It’s a tough time to have a job that requires you to be sexually aroused. (To be fair, it’s a tough time to have a lot of jobs, and mine ranks pretty low on the stress scale – but it’s the one I know and am qualified to write about!)
This week alone, I had three – count ‘em, three – dildo reviews on my docket. As you’ve probably heard, dildos are generally designed to penetrate an orifice… and inconveniently enough, my orifices were clenched so tight from life stress and doomscrolling that they could’ve squeezed a lump of coal into some kind of vagina diamond. (Hey, free drag name/burlesque name/band name if ya need one!)
Sure, I could review a sex toy from an unaroused state – but would you want to read a restaurant review written by someone who’d eaten a full meal before going into the joint they were meant to review? Probably not, because the reviewer wouldn’t be physically or mentally equipped at that time (in all likelihood) to give the restaurant a fair shake. Likewise, I need to be sufficiently aroused when I test sex toys; otherwise I just feel like my genitals are being poked and prodded, and that experience would make for a pretty boring and useless review.
So needless to say, my uncharacteristically low libido made it troublesome that I was contractually on the hook to fuck three dildos. As a result, my testing sessions this week were some of the most difficult I’ve ever had – which, let’s face it, it’s masturbating in my own comfy bed, so even at rock-bottom, it’s hardly a gruelling day at the office (or in the mines)! But nonetheless, it was a comedy of errors from start to finish. I’d start to get turned on from reading some hot erotica on my phone, and then suddenly get a stress-spiking notification that drained all my lust in an instant. So I’d put down my phone and switch to fantasizing about my crushes du jour, and I’d quickly get overcome by panicky doubt (“What if they don’t like me?! Or, perhaps even scarier, what if they DO like me?!?”) and have to do some deep breathing to calm down. I’d refocus on hot mental images to get back into the zone, only for my building’s fire alarm to go off (it was a false alarm, but the adrenaline it dumped into my bloodstream was entirely real). And so on and so forth, until eventually I had gathered enough testing notes to write a goddamn review.