ideally you should be waiting till you have a boyfriend to put his cock in there, not you putting phallus-shaped objects, in order to do so".
Getting over all that and moving on to being adult men and women - I think sex toys in general have suffered from the seedy connotations of "adult stores" and all that aura of raincoated flashers and hardcore porn magazines and movies of low quality. Trying to get a better image has, I think, been easier when it comes to women's sex toys; they could escape the image of the down-market sex shop by moving first to things like lingerie shops which bridged the divide between socially acceptable 'sexy' garments (as Victoria's Secret did when it exploited that market) and more daring sex-related material, and then into discreetly marketed toys for women alongside the sexy, lacy clothing. See the history of the first British sex shop that marketed its goods to women, the Ann Summers chain which evolved from a traditional sex shop to a more up-market version (and see the fascinating obituary of its founder who was definitely a rogue).
They're a little old-fashioned now, in the same way as Playboy, having been supplanted by much raunchier and more explicitly direct competitors online, but can you imagine an equivalent shop for men that mixes sexy clothing, colognes, and toys? Very much more difficult to do, leaving men's sex shops stuck in the seedy image era (I can't speak for modern shops since I don't know any and have never been in one, so maybe they're a lot more upmarket these days).
And speaking from personal opinion only, I think it is easier to get into more technically advanced and 'artistic' kinds of toys for women. Magic Wands were personal massagers first, and I believe are still marketed as same, even though everybody recommends them as vibrators. When it's not acceptable to be open about what you are using such an item for, it's a lot easier to pass off a device as "this massages my neck muscles when they knot up" use than something for men which is clearly "I shove my cock into this". Sorry, gentlemen.
You do still get the downmarket, cheap porn movie types of dildos (warning for NSFW link - I have no idea why anybody would want anything like this, but as they say YKINMK ) but you can also get 'could leave it out on your bedside table without too much embarrassment if somebody else saw it' types of devices as well.
Like this or this or this.
Women's sex toys are not confined to "insert inside you" so it's easier to move on to more abstract forms. What would be the male equivalent of this, for instance?
This which, while a lot more discreet, are still relatable to its function as "insert penis here". Or this, which looks more like an implement of torture.
There does seem to be much more development on insertables like prostate massagers, which can more easily go the upmarket design route like women's toys, but I think we've seen enough comments above about "that's gay" for the problem to persist.
You can write enthusiastic reviews about this sort of product, but this one looks more like "recommendations for serial killer lust-murderers". Try putting that up on the NYT recommendations page!
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