With several sex toy reviews on my docket at the moment, and my 11-year-anniversary of being a sex toy reviewer happening this month, I’m thinking a lot about the actual process of how I review toys. It has changed somewhat over the years, and I feel like I’m in a good place with it – I’m not always thrilled to turn masturbation into work or to risk ruining my own orgasms with bad toys, sure, but at least I know how to do those things well now!
Here are some notes on the process I use to review toys, from start to finish. A lot of this process is informed by the fact that I have a chronic illness and am tired/in pain all the time, plus I have many other obligations besides sex toy reviewing, so I can’t do what I used to do at age 19 and test + review a toy almost immediately after receiving it.
Getting the ball rolling:
Typically a company or retailer will reach out to me and either ask if I’ll review a specific product of theirs, or ask if I’d like to do some reviews for them in general. While there was a time, earlier in my career, when I basically accepted any toys that were offered to me, at this point I only accept toys if I’m either genuinely interested in trying them (rare) or am being paid to review them (much more common).
I do both sponsored and non-sponsored reviews, with the former being a more regular occurrence at this point. In both cases, I’m clear with clients that any review I write will be honest and fair, not necessarily positive. There are times when this scares clients away, but ultimately I’d rather they fuck off immediately than pay me and complain later when I criticize their toy.
My preference is that companies allow me to pick which toy(s) I want to review from their website, and often they do allow me to do this. This is better for them and better for me, because I can choose a toy that I’m actually interested in and/or that I think might actually work well for me. I really don’t need to review yet another terrible, nondescript vibrator, thanks!
When the toy arrives:
My policy at this point (for sponsored reviews, anyway) is that I publish a review within 4-6 weeks of having received both the payment and the product(s). Typically the payment is sent first, so when the product arrives, the countdown to my deadline starts, and I put a draft on my blog calendar immediately at that point, so I always know when everything is due. (Except when I forget, but let’s not talk about that…)
Whenever I have the spoons/time, I unpack the toy from its box, throw away any unnecessary packaging (or low-quality lube samples they’ve included which would likely just give me a vaginal infection), and plug the toy in to charge, if it’s that kind of toy.
These days I always try to take photos of the toy before ever using it, simply because I know that I don’t always have the spoons to perfectly clean a used toy so it’s photo-ready in time for my review to be published.
If the toy came with an instruction booklet, I’ll lay that out on my nightstand so it’s there when I need it. I used to have a little plastic bin on my nightstand that was basically my sex toys inbox/“to review” pile, but it used up too much valuable nightstand real estate so I’ve gone back to just keeping to-review toys in the top drawer instead. When I move to New York to live with my spouse (this year, if all goes as planned!), I’ll have an office, so space will likely be less of an issue. I hope.
Actual testing sessions:
There used to be a much more permeable barrier between my “work masturbation” and my “fun masturbation,” in that when I was horny, I would grab toys I needed to review and casually jerk off with them. However, things have changed as I’ve gotten older, for a couple of key reasons:
My sex drive is lower now, and I’m also having way more partnered sex (most of it being phone sex), during which we almost always stick to tried-and-true faves. (This is good, because both my partner and I prefer that I have high-quality, reliable orgasms when I’m with them.) As a result, I just masturbate way less than I used to.
As much as it is helpful to test toys as part of my regular masturbation routine to see how they fit into it, when I’m jerking off in my “personal life” I don’t really want to have to take notes, pay close attention to everything about the toy, etc. Sometimes masturbation is stress relief, or is about self-care or getting back in touch with my body, and it started to feel weird/bad to combine that with my work.
So, now I do dedicated toy testing sessions. Usually these happen in the afternoon or early evening, after I’ve dealt with my emails and any other important tasks or assignments I had for the day.
I’ll start by smoking a bunch of weed. It might seem weird to show up to my job totally blazed, but I know myself well enough to know that I’m better at this particular part of the job if I’m high. Weed helps enormously with arousal, which can be hard-won when you’re sticking a foreign object of questionable quality into/onto your genitals for work purposes. Weed also lessens my anxiety and ups my sensitivity, so that I’ll be able to give the toy a fair shot, instead of judging it through the lens of grumpiness that I might’ve been carrying around with me during my work day.
I always begin by reading the toy’s instruction manual if I haven’t already. This is helpful in learning the toy’s controls as well as noting details I might want to mention in my review, like how waterproof the toy is, what its battery life is, and what its makers claim it will do for you.
Then I’ll sometimes watch porn, read erotica, or fantasize in order to jump-start my arousal even more. If the toy I’m testing is a well-known one, I might read other people’s reviews of it as part of this self-administered “foreplay,” though sometimes I avoid these so as not to have my opinion influenced by outside forces.
I’ve experimented with a lot of different note-taking techniques to use during testing sessions. I have sex toy reviewer friends who take notes on their phone or make audio recordings in which they narrate their thoughts in real-time, but these don’t typically work for me; I hate having to repeatedly unlock my phone and type with lubey fingers, and transcribing a recording would just add another step to my process. Instead, these days I always have a Moleskine volant notebook next to me in bed, and a Blackwing pencil. I like having a notebook that’s separate from my journal that I use for work purposes, so I don’t have to see stressful work notes when I’m journaling about personal stuff – and I like pencils because I got tired of accidentally getting ink all over myself when a pen rolled around on my bed during testing.
I try to test all of a toy’s various functions, even if they’re functions I wouldn’t choose to use if I was just masturbating for fun. I also try to test it in the ways I would use it if masturbating for fun, including (ideally) getting off with it. Your experience of a toy can change pretty drastically during high levels of arousal; it’s in those moments that you notice key details like whether the buttons are hard to push in the heat of the moment or whether the toy gets excessively loud on its highest speeds.
I used to insist on doing at least 4-5 different testing sessions with a particular toy before writing my review, but these days that feels like overkill. I’ve been doing this for long enough that I know what key information to seek out when testing, and can usually be review-ready after 2 or 3 sessions, tops, with any given toy.
This description of toy testing only applies to when I’m testing a toy solo, by the way. Toys that require a partner’s participation – whether because they’re designed for couples to use together, or because they’re designed for anatomy I don’t have – are a whole other kettle of fish. Depending on the toy, we may need to organize a video call over FaceTime for testing and/or try it out together in-person if we have plans to spend time together any time soon.
Writing the review:
Often I like to write my review immediately after its final testing session, so the details are fresh in my mind. I’ll usually make myself a drink to sip while I write, because it helps keep the words flowing in a way that is honest and entertaining. (Side note: last night I asked ChatGPT to create a recipe for me, using only ingredients I had on hand, for a cocktail that a writer might sip at her desk while working on a sex toy review. It named this drink the “Sultry Scribe” and produced a recipe containing bourbon, Jamaican rum, Cointreau, simple syrup, lime juice, lemon juice, Maraschino liqueur, Peychaud’s bitters, and an absinthe rinse – and it was actually so fucking delicious that I’m angry about it. Robots are too good!!)
In front of me on my desk, I’ll lay out my notebook with all its mid-masturbation scribblings, and the toy itself, incase I need to refer to it during the writing process. There is a tape measure in my desk’s top drawer at all times – a must-have for all sex toy reviewers, if you ask me – so I can measure things if I need to.
My style of reviewing used to be much more essay-esque, but I have less energy these days – so, with, few exceptions, typically my reviews are divided into a few pre-determined sections. I’ll write an introduction, a description of what the toy is and what it does, detailed lists of its pros and cons, and a conclusion section. Sometimes I mourn the pre-SEO days of the internet when one could write a blog post without needing to worry about how random Googlers might feel about it, but in some ways I also like the ease of a formulaic approach to writing reviews. And if a toy makes me feel big feelings or think big thoughts for some reason, I’m still open to writing a more essay-style review of it, when and if I have the spoons to do so.
After writing and editing the review, I’ll add in images and links, and then hit publish. Later that evening, typically my spouse will read the review aloud to me over the phone, making amusing comments and asking clarifying questions here and there. This feels to me now like an integral part of the process, the natural conclusion of the work I’ve put into the review.
At some point I’ll email the company that sent me the toy and let them know that the review has been published. Generally they reply to thank me; sometimes they don’t reply at all, or once in a while they’ll reply to quibble with a point I’ve made, which may or may not result in an update/correction depending on whether I think they’re right or not.
And that’s how I review sex toys! I hope this was enlightening for you, or at least interesting. I’ll be repeating this process several more times this month, and because I’m a Taurus, I’m actually very comforted by the routine of it all. I do still sometimes resent the need to turn my private pleasure time into literal work, but overall I’m really grateful that this is my job, and that I’ve gotten good enough at it that publications like GQ, Self and Insider come a-knockin’ to ask for my sex toy opinions. There are certainly a lot of worse jobs out there!