Answering your sex ed and sex toy questions!
Further Reading/Viewing:
Sex Toy Material Guide
How To Find Sex-Positive Doctors and Therapists – Hedonish
WOCSHN (Women of Color Sexual Health Network) Directory
Think “If you’re not sure if you’ve had an orgasm, you haven’t?” Shut up. – JoEllen Notte
I Gave Up Vibrators For 4 Weeks – Dangerous Lilly
Fucking Trans Women #0 – Mira Bellwether
Muffing Toy Recs:
We-Vibe Tango
Pleasure Works Electra
Blush Gaia Eco
Tantus Silk Small
Tantus Pro Touch
Frisky Max
Unique Toy/Brand Recs:
Blush’s Avant line
Lust Arts
Uberrime
Geeky Sex Toys
Funkit Toys
Hole Punch Toys
Tails & Portholes
Hello hello! I’m Erika Lynae, back again to answer some of the burning questions y’all have sent me about sex and sex toys. Let’s dive right in.
What do you use to clean your sex toys? Is regular soap okay?
I talked a lot about general toy cleaning methods in my big Sex Toy Material Guide video a couple years back, but I’ve never really discussed how I personally do it.
I have a pretty simple cleaning regimen because my toys have pretty simple uses — I’m not really using them in multiple orifices or sharing them with partners, so soap and water is perfectly fine for washing them between uses.
I use Dr. Bronner’s castile soap, not because it’s necessarily better than anything else, but just because I use this stuff for everything. I clean my house with it. I clean healing tattoos with it. It’s great. I’ve also used regular dish soap, and that’s also completely fine.
When I do want to more thoroughly sanitize a toy because I’m sharing it or giving it away to a friend I’m not fluid bonded with, I’ll wash it like normal and then either boil it for a few minutes, soak it in a 10% bleach solution, or just wipe it down with rubbing alcohol depending on the material of the toy and whether it has a motor. And that will just kill anything else that could be hanging around from my body that could potentially cause problems for someone else.
You’ll see a lot of companies selling things like antibacterial toy cleaner sprays and fancy UV light boxes, but that stuff is really just expensive and unnecessary. If your toys are made of body-safe, effectively non-porous materials like silicone, glass, ABS hard plastic, and stainless steel (which they should be!), you don’t need to buy anything special to clean them.
These are the same materials that you’ll see used in your kitchen items because the mouth, vagina, and rectum are all similarly sensitive mucous membranes. What’s good enough to clean your silicone spatula or metal spoon is good enough to clean your body-safe sex toys. Some toys can even be thrown in the dishwasher to sanitize them (top rack, no detergent, on the sanitize setting). Easy peasy.
When I asked for questions for this video, a lot of the ones I got were about people having trouble getting to orgasm.
And those are hard questions to answer in this format because there are so many individual factors that could be at play — psychological things, physical body-related things, medication-related things — and even in more personal settings a lot of those factors can be really difficult to pinpoint. Plus, I’m not a doctor or a sex therapist, so the help I can offer in this area is limited.
(If you do want to seek out a professional, my friend Rachael Rose over at Hedonish has an excellent piece I’ll link to on how to find a sex-positive doctor or therapist, or you can also check out the membership directory on the Women of Color Sexual Health Network’s website and see if there are any providers there who are in your area.)
But one piece of advice I do sometimes give people when they’re struggling to orgasm and it’s causing them a lot of frustration and anxiety is to take orgasm off the table completely for awhile. Pretend that’s not even a thing that exists. Orgasm? Never heard of it.
Go into your masturbation or sex sessions focused solely on pleasure. What feels good right now in this moment? Sometimes when your sex is goal-oriented, whether that goal is orgasm or any other specific thing, it can be easy for your mind to get so wrapped up in trying to complete that objective that you may not be fully experiencing all the physical sensations happening to your body.
If something feels really good, relish that. Revel in how good it feels for as long as it feels good. I’m a firm believer that pleasure is worthwhile in itself. You may come or you may not, but either way more pleasure and less stress is probably going to make for a better time.
I’m gonna link to a couple more really great articles related to this subject in the video description. One is by JoEllen from the Redhead Bedhead about what “counts” as a real orgasm and the diverse ways different people experience it. And the other is by Lilly from Dangerous Lilly about how vibrators gave her her first consistent orgasms, what they taught her about her own body and pleasure, and that there’s no shame in needing or preferring vibrators to manual stimulation.
Do you have any sex toy recommendations for muffing?
I do! I was actually talking to someone about this recently.
So a little background info for anyone that doesn’t know, muffing is the penetration of one of both of the two inguinal canals located on either side of the testicles. (They’re actually the passages that the testicles descend from.) They don’t have any kind of surface opening, but the scrotal skin covering the canals is thin and flexible enough that you can press up into it to stimulate inside of them. And since there’s some fun nerves in there, some folks find that stimulation pleasurable.
Most people with testicles can do it to some extent, but it is most commonly associated with trans women and trans-feminine people — the word “muffing” was actually popularized by Mira Bellwether in her groundbreaking zine Fucking Trans Women. It can be a great avenue for frontal penetration that doesn’t involve the penis, and hormone replacement therapy often makes the canals both easier to access and more sensitive. (But of course it’s not for everyone, and there are also plenty of trans women who don’t enjoy it.)
As with all body parts, different people’s canals are different sizes and can handle different things. I would recommend getting comfortable playing with your fingers first before moving on to sex toys. That way you can measure the length and circumference of the finger(s) you enjoy to get a reference point for what size toy could work for you.
For vibrators, I’d definitely check out the We-Vibe Tango. It’s finger-sized, powerful, and awesome. Bullet vibes in general are pretty great for muffing, I’ve been told, as are slimlines like the very skinny Pleasure Works Electra and the slightly thicker Blush Gaia Eco (sidenote: this vibe’s motor is shockingly good for a $12 toy).
For dildos, there’s the Tantus Silk Small, which is thin and smooth, and the Tantus Pro-Touch, which is designed to mimic the shape and size of a finger doing the “come hither” motion and comes with a bullet that fits in its base. I’d also check out the Max if you want a more realistic shape and/or a rideable option, since it’s got that classic suction cup cock shape but is only an inch wide.
In general muffing is considered to be pretty medically safe, but it’s not something we really have a lot of data on. And there are theoretical risks to extreme stretching of the canals, particularly the upper inguinals closer to where they connect up to the abdomen. So I probably wouldn’t recommend putting anything particularly large very deep up there.
But again, I’m not a doctor, and I am a cis woman who has no personal experience being muffed, so take everything I say on this subject with a grain of salt.
Can you recommend some companies that make unique or just really pretty toys?
This is a really fun question! So I always think of sex toys in sort of three categories. There’s budget-friendly toys, which are under $50-ish (obviously everyone’s budget is different, but that’s the arbitrary cut-off point in my mind). Then there’s mid-range toys between about $50-$100 and luxury toys over $100.
I’m going to focus on those first two categories because I feel like they’re a little harder to find.
On the more budget-friendly end, Blush’s Avant line is super cool I think. It’s all fun stripes of bright colors, and some of them are based on different Pride flags!
For mid-range toys, there are some newer brands I’ve been super impressed by recently. Lust Arts is a company that does really cool, highly sculptural stuff like this Mermaid dildo or this one based on the chest burster from the movie Alien that you can even get in a special coloration to look like it’s dripping with blood.
Uberrime (Uberrim-ee? words are hard) do some beautiful colors and primarily more abstract designs.
And then I have some older favorites, like Geeky Sex Toys, whose products are based around different comics, sci-fi films, and general pop culture, Funkit Toys, who do incredible color work swirled in clear silicone, Hole Punch Toys and their ice cream butt plugs and glittery rocket ships, and Tails and Portholes, who specialize in nautical fantasy toys. (That last shop is currently on hiatus but should be re-opening later this year, so keep your eye out because their stuff is fabulous.)
So there we go!
If you have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them either there or in my next Q&A.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time!
